Rouge: The idée fixe
Performance art is not generally known for its sense of humor. For the past thirty years or so it has been tied down quite often to outrage and outrageousness, particularly concerning sex. However there is certainly another thread of performance art that draws upon absurd humor. Julie Andrée T. most certainly belongs to the latter group of artists who value wit and humor over political earnestness.
Book-It Rep’s The Art of Racing in the Rain
One of Seattle’s bigger theater production companies stages a play centered around a talking dog. No, the Rep hasn’t brought back Sylvia; instead Book-It Repertory has mounted The Art of Racing In The Rain, based on the novel by Northwest author, Garth Stein. John Allis weighs in with his experience.
boom! theater company, New Works Festival, Phase II
The offerings of the New Works Festival, varying drastically in tone and form, are matched in a number of combinations throughout it, making for continuously-changing playbills. So that while Mountain of Dreams, for example, goes up one evening alongside Vitruvius and Fight, it’ll share a bill the next week with Over: exposed. As a result, performances compliment and/or clash with one another to varying degrees from night to night, and each evening is by design unique.
Wing-it Productions brings us GAUNTLET: There’s jousting.
There is often a fine line between video games and reality. Some of us pour over a controller or mouse for hours at a time, tailoring our gaming experience to be exactly the fantastic reality we wished we could live in. Being able to escape from the sometimes harsh, sometimes monotonous minutia of our existence is in part the reason video games exist and have become so widely popular amongst people of all ages. So what happens when two people are given the opportunity to literally act out their real life experiences through a fantasy world in a video game? You won’t know until you witness the onstage interactive video game improvised show, GAUNTLET.
The Show Must Go On, Part 4: Off the Page
My plan was to write a draft of the story, and then cut and adapt the scenes. But all things work together for good, at least in this case. Before I spiral much further into angst or research or other forms of writerly avoidance and overthink-age, my producer asked if we could meet to run through the story and workshop it.
Annex Theatre’s Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors: Biff! Klertch! Sigh.
Team of Heroes: Behind Closed Doors, now in production at Annex Theatre, is the second part of a proposed trilogy that aims to bring the excitement of comic books on stage with a mix of humor and pathos. Unfortunately, the plays have so far leaned toward zany and wacky comedy, while paying lip service to pathos and drama.
The Working Artist Series with The Cabiri: Educating the audience
How does one get into aerial arts, anyway? It is no secret that one of the great problems of the performing arts is creating continuity. Not only continuity of style, and not only continuity of tradition, but also continuity of knowledge among practitioners as well as among audiences. For quite sometime in Seattle it has been fashionable among theater artists to talk about educating their audiences. The goal is noble but difficult.
The Show Must Go On, Part 3: The Structure and The Stakes
One piece of my self-assigned homework last week was to look at more storytelling guidelines, so I did. This set of storytelling tips on The Moth, hit me hard, especially this part: the stakes of the story need to be clear to you, and to the audience. Good news, then. Just by writing last week’s post, I figured out another piece of of why this story’s been tricky. I hadn’t identified the stakes of the story yet. Bad news: I didn’t know what the stakes were yet.
Live! The Realest MC: Posture and Poise
On the surface, Kyle Abraham’s new dance work at On the Boards, Live! The Realest MC, seems to be about gay issues. It is a queer retelling of The Adventures of Pinocchio. The reality, however, is more complex. It is as much about how sex roles, gender and homosexuality are framed largely by the context of race as it is about individual struggle and acceptance. This brings up other questions of race, of course, but in ways that most of the critics of dance and theater–who tend to be white and largely bourgeois–do not care to grasp because such a discussion, too, would prove reality more complex than currently fashionable when it seems easier to reduce it to psychodrama.
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