Recent Stories with tag erickson theatre

Melissa D Brown and Shelley Virginia in "deCOMPOSITION" at the Erickson Theatre. Photo by Reed Nakayama.

deCOMPOSITION, (previewed here last Friday and running this Friday through Sunday at the Erickson Theatre; tickets $12-$20) is an original play framed by and tangentially about the scientific process of decomposition. At the outset, and for anybody who’s seen a fair amount of experimental theatre, this might sound like a risky proposition, sort of a theatrical bridge to nowhere. What emerges instead is intelligent, intimate, and fresh.

deCOMPOSITION unfolds as three separate threads that entwine but rarely intersect: a childhood friendship gradually unravels as two women’s adult lives begin to diverge; another woman whose grandfather has died struggles to understand loss; and a biology professor delivers a lecture on the life cycle of the king salmon.

At its best, deCOMPOSITION examines loss and decay as ever-present forces of entropy that we experience in our relationships and everyday lives. Dissecting the word into its linguistic roots for the audience, the professor (Alaska native Ty Hewitt in a nearly pitch-perfect performance) explains that salmon begin to decompose even before their deaths.

This plays out metaphorically in the other two stories. Insecurities and resentment gradually create a rift between the two friends, while the grandfather-less young woman tries to make the absence in her life amount to something emotionally palpable by compiling memories, enumerating facts, and, unexpectedly, baking. All of this hints at the many ways that even as we live our lives things are crumbling down around us, often just as we begin to make sense of them.... (more)

When it rains, it pours, they say, and in the case of devised theatre--normally in short supply in Seattle--this weekend is a veritable deluge. In addition to The Irrealist Theatre's Amniotes and the restaging of the apparently Seattle-legendary Frankenocchio, both of which opened last weekend, tonight Jess K. Smith, a theatre artist who worked with Seattle Rep, Live Girls!, and Redmond's Second Story before heading to New York to study directing at Columbia, presents a two-week run of deCOMPOSITION at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway (tickets $12-$20).

Earlier this week, I had a brief phone conversation with Smith, who's in Seattle working on the play, which she developed with collaborators at Columbia under the guidance of Anne Bogart and staged this last spring as part of the Schapiro Series.

The work is based around the scientific process of decomposition--a morbid enough topic in the abstract--but Smith and the company she worked with built out a show from that basic concept that's anchored not in abstraction but in the deeply personal.

"We were interested in watching the decomposition of a friendship over time," Smith explained. From that basic idea--Smith's own--the group developed three simultaneous tracks for the work. Besides simply tracking the downward spiral of friendship, they built out two other components--one a series of monologues on the life-and-death-cycle of salmon, and the other, based on work by dramaturg Hannah Hessel (another Pacific Northwesterner turned New Yorker), an exploration of a woman's "loss of the sense of her own loss," as Smith put it. This track is based around a recipe--an actual recipe, as it happens, that was used by Brown's grandfather--for a cake, which is prepared during the performance and served each night.

"We knew that there was going to be a recipe," Smith said chuckling, recalling the work's beginning as little more than a set of seemingly unrelated ideas. "And an Appalachian folk song." (In this case, "Oh, Death.")

As abstract as some of the ideas seem, Smith assured me they're rooted deep in her artists' personal experiences. The lectures about salmon, for instance, were developed and performed by Ty Hewitt, a performer originally from Ketchikan, Alaska, who spent several summers working as a fishing guide lecturing tourists on salmon.

"I think what we try to do," Smith explained, "both in process and product, we've tried to find a way to communicate something honestly."

"The essence of the thing is in the storytelling," she continued. "How a folk song tells a story, or how a recipe is passed down."

What strikes me as most exciting is seeing this sort of theatre being made by Seattle artists--even if they had to move away to get a start--and then being brought back home. For quite a while, there hasn't been many artists or companies willing to work outside the narrow confines of the standard process of selecting a text, rehearsing it, building a set, and running it for three weeks. There's a risk going into this sort of performance that's exciting compared to most other work you'll see, and I'm glad that Smith & co. have seen fit to bring their work home.

Jim Kent and Ellie Sandstrom in Scott/Powell Performance's "Home." Photo by Peter Mumford.

So yes, there's one big dance event this weekend that everyone's going to be paying attention to. But it would be a shame if that overshadowed a pair of shows from two of Seattle's own leading choreographers, each with an impressive resume of her own, as well as a site-specific performance early next week that deserves consideration in its own right.

First up, tonight is the opening night of Scott/Powell Performance's Home, at the Erickson Theatre off Broadway (tickets $12-$15). I have to admit, when I saw this piece in a shorter form last year at NW New Works, I had mixed feelings about it at best. But with a year's time to reflect, I've grown to appreciate Molly Scott's sculptural vision, mixing, as she does, both a choreographic and visual art approach to her work, which certainly showed in the piece's unique costuming and emphasis on subtle, repetitive movements.

