Recent Stories with tag manifold motion

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)

Cornish College of the Arts' Fall dance concert at the Broadway Performance Hall

This weekend is a big week for closings: the Intiman's Abe Lincoln in Illinois finished its extended run Thursday, the Satori Group's Artifacts of Consequence is sold-out through its close on Sunday, and finally there's Macha Monkey's Nancy, Frank and Joe which closes up down at Freehold tonight (tickets $12-$15). Macha Monkey has always been good, and that's one I'm sorry to have missed.

Playwright Paul Mullin's collaborative "living newspaper" play, It's Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper, is closing Sunday, up at North Seattle Community College. The play has garnered some stunning attention, including an NPR feature on Friday that prompted Mullin to send out a press release taking aim at the lack of risk-taking on the part of the city's larger theatres (more power to him):

If this coverage by NPR proves one thing it’s this: the rest of the nation actually does give a damn about what we do in this city. They actually do care what happens to our newspapers, and they actually do want to know about what kind of original theatre we’re doing here, what stories we’re telling, uniquely, as Seattleites.

What they don’t care about, what they will never care about, is how carefully and exquisitely we craft a restaging of some chestnut from the canon, or the play that knocked ‘em dead off-Broadway last year.  And this isn’t because those stories aren’t good, it’s because those stories aren’t uniquely ours.  Seattle theaters that dedicate themselves exclusively to craft and the canon and providing a local outlet to New York’s latest exports are museums. And Seattle will never have as good museums as New York, Chicago or LA.

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Video still of Bridget Gunning from one of the works to be presented at Manifold Motion's "Miscellanea II" at the Canoe Club.

Manifold Motion, an interdisciplinary performance company founded by dancer/choreographer Keely Isaak Meehan, has a reputation for ambitious and visually arresting work. Earlier this year, they staged Woolgatherer at the Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, an original piece that explored the psychological crisis of hypermodernity by contrasting it against a stunningly visceral premodern world realized through through a fiber art installation. Now, tonight through Sunday, Manifold Motion is presenting Miscellanea II, the second edition of their showcase series that highlights the varied work of company members and collaborators, at the Canoe Club (tickets $10-$30).

Meehan will be performing Tulipomania, a collaboration with local poet and visual artist Linden Ontjes, a version of which they brought to On the Boards' 12 Minutes Max in late October. The core of the piece is Ontjes's poetic text, which uses metaphorical leaps to connect sexuality, economics, and life tensions to the tulip, which Meehan by turns interprets and counterpoints through movement.

Meehan's choreography--in my somewhat limited experience--tends towards the imagistic rather than the abstract. In Tulipomania, she anchors the movement to a series of concrete images of a flower blossoming, in between either interpreting the emotional content of Ontjes's text or counterpointing Ontjes by interacting directly.

Miscellanea II also features a movement-aerial-musical collaboration between upright bassist Evan Flory-Barnes and movement artist Bridget Gunning. Gunning is an extremely athletic performer to say the least, and while I have no idea what this piece will look like, I've heard it's as physical for the musician as the dancer.

The showcase also features work by Nicole Sasala (a frequent collaborator who otherwise runs the Asterisk Project), video work by Meehan and Leo Mayberry, an installation by Mike McCracken, and a variety of other work. Plus, this being the Canoe Club, the bar's open during the performance, giving it a bit more of a cabaret feel.

12 Minutes Max, On the Boards' semi-monthly showcase of local performance talent, kicked off the second edition of its season last night with a program co-curated by Olivier Wevers (it plays again tonight at 7 p.m.; tickets $8). While there was plenty of great (and some not-so-great) work on display, overall the night felt like the latest installment of the rolling launch of Wever's anticipated new company, Whim W'Him, whose debut is at OtB this January.

Keely Isaak Meehan in Manifold Motion's "Woolgatherer" in May 2009. Photo by Divide.

A PNB principal and a choreographer noted for his puckish, whimsical style, Wevers has had everyone remotely interested in dance talking about him and the incredibly talented group of dancers he's poached from around the region, even if no one seems to know how to pronounce his company's name.

Whatever the case, he's put together a dance-heavy program that highlights some extremely talented movement artists from Seattle, with only one non-movement piece in the line-up of seven.

Nicole Sasala of the Asterisk Project was the comic highlight of the evening with Front Porch. Starting out rocking in a rocking chair and pensively playing with a harmonica, Sasala launched into light and downright charming movement based around the gimmick that she had to continue breathing through the harmonica throughout the piece, and she couldn't touch it with her hands.

I have to admit, I'm a bit of a sucker for devices like this, when choreographers find ways to communicate the body's internal processes. The tone and quality of the harmonica's sound as she breathes through it turns the dancer's entire respiratory system into a sonic palette, and the idea offered plenty of comic gold, as Sasala, occasionally mugging, rolled around the floor to try to reposition the instrument in her mouth.

Keely Isaak Meehan, the artistic director of Manifold Motion, blew my mind earlier this year with Woolgatherer, a stunning dance/multimedia presentation featuring wadges of distressed yarn. Her piece, Tulipomania, is a collaboration with local poet Linden Ontjes, who presents a spoken word text centered on tulips that explores sex, relationships, and gardening, amongst other topics. While Ontjes reads, Meehan, wearing a flouncing red skirt, interprets, fluidly moving through a series of visual references to flowers blossoming which quickly transform into expressions of tension, outrage, and occasionally aggression.

Meehan's an innovative dancer and choreographer, and along with Sasala, she'll be presenting new work as part of Manifold Motion's Miscellanea II Nov. 20-22 at the Canoe Social Club (tickets $10-$30).

Of the other most notable pieces, dancers Kate Wallich and Markeith Wiley demonstrate some stunning ability with Hiatus, and Louis Gervais, a former member of the Compagnie Marie Chouinard, did a brilliant dance-theatre performance re-interpreting the same story of a stolen bag through six characters.