It’s the return of PodFest, our online showcase of new digital performative works that runs concurrent with the NW New Works Festival.

Click here to download the application [Word Doc]

Applications are due by April 26, 2010, so start making some art!

Here are a few of the NW New Works reviews that have rolled in this week:

Seattlest takes on both the Studio and Mainstage showcases for weekend 2.

The Seattle Weeky reviews the whole festival, with special attention to all the dance.

If the Weekend 2 showcases of NW New Works this year were any indication of Weekend 1, I’m sorry to have been out of town at that time. Way to shake off the shackles of geographic anaemia, northwesterners! What a captivating display of creative vitality.

Sunday night on the mainstage:

The evening begins with It’s Just a Dance by the response. I would say that it’s much more than just a dance, it’s a successful lobby installation. Seeing a good pre-show lobby installation is like spotting a pegasus perched on top of a tree outside your window. All odds are against the performers. It’s Just a Dance was enticing enough to pull me away from milling-about-the-lobby conversation to observe, then the music continued to build, then the two dancers started pulling and throwing each other around the lobby, onto the bar, forcibly breaking up patrons’ conversations through the energy of their activity. They conquered that lobby.

Amelia Reeber and Scott/Powell Performance comprised the first half of the all-dance showcase. Both works had interesting elements of choreography and solid performances, but this juxtaposition brought me to contemplate the use of visual art and costumes in dance. I saw it aid Amelia Reeber’s this is a forgery and detract from Scott/Powell’s work. HOME had some beautiful moments, but I found myself continually pulled away from a connection while I wondered about the significance of the blue lines on the floor or what the costumes were intended to convey.

Leaping momentarily to the last work of the evening to follow this train of thought, zoe | juniper’s work continues to hold a strong awareness encompassing all mediums they work with. Partnering with Holcombe Waller for the music in Old Girl powered some complex twists and turns in the tone of the work. Zoe’s choreography is full of tension, looks wildly uncomfortable, and is continuously emotionally communicative.

Directly preceding zoe | juniper, 605 Collective’s Audible was my favorite work of the evening, and given the audience’s response, I believe I was not alone. Infectious energy, gloriously playful, absolutely precise. I could have watched them for hours, which is fortunate because it looks like this was an excerpt of an hour long work to be premiered in Vancouver, BC in July. Keep it coming.

Friday night in the studio:

Sunday Service: art without contrivance. I know these women, I know that they’re all talented with distinct, compelling personalities, and I knew the basic intent of their Sunday meetings. I was not prepared for them to take their personal, spiritual, musical exploration and turn it into such a compelling and exposing theatre piece. The pacing was flawless and their physical interaction added humor and warmth. I did not grow up with the expectation of following an organized religion put upon me, but there was a universal quality to their testimonies that was intensely emotionally moving. Their work reminded me that vulnerable performance is often the most shocking. It wasn’t a self-indulgent confession, it was a hand extended. And the a capella Bach at the end floored me. Way to create a gem, ladies.

Given my emotional reaction to the first piece and how starkly different it was from the rest of the studio showcase works, it was difficult for me to change gears and accommodate. I did pull my mind back around to note the well-crafted blend of choreography, sound and video work in Jurg Koch | Lyn Goeringer’s ab: from / to. I enjoyed the juxtaposition of this work with the first, contrasting the directly emotionally connective nature of Sunday Service’s piece with an analytic observation; emotional situations seen from the lens of a scientific behavioral study.

The last two pieces in the studio showcase distanced themselves even further from the start of the evening’s program through a sharp focus on satirical social commentary. From Angela Fair’s portrayal of a vapid narcissist having an emotional breakdown while wailing some Nine Inch Nails to Rush-N-Disco’s manic, condensed view into YouTube personalities, the showcase ended with a reminder of the commotion and information overload constantly at our fingertips.

- Kate Ratcliffe

The NWNW mainstage showcase on June 14 was an exciting evening of dance that raised many questions for me as a viewer. The show made me wonder about the relationship between kinesthetic and aesthetic choices, about abstracting the body, about virtuosity and how it can be both invigorating and isolating. I feel that great art should provide more questions than answers so as to inspire inquiry into art and life. I salute all of the participating artists for their work, and On the Boards for continuing to give performance opportunities to the Northwest dance community, a network that is constantly growing in richness and variation.

