With this year's Bumbershoot nearly upon us, let's continue to hope that the weekend weather keeps looking good. If you don't have tickets yet, stop by your local Starbucks to avoid the lines and fees at the gates. Check out a few more tips (bring water and a jacket! take the bus! wear sunscreen! call your mother!) at the Bumbershoot site. While there's plenty of music acts to see (and to harass by requesting......

A Chorus Line: The Company on the line in "I Hope I Get It" (National Tour Cast) © Paul Kolnik When Seattlest was a little girl, our mother rented the film version of A Chorus Line and, in that single theatrical moment, we were transported from little girl-dom straight to an imaginary world where we would grow up to be a chorus girl. As a young dancer, we saw a couple of different productions of......

The 15th annual Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation is in full swing, and let's be honest, most of us had no idea. We are not studying dance at Cornish or Velocity, and we're out of the loop. This will be our first year knowing of and attending the festival, so we'll report back. But we're anticipating some On-the-Boards-ish unexpectedness from a show called Off the Cuff. Tonight and Saturday night there are two different faculty......

Macho, moody, and whimsical, PNB's All Robbins program is a stand-up triple, if not a home run (at McCaw Hall through June 8; tickets: $20-$150). Actually the Mariners could learn a lot from the raw athleticism, discipline, and teamwork on display. Opening night's Fancy Free sparked and fizzed erratically; conductor Stewart Kershaw, swinging the baton sans panache, kept Bernstein's charged score sounding off-kilter. But PNB rallied during In the Night, and by the time The......

With two years' experience at the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards under our belts as of this weekend, we're seeing a pattern emerge: The really exciting work happens down in the studio, and the mainstage performances are more or less skippable unless you're really into that sort of thing. Saturday afternoon was a hard day to justify spending indoors in a small, dark (though thankfully cool) theatre, which left John and Anna......

At the point that we realized all 24 dancers from the Mark Morris Dance Group were on stage simultaneously, we were struck by two thoughts. First: holy shit 24 dancers on stage at once in a delirious, joyous romp; and second: thank god dance companies can still exist that can put 24 dancers all on stage at once. Morris' company was celebrating the 20th anniversary of his early-career classic L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato......

Get your dose of the Northwest’s latest and greatest performing artists at On the Boards Northwest New Works Festival the next two weekends, May 9-11 and 16-18. The festival showcases 20-minute sections of eight groups/artists’ works in progress, four on the mainstage, four in the studio. The segments include music, theatre, puppetry, dance, and drag. Whether you’re watching a simple solo narrative or a twenty-person musical extravaganza (and we’ve seen them!), you’ll be placing......

DANCE: "Feral ballet" choreographer Zoe Scofield, visual designer Juniper Shuey, and composer Morgan Henderson bring "The Devil You Know Is Better Than The One You Don't" to On the Boards for its Seattle premiere. We're told it builds off "hard luck accounts of adolescence and the suckiness of group dynamics." Dancers are Christiana Axelsen, Ezra Dickinson, Lizzy Melton, Zoe Scofield, and Allison Van Dyck. We're going, we expect good things. 8 p.m. // On......

Depending on how quickly we post this, there are two more showings of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Laugh Out Loud Festival's Program B today, at 1 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $20-$80. We don't know about you, but with all the sleet and snow this weekend, we've been craving some silly indoor festivities. This fills the bill to a T. Program B presents a light-hearted world premiere from the PNB's Olivier Wevers, "Shindig," with music......

If we learned anything at Pacific Northwest Ballet's Laugh Out Loud Spring Festival last night, it was that pointing your fingers while dancing en pointe is hee-larious. Ba-dum-ching. We'll be here all week. The fest, another genre-busting divergence from the norm by director Peter Boal, aims to celebrate all that is wacky and funny about ballet. They mean funny "ha-ha" but there's some funny "strange" thrown in as well. We caught Program A (there's a......

