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.
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.
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 fierce band of Seattle-based artists presents an intensely visual, music-driven theatrical event. Predator Songstress is a modern-day fairy tale of an anti-heroine in search of her stolen voice, set in a world where the tools that are used to stifle and control are appropriated as means for individual realization. Prepare your eyes and ears for otherworldly visuals, gorgeous vocals, incredible costumes, merrily creepy earworms, and a singular butoh-meets-anime vision.
Theater artists and longtime friends Marcus Youssef and James Long sit at a table and play an invented game called winners and losers. In it, they name people, places or things— Pamela Anderson, microwave ovens, their fathers, Goldman Sachs, Mexico — pronouncing each one winner or loser. Their game turns personal as they mercilessly dissect each other's families, privileges and class backgrounds. The competition quickly heats up, resulting in an intimate and blisteringly honest performance.
Christopher Walken falls off a ladder in Russia and is unable to perform his Chekhov-inspired solo show. Karen, who apparently proofread the script once, is asked to go on in Walken’s place. A precarious bilingual performance duet ensues between Karen and her Russian interpreter, Leo. There There is a wildly unpredictable theatrical roller coaster about being the completely wrong person in the totally wrong place at the exact wrong time saying and doing all the most wrong things.
Writer/director Tina Satter draws on Chekhov’s letters, translations, and perverse sense of comedy to consider anew the darkness, beauty, and history of Chekhov’s iconic play The Seagull and its resonances with her Half Straddle ensemble. Seagull (Thinking of you) is a personal look at performance, failure, and attempted love — ultimately an unexpected meditation on why we ever try to say something out loud. With a Russian folk metal-influenced score.
A man departs for the US–Mexican border and vanishes before reaching his destination: Amarillo, Texas. Through stunning projected images, bilingual monologues and a sea of displaced objects and natural elements, this renowned company reconstructs his journey in a multimedia performance that travels imagined landscapes of both geography and cultural identity.
As the visual and performance worlds continue to collide, Kyle Loven is a difficult artist to categorize. An object maker with theatrical designs, his Rube Goldberg-esque Loss Machine unearths a world of lost items, misplaced thoughts and fractured journeys all housed within an intricately detailed set. Digging through the layers of the everyday and the fantastical, this piece poignantly displays a narrative of discovery and loss from the drama of imagery.
