Recent Stories with tag stifle

Allison Hankins, Marissa Rae Niederhauser, and Spencer Moody in "stifle." Photo by Tim Summers

"It wasn't a full-blown near-death experience," dancer and choreographer Marissa Rae Niederhauser said in a recent telephone interview, "where I left my body and saw the light at the end of the tunnel and met God. It wasn't that type of near-death experience. But it was one of those, waking-up-to-your-own-frail-mortality moments."

She was referring to an event that happened a couple years ago, when, while performing onstage, she began choking on food. While she admits she was only unable to breathe for a matter of seconds (she didn't fully pass out, and completed the performance effectively without interruption), the experience was a transformational one.

"No one—for whatever reason—was able to come to my rescue," she continued. "I saw some people in the audience look very concerned. And some people were laughing. And some people looked angry. But nobody got up to aid me, even though I was in front of all those people. And I understand. I don't know if I'd do something different. Eventually what happened was that my diaphragm went into intense, painful spasms. I coughed it up and finished the dance in this strange, sort of euphoric state of being."

While terrifying, the experience proved artistically fruitful for Niederhauser, who has been exploring it in a series of pieces since, leading up to this weekend, when her company, Josephine's Echopraxia, presents stifle at the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards (Sat. & Sun., 8 p.m.; tickets $14). It's Niederhauser's most ambitious stage project to date, having previously produced a pair of dance films (Holding This For You (2008), and Tracings (post-production)), in addition to performing with companies like Maureen Whiting and Degenerate Art Ensemble, while presenting her own work in mixed repertory evenings at events throughout the Northwest....

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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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