Recent Stories with tag northwest new works

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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Catherine Cabeen's "Into the Void" will appear as part of On the Boards' 2010-2011 season. Photo by Julietta Cervantes.

Today, On the Boards announces their upcoming 2010-2011 season. Full stop. I'd add in some sort of excited, oh-my-god-you-guys-check-this-out! sort of deal, but there's not really a point: for those of you who already go to OtB, my excited gushing isn't why you're interested, and if you don't go to OtB (yet) you have no idea what you're missing and we'll all just have to find some way to change your mind over the coming year.

To begin with the basic factoids: season subscriptions go on-sale today at OtB's website; through June 30, you can take advantage of the early-bird special, which further discounts what are already the best deals in town. It's $130 for the Inter/National Series subscription, $100 for the Northwest Series, and $225 for the whole thing--twelve performances in all.

The Inter/National Series (the non-Northwest artists) is a bit more theatre-heavy this year, with companies from France, Poland, and Mexico. L'Effet de Serge, which originally debuted in 2007, was an audience favorite at the last Under the Radar Festival. From what I gather, it's essentially a solo show by Gaëtan Vourc’h of Vivarium Studio (Paris), who plays a charmingly eccentric man who makes Rube Goldberg-esque lo-fi special effects, presented to an onstage collection of friends culled locally. Or something. I don't really know, but if by chance you're headed to Montreal next month, you can catch it at Festival Transamerique and let me know....

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Erin Jorgensen. Photo by Basil Harris.

It's been a long, crazy, five-week ride with SPF 4, but the Solo Performance Festival is drawing to a close this weekend (at Theatre off Jackson; tickets $15). A line-up of three shows plays April 1 through 3, with pieces by Ben DeLaCreme, Jennifer Jasper, and Ernie Von Schmaltz. Then on Sunday, the festival closes up with a best-of-fest presentation of Lisa Koch's The Place of My Abode.

But tonight, March 31, there's a double-bill that, for my money, is a can't-miss.

First up is local musician and performer Erin Jorgensen, with Worse Places. This is the third piece I've caught Jorgensen in (including Sunday Service last year at the Northwest New Works Festival, and on-and-off-again French Project), and it's always an odd treat. A tattooed redhead with a bluesy voice, in Worse Places Jorgensen situates herself behind her marimba (her instrument of choice) and delivers a series of monologues, ranging from a nightmare about a mane-less lion to accidentally feeding baby birds to crows, with an awkward date thrown in. Whereas too many solo performers use obscure, poetic language, Jorgensen's minimalist narratives are blissfully concrete and minimal on the flourishes--Gordon Lish-style editing for a monologist. And of course she's a pretty marvelous marimba player, whether creating a lush soundscape for a text or accompanying herself on a song.

And then there's Paul Budraitis' Not. Stable. At all., back for one last showing at SPF. I've already written about Budraitis' performance at greater length, but it's tough not to recommend the piece again. Budraitis nails one of the most technically difficult parts of solo performance: the hairpin turns switching from character to character, carrying the audience from an aggressive attack on their personal space to a comic but creepy bit about a totalitarian police state to playing a genial con artist extracting information from you. Not. Stable. At all. is a Don Delillo-esque exploration of agency panic and paranoia in contemporary society, and it's been one of the stand-outs in the festival, as far removed from the stereotype of solo performance as a step above stand-up as you can get.

Directed by Sean Ryan, Budraitis will also be presenting the piece at this year's Northwest New Works Festival in June, so even if you can't make it tonight, you've got another chance.

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. ...

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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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Trying to describe the performances of Queen Shmooquan demands a literary acuity far beyond my limited powers. This last June, I saw Shmooquan at On the Boards, as part of the Northwest New Works Festival. She closed out a program of four, following up a doze-inducing semi-improvised dance number, and it was sort of like the heavens split open and a choir of angels began vomiting unicorns down on us all.

Entering on a bicycle and dressed like Prince, Shmooquan proceeded to perform her own downward spiral from aspiring actress to coke-addicted burn-out in a 20-minute performance replete with a degrading producer's couch audition, frequent mispronunciation of the word "vagina" (as in, The Bagina Monologues), and fake male genitalia made from a dildo and two maracas stuffed into a bra and hung between her legs.

In a word, it was awesome, and tonight and tomorrow (9:30 p.m., tickets $15), Queen Shmooquan is performing the evening-length work she turned that show into, the greatest Amerikin Hero ALIVE, at ACT...

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