Culture Fiend

Sound Artist Trimpin Tackles the Holocaust

With the help of the Fire Organ, naturally.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on May 17, 2012 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Anytime Seattle-based sound artist Trimpin unveils new work, we stop to listen. Sometimes it sounds like the chanting of monks, or an eerie duck call—dissonant sounds created by his Bunsen burner–powered Fire Organ. (Watch the video below.) Other times, it’s the mechanized plucking of guitar strings, or the song of tree bark. His kinetic sculptures are the stuff of genius—he is, after all, MacArthur certified—but it’s rare that he dabbles in full-fledged librettos and oratorios, until now.

In collaboration with director and vocalist Rinde Eckert, Trimpin has written The Gurs Zyklus, which he’s calling “a music performance, multimedia installation using sound sculptures and a kinetic set design, along with vocalists and actors.” So…it’s a little hard to describe. At its core is a libretto inspired by found letters from the WWII internment camp Gurs, where the Jews from Trimpin’s childhood home of Efringen-Kirchen, Germany, were sent. The chance discovery of these letters is an amazing story in itself: A man named Victor Rosenberg read a 2006 New Yorker profile of Trimpin and realized that his mother came from the same hometown, and his uncle was interned at the same camp. Rosenberg reached out to Trimpin and sent him a shoebox full of letters from his family during their time at Gurs; the correspondence prompted Trimpin to revisit his own postwar childhood in Germany and the fate of his town’s Jews. He even went so far as to travel by train from Efringen-Kirchen to Gurs, following the same route; photos from that trip accompany the performance.

Trimpin: The Gurs Zyklus
May 17–20, On the Boards, $20

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Tags: Theater, On the Boards, Trimpin

Met Pick: Portland Dance Troupe Teeth at On the Boards

The 2011 A.W.A.R.D. Show! winners have a new multimedia piece to show off.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 28, 2012 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Portland dance company Teeth ­dominated last year’s A.W.A.R.D. Show! competition with Home Made, an electrifying interpretation of a long-term relationship, from lust to languish. At the time, I think I called it the dance equivalent of Blue Valentine. Dancers Keely McIntyre and Noel Plemmons engaged in flashlight foreplay beneath a sheet, using a handheld camera to trace each others’ naked bodies while projecting close-ups of elbows, feet, and chins onto a screen behind them. A foot caressed a head; it was… sweet.

Ever since choreographer Angelle Hebert and sound designer Phillip Kraft teamed up 11 years ago, Teeth has explored the boundaries of contemporary dance. This isn’t just about movement—it’s finely crafted theater, with an appreciation for dark comedy, improvisation, and creative multimedia. The group returns to On the Boards this weekend with the local premiere of Make/Believe, a new piece about obsession and anxiety featuring Plemmons, Philip Elson, and Seattle’s Molly Sides and Shannon Stewart draped in microphone cords—a sort-of modern Marley’s ghost bound by chains.

On March 3, Hebert and Kraft will co-teach a master class at Velocity Dance, covering material from Make/Believe, as well as dance technique, improv, and composition. All levels welcome.

Make/Believe
Mar 1–3 at 8, On the Boards, $20

Teeth: Master Class
Mar 3, noon–1:45, Velocity Dance Center, $15 ($7 with ticket stub)

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Tags: Velocity Dance, On the Boards

Arab Winter

Lebanese performance artist Rabih Mroué leads a creative rebellion in his U.S. debut.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Jan 17, 2012 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

Originally published January 2012. A text, a tweet, a cellphone photo: these were the weapons of the Arab Spring, wielded by young, tech-savvy revolutionaries who issued a call to action—a call for freedom—with Silicon Valley technology. As rebellion simmered on Facebook and spilled into the streets of Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, Rabih Mroué took notice from his home in Beirut. The 44-year-old performance artist has long had an eye for political theater; ever since his native Lebanon ended its own 15-year civil war in 1990, Mroué has played the provocateur, using monologues and video installations to probe his country’s troubled history. The 2005 performance piece Who’s Afraid of Representation, based on the true story of a civil servant who went on a killing spree after losing his job, earned Mroué a phone call from the office of the interior ministry. They demanded a rewrite.

“To use the words of the censorship department, they tell us: We don’t censor you, we just play with the contrast, we make it less sharp, just make it more gentle, not so violent or provocative,” he told CNN last year. In turn, Mroué has worked alongside his fellow avant-guardians on the fringes of Beirut’s theater scene. His performances are more pop-up than popular, but they’ve earned him international respect, including a 2010 Spalding Gray award issued by a U.S. consortium of museums and theaters. Quite the honor for a man who’s never performed stateside before—until now.

Find out about Mroué’s upcoming show at On the Boards in our full article.

Rabih Mroué
On the Boards, January 19–22

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Tags: Theater, On the Boards, Performance Art

NW New Works Festival Expands Some Horizons

On the Boards presents a new wave of entertainment.

