There's not much time left to catch Paris/Vienna art collective Superamas at On the Boards (through Saturday, 8pm, tickets $24/$12 under-25). The performance group is billing (happy/end) as the third installment in the BIG trilogy, but trust us, having seen the first two won't help you. Our friend arrived a little late and as we were walking out asked, "So...did they tell you what the message was in the first five minutes?" They didn't. But......

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......

Saul Williams has done a little bit of everything. He’s an actor, a poet, a spoken-word performer, a musician and a writer. Since we first discovered him in the movie Slam -- which he helped write -- we’ve been fascinated by him, his energy and his words. Since then, we’ve seen him perform twice. Once after the release of his first album Amethyst Rock Star we saw him perform a full-on rock show. The last......

FRIDAY MUSIC: We're supporting local talent this evening, with a Cornish Senior Recital. Composer Andrew Boscardin (aka Bosco) has two new pieces ready to meet the world. He tells us:The first set will feature a sextet with myself, Mack Grout, Brad Gibson, Rachael Contorer and Clark Gibson. The second set will feature a 13-piece big band. All of the music was written by me and represents easily the largest and most daunting undertaking of......

Over at the Slog, they've tossed some fresh meat to the slavering Obama and Clinton hounds: video of Clinton repeating three or four times that she and McCain have a lifetime of experience to draw upon, while Obama has "a speech he made in 2002." Which makes this TIME article about the value of experience especially topical:[Anders] Ericsson's primary finding is that rather than mere experience or even raw talent, it is dedicated, slogging, generally......

Friday Theatre: The Solo Performance Festival, SPF2: Sweatproof!, returns to the Theatre Off Jackson with a terrific lineup of uni-personned shows. In fact, tonight has a terrific lineup all on its own, thanks to the Unicycle Collective. Their MonoLodge 4 is an evening of solo shorts from Seattle veterans and up-and-coming talents: Keith Hitchcock, Jennifer Jasper, Troy Mink, K. Brian Neel, Becky Poole, Mary Purdy, Seth Rosenbloom, Mark Siano, and Jenna Bean Veatch. (Saturday......

From the buzz circulating the budding career of Josh Blue, we thought his Saturday evening performance at the Kirkland Performance Center would be full of self-deprecating and occasionally awkward humor. It was not. Let’s start with the facts. Blue has Cerebral Palsy. He is a stand-up comedian. He is funny - no, he is hilarious. He is a Nike-sponsored striker for the U.S. Paralympic soccer team. Finally, he feels compelled to use anything with......

Evergreen State College alumni and fourth-season winner of Last Comic Standing, Josh Blue is coming to the Kirkland Performance Center (KPC) this Saturday. We're looking forward to an evening of self-deprecating humor, as Blue’s comedy stems from his personal experiences of living with cerebral palsy. Blue hopes to dispel stereotypical myths about the "disabled" through stand-up comedy and what he calls "reverse teasing." (His comedy routine is not recommended for children under 16 years old,......

This week, On the Boards' fantastic New Performance Series continues with the Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio's Hey Girl!. Purportedly inspired by a group of women waiting around a bus stop, the Italian performance group's show traces the "lineage of women" and promises to be both breath-taking and sexy. We haven't been able to find out too much about Socìetas Raffaello Sanzio (most of the stuff we've found is in Italian), but the images of the show......

Last night, a besuited Crispin Hellion Glover took the stage at Broadway Performance Hall with the perfunctory greeting: "Good evening. Presently, I will read to you from eight books." And he did. Now, we were kinda expecting something along those lines, as the Northwest Film Forum's blurb on his film events this weekend announced: All performances preceded by Glover’s one-hour slide show, which consists of ten eight different stories dramatically narrated by Glover himself.......

They'd finished their "last" song, gone backstage and waited. But there would be no encore because there was no call for one. People had begun filing out of the Crocodile like Night of the Living Dead extras. A few of us lingered, hoping for more, but after the band peeked out and saw that most everyone had already left, they too called it a night. Vocalist/keyboarder Rachel Stolteand and The Comas' Nicole Gehweiler took......

