Check them out:

“Man oh man! Last night I was fortunate enough to see the last performance of Diane Szeinblum’s piece “Alaska” at On the Boards. At it’s most fervent moments, the piece cast a hypnotic spell over the audience.”

- Seattle MetBlogs

“This is pretty heady stuff, and Szeinblum’s conceptual Alaska is rather more dark, desolate and austere than our majestic, cruise-ship friendly, oil-rich, eccentric, and ruggedly individualistic neighbors many have in their minds.”

- Cross Cut

Jim Demetre reviews Alaska:

When we use the word “contemporary” to describe a work of dance we are usually talking about two things. First are the formal elements of movement employed in conveying the meaning; elements that are of the moment and constitute a kind of recognizable global vernacular. Second is the vaguer realm of mood, tone, and sensibility. Does it define something particular about the era in which we live?

Argentinean choreographer Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska, which opened Thursday at On the Boards and runs through Sunday, can clearly lay claim to the former properties. When it comes to the latter, however, the piece is as traditional and familiar as that other product of Argentina, the tango.

Read the full review

Jean Lenihan had the following to say about Alaska:

In the fearless, gale-force landscape of “Alaska,” created by Argentinean choreographer Diana Szeinblum, bodies convulse and metamorphose in brutal phrases that read like symptom and remedy both. Like 90-proof dance theater, “Alaska” packs an amazing rush of raw, coursing energy into 60 minutes, all while playing subtly with the audience’s need to assign meaning.

Read the full review

Does a series of forceful, compelling moments amount to a show? Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska, performed by a quartet of untiring, impervious and inconsolable dancers, consists of a chain of incidents that compound subtly over the course of a quick hour. The result is not so much a play, as the director describes it, as an artwork that offers physical evidence of things that never happened.

Early on in Alaska, I thought of Richard Maxwell, playwright and director of the New York City Players. Not because both artists come from the theater but because of the restraint they share: As Maxwell trusts his performers to deliver meaning without necessarily acting, Szeinblum knows that the mechanics of the human body don’t always need expressive overlay to achieve dramatic effect. Leticia undulates. Pablo looks away. I take a breath.

But unlike Maxwell, whose characters often face the audience, Szeinblum creates a solid fourth wall—with one conspicuous (and weak) exception. Generally, the characters in this third person drama disregard the audience as animals in a documentary disregard the camera, as living people disregard ghosts.

We watch these characters. We watch their relationships; we watch to see whether they will change because it’s so interesting to see people change. When they cycle through patterns of behavior instead of changing, it’s disturbing—no matter how abstract their world is. These characters seize one another and turn from one another, consistently uncomfortable in each other’s presence. We watch them cycle, their loyalties, sorrows and mysteries engulfed in shadows.

Though it’s intense, Alaska is just this side of extreme, which gives it surprise. Szeinblum exploits repetition, but ideas are interrupted before they get dizzying. The performers pick up those dropped threads: Lucas transposes Alejandra’s violent torso thrust to a horizontal plane, making terrific use of the manipulation technique that otherwise grows a little tiresome. Unison arm movements shared by the men are different on a boy-girl couple. Subtle shifts, rather than severe repetition, provide the punch.

Despite its intensity and a sudden special effect, Alaska never explodes but fades like the bizarre and possibly brilliant train of thought you have just before sleep. As the dancers sit listening to the music near the end, the light misses them. Shadows swallow them all. Perhaps this world belongs in darkness—these interior corners don’t normally see the light of day. As dim panels of light cross the stage, we get the sense the cycle will continue without us, in darkness. The musicians leave their instruments but the music goes on through the bows, accompanying us faintly as we exit.

-Dayna Hanson

I’m glad I didn’t read anything about ‘Alaska’ before seeing it. I didn’t know what to expect; I had no expectation or background or assumption. What I found was four people, not characters or dancers or performers, but people. They each felt the need to MOVE, vigorously and frantically. They moved with an incredible sense of control, and yet they all seemed out of control. There was no clear message, meaning, story, purpose, or throughline to what I saw onstage, even when the beautifully ethereal music (performed live) was added to the mix. If someone in the audience thought they knew ‘why’ the people were moving the way they were, it’s my belief that they were making their own meaning as a viewer. But in that vagueness onstage, I felt a calm passion rise and fall inside me, the pleasure of emptiness, the release of my need to understand. The pushing, pulling, writhing, throwing, catching, slapping, kissing, and running all existed in a strange and blank place, and I was completely fine with that. After the show, I read the program notes. Apparently, that is exactly the kind of place they were trying to create: Alaska. If this sounds like something you’d even remotely enjoy, go see this show before it’s gone!

- Ben

by Louis Gervais

If we examine the darkness in us, where does it go? Does it inflame it? Does it release? Does it spread it around? Although melancholy hangs in the air, the darkness in Alaska is beautiful as it passes out of the bodies of the four dancers in the work. There is pain and there is pleasure, but this organic work gives us time to look and to see the heartache as it escapes.

Dancers repeat movement with such commitment and fire that emotion burns through the space. At the very opening, Alejandra Ferreeyra Ortiz stands and dives her upper body down between her legs throwing her arms and flying her hair. She flies out to us and looks back to her companion and every time she comes up for air we want to catch her before she falls.

