NW New Works Fest, Week 2: The Studio Showcase
Angela Fair's "Hot Live Action" at NW New Works at On the Boards last weekend. Photo by Hannah Cranford.
The Northwest New Works Festival, showcasing top NW dance and performance talent, wrapped up this weekend at On the Boards. Up next, they have the summer edition of 14/48: The World's Quickest Theatre Festival in late July, and until June 30, you can still get their early subscriber special for next year's season.
Sunday Service, Sara Edwards, Becky Poole, Erin Jorgensen, Paige Weinheimer. This show was odd--in fact, we'd be tempted to say it didn't work if not for the fact that something very real, emotionally, was happening onstage. The four performers behind Sunday Service have produced a 20-minute exploration of faith and its loss, expressed through monologues, movement, and above all music. All four present themselves as one-time Christians, but as they begin telling stories about their ideas in a higher-power which persist despite their atheism, the entire affair becomes painfully real. We're still not sure what to make of it, but all four performers are extremely talented (Becky Poole won us over completely a while ago), and had the courage to expose some very real, painful things onstage.
ab: from / to, Jürg Koch | Lyn Goeringer. Koch, a UW dance professor, has created a multimedia work featuring videos of a large dance crew performing onsite at some sort of industrial complex, with a trio of extremely talented performers, led by Koch himself, onstage. The work seems to explore complex relationships in contemporary culture...or something. It's often hard to tell. There was a voice-over track that kept talking about what "A" did to "B" and why "D" slept with "E." General impression: Concept was an excuse to perform the piece.
Hot Live Action, Angela Fair. Portland's Angela Fair was a brilliant counterpoint to last week's performance by Queen Shmooquan. Fair creates solo performance pieces based on "flawed characters that satirize the human experience," as the program put it, and that's an excellent description. In Hot Live Action, Fair adopts the persona of a sex addicted party girl who eventually found that having her "meat-holes" stuffed daily was spiritually empty. So she's become a New Age-y inspirational speaker, of sorts--everything's still about her. Fair's performance is brilliant, a comic burlesque that generates empathy for the wounded soul so clearly being mocked.
Rush-N-Attack, Rush-N-Disco. The Portland duo of Greg Arden and Alicia McDade appropriate the content of YouTube videos for live performance. It's a weird and unsettling effect, a montage of references without the cuts between them. The show sort of works even if you don't know all the various video and Internet memes they're jumping between, but really, this show is theatre for the sort of people who sit around watching Attack of the Show. If you don't know the source material, you really are missing out on this incredible dialogue they generate with the world of the interweb as they reinterpret its shallow obsessions on the stage.
