A couple things landed in my inbox this morning that ought to be shared. The first is a link to a post on Seattlest talking up Intermission Impossible, the recently announced location for Nature Theater of Oklahoma and the awesomeness that will be Theatre Replacement. The other is a recommendation from Daily Candy -  they think our party is one of things you ought to be doing this weekend.

And here are a few recommendations from staff for Intermission Impossible:
Dress festive | Costumes are absolutely encouraged. Last year we saw everything from a patriotic bunch of performance artists to Amy Winehouse wigs and tracksuits for Olivia Newton John karaoke to a particularly memorable fellow known as Sergeant HotPants.
Buy tickets early | Want to help cut down on your wait time at the box office? Buy your ticket in advance.
Don’t be afraid to come late | We’ll be partying late into the night. Although a word of advice – the box office won’t be open as late. If you’re thinking you may not get there until after 11 or 11:30, see the above link.

We CAN’T WAIT for this party to begin and hope to see you all there!

zoe|juniper are touring their piece the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t all along the East Coast. This weekend they were reviewed in the NY Times. We’re thrilled to watch this company keep growing and touring. Read Gia Kourlas’ thoughts on their piece in “Writhing, Twisting Torsos and an Indoor Snowfall.” 

…that you come to Intermission Impossible this Friday. Here’s the SLOG post saying so.

Get your tickets here.

Still figuring out what to do for Valentines Day? Looking for an alternative spin on the dinner and drinks routine?

We’ve got you covered.

First, go to the Sitting Room, which is running a few specials for the evening:

Special 1 | Bellini (champagne gellee, homemade peach sorbet & white peach coulis) & a bottle of rut Cava Reserva | $40
Special 2 | Plate of assorted truffles & cookies & a bottle of Brut Cava Reserva | $40
Special 3 | Choice of cup of soup or green salad, entree & bottle of tropiche Malbec wine | $65
Special 4 | Same as #3, except with a bottle of Brut Cava Reserva | $70

Then come upstairs at 8pm for the final performance of Grub. It’ll kickstart your evening in all the right ways.

Welcome to our review blog for Grub. Read our patron reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

“It’s dynamic and creative and funny (someone in the audience yelled at the rest of the crowd for being afraid to laugh) and definitely worth seeing.” – Seattlest

“There’s stomping and grunting, laughing and muttering, grimacing and thumbsucking, videography (including blue-screen trickery) and snapshot-taking (or the parody thereof), jitters and quivers, lip-licking and teeth-gnashing.” – Seattle Times

“When the improvisational-based troupe (2 men, 4 women) relax they boast a child’s happy sense of the absurd.” – Seattle Met Mag’s Out Post

“The company brought both wit and terror to the stage, along with live-feed cameras, straight-jacket costumes right out of Tim Burton’s The Night Before Christmas, and a gorgeous sound track.” – Seattle Magazine

You can also read a review from artdish posted below…

Dance is seldom easy to quantify or explain. How can the movement of bodies across a stage depict things so essential to the human experience?  Often we witness the drama of personal relationships or the interaction of the soul and the larger cosmos. The object is frequently transcendence, the process of our unlocking this mortal coil to inhabit a space beyond it.

The Portland collective tEEth, whose work Grub is being performed through Saturday the 14th at On the Boards, takes the human body itself as domain and subject. Try as we might to achieve a communion with others or ascend to some unspecified higher order of existence, tEEth reminds us that all we have in the end is the discomfort of our own physical presence. The realization is compelling to watch, but not pretty.

 Grub’s movement is harsh and punishing, initiated, then later punctuated, by a host of shrieks, cries, and high-pitched wails. The dancers appear completely unrestrained as their contorted facial expressions give way to violent spasms. Limbs and torsos shoot out wildly and seemingly without cause, but ultimately rotate back upon themselves, culminating in slaps, slams, thuds and more primal screams.

 Throughout the performance there are interruptions that change the mode and tonality by way of a camcorder and projection. As simple as it sounds, the effect of having a woman writhing on the floor in silence while simultaneous gazing at us on a large screen is powerful, providing us with an alternate, more intimate perspective of the trauma we have been witnessing all along. At other times, the video feed is distorted in a way that suggests human forms exerting pressure or even melting through the surface. 

There is a kind of physical grounding that results from these repeated attempts to break free from the constraints of the body. While I am not sure I have ever seen a dance like this before, it did remind me of one artist who works in a very different medium: Kiki Smith. There was something about the strange quality of human forms impressed upon the screen, the emphasis on extremities, the wild-haired women with their silent-screen faces, open mouths and popping eyes that made me think of her. 