To say that Alaska is depressing would be misleading. Although everyone does seems a bit depressed, the piece feels more like a leap from a dark place than the dark place itself. Dancers thrash their way to the ecstatic and there are also many moments of sensuality and humor. Apparently, you can’t get out of pain without going through some real pain first. Like little births, twisting and squeezing through the small openings that others provide to escape and torquing every limb available are some of the pressured ways out.

Some highlights include a combat striptease, surprising kisses, and a mating dance with spoons. There were also a few WTF moments like a table that makes a dramatic entrance and then has nothing more to contribute but an awkward strike. And a musician that does a quite distracting cross over in front of the solo performer in the middle of the last solo. But these are minor errors.

I could have easily watched for another half hour and I get bored easily. I left wanting more. The performers, Ortiz, Leticia Mazur, Lucas Condro and Pablo Lugones, although somewhat detached from the whole experience, were so accomplished that watching them do anything would be interesting. The music by Ulises Conti created a suspended world, heavy with anticipation and real aching beauty. Szeinblum has an aesthetic that allows for all kinds of random quirkiness but the work maintains a clear link to its creative source of the chaos of memories, emotions, sensations and experiences that are never visited.

- Louis Gervais

Check out my blog. louisinperformance.blogspot.com

Did you see Alaska? Read patron and press reviews, click on the Comments button to read the comments of others and post your own thoughts.

Diana Szeinblum comes to Seattle with Alaska, a dance theater work that is as heavy as it is light, as aggressive as it is quiet, as mysterious as it is ordinary. It is a lot of contradictory things. It’s perhaps an illumination of the fragmented spaces that are in everyone’s minds, silent one moment and thunderous, another. It’s a beautiful work that’s a lot like walking into someone’s lonely room unseen and seeing thoughts that you probably weren’t supposed to read, watching moments unfold that you probably have no business knowing. A feeling of dread, despair, loss, and recapture that is at once somber, frightening, and fascinating.

I won’t talk too much about what has been said about Szeinblum and her work with the great Pina Bausch, but I will say that this connection is certainly present and that Szeinblum is making compelling work that is inspiring to watch. The performance very much feels like an invitation into each individual dancer’s personal space, their introspective viewpoint made flesh with their body. It’s like we’re all tiny visitors burrowing under their skin, admiring the wallpaper but  noticing where it’s starting to crack. The dancers are spectators as much as they are participants or vessels of information. (Also, I love an onstage coffeemaker.)

I will say, though, that I was expecting fiercely violent movement, that dreamy, cathartic, visceral and emotional punch in the face; a brutality of movement, assault to the senses. Maybe I’m just a theatrical sadist – maybe I just like ‘ugly’ movement, sloppy sequences, a little roughness and rawness in my performances. Maybe I just hope that happens every time I go to the theater…

Alaska, for me, contained these spurts of energy, though not so much brutal or fierce. I saw grotesqueness in provocative shapes, but with an almost tentative energy, a heightened restraint; a strange and bizarre tension, that exists perhaps in fractured memory or situational detachment, a palpable introspection and self-consciousness that reminded me of the waiting room at the doctor’s office or the time and space to allow your eyes to adjust to a darkened room. It was a pleasant surprise which reminds me, as radical of a theater-goer I think I am – that I, too, can be bogged down by pre-conceived notions and ideas.

Much of the movement in the piece is about isolation, almost to a literal sense. Limbs, bellies, feet, elbows, knees, locking and interlocking, breaking apart, observed, manipulated, shaped grotesquely; bodies long suffocating memories, only now spilling out trauma and sorrow in measured strokes (words) experiencing the memories once more in physical form. Looking at what things could have happened, how it all fell apart. There was a stifled desperation that was bubbling under the surface. It felt buoyant, close to breaking through, but with each passing repetition pushing it deeper within yet further from my reach.

The live music was effective – especially the viola. I played violin for 15 some years, and the viola was always an unusual instrument for me to hear – it always sounds ‘wrong’ for some reason. But it can soar to the screeching heights of the violin and plummet to the gutteral moans of the cello. A great choice for this work.

I was surprised at when the audience laughed during the show. Twice. I didn’t think either moment was funny. I wonder if that happens at all the performances, or if this was an isolated incident. I don’t want to spoil it, but please do not ask a stupid question…

The dancers performed the work with skill and precision, but I wished the execution was more out of control. In general, the Body is a performer’s #1 tool, and Memory is #2. But for me, memories are muddled, confusing, messy, out of control; attributes that are diametrically in opposition to everything we’re taught as performers. On the flip side, this inhibition can be a good thing – because what’s really exhilarating is the anticipation of the moment where it snaps, when memory and emotion come flooding out. And then what do you do?

-Mike P

Local dance guru Alice Kaderlan talks up Diana Szeinblum, Jiri Kylian (whose Petit Mort is having its Seattle premiere as part of Director’s Choice @ PNB this weekend and next) and more. Go to KUOW’s site to hear more about these and other dance happenings in Seattle this week and next.

Here’s how Jeremy Barker’s preview of Diana Szeinblum’s Alaska opens:

The people at On the Boards are usually enthusiastic about the shows they bring to Seattle, but there’s a special vibe coming from the Behnke Center down at First & Roy this week. They’re serious when they say they’ve been working to try to bring the Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum to town for six years, and the sense of pride and excitement in Alaska, which runs tonight through Sunday (Nov. 5-8, tickets $24), is palpable.

Read on to find out just why we’re all so excited.