Results tagged “ontheboards”

GO BREAK A HEART: Nothing unites people against love like the celebration of love, or perhaps the commercial celebration of love. But who’s to say that unity against love can’t be beautiful? Nine dance artists create seven unique pieces revolving around the idea that love is not Love, and Valentine’s Day is the “most unfortunate holiday of the year.” Choreographers Wade Madsen, Crispin Spaeth, Diana Cardiff, Kristina Dillard, mouse bones (ilvs strauss/Jody Kuehner), Sara Jinks and Juliet Waller Pruzan/Stephen Hando join forces to take down the big day. Why break a leg when you can break a heart? Performances run through February 14th. more ›

On Sunday, we saw the wrap-up of The A.W.A.R.D. Show at On the Boards, a dance show in an experimental competition format brought to Seattle after success in New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Intrigued, we took to "the streets" (the internet) to engage in a conversation with a fellow critic as to whether this event has the potential to find its legs in the Seattle dance community. more ›

IT’S JUST WHAT WE ALWAYS WANTED: The bad news is Pioneer Square just lost a chunk of its soul the size of The Complete Miss Marple. The good news is Elliott Bay Bookstore is coming to Capitol Hill! It’s a big day for the 36-year-old bookstore, which announced its upcoming move yesterday. The news makes tonight’s Season’s Readings event one not to miss. Publishers will gather to share their book recommendations in a night sure to be filled with holiday joy and maybe a few tearful goodbyes. more ›

BACK TO THE MOON!: Andrew Chaikin, author of “A Man on the Moon,” recounts his conversations with Aldrin, Armstrong and other Apollo astronauts and discusses the recent LCROSS moon mission. It’s been forty years since One Giant Leap and instead of lunar suburbs and sweet dune buggies, we’re intentionally crashing rockets into the moon’s surface. Sounds like something we’d do. more ›

Amidst the hustle and bustle of the lobby at On the Boards last Friday night, as the audience exiting the 8 p.m. performance of 14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival, clashed with the incoming patrons for the 10:30 show, we found ourselves in the back corner chatting with Seattle director Aimee Bruneau. more ›

RECOMMENDED 14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival @ On the Boards. 14/48 has become a twice-yearly staple of Seattle theatre: dozens of actors, directors, and writers get together to throw together the best 10-minute plays they can pull off in 24 hours. The first weekend opens tonight with two showings of the first seven plays, based on themes divvied out to playwrights last night; tomorrow, there's a whole new set of plays--in total, 14 original plays in 48 hours. The festival runs for two weekends at OtB, with a new set of directors, writers, actors, and musicians next weekend. (100 W. Roy St. Fri. & Sat., 8 & 10:30 p.m. Tix $18-$35.) more ›

Artistic happy dances are going on within the Seattle arts community. News came this week that $1 million in federal funding will be spread out among local art, theatre, music, and literary organizations to help preserve nonprofit arts jobs in jeopardy. Thirteen local arts groups received $25,000 or $50,000 in funding, including: On the Boards, Northwest Folklife, Pilchuck Glass School, Intiman Theatre, and Seattle Theatre Group. Both the City of Seattle and the Cultural Development Authority of King County received $250,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts, which will be allocated--via an application process, due August 10--in a one-time arts stimulus for additional Seattle-based arts nonprofit groups. more ›

Audible, 605 Collective. Hell yeah! After an hour of interpretive dance pieces heavy on long, languid, movements, 605 Collective emerged like an antidote, kicking it up more than a few notches. The five dancers that comprise 605 are electrifying, delivering an athletic, fast-paced, personality-driven snippet from a 60-minute work to debut at the Dancing on the Edge Festival in July. If you live in Vancouver, B.C., don't miss these people. Influenced by everything from hiphop to ballet, they delivered in a stunning way. more ›

Sunday Service, Sara Edwards, Becky Poole, Erin Jorgensen, Paige Weinheimer. This show was odd--in fact, we'd be tempted to say it didn't work if not for the fact that something very real, emotionally, was happening onstage. more ›

RECOMMENDED NW New Works Fest @ On the Boards. Week two of OtB's annual revue of the best experimental theatre, performance, and dance from around the Northwest. Last weekend was a blast, and this weekend there's eight completely different performers hitting two stages. The Studio Showcase plays tonight at 8 and Sat. and Sun. at 5, and the Mainstage performances are Sat. and Sun. at 8. (100 W. Roy St. Tix $14.) more ›

Saturday at five o'clock we went down to On the Boards to catch the first week's Studio Showcase, part of the Northwest New Works Festival. The festival closes up next weekend with entirely different lineups in both the Mainstage and Studio showcases; more info here [PDF]. Tickets $14. more ›

RECOMMENDED Northwest New Works @ On the Boards. The NW New Works Fest returns in top form! The first weekend features a lineup of top Northwest dance groups on the mainstage, and a cast of brilliant experimental troupes down in the studio, our favorite part of the fest. The studio showcase plays Fri. 8, Sat. and Sun. at 5. The mainstage performances are Sat. and Sun. at 8. Next weekend, the lineup changes, so this is your only opportunity to see some of Seattle's best performers, including Helsinki Syndrome, featuring former Seattlester Rachel Hynes, live from London. (100 W. Roy St. Tix $14.) more ›