The evening was opened by Amelia Reeber’s solo work, this is a forgery. Her rich gestural vocabulary was witnessed by a larger than life cosmic cat that pawed at Reeber’s body from a screen upstage. Reeber’s movement was grounded, piercing and deliberate just like her set, a sculptural anchor that rested downstage left. The work was at times funny and touching. It did contain a few modern dance clichés that should be off limits to contemporary artists at this point, such as guttural vocalizations accompanying movement and unwinding ribbons from one’s dancing body. However, these theatrical devices were embodied well by Reeber so one assumes she knows the history of work hers is referencing.

Next on the program was Scott/Powell’s Home. This was the most interesting work I have seen from Scott and Powell. The dancers were costumed and utilized more as individuals than I have seen in their previous work. It inspired me to contemplate the relationship between idiosyncrasy and virtuosity. One of the great invitations of post modern dance is that performers are now able to be themselves while performing virtuosic actions. Rather than dissolving the self into a technical vacuum, skilled contemporary dancers bring their personality and life experience into their ability to create form and manipulate time with their bodies. Ellie Sandstrom is an exemplary performer in this regard. She has long been gracing Scott/Powell’s stage with technical prowess that is effectively embodied in her expression of herself as a unique individual. She sets a high standard for the company. Scott and Powell’s kinesthetic and sonic collaboration met at particularly beautiful points in Home. The dancers were often costumed in plastic that whispered and rustled as they moved, creating a dialogue between the movement and the score.

After intermission, The 605 Collective brought down the house. These five dancers were all costumed in suits and tennis shoes. Though their performance was virtuosic in its own way, the costume choice made it clear that we were watching people dance, not dancers perform. This made the kinesthetic experience of the performers more immediate to the audience, evoking a delicious metakinesis. John Martin coined this term writing about Graham’s work in the mid 20th century. It refers to the physical experience an audience has when watching movement. There have been all kinds of studies done that show we have more of an embodied experience as viewers when we watch people moving whom we can relate to. The relaxed posture that informed The 605 Collective’s group choreography, and the daring athleticism of their partnering, made metakinesis inescapable. The audience found itself swaying and rocking with the formal structures and rhythmic coordination that supported the wild courage of the dancers. I found myself wondering as I watched about how different aesthetics are that come from physical experiences rather than conceptual ideas. It was refreshing to see work that so deftly celebrated the physical, not as a concept, but as a reality that puts performers and audience alike, in touch with gravity, our joints, and each other.

Zoe/Juniper’s work then embodied the exact opposite style of virtuosity. It was a story about dancers. While Old girl contained breathtaking physicality it was of the sort that separates the performers from the audience, transforming the dancers into superhuman beings who live in a separate place from the gravity bound reality of the audience. Scofield has incredible power as a choreographer to manipulate classical form. She is particularly gifted, but victim to that gift. The content of her work is evident in her body, which seems to be possessed by a demonic hunger to move in the extreme ends of its range. This inhuman physicality was supported by the brilliant costume designs of Erik Andor. He created leotards with protrusions along the backs and sides of the dancers. These spikes along with bright green neckpieces abstracted the dancer’s bodies in surprising ways. The dancers appeared to have been stripped of their humanity in the interest of stark aesthetics, a classic story in dance history. The movement wrote a sad story in time, one of individuals consumed by their art, unable to escape the demands of their craft, even after the lights go out. Old girl is both evocative and heartbreaking.

It is exciting to see how many talented performers there are in the Northwest. This Festival continues to be a gift to Seattle and the region not only because of what it offers to the performing artists, but also for the diversity and stimulation it offers to the audience.

-Catherine Cabeen

Alice Gosti | Hit Me

This video was only available for the duration of the 2009 NWNW Festival.

BASE Movement Theatre | Drop Your Art

This video was only available for the duration of the 2009 NWNW Festival.

Stotler Ludwig Kioe | One

This video was only available for the duration of the 2009 NWNW Festival.

Two out of two local magazines agree that the NW New Works Festival is a thing to check out:

Steve Wiecking at Seattle Met recommends a couple NW New Works artists in his weekend round up.

Seattle Mag calls the festival “overwhelmingly good stuff” as pasrt of their “Weekend Must List.”

Here’s a couple of the reviews that have rolled in so far:

“God Save the Queen” – Brendan Kiley on Slog:

“Shmooquan’s heart beats pure entertainment—glittery, gaudy, and shameless.”

“NW New Works, Week 1: the Studio Showcase” – Jeremy Barker on Seattlest:

“Helsinki Syndrome produces experiences, not just shows, performances that actively engage (and frequently trip-up) their audiences.”