Choosing to choreograph work which flirts so dangerously with the profane and the ordinary is courageous and brave. To create a successful piece in the process, as tEEth has done, is something to marvel at.

-Jim Demetre
[Originally posted @ artdish]

Dear Colleagues of tEEth,

I want to say thank you for your performance tonight. I was glad to have a chance to see your work in person, as opposed to pressed into a tiny YouTube box.

You are clearly a charismatic and talented group of artists, and it’s for this reason that I want to be respectfully honest about my reaction to your work. What I saw tonight, though engaging and dynamic at times, seemed unfinished, or perhaps more specifically, underdeveloped. With the level of abstraction in your work, and with your company decidedly in the tricky territory between dance and grotesque physical theatre, I felt that there needed to be more than what I was getting in order for me to be fully engaged by the performance. It was like watching a well-polished work-in-progress, one for which another period of development could very well allow the piece to evolve into a more substantial whole. The experiments with technology felt like just that – experiments. The transitions between the etudes seemed too random, and didn’t allow the piece to gestate an energy that built over the course of the performance. The lighting design felt too general, often making the stage itself too wide, flat, and present for the type of work that you’re doing.

With the hope that I’m making sense I’ll say this too, again with heaps of respect for your company, which seems to be on a path to finding great things: think about playing to your strengths more. In it’s current form, this company’s strength does not seem to be straight-up modern dance. Instead, I found the most engaging moments of the night to be the ones that leaned more toward the theatrical – but forget that word if it doesn’t work for you – I mean specifically the moments when facial and vocal expression was merged with movement or with the power of simple presence. The intimate duet with performer and video camera, the quartet where sounds were being forced out of the women’s bodies, the seemingly eight-foot tall bald-headed birdman eating his way through a line of blue tape, these are examples of the type of moments in the performance when I felt that I was seeing the sparks of what this company is capable of doing.

I’m not suggesting that you do away with dance, as evidenced by my appreciation of the quartet, I’m only encouraging you to consider exploring ways to more fully and/or frequently integrate the things that you do well into your dance work. You might consider the use of language (not necessarily logical or literal). Do you know of Jo Strømgren? He’s a Norwegian choreographer who incorporates a gibberish language that he invented into his performances. I thought of his work during the duet where the male and female partners kept mouthing words to each other. I admit that it was an interesting action in and of itself the way it was, but having heard the power of your voices… by now you probably know what I’m trying to say.

You’re a playful, talented, and expressive group, and I hope I don’t come off as a prick know-it-all. Please take everything I’ve written as the thoughts of an objective colleague in the performing arts who wishes you a great deal of success and looks forward to seeing your work again in the future.

All the best,
Paul Budraitis

my friend adam and i adjourned to the sitting room after the show last night, talked about Grub and drew a napkin flipbook. Click the picture above to go to the animation i made of it.

- Tania

Inside you there is something uncivilized, miserable, hungry and to put it frankly– grubby and no matter how much you try to paste a well-behaved pretty face atop it will always be there just under the skin screaming for attention.  Your ill-tempered, self-indulgent inner child so to speak.  tEEth let this part of themselves run the show from start to finish.

I was under the misconception this was a dance show, but really it is more of a multi-media musical theater piece.  tEEth has a lot of things going for them.  A physically diverse and courageous cast. Well integrated and inventive use of video that transforms the human head into a hundred swirling eyes and gnashing teeth.  Simple costumes that evolve into ever more complex puzzles while never being distracting or overpowering the shape of the body.  Dynamic music at times jarring and at others graceful.  Beautiful and clever use of vocalization.  Precise and well-crafted facial expressions.

On the other hand,  I wish tEEth had pushed the physicality of their bodies to the extremes that they did their faces.  Take away the grimaces and scowls and much of the movement is bland and unclear as if their heads were pasted atop their bodies.  I think tEEth could also benefit from a closer examination of pacing and development.  Early on they set up their dynamics and carried them through until the end of the show.  Alternating an aggressive, assaultive moment with a quieter, reflective one and back again.  The characters didn’t seem to experience growth or decay and at the end I felt that although it had been a fascinating and at times very moving evening I hadn’t really been given anything to hold on to.

While you may have to look elsewhere for transformative theater you should go to tEEth to see multi-media done right, to see dancers not afraid of using their face and to see song and dance happen in the same space without being trite.

-Marissa Niederhauser