Recent Stories with tag amy oneal

The Satori Group's "Making of a Monster," part of NW New Works at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers.

Last weekend I made the trek back to Seattle from New York and managed to catch both the studio showcase and mainstage shows at the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards. As I've said before, this really is one of the best events in town all year, and it was a fairly humbling experience to watch artists whose work I helped select (I was on the panel last fall) bring the pieces to fruition, to say nothing of the fact that we've covered the development of some of these pieces over the last year.

At least five of the works killed. Paul Budraitis presented 20 more minutes of Not. Stable. (At all.), which helped flesh out the piece along with the presentation at SPF 4 this last winter, and shows the direction the show will go as it approaches its evening length debut at OtB this coming winter. Mike Pham's I Love You, I Hate You was a deceptively funny performance that had the audience uncomfortably laughing at Pham's evocation of the downward spiral of internalized anger, public humiliation, and the cruel process of building oneself back up.

Lily Verlaine. Photo by Tim Summers.

On the mainstage, Amy O'Neal stripped down (literally and figuratively) with In the Fray, a new lo-fi solo work that saw her move away from the spectacles of Locust and explore something more personal; a woman wearing pasties has never looked more powerful and intimidating than O'Neal at the end, clutching a pink samurai sword. Mark Haim's This Land Is Your Land probably takes the cake for most commented on and most controversial, in the sense that reactions are fierce and divided. I loved it: for 20 minutes, a crew of dancers and non-dancers simply strut forward and backwards across the stage, with subtle changes at each passing. Haim's choreography is a bit like microscope slides: a relentlessly intent focus on a series of different details, inviting the audience to consider everything from the simple act of texting while walking to the ways in which different naked bodies move....

(more)

Amy O'Neal's "In the Fray," part of the NW New Works Festival this weekend at OtB. Photo by Grabrielle Bienczycki.

This weekend is the opening of one of my favorite performance events all year: the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. Over the next two weekends, sixteen artists or companies will be presenting 20-minute pieces that speak to the vibrancy and diversity of performance in Seattle and the greater Northwest region. It's a smorgasbord of cutting-edge arts, and while you're bound to hate some of it, you're also bound to have something blow your mind.

The festival is broken up into two spaces over two weekends. Here's the breakdown for the coming weekend; tickets to the festival are $14 for one showscase, $20 for two, $24 for three, and $30 for four.

Studio Showcase (Fri. 8 p.m., Sat. & Sun. 5 p.m.)

Daughters of Air. A new work by avant-garde musician and composer Ivory Smith, Daughters of Air reinterprets Hans Christian Anderson's classic fairy tale "The Little Mermaid" as a polyphonic vocal symphony. But beyond the musical component, Smith and her collaborators Kelli Frances Corrado and Joseph Gray, have created a beautiful piece of multimedia art that evokes the story's setting beneath the sea. Using re-purposed videogame controllers, the performers will be generating digitally projected imagery live during the performance.

Daughters of Air, part of the NW New Works Festival starting this weekend at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers

Paul Budraitis, Not. Stable. (At all.). Budraitis is one of the most interesting theatre artists in Seattle. His production of David Mamet's otherwise unforgiveably bad play Edmond this winter at the Balagan was one of the most accomplished pieces of fringe theatre I've seen in years. His singular accomplishment as a director was getting world-class performances from his actors, proving a point I've long maintained that Seattle theatre's greatest weakness is not its actors, but its directors. Not. Stable. (At all.), Budraitis's first solo performance piece, directed by Sean Ryan, was a stand-out at SPF 4 earlier this year. In it, through a series of schizophrenically varied characters, Budraitis explores anomie, paranoia, and solipsism, and as he continues developing the piece into an evening-length work (which will have its premiere at OtB in February 2011), he's presenting a new set of monologues at NW New Works, so the performance will not be duplicative of the SPF show. (Click here for TSB's previous coverage of Paul Budraitis.)

Mike Pham, I Love You, I Hate You. In this piece, Pham, one-half of the creative due behind Helsinki Syndrome, continues his evolution away from theatre towards visual and performance art. In a text-free movement and video-based solo performance, Pham uses the rise and publicly humiliating fall of a figure skater to explore ideas of the public and private self, acceptance and rejection, and the narcissism and self-loathing-inducing struggle to maintain an idea of self. Which is all a pretty wordy and vague description of piece in which Pham pirouettes himself into a painful downward spiral, brutalizes some body bags, and drowns in an identity-destroying sea of glitter....

(more)

Velocity Dance Center has to be thrilled--their first big show in their new space at 1621 12th Avenue played to two sold-out houses over the weekend. Admittedly, that's about 90 people each night, but if follow contemporary dance in Seattle and can subtract, you know that 90 is a lot more than, say, 25. A nice way to break in the Founders (Michelle Miller and KT Niehoff) Theater.

Jacinta Vlach

This show, SCUBA 2010, was part of Velocity’s national indie touring network (its partners are The Southern Theater in Minneapolis, Philadelphia Dance Projects, and ODC in San Francisco). While building a coterie of loyal fans is essential for a small dance group, sometimes boosterish love and acceptance gets a little stifling, artistically. Getting to tour in front of people who don't know you or your city's dance scene can be invaluable.

For audiences, it can be a blast, too. Friday night was the first time in my life that I've seen a dance work based on Orwell's Animal Farm, created by Jacinta Vlach, founder of the Bay Area's Liberation Dance Theater. LDT's core interests are "identity politics, race relations, gender inequalities, and marginalized communities," so Animal Farm is just the ticket. 