Recently Brendan Kiley wrote another piece in The Stranger lamenting how Seattle doesn’t have a festival like Portland’s TBA or Austin’s Fusebox. I love TBA, but let’s be fair. TBA tries to do in two weeks what On The Boards does over an entire season. It’s impressive that last year TBA had Jerome Bel and Tim Etchells (two of my favrav artist/thinkers), but this year OtB had Jan Faber, Marie Chouinard and Tanja Liedtke doing full-scale productions—one of my favorite OtB seasons to date. In this context, consider The NW New Works Festival (along with the NW Artist Series) OtB’s more than equivalent presentation of PNW time-based art. For sure, OtB’s season doesn’t have the carnival atmosphere that it would if it was crammed into a two-week extravaganza; and it doesn’t have the extensive symposia, lectures, and gallery shows of TBA. But if you add it up, I’m pretty sure OtB would come out on top for in more than a few categories including stellar master classes and particularly, presenting home grown dance talent.

One thing TBA does that I do wish NWNW / OtB could do more ($$$$) is work with artists to imagine (or reimagine) their work in cool, local sites beyond the walls of OtB’s building. I know this is probably financially impractical. But every year since OtB moved to Queen Anne, NWNW has featured an installation that attempts to “transform” the lobby. After many seasons watching gifted artists attempt this and fail, I’m wondering if it’s possible. This year Sara Osebold took an admirable go at it. It’s probably not Sarah’s fault that the festival PR set me up: “experience the mysterious hidden between layers of ice as the lobby is transformed into a dreamlike artic space.” This description, coupled with the fact I was born in the Canadian north—set-up some high expectations. I clearly have different references than Osebold. What I was drawn to were the woolen creatures Osebold created out of layered earth toned knits and hair: a human form and a musk ox moving infinitesimally slowly. I would love to see Osebold’s work again in a vast space. One freaky thing about the tundra and artic, beyond it’s barren landscapes, are its sounds—from the high-pitched whir of the Northern Lights to crackling icebergs. There is so much less noise pollution in the North that you can hear someone digging in his rocky garden from a mile away. The OtB lobby was so congested I missed the “sounds” generated by this work completely.
I’ve become increasingly annoyed by the rituals of gushy performance descriptions and PR hype anyway. Words like “amazing”, “brilliant,” “blow your socks off” (all used to describe the evening’s artists) get thrown around in a way that sets-up unrealistic expectations, unless you are dealing with work genuinely surpassing. (For example “shameless” didn’t begin to prepare me for Jan Faber’s performer sticking a rifle up his ass while foaming at the mouth –my expectations were surpassed.) “Blow your socks off” isn’t what NWNW is essentially about. In many cases, it’s about local artists, working with painfully low budgets, getting a chance to try out a new project for an audience. Every work on last nights program (with the exception of Headwaters Dance Company’s commission from New York choreographer Donna Uchizono) looked to me like fine works-in-progress: work that will continue to be developed, or is an important transitional work in the artists development. Artists need a place to try things out, and exchange ideas. If you like seeing things in their nascent form, or enjoy ideas while they are still being tossed in the air, NWNW is a great festival.

In full disclosure, I have many friends, former collaborators and students in the show. So I’m going to focus on the general. If there is an overarching theme among the evening’s four dance works, I would say it is nostalgia. If one wonders what NW dance artists were doing at the dawn of the Obama Era while the implications of The Great Recession and the possibilities of a swine flu pandemic vibrated in the air, on this night they seemed to be turning to the past. Uchizono and Sandstrom had flashes of full-tilt, pure kinetics, but the darkly light evening tended to turn towards the small gesture. The ephemeral nature of dance with its tendency to obscure, make it a medium often used to evoke loss, absence, the unsayable or the irretrievable. Last night didn’t leave one with a sense of artists boldly pushing towards the future or finding new edges. Instead I saw artists turning inward, to the past, or towards the relative stability of geography. The evening didn’t challenge or transport me but it did (as another audience member evoked in the lobby) leave me relaxed in my chair, happy to let the work wash over me.

Portland’s Hot Little Hands’ Always Merry and Bright seemed drawn from image rather than deep kinetic or thematic investigation. Six women dressed like disheveled princesses in layers of shredded slips and distressed tulle place cardboard crowns on their heads and open large, homemade pop-up books. Their flesh-colored costumes under dim amber lighting at times evoke the image of a sepia photograph. I was reminded of Julia Margaret Cameron’s portraits of young middle class Victorian women dressed like cherubs. Or, Weegee’s infamous 1943 photograph of two tiara-wearing society ladies dismayed by the homeless woman the photographer threw in their path. Beyond these images, the dance’s primary movement theme focused on insolated body initiations and successional sequencing. The movement quality was general, sometimes apathetic, perhaps because the initiations appeared uninterested in space or dynamic variation.