Last night, Bumbershoot announced the first set of acts slated for this year's festival. So far, there's a name or two that could draw us to Seattle Center this Labor Day weekend. Beck? Hell yes! A reunited Stone Temple Pilots? Not so much. Beck / Stone Temple Pilots / Lucinda Williams / Neko Case / Ingrid Michaelson / Jakob Dylan / Del Tha Funky Homosapien / !!! / Lee "Scratch" Perry / Saul Williams......

The choreographic genius of Spectrum's Donald Byrd makes God-fearing folk swear and the irreligious cry, "Oh my god!" Partly that's because his dancers present as solid, sweating people, rather than mysteriously gesturing messengers. He consistently brings ideas back to the body--his pas de deux can have an X-rated quality--so you feel the argument he's making. Last night he was perched on the Moore's stage pre-show, mic in hand, "Okay, so it's not a full house......

"Ah, this is ballet," sighed one white-haired woman to another. And then, for emphasis, "This is ballet." Originally choreographed by George Balanchine, this is Francia Russell's staging of the master's A Midsummer Night's Dream (at McCaw Hall through April 13, tickets $20-$150). It's "real" ballet in the way that a Cheever short story signifies the New Yorker. But we're not here to beat up on oldsters, according to our parole officer--and neither is the Peter......

POETRY: This is a bit of a hike, but former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins is down in Tacoma at the Pantages Theatre. Collins is admired and reviled because people "get" his poetry, which is written largely in the key of sardonic. He sees his poetry as “a form of travel writing” and considers humor “a door into the serious.” Friday 7:30 p.m. // Pantages Theatre, 901 Broadway, Tacoma // Tickets: $24-$46 FILM: This......

First we heard that principal dancer Casey Herd was moving to Amsterdam to join the Dutch National Ballet; now we learn that 27-year-old Noelani Pantastico is spreading her wings to join Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo, which is led by Jean-Christophe Maillot. We totally would not have praised his choreography so much if we'd known he was going to steal one of our dancers. They're both staying with PNB through the end of this season, so......

DANCE: George Balanchine's A Midsummer Night's Dream, in a Francia Russell staging, opens tonight at the Pacific Northwest Ballet. Scenery and costumes are by the irrepressible Martin Pakledinaz, evoking a primeval Pacific Northwest. With Shakespeare's play as the basis, Balanchine turned to Felix Mendelssohn's music to dream on the childhood relationship to nature, and the nature of relationships. Here's the video preview. (Photo: Carrie Imler and Timothy Lynch; © Angela Sterling) 8 p.m. //......

POLITICS: Samantha Power (where have we heard that name before?), a professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, is in town Friday night to discuss her book, Chasing the Flame. It's about the 2003 death of UN High Commissioner Sergio Vieira de Mello in Iraq, and how we might better deal with the challenges of religious extremism, refugees, terrorism, and ethnic struggle. She also wrote a book on genocide, A Problem from......

Seattlest first heard about the Raveonettes from a troubled, neurotic friend. He recommended their '03 release Chain Gang of Love, which struck us as analogous to that friendship: addictive and harping on the same two or three themes. The dark, early '60s-nostalgic Danish pop group played at Neumos this weekend, and the show too was like that odd, long-ended relationship. The first three songs gave us goosebumps, and the rest of the set (with......

FILM: If you see only one documentary about fonts this year, make it Helvetica. New York taxi numbers are also in Helvetica. The font is on IRS tax forms, U.S. mailboxes, and ConEd trucks. The 50-year-old sans serif font spells out countless logos: Sears. Bloomingdale’s. JCPenney. Crate & Barrel. Target. Fendi. Jeep. Toyota. Energizer. Oral-B. MetLife. Nestlé. Once you realize Helvetica is everywhere, says Hustwit, "you just can’t stop thinking about it." 7:15, 9pm......

There are two more poets due in town for the Seattle Arts and Lectures Poetry Series, both in April. Lucille Clifton shows up at the Intiman on April 7, Edward Hirsch on April 21. We hadn't been to one of these poetry talks before, and since Irish feminist and poet Eavan Boland read from both her prose and poetry, we're not sure we got a typical experience. Whatever it was, we were happy we dropped......

