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......

You know how in horror films they were doing this thing where they'd delete frames and speed up or slow down the film to give the "evil" an eerie, inhuman quality? Zoe Scofield does that live, pretzeling, twisting, writhing, blank face dusted white with a silver streak down the center, her eyes disturbing pools of black under the lights. Yet...a hand reaches out to softly enfold the nape of a neck, there's a surrender, a......

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. //......

Tonight's show starts at 8pm and Sunday's matinee is at 2pm. Tickets are available online or at the Paramount's box office before the show. Programs for both performances are available on the Ailey site. As the curtains parted at the Paramount last night to reveal an undulating gray mass of dancers at center stage, it was immediately obvious that we were in for an evening of dance vastly difference from the usual Seattle repertoire. When......