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| PNB School student Photo by Isaac Aoki |
PNB’s NEXT STEP: Choreographers’ Showcase
June 14, 7:30 PM, McCaw Hall
A vehicle for emerging talent, NEXT STEP is where PNB Company dancers rise as choreographers and PNB School’s Professional Division students take center stage in an all-premiere lineup of works created just for them. Featuring premieres by Andrew Bartee, Kyle Davis, Eric Hipolito Jr., Jonathan Porretta, Price Suddarth, Sean Rollofson, and Ezra Thomson, with performances by the Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestra. NEXT STEP runs for one performance only, Friday, June 14 at 7:30 PM. More information and tickets can be found here.
NW New Works Studio Showcase
June 14, 8:00 PM and June 15–16, 5:00 PM, On the Boards Studio Theater
A hugely diverse bill, this weekend’s Studio Showcase features four artists. Jeffrey Fracé presents Harp Song for a Radical, inspired by Marguerite Young’s book of the same title. In this dance theater piece informed by radicalism, Jeffrey Fracé leads a group of talented performers to dance, yell and sing in order to draw a parallel between old issues and our current climate. The Eternal Glow Project performs Ω < 1 where a group of visual, theater, and performance artists contend with an engineer and scientific principles to discover their lack of purpose in this life. Grounded in fragmented text this work deals with the most primal burden of humanity: our incessant need to escape truth and our desperate longing for meaning. AMADOR/STOKES presents Duels, a new play written by Nick Stokes and directed by Jose Amador that tells an unconventional story of love, death, and repetition. It experiments with narrative structures by fusing the surreal and hyper real alongside performances by Carter Rodriquez, Aimée Bruneau, and Daniel Christensen. Rounding out the bill is Paris Hurley’s BEWARE THE ILLUSION OF Built upon a year of research examining shame, the work’s creation is centered in a mining of personal experience. It investigates both the culturally accepted definitions of man, woman, beauty, sex and sexuality as well as ritual and repetition. Tickets are available here.
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| Paris Hurley Photo by Tim Summers |
NW New Works Mainstage Showcase
June 15–16, 8:00 PM, On the Boards Mainstage
Four artists also grace On the Board’s Mainstage Showcase in Weekend Two of NWNW. Paul Budraitis returns with a new solo work that infuses video and text with action and presence. Combining the stories of an air traffic controller, a train conductor, and a father of a fallen hero, Our Great Home takes us on a journey to reimagine a visual and aural landscape of the concept of “home.” Markeith Wiley’s group, The New Animals presents TRE (where were you), an examination of what happened when a close friend of the group died in 2008 and what has surfaced from four years of recollections, questions and creation. In This is how we Disappear, two performers traverse through the complexities of disconnection, desire, belonging and grace. This newest work from bobbevy (Portland, Oregon) juxtaposes the natural simplicity of time passing with our own experience of human relationships and features both real-time video generated by Brian Richardson and sound composed/performed by Jesse Mejia. A theatrical collaboration between the Satori Group and musical duo The Bengsons, The Land is Always Known is a rollicking musical attempt to create a new American folk hero and a new mythology. The piece explores the violence in our pasts – whether personal, familial, cultural, historical – and questions the possibilities for healing. Tickets are available here.
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| Idan Cohen (Israel) Photo by Dani Berman |
Seattle International Dance Festival
June 14–23, Raisbeck Hall
The Seattle International Dance Festival has established itself as a huge presence in the Seattle dance scene each year. With two weekends of international performances plus three evenings celebrating the diversity of the local dance scene, this festival offers a huge array of performances. Here’s what’s on the line-up for Weekend One and the upcoming mid-week Spotlight on Seattle shows. Tickets for all performances are available here.
INTER|NATIONAL ARTIST SERIES Weekend One
Program A: Friday, June 14, 8:00 PM
Program A: Friday, June 14, 8:00 PM
A one-night-only event, Program A features Idan Cohen, one of Israel’s leading young choreographers, and Tere Mathern Dance from Portland, Oregon. Idan Cohen will present Wayfarer. Set to Mahler’s composition, the piece manifests the inner journey of the wanderer, searching for symbols and images of a home. Surrounded by bird songs and the beauty and abyss of nature, Wayfarer walks on unstable, fragile ground, looking for a haven. Tere Mathern Dance performs Gather, a dance about convergence, digging in, interdependence and the moment of interaction. This is a collaboration between Tere Mathern Dance and the music group, Battle Hymns & Gardens including saxophonists Reed Wallsmith and Joe Cunningham, both members of the critically acclaimed Blue Cranes.
Program B: Saturday, June 15, 8:00 PM and Sunday, June 16, 7:30 PM
Program B presents three different groups. Yurek Hansen of the Idaho Ballet Theater and Manimou Camara, West African dance master bring a collaboration of different traditions together: West African, hip-hop, ballet, and martial arts. Kokoro Dance from Vancouver, Canada, performs a solo, A Simple Way, embodying the concepts of yugen (profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe and the sad beauty of human suffering), wabi (transient and stark beauty), and sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging). Local Khambatta Dance presents its powerful and mesmerizing Truth and Betrayal “which spins questions of trust and deception into a tangy affair with a lightly cruel edge.” (Seattle Times)
SPOTLIGHT ON SEATTLE
Program B: Saturday, June 15, 8:00 PM and Sunday, June 16, 7:30 PM
Program B presents three different groups. Yurek Hansen of the Idaho Ballet Theater and Manimou Camara, West African dance master bring a collaboration of different traditions together: West African, hip-hop, ballet, and martial arts. Kokoro Dance from Vancouver, Canada, performs a solo, A Simple Way, embodying the concepts of yugen (profound, mysterious sense of the beauty of the universe and the sad beauty of human suffering), wabi (transient and stark beauty), and sabi (the beauty of natural patina and aging). Local Khambatta Dance presents its powerful and mesmerizing Truth and Betrayal “which spins questions of trust and deception into a tangy affair with a lightly cruel edge.” (Seattle Times)
SPOTLIGHT ON SEATTLE
Tuesday, June 18, 8:00 PM
Curated by Amy O’Neal Tuesday has huge diversity of local talent including Paige Barnes, Corrie Befort, Alice Gosti, Beth Graczyk, Jody Kuehner, Danny Long, Devin McDermott, Ricki Mason, Amelia Reeber, and Shannon Stewart.
Wednesday June 19, 8:00 PM
Wednesday June 19, 8:00 PM
Curated by Tere Mathern and co-presented with Conduit Dance Center in Portland this line-up features the work of Allie Hankins, Lotus Body/Tara Dyberg, Danielle Ross, UMAMI Performance (Aiko Kinoshita + Aaron Swartzman), and Kate Wallich.
Thursday June 20, 8:00 PM
Thursday June 20, 8:00 PM
Curated by PNB soloist, Kiyon Gaines, Thursday’s program features Amy Johnson, Ashani Dances (Iyun Ashani Harrison), badmarmarDANCE (Marlo Martin), Coriolis Dance (Christin Call and Natascha Greenwalt Murphy), and Shannon Stewart.