On Saturday night, we took one of our oldest and best friends to her very first hiphop show over at the Sunset in Ballard. She's typically more of a KT Tunstall/Garden State soundtrack kind of girl, and we had to bribe her with $2 mojitos at La Isla's late Happy Hour to get her to even leave the house after 9pm. Her feedback after three hours of Elefaders (trippy), N/NW (loud) and dj100proof's mixes?......

At first, we weren't ready to like Artistic Director Nacho Duato's work Castrati--out of the gate it felt strained, and we worried that the topic (castrated Italian boys who became famous singers) would be too easily over-dramatized. Set to a series of works by Vivaldi, it opens with a group of men wearing low cut gowns, half dress-half cape numbers in all black; we later deduce these are the veteran castrati, their mission to bring......

When Seattlest was a young dancer, we dreamed of creating choreography worthy of this Spanish company. Not that we knew La Compañía Nacional de Danza back then, but the first time we saw them perform it was like watching the dancers from our imagination writ large on stage--we never succeeded as a choreographer, but Artistic Director Nacho Duato (that's right, you read correctly) has The Gift. Intense, vivid and poignant without ever being self-important or......

Hollywood Knowledge: Tonight the Northwest Screenwriters Guild hosts a talk with special guest actor/screenwriter Walter Dalton. Dalton has written for TV (Laverne and Shirley, Barney Miller, Benson) and appeared on it (Rhoda, Mork and Mindy, Northern Exposure, and Millennium). He'll discuss a Hollywood career's ins and outs, then hang around for a Q&A session. Saturday he'll lead a workshop on pitching. Friday 7-9pm, Saturday 10am-2pm // NWSG, Clear Channel Bldg, 351 Elliott Ave W......

We'll tell you right now, there is just not going to be a better Valentine's Day-ish gift than this Roméo et Juliette. When we lived in France, we got used to rounding a corner and seeing an impossibly attractive young French couple having what seemed to be fully clothed intercourse. On a park bench. In the train station. Outside a bar. Halfway up a mountain. In the bus. Ah, la jeunesse! the older people would......

They can't solve the arts space shortage in Seattle fast enough for the Pat Graney Company. For her newest work, House of Mind, Graney wants to bring the audience "into the very nature of how she conceives of memory." To do that, she plans to create a complete world in a 10,000-sq.-ft. warehouse-type space. This turns out to be a two-part process. That's the second, more artistic part. The first, more discovery-oriented part sounds like......

The artists behind Buttrock Suites uniquely combine the dramatic force of '70s and '80s arena rock (AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Boston) with choreography. It's a hard music dance revue, plus plenty of hairspray. Last year, Seattlest interviewed co-founder Diana Cardiff, who told described the choreography as: ...many styles of dance, movement, theater. No two pieces are alike. Each piece has its own take on a song, whether it be in full stereotypical Buttrock fashion/costumes, glammy jazz,......

Do dancers hibernate in winter? There's an explosion of dance activity coming up as January draws to a close. Had we but world enough and time, we'd go to all these shows, but time's chariot won't permit us to make up all the stops. Here's the wealth you have to choose from: January 25 - 27: The Bridge Project @ Velocity Dance Center. Two young Seattle choreographers and one team (Kristina Dillard, Kelly Sullivan, and......

For Drought and Rain, Vol. 2, Vietnamese choreographer Ea Sola follows up her dance exploration of life during wartime with war's effects on the next generation. Sola was only twelve when she left Vietnam in 1974, so she has a foot in both worlds. There's more preview video, if you're into that kind of thing. There are thirteen dancers and, happily, six musicians (we get a little tired of canned music and dance). In the......

As ChrisB of Three Imaginary Girls points out, losing your job sucks. Losing a job that meant a lot to you sucks more. And losing all that during the holidays? Well that just blows a goat. So what do you do to help out these fellas who so unexpectedly got canned on Sunday afternoon? If you're former Croc booker Pete Greenberg (now at Chop Suey), you organize a benefit show to help these guys pay......