This Friday and Saturday, Velocity Dance Center presents its Strictly Seattle series, with a who's who of Seattle choreographers: Pat Graney, Dayna Hanson, Keith Johnson, Pablo Cornejo, Aiko Kinoshita, and Crispin Spaeth. It may also star your neighbor -- the series is the result of a three-week course where participants study with up to seven different instructors, work with a choreographer to create a new piece and then perform it publicly. (Here's the relevant Flickr......

Back when we were in college, one of our favorite theatre professors down at the University of Oregon was Grant McKernie. McKernie was an expert in experimental theatre and performance, and would occasionally tear up while recounting a particularly moving production by someone like Eimuntas Nekrošius. The challenge he always faced was convincing skeptical students that radical experimentation in performance wasn't just weirdness for weirdness's sake, or vapid pretension masquerading as high-brow art, but that......

This week the weather's cooperating a bit more. Nothing like escaping rainy days with a film festival (except if you get stuck in a downpour while waiting in line, so pack that umbrella). Once inside you'll be golden thanks to your perusal of Seattlest picks. Trust us. Golden! But first, we want to highlight some special events: · A Conversation with Julien Temple, with musician/critic Sean Nelson, will no doubt cover Temple's three music......

This weekend the National Weather service is calling for mid-70s to 80 degrees. You may want to recover from heatstroke by rehydrating in an air-conditioned theater with other bepinkenned Seattleites, and their melanin-endowed friends savoring their little moment of schadenfreude. (Here's the Seattle Times cheat sheet on the various venues.) · We caught the press screening for the not entirely laugh-free Death at a Funeral with a friend who said, summing up Frank Oz's......

Celebrate Seattle Festival @ PNB Program A: Sunday 1pm; Program C: Sunday 7pm McCaw Hall, tickets $20-$80 Pacific Northwest Ballet's Celebrate Seattle Festival gave Artistic Director Peter Boal a chance to invite a number of companies to share the stage with PNB, and while it seemed like a nice gesture to invite Christopher Stowell's Oregon Ballet Theatre, it turned out to be a canny artistic one, too. "Adin," to music by Rachmaninoff, is both......

Dorkbot, we've missed you. If our attendance record for the monthly technology and art event has been spotty at best recently --we've only been to one meeting since it lost the CoCA digs-- it's not because of the scheduled themes. They've all been awesome: Multimedia Performance at the Abbey, Innovation in Games back at CoCA, remote aerial photography at CHAC (actually we did get to that one)... New curator whatshisname (can't find it on the......

MUSIC: For the nine millionth time, get your ass to Easy Street to see Aqueduct's all-ages in-store performance. 7pm // Easy Street Queen Anne, 20 W. Mercer St. // Free OPERETTA: The Seattle Gilbert and Sullivan Society presents their production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow. Expect lots of romantic entanglements and disentanglements rife with misunderstandings and mistaken identities. 7:30pm // Town Hall, 1119 8th Ave. // $26 DANCE: Get your rumba on with......

Carl Hancock Rux's No Black Male Show is presented as an anti-performance. The audience is introduced to its three players as a distraught Rux announces that there will be no show tonight despite having learned their lines. The show (obviously) continues, but it provides a sense of unease for the audience, immediately drawing them in. The No Black Male Show is based on a poem partially written in response to New York's Whitney Museum's......

MUSIC: Blue Scholars and Common Market 8pm // Neumo's // $20. 21+ MUSIC: Harvey Danger with Slender Means and "Awesome." 9pm // Crocodile // $25. 21+ (also an early show at 4pm for all-ages; $5) PARTY: Arcana: New Years Masquerade Ball 9pm // Capitol Hill Arts Center // $30 (or $75 for deluxe pimp action) MUSIC: The Melvins, Big Business, Porn, "Hot Sauce" Butch Darlene 8pm// Showbox // $25 "MYSTICAL" PARTY: There's this weird......