Earlier today on Slog, we read about Greg Lundgren's newest "Arbitrary Art Grant," via Vital 5 Productions: $500 for someone protesting "performance art" at On the Boards this Friday between 7 and 8 p.m. at the corner of W. Roy St. and First, right before the opening of the Northwest New Works Festival. We inquired with OtB if they had an official response, and they sent us a link to the below video. more ›

Jan Fabre may be direct, but he's not didactic. In , which played last weekend at On the Boards, he avoids becoming just another European leftist railing against capitalism and instead delivers a nearly two-hour exploration of the fear and loathing that underlies Western liberal capitalist society. Starting with proposition that consumerism is a form of autoeroticism--that it's masturbation, basically--his theatre troupe Troubleyn delves deep into the anxiety and self-loathing of people who consume to self-realize. more ›

ONE WEEKEND ONLY: ) more ›

Yesterday, On the Boards announced their next season of shows, and we're excited. OtB is the company we most often recommend to friends, particularly if they're , classic tragedy and issue plays about people coming to terms with things are right up your alley. But a lot of people aren't like that, and for them, the whipsmart contemporary performance at OtB, visually interesting and intellectually stimulating, is going to be a more enjoyable night out, so long as they can get over the initial "it's performance art" thing. more ›

Troubleyn, the theatre/performance company Belgian artist Jan Fabre founded 1986 to produce his idiosyncratic stage pieces, and this week, Troubleyn makes a rare U.S. (and Seattle debut) at On the Boards with unforgettable in terms of its effects and staging. more ›

Last Saturday we spent a fair bit of the morning and part of the afternoon at On the Boards watching a preview of most of the studio shows from the upcoming Northwest New Works Festival, June 5-7 and 12-14 (, about the travails of a Chinese restaurant deliveryman stuck in a New York elevator. Umami Performance presents a semi-improvised dance work about a couple's difficulty sharing a home. more ›

1. Wynne Greenwood is a surprisingly natural actor...for a visual artist/musician. She even ad libs well. Someone needs to make sure their cell phone starts ringing during performance just to see how well she takes it. (Okay, maybe not. Seriously, people.) more ›

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Wynne Greenwood's solo electro-pop trio Tracy + the Plastics was one of the most brilliantly conceived and executed performance art projects to come out of the Northwest that we know of, ever. Really--just think of how contorted that last sentence is. Greenwood played all three characters of her band: onstage, she performed as Tracy, interacting with herself (via pre-recorded video) as both of her own backup singers, Nikki Romanos and Cola ("the Plastics"). Her Stranger Genius Award last year was well-deserved, but Greenwood's always been more than Tracy + the Plastics: her performance art and video installations have been seen around the world, from the Tate Modern to the Moscow Biennale. And now she's returning to the stage with , next week at On the Boards. A work exploring the rather painful-sounding question--"What must we give up in order to survive?"--Greenwood has apparently transformed OtB's entire studio theatre into a mixed-media sculpture gallery/video installation/performance space. The work promises to be a brilliant piece of interactive art. more ›

The old adage--variously attributed to everyone from Leo Stravinsky to Martin Mull--that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" has always struck us as a sort of challenge for dance to step up to. While we don't dispute that the majority of music writing is lacking, dance, like architecture, is about physical forms, so it would seem perfectly reasonable to suppose it was possible. That said, we'd never actually architecture, they actually dance the architecture itself into existence. more ›

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The Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's of the performance. The website links will be working by this weekend, but you can purchase tickets over the phone currently at (206)217-9888. Tickets are $24. more ›

A couple interesting news bits from On the Boards. First up, the next show in their Inter/National Series, the Nature Theatre of Oklahoma's is about as strange a piece of theatre as you can come by: 100 hours of transcribed phone calls crammed into a four-hour dinner theatre production. And where will you be eating your sack lunch dinner? A deserted office suit on the fifth floor of the building at 1100 Eastlake Ave. E. (Parking is available in or near the building, apparently.) For those interested, the only night not yet sold out is Sunday, March 8. Performances start at 7 p.m., and with a half-hour break, should end around 11:30. more ›

Virtually all dance performance is, in one way or another, an exploration of the human body: the dancers are lithe and athletic--look at the movement, the balance, the elegant contortions that the body, fine-tuned as an instrument, is capable of! But Portland's tEEth (at On the Boards tonight and tomorrow at 8 p.m., $18), in their world-premiere work , have another way to explore the body: through sound. more ›

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Before we even start getting into the coolness of chelfitsch's performance last weekend at On the Boards, we need to apologize for something: We try to make sure to let readers know about events in time to get tickets, but for the second time this season, OtB sold out before we started plugging. This is their 30th anniversary season, and the line-up has really rocked, so consider this your notice for the month. more ›

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