As we said on Friday, this past weekend marked the opening of the 24th annual Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards, which also runs next weekend and features 18 new performances from local artists. Seattlest had the chance to catch the Mainstage Showcase on Saturday night and, well, color us blown away.

Ticket info is available on their site. Two new showcases will run next weekend, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. Though it may take you all week to recuperate.

The Mainstage show opens this weekend with Erin Jorgensen, who can do things with a marimba you need to hear to believe. Her three-piece set, a combination of original and adapted music and narrative, is perfectly suited to show off the understated soulfulness of her instrument. The first piece is a quiet and inquisitive original composition coupled with a story about growing up in Moses Lake where apocalyptic dogma was plentiful and neighbors were few. Jorgensen transitions into George Cole’s Mormon hymnal “A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief,” and closes her set with Schubert’s “An Die Musik,” an art song she sings (in German) and plays, and roughly translates as “In my life, when all of these horrible things have happened to me, art and music have taken me to a better place.” In a pre-show interview with On the Boards, Jorgensen talks about “the seed that’s planted in you as a kid that stays with you forever,” and her set feels just like that: dreamlike and comforting and universal. We’ll admit, we were iffy when we heard that a marimba was going to be part of our evening; now marimba is all we want to hear.

We were fully prepared to drift through the rest of our night when the Maika Misumi Movement Troupe took the stage with “The Wheel of Time” and punted us back to reality. And man, a stormy reality at that. When Misumi created “The Wheel,” her mother’s cancer diagnosis was forcing her to wrestle with idea of karma and question how our lives are shaped by our actions. The piece opens with four identical female dancers in red, pacing uniformly around two men performing a slow, fluid martial arts sequence. It feels strong and dynamic and steady, but ominous. From then on, the female dancers are tossed and trapped and freed, finding turmoil in one moment and solace in the next. Technically, the dancers are flawless and when they move they do so with a sort of near-surrender that teeters on exhaustion, but hints at underlying strength. We have been there, Ms. Misumi, in those moments of panic and ambiguity and complete fatigue. And we are crossing our fingers that next time our tumult will look as stunning as yours.

So yeah, how do you follow that up? If you are Deborah Wolf’s troupe of eight, you punch and kick and fight for your audience’s attention. We’ll admit that maybe our mental palate wasn’t as cleansed as it should have been after “The Wheel,” and maybe we weren’t as open to getting into Wolf’s “Arc Angle,” but damned if we won’t applaud the effort. “Arc Angle” is PHYSICAL. There is sweat flying and loud labored breathing and feet pounding for 20 solid minutes. The pushing and pulling pas de deux sequences grab our attention, but it’s the pulse, literally a rhythmic collective beat of movement that flows through “Arc Angle,” that keeps us watching.

The bang went out with local anti-theater group Implied Violence. Ever watch someone with OCD spend twenty minutes washing her hands or fixing the tassels on a rug? Now imagine being trapped in her brain. That is what “The Air Is Peopled with Cruel and Fearsome Birds” feels like. At its center, two characters are caught in a cycle of compulsive self-criticism and self-correction while a maddening cast of background characters look on and break dishes and shine light in their faces. It is uncomfortable. Teeth grinding, scream-into-a-pillow uncomfortable. And somehow, it doesn’t feel like a complete mess. Implied Violence manage to create an unbroken flow of sound, movement and dialogue that actually feels natural (naturally unsound). There is also pie and some talk of Southern food and intestinal systems. But it works! We don’t know how, but wow does it work.