Recent Stories with tag mark haim

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....

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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....

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The Stone Dance Collective, part of Chop Shop: Bodies of Work, at the Meydenbauer Center Feb. 13 & 14. Photo by Zebra Visual.

"The first day of class, whenever I have new students, I ask them, 'What is modern dance?'" Eva Stone said recently over coffee at Edmonds' Walnut Street cafe, near her home. "And they all stare blankly at me. And I say, 'Children, it's a rebellion!'"

In person, Stone looks the part of the classic suburban mom, casually dressed, her blond hair cut shortish and pulled back. But the appearance of domestic normalcy is mostly a facade--in person, Stone is as vociferous and passionate a proponent of contemporary dance as any you're likely to meet, at once strongly opinionated and an ambassador for the art form overall.

Since moving to Seattle in 1995, Stone has been the choreographer and artistic director of her own company, the Stone Dance Collective, a teacher at both the Washington Academy of Performing Arts and the International School, and, for the last three years, the driving force behind Chop Shop: Bodies of Work, the Eastside's biggest festival of contemporary dance, which goes up this weekend at the Theatre at the Meydenbauer Center in downtown Bellevue (Sat., Feb. 13, 7:30 p.m. & Sun., Feb. 14, 3 p.m.; tickets $15-$25).

Raised in Phoenix, Arizona, Stone began choreographing work at age 14, before she really studied dance technique, which left a strong impact on her art. "I really had to create my own language," as she described it. After graduating from Arizona State, she bounced around the country--studying choreography at Harvard, dancing in Boston, performing musical theatre in LA--before heading to the Laban Centre in London to complete her master's. It was there that she first founded her collective and met her husband, before relocating to Seattle, where she restarted her dance collective on Capitol Hill....

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The various contributors to "Break a Heart" at On the Boards. Photo by Tim Summers.

Not that plenty of interesting plays aren't opening this month (Glengarry Glen Ross at the Rep, Not a Genuine Black Man at Theatre off Jackson, and The Woman in Black at Open Circle, to name a few), but February is shaping up to be a particularly incredible month for dance in Seattle. With offerings ranging from a noted staging of a ballet classic at PNB to a world premiere by one of Seattle's up-and-coming performance groups, and a couple festival line-ups thrown in, this month presents a veritable cross-section of the best of what Seattle and the region has to offer.

Sleeping Beauty at Pacific Northwest Ballet (Feb. 4-14; tickets $25-$160). A masterpiece of Romantic ballet, with a score by Tchaikovsky, PNB's production of Sleeping Beauty is based on British choreographer Ronald Hynd's painstaking 1993 reconstruction of Marius Petipa's 1890 original. I sat in on the dress rehearsal last night, and was wowed (along with a dozen or so starry-eyed little girls) by the sumptuous production and Princess Aurora's glorious movement.

Break a Heart at On the Boards (Feb. 11-14; tickets $18). A host of Seattle choreographic talent joins forces to present an evening of movement exploring love, which is of course set opposite Valentine's Day. Break a Heart features work by Wade Madsen, Crispin Spaeth, Diana Cardiff, Kristina Dillard, ilvs strauss/Jody Kuehner, Sara Jinks and Juliet Waller Pruzan/Stephen Hando....

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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.