MUSIC MOVIE: Danielson: A Family Movie follows musician/multi-media artist Daniel Smith as he endeavors to create art with his siblings and friends while also balancing his love for Jesus. Including appearances by Sufjan Stevens, Rick Moody, Daniel Johnston, and Steve Albini, tonight’s the documentary’s Seattle premiere. 7pm, 9pm // Northwest Film Forum // $8.50 SHOPPING PARTY: Galactic Boutique teams up with local artists MasterCraft for its holiday party/craft extravaganza GalactiCraft. Check out the latest fashions......

No, the Other Theater: The new movies out this weekend are shite, so this is your chance to catch up on the wealth of quality films already in theaters. Babel, Borat, Casino Royale, For Your Consideration, The Fountain, Little Children, Marie Antoinette, The Queen, Stranger Than Fiction, and Volver are all continuing their Seattle runs. Go now before you get back-logged further with the scads of Oscar contenders released later this month. Movie time......

It's a holiday week, and people are too busy stuffing themselves with turkey and cranberry jam to talk much. Just hang on until Tuesday, when things really pick up. Thursday, November 23 >>>Our parents' house, all afternoon. Dad talks on "The 7 Worst Habits of Today's Generation." Mom covers "Communication Breakdown: You Never Visit." Join the annual panel for a starchy Thanksgiving meal, that mysterious "fruit" salad with mini-marshmallows, and an in-depth critique of......

Watching The Grand Illusion is screening a film on Japanese architecture tonight called Kochuu. "Kochuu, which translates as “in the jar,” refers to the Japanese tradition of constructing small, enclosed physical spaces, which create the impression of a separate universe." Plays at 7:30 and 9pm. Broadway Performance Hall has some showings of Crispin Glover's "What Is It" this weekend. What is "What Is It?" Hard to say, really. IMDb says, "Being the adventures of a......

Yes we do. Ever since moving to Seattle in '93 and discovering "I Was Seven in '75" in, we're pretty sure, the Weekly, back when we read anything but the movie times in the Weekly. So we thoroughly, heartily, and fully recommend attending her "Reading/Video/Performance/Signing" at Bailey/Coy books tonight at 7, followed by purchasing her new book, I Love Led Zeppelin. Yes, The Stranger recommends it too, but they've worked with Forney in the past......

The end is near. Soon SIFF will be but a fading memory. So if you've been putting it off, this weekend is the last chance until next year for you to get some festival action. As an added bonus, on Sunday night at the Broadway Performance Hall, there will be an encore presentation for two of the films (one short, one full-length) that end up taking home SIFF awards. If you missed 'em the......

The final full week of SIFF is upon us. It's time to get some last few films before the sun sets on this year's fest. This week's got a couple great music events as well: Friday night, Portastatic will be on hand to perform a specially-commissioned live score accompanying circus freakshow-themed silent film The Unknown (more about that in a few days). Meanwhile, Thursday night's the Face the Music Rock Party at Neumo's, featuring......

As a wise man once said: "Ohhhh, we're half-way there / Ohhh-oh, living on a prayer." On Wednesday, SIFF officially reached the half-way mark. But it's by no means all downhill from here. There's still tons more great films to see before the fest is through. Seattlest applies our well-honed knowledge of all things cinema to the SIFF catalogue in order to point out some notable films playing this weekend: · Maxed Out Got......

SIFF enters its second full week with a slew of great documentaries, including the final screening of fair trade coffee doc Black Gold (Tuesday, 9:30pm @ the Egyptian). The directors, Marc and Nick Francis, will be in attendance, as will Tadesse Meskela, an Ethiopian Farm Cooperative Organizer featured in the film. The SIFF screenings mark the first time the directors and subject have been together since the making of the film---and the first time......

We were busy recommending you see Stewart Copeland speak at the Egyptian tonight before the screening of his documentary when we heard that his brother Ian died last week. Hmm, we wondered, might this recent event result in Copeland skipping his Seattle appearance? After all, the death of a loved one is a little more important than SIFF. The official word came today--- Due to the death of his brother Ian Copeland, Stewart Copeland......