JACK & is a comedy of errors structured on social codes and trainings, from prison reentry programs to African American debutante balls. Conceived and directed by Kaneza Schaal, a veteran performer with Elevator Repair Service and The Wooster Group, JACK & combines influences from aspirational class stories found in 1950s sitcoms, real and imagined entering-society ceremonies, and tigers in Harlem to build a portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed.
Dance enters a new dimension in a daring collaboration between two former Merce Cunningham dancers and an iconic filmmaker. New perceptions of bodies in motion emerge as Rashaun Mitchell's and Silas Riener’s powerfully physical and precise choreography is mixed and projected live by radical video artist Charles Atlas. Ways of seeing evolve in real-time as the camera tilts, shifts, expands, and contracts, allowing for shocking new perspectives of human movement in time and space.
An eerily glowing kinetic sculpture and a hacked '50’s era typewriter create a fuzzy portrait of a Cold War operative, privacy-obsessed misanthrope, and real-life father of director Lars Jan. Archival wiretap transcriptions and missives from communist spies intertwine with MRI brain scans and the NSA, prompting questions about the nature of memory, privacy, and the possibility of ever truly knowing your dad.
The merciless humor of comedian and social critic Paul Mooney is channeled in a fast-paced and ruthless new work merging stand-up comedy, theater, and physicality. Billing himself as “Seattle’s first Black talk show host,” choreographer and performer Markeith Wiley unveils a new, no-holds-barred persona as an engaging, brutally direct entertainer and loquacious dancer. Featuring live guests and a house DJ, It's Not Too Late is a timely capsule of emotional resignation around race immediately following the 2016 presidential election.
Outer space meets schizophrenia in this work made as a gift for a self-described psychic radio star. For over ten years, Seattle dance artist Ezra Dickinson has created emotionally powerful solo dance performances as gifts for his schizophrenic mother. Psychic Radio Star is a culmination of these gifts: a mixture of childhood memories, mythologies, an extraordinary imagination, and Dickinson’s virtuoso talents in dance and visual art.
Comedian/musician/captivating storyteller Ahamefule Oluo leads a team of talented musicians in a grand-scale experimental pop opera about keeping it together. Drawing from darkly funny personal stories about illness, despair, and regeneration, Now I'm Fine ranges from intimate to epic, featuring a 17-piece orchestra and a spectacular cast of performers including Okanomodé Soulchilde, Samantha Boshnack, Josh Rawlings, Evan
Big Dance: Short Form is Big Dance Theater, distilled. BDT returns to its dance roots for its 25th anniversary celebration, theatrically re-imagining the conventions of a dance repertory program and presenting the company’s unique blend of dance-theater on an intimate scale.
Maneries [from Manare: spring form, emergence] works the body as linguistic material. Taking iconic, motivated and arbitrary signs, the performer builds and explores a series of tests on the limits of her formal capacities. These forms, having gone through time, constantly build, destroy and expose the body as producer of possible universes and perceptions over time.
With a passing nod to Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape and a swipe at the age of selfies, this theater/dance performance examines the very moment something or someone is captured, recorded and then memorialized through technology. In an age where pictures and film are frequently doctored, Findlay//Sandsmark draw a line between the fragile image and the fallibility of memory.
A solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in the 1980s—where Newports are bought in singles at corner bodegas, and sex-saturated notes are passed in class. In a performance of psychic and physical collisions that threaten to break the body, it’s an unflinching look into the exquisite turbulence of one woman’s memory.