That said, you don't need to have the book in hand to get the gist of the dance. In addition to a pulsing score by Abdullah Ibrahim and Cinematic Orchestra, there are declamations about power's use and abuse (in a full version, video projections explore the revolutionary spirit through poster art). Vlach's choreography here is for three--two women (Vlach and Olivia Eng) in cotton jumpers dyed to look like "workers" blue overalls and a man (Rashad Pridgen) in a white linen jacket. "Fusion" is a word that's used to characterize Vlach's recipe: hip hop, modern, step, ballroom, tribal dance--but the results are what count and what you get is hybrid vigor. All three dancers keep your eyes glued to them--you can see why they were invited to Jacob's Pillow....

(more)

"Tourist," a view from the Columbia Tower, courtesy of The SunBreak Flickr pool's slightlynorth.

It was a week featuring two of Seattle's most prominent architectural icons: on the tenth anniversary of the Kingdome implosion, the market for commercial space downtown has imploded, too. Beacon Capital Partners missed a loan payment on the Columbia Tower, and faces a 33 percent vacancy rate once Amazon decamps next year. Starbucks announced ten-cent-per-share dividends at its annual meeting. One of our hippos died.

Plans for a private Chihuly exhibit at Seattle Center ran smack into Seattle process; now the Center will open up public bidding for use of the space vacated by the Fun Forest. Seattlepi.com reports that "Beth Campbell filed a motion in U.S. District Court asking that construction of the southern mile of a viaduct-replacement project be delayed until a full environmental-impact study is done of the entire viaduct project."

The city council joined every other Washington Democrat in wishing AG Rob McKenna would not challenge the constitutionality of the federal health care reform bill. Seattle's direct care providers Qliance are looking forward to the new insurance exchanges. Seattle was named the top city for cybercrime in America.

Mayor McGinn claims he has an affordable West Seattle-Ballard light rail line up his sleeve. Amtrak passengers had to take the long way around when a mudslide hit the tracks near Mukilteo--for the second time in two weeks. Mudslides aside, we now have extra Amtrak to Vancouver, B.C., through September. Nick Licata wants to lean on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for help with the seawall replacement....

(more)

Amy O'Neal and Ellie Sandstrom in "too," this Thurs.-Sat. at NW Film Forum. Photo courtesy of amyo/tinyrage.

"Also, I'm really fascinated with ninja lore. Like a lot of people," said Amy O'Neal, and we both started to chuckle. Having just watched Ellie Sandstrom and her rehearse at the Northwest Film Forum, where O'Neal's dance piece too will be the second installment in their new "Live at Film Forum" series (this Thurs.-Sat.; tickets $12-$15), we had retreated to Caffe Vita to talk over coffee, and were getting sidetracked discussing In the Fray, the solo dance piece O'Neal will be debuting at this year's Northwest New Works Festival.

While she offered the cerebral description of the show as being "about how we create fictitious fights with our self," she had politely gone on to explain how the movement was coming out of her longstanding interest in fighting (though she admits to never actually having gotten into a fight), boxing (which she was "obsessed with" for two years), and, of course, ninjas.

"A lot of times, when I'm dancing or teaching, I'm imagining dancing with swords, or having some sort of imaginary foe that you're dancing with," she said. "A lot of times, I'll be like, 'Okay, this leg comes over here'"—she mimed something swinging toward her head—"'imagine someone's kicking over your head and you have to duck that. Imagine the ninja stars coming at you, you have to get down to the floor or that thing is going to stick you in the head.' I'll use things like that in class so that people will do something, they'll put themselves in a scenario so that something's at stake."...

(more)

Erik Lochtefeld with Richard Nguyen Sloniker and Matt Shimkus in a scene from the Intiman's much raved about "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," which closes tonight. Photo by Chris Bennion.

A couple big announcements on the theatre front today. First off, the Intiman just announced next year's season, the first under the guidance of incoming artistic director Kate Whoriskey. The big--and rather unsurprising--news is that Whoriskey will be re-staging Lynn Nottage's Ruined, the winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Whoriskey directed the premiere and worked for several years with Nottage to bring the play, which explores the plight of women in war-ravaged central Africa, to the stage.

The next installment of the Intiman's "American Cycle" features a new adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, by Naomi Iizuka. Also, Seattle playwright Sonya Schneider is debuting an original one-man-show called The Thin Space, based on interviews conducted by KUOW's Marcie Sillman. For full details on the rest of the season, visitthe Intiman's website.

The other news of the day, which is more exciting (and not just because I was on the selection panel for it), is that On the Boards has announced the line-up for the 2010 Northwest New Works Festival. Every year it's one of my favorite performance events in town, and this year will be no exception. Again, the mainstage is all dance, with new works by Amy O'Neal (Amyo/tinyrage), KT Niehoff (Lingo Dance), Mark Haim (choreographic artist-in-residence at the UW), and Marissa Rae Niederhauser (Josephine's Echopraxia), and more.

The studio showcase, which is always more eclectic, features new work by Mike Pham of Helsinki Syndrome, Erin Leddy of Portland's Hand2Mouth Theatre, the Satori Group (whose Artifacts of Consequence closes at the Little Theatre this weekend), and local burlesque superstar Lily Verlaine, among others. See here for the full line-up; the festival runs two weekends, June 4-13, 2010.