NW New Works Festival: Weekend Two

The final weekend of the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards was all about sound. Where the first weekend was dominated by movement-based work, music and the spoken word came to the fore in the second weekend. Musical groups FINGER and The Blank Department presented in the studio and on the mainstage respectively. Haruko Nishimura's dance piece featured a string quintet version of the Degenerate Art Ensemble as live accompaniment. The spoken word, too, helped to blur the lines between dance and theater in Quark Contemporary Dance Theatre's piece.

Last weekend Coriolis Dance Collective's piece, try to hover (or Private Practice 7) used spoken monologue by dancers to heighten the emotion of their piece. This time around Quark Contemporary Dance Theatre's piece in the On the Boards Studio space, Toast, also uses spoken monologue but even more prominently. One might even construe it as primarily a spoken piece with illustrative dances. This cross-pollination of genres is fine enough in idea. The problem with the Quark piece is technical: namely, that the actor-dancers have voices that fail to fill up the auditorium. While the action of the piece is certainly easy enough to understand even without words, where one uses words they must be audible and clear. Because of the technical deficiency, the movement in the dance overwhelms the piece and the text cannot compete, which leads me to wonder: why not just abandon the text entirely? A more polished piece might restore this balance, but the question deserves asking.

In the realm of traditional theater is Danielle Villegas' monologue work, Azteca la Curandera - As I See It. An exploration of the gender roles that Europeans forced upon the Native Americans that continue to infect American culture today, it is filled with sharp observation, humor and pathos. Ms. Villegas has a great mastery of the characters she creates on stage. They are clear and rich. The weakness of the performance is the video projection, where text about gender roles and perceptions project on a screen behind the performer. I have no problem with the projection; I have a problem with the text. There is either not enough text or there is too much. Ms. Villegas seems to be trying to construct an intellectual case in the texts that various cultures have more flexible concepts of gender roles. But she switches from subtle suggestion in the first couple projections to overt statement in the last. I'm not convinced. It is far too weak to summarize her case so neatly, and deliver to the audience with the moral equivalent of gift-wrapping. I'd prefer she either stick with the subtle, metaphoric approach she establishes at the beginning or, if she truly intends to deliver a "message" at the end to build a much stronger case, which would require far more video slides than she currently uses.

I enjoyed Lori Hamar's dance, Blood Line. At least, I did until I left the theater and found I could barely remember it. Ms. Hamar's piece has some truly beautiful imagery, with a use of line and space that is almost classical in approach. Her use of contact points between the dancers is also very impressive. It is a very sensitive and delicate piece in many ways and emotionally affecting. Then why could I barely recall it?

I don't think it's Ms. Hamar's fault. I think it is because the delicate Blood Line immediately preceded FINGER's absolutely absurd musical performance of The FINGER Songbook. The contrast between the two could hardly be greater. To go from the soft, sensitive, gold-lighted work of Lori Hamar to watching Julie Baldridge in a Valkyrie hat with a broken horn hammering out black metal riffs on a violin while Jeppa Hall twirls about in a sequined gown like a Fluxus poet singing about teeth falling out - well, I leave it to the imagination. Don't get me wrong. I adored FINGER's performance. It was a fine choice to close the evening of studio shows. But the transition is abrupt, to say the least. It is a testament to diversity, and perhaps asks a quiet question about editorial selection. My own impression is that Danielle Villegas's piece should have switched places with Ms. Hamar's to make a more seamless night but of course I am not an artist who understands such things.

The mainstage shows, on the other hand, were much harmonious. That three of them were nominally dance pieces probably assisted in that illusion. Haruko Nishimura's piece, Grandma Mothra's Mercurial Tale is an interesting relative of The Blank Department's piece, Orders of Magnitude in that both belong nominally to a single genre - Ms. Nishimura's piece is "dance" and The Blank Department is "music" - but each draws heavily upon another genre. Ms. Nishimura sings with accompaniment from a string quintet. The Blank Department is nominally a band but they have a narrator on stage (the delightfully knuckleheaded Basil Harris) teaching the audience about evolution and entropy while two other actors who engage in pure illustrative movement (Sara Edwards and David Nixon). In fact, both pieces are a little bit like what used to be called "rock theater" in the 70s. They are both fabulous, coming from different disciplines, yet more similar to each other than to other pieces within their nominal genres.

The remaining two pieces, Shannon Stewart's A Better Container and Aluminum Siding & mattisonthemove's TORN are both brilliant dance works. A Better Container is an eerie piece, exploring the continuum of feminine identity over three generations. The combination of Sam Mickens' ingenious musical score and Ms. Stewart's striking conceit of a visual representation of time rewinding left a powerful impression that quite eludes too much verbal description. Ms. Stewart's command of stage picture combines with Jessica Trundy's surreal hard light effects to create an extended moment of reverie that is potent and unforgettable.

TORN also builds on a brilliant conceit and an equally brilliant stage image: a life where human beings are literally buried in paperwork. Dancers Donna Isobel and Matt Smith extract a real magic from the use of paper not only as prop but also as environment. The choreography has wit, charm, beauty and that pure childlike magic so rare on stage. I'm excited to see Ms. Isobel working so hard on her dances lately and I hope to see more in the near future.

All in all, the NW New Works Festival covered a lot of ground, spatially as well as figuratively. It is a good testament to artists in the Pacific Northwest that after twenty-eight years of the festival, the work continues to be consistently challenging, diverse and enjoyable. It also offers a rather accurate gauge of what ideas are floating about in the aesthetic ether. Expect to see even more cross-disciplinary work in the future. Expect even more explorations of non-traditional text and abstract movement. All these are, I think, good developments. At the very least, it shows that artists in one discipline are finally becoming aware of the strength of other disciplines and, one may hope, of their necessity as well. At a time in American history when all arts are under fire, it is important for all artists to work together. The NW New Works Festival shows that they can, and will. Let us hope the lesson spreads.