Plus, extended to evening length, I imagine Home has lost most of the episodic feel that initially bothered me. And anyway, this piece features a remarkable line-up of dancers, including Beth Graczyk, Jim Kent, Jess Klein, Michael Rioux, Sean Ryan, Ellie Sandstrom, and Belle Wolf, the sort of people whose skill allows them to work wonders with subtlety.

Second, tomorrow night, choreographer and dancer Catherine Cabeen and Company is presenting an evening of mixed works called Form and Fluidity, at the Seattle Changing Room (tickets $15). Cabeen's a remarkable dancer and choreographer, as anyone who's seen her work knows. With her company and associated collaborators, Cabeen is exploring the "shifting intersections" between various means of communication, in a performance that promises to be charmingly intimate (the Changing Room is actually a yoga studio). Friday night is, unfortunately, already sold out, but tickets are still available for Saturday.

And finally, Tuesday, May 25, dancer and choreographer Alice Gosti is presenting a site-specific performance atop Kite Hill in Gasworks Park. Gosti, a dancer who, among other things, produces and curates the quarterly Modern Dance Behind the Pink Door series, is presenting DO While, performed by Gosti, Devin McDermott, and Meredith Mieko, explores "endlessness through body performance by juxtaposing physical endurance with spatial architecture." Set before the backdrop of the city at twilight, the costumes feature lit elements which track the artists' heartbeats, creating both a dramatic visual dynamic and a representation of the complex internal processes of the body. The performance is, of course, free to anyone who wants to come, but check back to its Facebook page, as this week's performance was effectively rained out due to mud.

Sunday last, after a weekend of moving, I headed down to the Erickson Theatre off Broadway for the closing night of the BOOST Dance Festival, organized by choreographer Marlo K. Martin of eXit Space, and that might account for some of my prickliness in writing about the lineup. Of the seven pieces presented, only two really rose above the fray, the rest being under-developed or academic in their vocabulary. But that said, it was a great opportunity to see some fine young dance artists, even if the choreography was occasionally lacking.

To begin with what I liked about some of the pieces I didn't, I have to call out two dancers: Karen Grady-Brown and Anne Motl. I first saw Grady-Brown in Kristina Dillard's Heavy on the Nymphs last month as part of Break a Heart at On the Boards (re-presented at BOOST). Even though she's mostly being called on to flounce around doing nymph-ish things, she stands out for having a subtle, gestural control that goes a step beyond formal training. And at BOOST, she followed up Heavy on the Nymphs by appearing in Tesee George's Conversations, which gave her more solo opportunities.

Anne Motl was the only dancer called on to perform triple duty, and whether she's nymphing about with Grady-Brown, mugging in Bake You a Cake, or getting a serious cardio workout in Martin's own i.see.you., Motl demonstrates versatility and charisma.

As for the works themselves, the only two which really spoke to me were Martin's i.see.you. and Kristin Hapke's (of tindance) I need this poetic. These two pieces were more dynamic, more cognizant of space and geometry, and finally more accomplished in their movement language than the others. One moment that struck me was in Hapke's piece: dancer Hendri Walujo leaves a pairing to take a pose that looks a lot like the Crane stance from The Karate Kid. It's a brief moment, but he makes a series of small but precise gestural movements that really demonstrate the subtlety of how movement can speak. It was a beautiful moment in a beautiful piece.

Martin's i.see.you. was a great way to close out the night. Athletic and demanding, with dramatic shifts in tempo and a great lineup of dancers from NW Dance Syndrome, it sent the audience out into a rainy night on a high note. In the relatively short piece, Martin offers creative pairings, some lovely solo work, and some great ensemble movement. In short, the last two pieces really made the evening for me.... (more)

Beth Graczyk and Jens Wazel in Salt Horse's "Man on the Beach." Photo by Tim Summers.

Tuesday afternoon, a couple hours before dress rehearsal, I sat down with the three core members of Salt Horse Performance in the lobby of the Erickson Theatre Off Broadway to discuss Man on the Beach, the company's second evening-length work, which opens a two-week run on Feb. 26 (Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; tickets $12/$15).

Proper seating being in short supply, dancer/choreographer Beth Graczyk explained the inspiration for the piece while sitting on a wooden box; Corrie Befort, also a dancer and choreographer, was perched on the middle rung of a folding ladder, while composer/sound artist Angelina Baldoz was relegated to a miniature chair that, much to the amusement of her cohorts, raised her a scant half-foot off the floor.

"I went down to the beach with some family members," Graczyk recalled of a day almost two years ago in Port Townsend, "and saw this man who kept repeating these very simple gestures over and over again. And the way that he was set against the ocean, he was in perfect silhouette, and nothing was surrounding him. It was so particular, because it seemed like the whole environment really framed him, like he had gone there of all places because that's where he could be who he really was. And yet he was so internal, it was like there was a little sheath or bubble wrapped around him."

That image—a solitary man with long arms, alone on a beach, carrying on with a portrait of a woman—captivated Graczyk, and when she brought it to her collaborators, they were likewise transfixed by the mysterious man who was stuck in his own life, trapped in a personal drama. ... (more)