Take a listen as our artistic director, Lane, talks with Holcombe:

Audio Interview [Full Length Interview, mp3]

Audio Interview [Short Excerpt, mp3]

Check out our spiffy new t-shirts, as modeled by the OtB staff. These 30th Anniversary shirts are available in the lobby before shows for a mere $15! Sexy silver ink printed on quality American Apparel shirts.

Check out this post on the Mumbling Madly blog about being an extra in the Superamas show:

Team Seattle: A Behind the Scenes Look

Check out what the local press had to say about “BIG 3rd (happy/end)”:

The Seattle Times | “Performance ensemble takes on the pursuit of emptiness”

The Seattle P-I | “Superamas put on a glossy show, but what’s the point?”

Seattlest | “The Superamas Go BIG at On the Boards”

The Stranger SLOG

Click here to see a larger version.

- Sara E.

Welcome to our review blog for BIG, 3rd episode (happy/end). Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

We found our seats near the front. A beautiful woman in tight fitting jeans and red heals took the mic. Downstage, a man started strumming a guitar. I started tapping my foot to a song I thought I knew, but couldn’t quite remember. A few minutes later the whole cast came downstage to sing the refrain, coaxing the audience to clap along to the uplifting beat. My sister turned to me and whispered, “I’m not clapping, they’re fucking with us.”

What followed is a series of satirical variations on scenes we know: incestuous drama at band practice, competitive dance-off in a club, confident babes gossiping about sex in the locker room, a spiritual support group for lonely schmucks dedicated to releasing personal anxiety, a self-conscious video montage documenting Superamas’ successful run in New York.

While splattered with titillating scenes of half-dressed, gorgeous women, a sophisticated sound design and seamless transitions between video and live action, Big, 3rd episode (happy/end) only seems interested in making one simple point: in a media driven, commodified culture we are under a constant deluge of images. Whatever the medium, whether it be music, television, print, or film, the intention of the producers is to distill our base desires, repackage them and sell them back to us. All pop culture is a manipulation in order to sell us something. And the more we struggle to assert our individuality through the available mediums, the more we become part of the club.

Most of us know this already, but I will admit that in the daily routine, it’s easy to forget. Superamas is here to remind us what’s really going on, by repeating recognizable scenes over and over again with slight variation, stopping occasionally to catch us watching, or accenting a character through light and sound to hammer it home–we are all self-consciously created individuals, presenting ourselves in a calculated way in order to mask our deep insecurities. Repetition with slight variation is a device that can subtly shift the mood and tone very effectively when infused with an inventive imagination (I’m thinking of the inspiring piece from Dorky Park a few years back and the way they made similar points through a mash of repeated movement, and pop culture iconography, then shattered our expectations in deliciously chaotic ways), but unfortunately in the case of Superamas, a dull, satirical cleverness takes precedent.

The group is definitely successful in what they set out to do, but I think this piece is pretty slight and obvious in what it wants to say—it’s slick, and stylistically unified, but lacks genuine physical grace and guts. I felt Superamas’ creative impulse was sort of cannibalized by its own mission of exposing our collective artificiality. Still, I encourage you to go to the show this weekend and decide for your self.

- Braden

In the program notes (which, thankfully, I read after the show), Gillian Harkins of UW says this show is “deeply uncomfortable” — which I find baffling, because I had quite the opposite response: The show is all too comfortable, blandly so, really. It’s a handful of scenes — some live, some on video — and some songs (including “Smells Like Teen Spirit” — can there be a ban on anyone using that song in any movie or live performance for at least the next ten years? It might regain its potency by then), some dancing. Some of the scenes — one in particular– are repeated, sometimes exactly, sometimes paused, sometimes interrupted (by a brief clip from “What’s New Pussycat?”, among other things). The dialogue (all prerecorded and lip-synched by the performers) is at the level of something like “Footballer’s Wives”, though apparently one sequence was inspired by watching the much more clever “Sex and the City”. And an excerpt from an interview with deconstructionist philosopher Derrida,
which is also lip-synched. Quite the mishmash, really, only not very mashed up.

There’s considerable skill in the presentation, the design is sleek and the performers are pleasing to the eye (the women spend a good chunk of stage time naked or semi-so; the men, oddly bashful, never do more than take off their shirts), and one of the guys had a fantastic pair of red-and-white sneakers that I envied. So I wasn’t bored. Nor was I particularly engaged or stimulated, and I certainly wasn’t made
uncomfortable. When it was over…well, what was I left with? The inclusion of the Derrida quote (I’d also like to suggest a ban on anyone referring to Derrida for the next…well, forever) suggested there was a definite point to the proceedings — Pop culture is shallow? Not exactly news. In a sequence at the end, a mass of Seattle “extras” danced enthusiastically while the Europeans looked glum and despondent — was this pointing some kind of finger at American vapidness? Surely Superamas is aware that European pop culture is every bit as sleazy and trashy as American, if not moreso.

It struck me as a performance trying so hard to mean something that it forgot to be something.

- Bret Fetzer

My personal experience with Superamas has been quite intense and immediate. Its been interesting to work the load-in/tech for the show, as well as being one of the local, high-kicking extras for the performance. I got a sense of the piece from seeing some video during rehearsal for the dance extras, and was initially put off a little by the extreme content. However, after watching a run-through in the theater and seeing a majority of the piece (except for when we had to run backstage to get into place) I felt the power and the draw brought on by the focused execution of the performers. The piece is hilariously animated, and engagingly concentrated. I’m excited for the master class on Saturday, and the last few performances to come.

- Danny Herter

The first podcast of the season is on-line now for the Superamas show that opens this Thursday night:

Click here to listen [mp3]
In Search of Happy Endings

by Gillian Harkins, Assistant Professor, Department of English, University of Washington