Lighting designer Itai Erdal can’t have planned it this way, but the same week that his one-man-show How to Disappear Completely has made its way to On the Boards (through March 24), a middling controversy erupted over whether Voyager 1 had left the heliosphere for the vaster reaches of interstellar space. Continue reading Lighting a Way Toward a Mother’s Death, and Life, with Itai Erdal
Here is what we know. False Peach uses the text of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It stars, in the traditional sense, a single performer: Scott Shepherd (you may remember him from such shows as Gatz, the eight-hour theatrical adaptation of The Great Gatsby). But the creative team that Dorsen has assembled — the “perfect dinner party” she calls the collaboration — were all enlisted to create a “hamletmachine” that would perform-parse False Peach differently each night. Continue reading Welcome to the Hamletmachine, Says Annie Dorsen
Were we close enough to touch the dancers we might notice the changing tension in their muscles or a bead of sweat forming and beginning its own dance. In OtB’s deep proscenium we are more likely to drift from the dancer to notice that the set has changed, the lights have shifted, and the world of this dance is not as it appeared.
How could we have been so blind not to notice these changes? Continue reading Mark Haim Challenges and Charms at On the Boards
Te haré invencible con mi derrota is the gnomic title of Angélica Liddell’s deeply unsettling performance (at On the Boards tonight and Sunday, she’s taking Saturday to recuperate; tickets: $25). It means “I will make you invincible with my defeat,” although the performance may defeat you, if you have a low tolerance for someone drunkenly slicing into herself with razor blades, driving broken glass into her back, or piercing her fingers like a pin cushion, while you watch. Continue reading You Will Be Invincible, or Angélica Liddell Will Die Trying
The New York Times has called On the Boards one of the best venues in the country for contemporary dance, and the first dance-heavy week of the Northwest New Works Festival left me cheering OtB on. Last weekend began the theater’s 28th year of showcasing the freshest artists in the area, and this weekend the second set of artists bring their 20-minute pieces to the festival (June 17-19, tickets $14). Continue reading Week One of Northwest New Works is Hairy and Hungry
For the 28th annual Northwest New Works Festival (June 10-12, 17-19; tickets: $14), On the Boards has selected 16 companies from Washington, Oregon, and Victoria BC. Audiences get to see either new or in-progress performance works, all of which clock in under 20 minutes–if you don’t know the names, that’s all right. Discovery is actually the point. (OtB has recordings of the artists interviewing each other here.) Continue reading Northwest New Works Fest Brings 16 Companies to On the Boards
At turns whimsical, surreal, and yawn-provoking, El Gallo (at On the Boards through May 15), is the kind of show that I imagine “show people” are most likely to take to. The set-up is that a conductor/composer has two weeks to find and rehearse a quintet, and the show takes you through the esteem-testing of auditions and soul-cauldron of rehearsal, before the big night. At different times it plays like rehearsal reality TV, a winking farce, and performance art that dares you to fail to find it interesting. Continue reading At On the Boards, an Experiment in Opera (Review)
