Recent Stories with tag not. stable. at all

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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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.

Paul Budraitis' "Not. Stable. At all." Photo by Ian Johnston.

Wednesday last I was down at Theatre off Jackson for another evening of Solo Performance Festival 4, the month-long festival of local and visiting talent that continues this week with Gin Hammond's Returning the Bones, Suzanne Morrison's Your Own Personal Alcatraz, and Jeff Frieders' Kitty in the City. I went for a triple bill of Mike Harris, Paul Budraitis, and Norman Bell, and I have to admit that I didn't stick around for the roughly 40 minutes Bell presented of his evening-length work Subprime!.

Not that you should read that as a criticism. I've seen it and liked it, Bell having transformed his abortive employment at the East Side's Merit Financial—which became one of the first subprime lenders to collapse under the dead weight of its bundled securities—into a story that offers a very human insight into the people who helped cause this mess.

As for Paul Budraitis, just last month he raised the stakes for the Balagan Theatre as the director of David Mamet's Edmond. In terms of the performances he got from his actors as well as the staging, which made the poverty of fringe theatre a strength, it was a knock-out show that did just about everything it could have to make Mamet's over-wrought play soar, and compared well to the Rep's who's-who production of Glengarry Glen Ross. But to my knowledge, Budraitis has always been more of a director than a performer (or so he suggested in our interview), so I was extremely interested to see what he could do as a solo performer, and he didn't disappoint. My guest even declared Budraitis her new "theatre crush" for his work as an actor and a director, and coming from someone subjected to more theatre than any non-theatre person should be, that's saying something.

In Not. Stable. At all., Budraitis digs deep into the fear and paranoia that isolate us in the modern world, a subject that—less competently handled—could be a huge flop. But Budraitis the performer exhibits the same subtlety and control he did as a director. Budraitis is a a big guy, tall and broad and fairly imposing, which works well when he's projecting aggression, even bum-rushing the front row of the audience. But through subtle tweaks to his posture, the tension in his shoulders or the pursing of his lips, he switches quickly into comic or even vulnerable mode....

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