Headwaters Dance Company’s Montana Suite Part IV: 100 Miles from Forsyth (A pun on William Forsyth?) grew out of a cool multi-year project commissioning some of the most interesting American choreographers working today to work with Montana composers and create dances inspired by Montana. Donna Uchizono choreographed Part IV. It was interesting to see the work of an established New York choreographer with an international reputation on the NWNW stage. I first saw Uchizono’s work in 1990 when she was just getting started. One can see in her choreography the refinement of the same movement preoccupations she had back then: inheritances from Contact Improvisation and Judson dancemakers like Trisha Brown. Limbs are flung in quick flurries or articulated from their edges. Phrases of movement contain quick shifts in dynamics or abrupt redirections in space with eyes and limbs often moving in opposite directions. There are sudden juxtapositions of abstract movement and literal gesture. As thrown and off-handed as the movement looks, it’s difficult to fulfill and the Headwaters dancers rise to the challenge. But it is Uchizono’s visual sensibility, cultivated over the last twenty years, that sets her apart. Part IV begins slowly with dancers crouched behind clay basins, wringing water from shirts into mason jars. Then they slip into the wet cotton fabric.

Salt Horse and the work of primary collaborators Angelina Baldoz, Corrie Befort and Beth Graczcyk I’ve also had the pleasure watching develop over the years. Man on the Beach I think is the most evolved representation of their obsessive preoccupations. In the choreography and improvisation of Befort and Graczyck, movement is often trapped in repetitive, inward turning loops. Images are fragmentary and isolated. Nothing transforms. Nothing develops. Everything sustains. A single kinetic image is often sustained longer than anticipated. In Man on the Beach, they finally seem to find a narrative that frames their structural, kinetic interest in repetition and fragmentation by focusing on the image of a man trapped in a singular moment of remembrance. Memory returns in fragments. These fragments are evoked in short scenes performed by Befort, Graczcyk and their three fine collaborators Michael Rioux, Serge Gubelman and Jens Wazel. These men have a theatricality of presence that brings new substance to Salt Horse’s strong narrative images. The fragmentariness of the narrative finds a particularly memorial embodiment in a moment when the head, shoes, suit and shirt of a man are isolated (yet animated) throughout the stage. The shoes slide behind Graczcyk, visibly pulled by strings—a body evoked through its absence.

The gorgeous score by Baldoz creates a cinematic container for the work that the lighting failed to do. I was distracted by light on the shins and the edges of the scrim—never feeling transported despite the vivid imagery. Perhaps this was the intent.
Watching Salt Horse, I was also reminded that like Uchizono, Seattle dancers inherit rich legacies. Both Graczcyk and Befort worked with Sheri Cohen and Molly Scott for years, and their influence on their sensibilities is clear. Cohen was the first artist who ever “blew my socks” off at NWNW. For years she directed Befort and Graczcyk in deep work nurturing the visceral and sustained dramatic image. Sadly, some of their incredible performances only inspired tiny audiences. I also believe Salt Horse benefits from Molly Scott’s obsession for tight, bound repetition. What Scott transposes onto abstract, vibrating stage spaces Salt Horse locates in awkward daily interactions or the surreal world of dreams, fairytales or the past. But like Uchizono what sets Salt Horse apart are often their powerful visual ideas. In Man on The Beach these images are given even more flesh and blood.

Eli Sandstrom also worked with Molly Scott, and has collaborated with Amy O’Neil since college. A much loved dancer in other artists work, it was exciting to see Sandstrom stepping out on her own. Throughout the arrival/RISE I was in full appreciation of Sandstrom’s outstanding dancing and Ben Zamora’s exceptional lighting. In executing her own movement, Sandstrom highlighted her incredible range and articulation. Sandstrom dances from deep inside her organs to the tips of her toes, sending movement far beyond the edges of her body. After an evening of fairly internalized movement, the expansiveness of Sandstrom’s movement was a reprieve. Sandstrommovement’s dancers, faced with the unenviable challenge of dancing alongside the force of nature that determined the choreography, threw themselves full force into the work. However, Zamora’s lighting ultimately gave the work its thread.

Every performance is a collaboration. Thank you OtB for producing and supporting so much great local dance! And props to Velocity as well—soon moving into their new digs. In their old space they nurtured and supported the majority of the Seattle dance artists on the stage last night.

- Tonya Lockyer