Recent Stories with tag mike pham

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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There's plenty of great things going on this weekend, from Salt Horse's opening tonight, to ArtAttack's production of Fat Pig (just extended!) and the Balagan's Trout Stanley, to the closing of Glengarry Glen Ross down at the Rep. But that said, there's a bunch of top-notch, one-time-only events this weekend to keep you busy.

Tonight, Feb. 26, is the SAM Remix down at the Seattle Art Museum (8 p.m.-midnight, tickets $10, $8 students) the bi-monthly art-and-performance bash that tries to bring in the under-30 crowd. SAM Remix almost always sports an awesome lineup of events, but tonight's lineup is exceptionally good for two reasons: First, KT Niehoff's Lingo Dance are installing themselves as human sculpture throughout the galleries. It's part of a three-month project the company is developing with ACT Theatre called A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light. The second is a new work from Mike Pham, half of Seattle's performance art darlings Helsinki Syndrome, called Soccer Practice. Expect something funny, odd, physical, and--quite probably--involving glitter.

Tomorrow night, Sat. Feb. 27, the Canoe Social Club above Theatre off Jackson is hosting what promises to be the sexiest fundraiser for Haitian relief yet, Hotties for Haiti (10:30 p.m., $15, 21+), an evening of performance by local burlesque and aerial performers including Tamara the Trapeze Lady, Lara Paxton, and Violet Tendencies. I've been told to expect nonstop striptease and table dancing, with your drool-slathered dollar bills destined to travel quickly from g-string to helping the people of Port-au-Prince.

And finally, I've saved the best for last: all weekend, the Seattle Chamber Players are hosting a stunning series of concerts called Icebreaker V: Songs of Love and War at On the Boards (tickets $18). Here's the deal: for the fifth year in a row, SCP is presenting a festival celebrating the best contemporary European chamber composers. Each of the five concerts features a different nation and deals with different themes, and to top it off, SCP is bringing in guest performers from around the globe, from Polish soprano Agata Zubel, to Denmark's FIGURA Ensemble....

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Faith Helma in Hand2Mouth Theatre's "Undine," photo by Tim Summers.

"What I've always loved about his telling of it was that it was very ambiguous," said Faith Helma of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's 1811 fairy tale novella Undine. "Like, 'The Little Mermaid,' you read the original version of it, it's a pretty dark story. But this one was even more so. All of the characters are very ambiguous, and none of the characters are all bad or all good. Even the most creepy, scary character, you can kind of see his point of view. He's not a villain. And then there's the spirit world, which is frightening but also beautiful. And she's presented as this character you can identify with, but who's not to be trusted. There's something a little unsettling about it. That was my experience of reading the story—you can't really decide if you're on her side."

This was last Saturday, and I was sitting in Fresh Pot Cafe in Portland, Oregon's Mississippi district, with Helma and her husband Jonathan Walters. The two are long-time members of Portland's well respected experimental theatre company Hand2Mouth, which Walters founded in 2000. This Friday and Saturday, Jan. 29 and 30, they're bringing Helma's first solo work, Undine, back to Seattle, where it debuted in 2008 as part of the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. The performances are at Theatre off Jackson, in a co-presentation with Seattle's Satori Group (tickets $10-$12), with a panel discussion about creating new work in the Northwest after each performance, moderated by The Stranger's Brendan Kiley.

While nominally inspired by Fouqué's novella, elements of which Helma admits trying to incorporate into Hand2Mouth's previous shows to little or no success, the piece is not so much an adaptation of the narrative. "I'm obsessed with the fairy tale, so I wind up talking about that, but I feel like it leaves this image in people's minds of, 'Okay, solo performance, fairy tale...'" She trailed off, eyes rolling and chuckling at the image that description must put in people's minds....

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They call them "awards," but The Seattle Times' Footlight Awards are more or less a best-of, year-end wrap-up of what notably happened in Seattle theatre. And since they've hit pretty much everything large and small, I'm not going to bother doing my wrap-up. Instead, I'll just add my two cents to theirs.

Mike Pham and Rachel Hynes of Helsinki Syndrome in "The Importance of Being Earnest." Photo by Amber Wolfe.

Most of the plaudits go to the big companies--the Rep for Opus and Equivocation (though the latter was imported from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival), the Intiman for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (fair enough), and ACT for Rock 'n' Roll (really?). The big, notable exclusion from the list of mainstage shows is The Seafarer, which was a powerhouse of show. Russell Hodgkinson and Sean Griffin get mention for their performances in the show, but what about Hans Altwies? Also, the Rep's Betrayal blew a fair number of people's minds.

In terms of the big performances, there's a dearth of women represented. Yes, Anne Allgood is amazing, we all know. But surely Jennifer Lee Taylor and Betsy Schwartz deserve to be called out by name for their work in Orange Flower Water. The entire ensemble gets credit for that show, but the female roles are far more challenging than the male, and without their brilliant performances that play would have collapsed under the tedious weight of its overwrought plot. Oh, and no mention at all of Hana Lass, who impressed nearly everyone with back-to-back performances in Crime and Punishment at the Intiman and The Tempest at Seattle Shakespeare? First, Misha Berson tries to make her a poster child for local actors who can't find work, and now this?

On the "fringe" side (which has apparently become synonymous with "small" and "independent"), it feels a bit crowded. Everyone agrees that Strawberry Workshop's The Elephant Man was incredible, but with a cast consisting of David Pichette, MJ Sieber, and Alexandra Tavares, you might as well be at one of the regional theatres (if only they hired more local actors). The Community Theatre's Wrecks, a collection of Neil LaBute shorts staged at the Balagan, is a nice choice but feels out of place....

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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.