Recent Stories with tag elizabeth rose

ticktock dance performing on Miguel Edward's "Perseus". Photo by Terry Wallace.

This is a big, big week in terms of performing arts in Seattle. First, tonight is the opening of the Rep's God of Carnage, Yasmina Reza's most recent 90-minute verbal battle of class snobbery and interpersonal emotional violence (tickets $15-$59). Normally, I wouldn't have much truck with Reza, but the Rep has brought back Wilson Milam to direct, and damn if I ain't sad to be missing it. This is the London-based (but Seattle-raised) director's third directing job for the Rep in three years, and he's long since proven his capacity for carefully crafting combative, dialogue-driven plays with both The Seafarer and Glengarry Glen Ross.

The trick here is that this is the first time we get to see how Milam handles women (both other plays were all-male casts). Whatever the case, Milam's not just some big-shot import, he's done amazing work over the years, launching his career alongside Tracy Letts and specializing for two decades in directing new plays, including Martin McDonagh's The Lieutenant of Inishmore, which is opening at ACT in just a week. And fortunately, The SunBreak, being your best local resource for all things theatre and performing arts, has previously sat down with Milam to get the skivvy on all sorts of good stuff.... (more)

Tuesday night just past seven, I wandered into Ballard's Copper Gate, a 64-year-old Scandinavian bar on 24th Avenue NW. I'm no doubt late to this, but the Copper Gate's an odd but incredibly charming place: immaculate and well-lit, with a copper-topped bar built into a replica of a Viking boat, the relaxed, mostly middle-aged crowd of diners sat sipping wine and eating Scandinavian classics, surrounded by classy erotica. The walls are covered in places with vintage nudes and tame fetish shots that are somehow sexy but not dirty. It turns out that when new owners took over several years ago, they found the former owner's wife's stash of pictures, and took that as inspiration. A painting of a pretty young lass on the main wall, I was told by a helpful bar manager, has been there since the bar opened, and is supposedly the erotica-collecting woman herself back in the day.

The point is, as pretty much everyone who's written about it has noted, the Copper Gate, for all the naked ladies, is still the sort of place you could take your grandma (and I'm pretty sure there was one there). And much like the main bar, "the Pussy Room" in back is not nearly so dirty as it sounds. That said, you get to it by walking through a narrow, rounded passage painted deep red that leads to a room blocked off by red velvet curtains. Ahem. Pussy Room, indeed!... (more)

Formed in summer of 2009, ticktock is an experimental dance company that produces the collaborative work of Elizabeth Rose (the Aerialistas), Jill Schaffner (DASS Dance), and Bridget Gunning (Manifold Motion).

Three modern-dancers-turned-aerialists, we met in Seattle in 2008. All of us were mid-career performers and all found we were drawn to aerial and circus because of its extreme physicality (Jill and I are both former gymnasts, Bridget a former competitive swimmer), but had a hard time finding most contemporary circus artistically satisfying because it lacked choreographic depth and seemed to be an art form based on "tricks" and archetypal character portrayals. 

At the same time, in most contemporary "aerial dance," the apparatus and the performers are sadly underutilized, and much of the work relies on its "Look! We're off the ground!" effect to impress audiences, but is ultimately unimaginative.

After a series of initial conversations and small collaborations, we went into the studio with an intention to deconstruct the language of aerial and rework our circus skills from a modern dancer's perspective. Using Mary Overlie's Viewpoints, dance composition exercises, and lots of improvisation, we began with a concept and started choreographing aerial dances, instead of making "aerial dance." 

The result is a hybrid performance medium that is more textured and contemplative than typical circus, and more sensational and extreme than typical dance. The goal is to continue refining this process of deconstruction and integration while continually pushing the edge of our physical possibilities into a realm of "expressive athleticism." We hope that with the development of this process, a choreographic style will emerge--one that inspires audiences with undeniably real surreality and fantastically literal flights of fancy.

Since the company’s inception, we have shown our work in "Circus of Dreams" at ACT Theatre, Manifold Motion's "Miscellanea II" at Canoe Social Club, and "Bedlam!" at the Emerald City Aerialdrome, where we were offered a six-month residency to produce our first show, glibly titled "No.1."

Our show premieres on January 29 and runs three performances: January 29 and 30 at 8 p.m., and January 31 at 7 p.m. Tickets are available on Brown Paper Tickets: http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/93280