NW New Works Festival
On the Boards, 100 W. Roy St., 217-9886, ontheboards.org. $14. 8 p.m. Fri., 5 & 8 p.m. Sat., 8 p.m. Sun. Ends June 14.
On the Boards has been producing this festival for 31 years, and every time there’s something you could never predict. Which is the point, but it still makes our eyebrows shoot up and our jaws drop when we see it.
Opening weekend’s contenders for “Who would have thought of that?” include Sarah Rudinoff’s snappy observation that, on Facebook, “Everyone is having a cocktail. You never see them paying a bill.” Then there’s ilvs strauss’ mild-mannered imitation of a sea cucumber giving birth in a wonderful costume fashioned from a red sleeping bag. In the final tableau of dancer Linda Austin’s Hummingbird, she balances on top of a cat’s scratching post with a tablet computer glowing on her head, tooting on a pair of noisemakers. Zac Pennington shoves his microphone down Allie Hankins’ pants, then sings into her crotch.
You get the picture.
Some works have a seriously spooky aspect. Kyle Loven is already disturbing as a Morse-code transcriber in Ham Sandwich, but then his world falls apart, and he’s reduced to using bread to record his messages. Finding a surveillance camera in the light fixture just makes it worse. Anna Conner turns her camera on the viewer in YOURS, but don’t kiss me when her dancers exit the stage, leaving the audience grateful that the camera is pointing at someone else. The Pendleton House and Rainbow Fletcher both explore dark corners in their choreography—literally so for Pendleton House, where dancers spend long chunks of time in the near-dark, only to blind us with reflected light when they pass through a beam. Fletcher’s dancers appear in balaclava masks; her visceral movement style and deft use of stage patterns was a disorienting contrast to the anonymity of the masked performance.
The lineup for the second weekend is equally rich; however, you won’t be able to see anything I just described, since none of the programs repeat. That too is the point of the fest: to introduce as much new work as possible. For that reason, I look forward to seeing Amy O’Neal, who continues to reconfigure hip-hop dance in an intense solo; and Erin Pike, who’ll explore female stereotypes in theater, as expressed through their stage directions; and David Schmader, whose new monologue We All Can See Your Lips Move promises to devour itself.
stage@seattleweekly.com