Posted by: Annie Rose Favreau on Jun 09, 2011 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

SLIDESHOW: Two dancers “steel themselves against the unstable ebbs and swells of absence” in Part and Parcel’s (choreographer Allie Hankins) new piece “By Guess & By God.” Photos courtesy Tim Summers.

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SLIDESHOW: Two dancers “steel themselves against the unstable ebbs and swells of absence” in Part and Parcel’s (choreographer Allie Hankins) new piece “By Guess & By God.” Photos courtesy Tim Summers.

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Alice Gosti’s “Spaghetti CO” begins with a simple setting: three performers around a dinner table and a huge bowl of spaghetti. The project’s aim is more complicated: it “seeks to investigate the relationship that individuals and families have with food, and the memories that are attached to certain tastes and smells; for example the capability that food has the ability to make one feel at home or very far from home.”

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The Blank Department (Drew Dillhunt, Jed Dunkerley, Jenelle Greninger, Mike Katell and Jason Puccinelli) is an “art rock band that wanted to enlarge the scope of its performing experience beyond playing motley sets of music in clubs and bars.” Their act “Orders of Magnitude” includes original animation, the band’s opinions about the extinction of dinosaurs, and three actors performing silent vignettes.

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Paige Barnes’s “War Is Over” was “Inspired by the spirit and physicality of boxing,” Exploring the idea of self-sabotage, the dance looks at the desire to win a three-rounding boxing match…with yourself.

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Finger is Julie Baldridge and Jeppa K Hall’s (a.k.a. Queen Shmooquan) musical duo. They perform “haunting madrigals about sex and death,” that recall “old-fashioned murder ballads, folk music, and avant-garde death metal.”

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Choreographer Jessica Jobaris’s “You’re the thing that sets me free” centers on “how we hasten healing through the five ‘opiates’ of suffering: endurance, denial, transcendence, revenge and escape.” It promises to include athletic movement, ancient indigenous practices, psycho-therapy, and Celine Dion in a matador’s suit.

“It’s the place where you can see tomorrow’s innovators today.” That’s how On the Boards’ Jessica Massart describes the 28th annual NW New Works Festival. Sure, it’s a little cheesy, but it’s also kind of true: The fest has previously featured cutting-edge organizations and artists like Catherine Cabeen, tEEth, Waxie Moon, and Implied Violence.

“It really serves as a laboratory for Northwest artists and an opportunity for artists to incubate a new idea or foster a sense of original work,” Massart explains.

This year, the two-weekend event will showcase 16 experimental performance pieces from local artists (the word local is used loosely: performers hail from Oregon, Washington, and Canada), in mediums ranging from dance and theater to puppetry and film.

So, when you hear the words “experimental art,” do you imagine a naked lady performing interpretive dance to a soundtrack of atonal flute music? If so, you may wonder what these audiences are getting themselves into.

“The artists are definitely playing with the boundaries of their genres,” Massart admits. “But they’re actually doing this to communicate more clearly to the audience what their ideas are. Audiences can expect to see pieces that are thought-provoking, conversation-starting and fun, in addition to experimental.”

Click through the slideshow above to get acquainted with a few of the groups performing in the festival. (Warning: the last photo is not for sensitive eyes.)

The NW New Works Festival is on Friday through June 19 at On the Boards.

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Tags: Theater, Dance, Festivals, On the Boards

Catherine Cabeen Goes ‘Into the Void’

Inspired by French painter Yves Klein, the choreographer’s new work is a “painting in time and space.”

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Apr 28, 2011 at 10:30AM 0 Comments

Photo: Michael Clinard.

Catherine Cabeen creates “a painting in time and space” with her new dance Into the Void at On the Boards.

When I spoke to choreographer Catherine Cabeen this winter, she already had a blueprint for her world-premiere performance this weekend at On the Boards. Emphasis on the “blue.” Into the Void is dance-theater inspired by the artwork of postmodern painter Yves Klein, who patented a brilliant shade called International Klein Blue [IKB] and employed naked woman as living paintbrushes. Cabeen, a feminist scholar, is less interested in having women roll around in toxic paint and more in the metaphor.

Why Yves Klein?

I first saw Klein’s work when I was a child. My mother is a visual artist so I grew up going to contemporary art museums all over the world… Klein found that, when he would paint a surface, it would be really shiny and luminous and beautiful, but as it would dry, it would become extremely matte. It would lose its excitement. So he figured out a chemical process to suspend aquamarine blue pigment in a sort of resin, which meant that when it dried, it stayed just as luminous. The color is really striking. I always really enjoyed that, and when I found out how it was made, I got excited by the metaphor that exists within it: because by suspending the pigment in the resin, he keeps each grain of pigment whole. One color made up of a million individual tiny parts, and that’s very much what I’m interested in in my dance company. I want to create a whole evening’s-length work that is one cohesive piece, but I’m interested in working with dancers who are very strong and powerful individuals, and also with other collaborators [an installation artist, digital media artist, and kora player among them] who are strong and powerful individuals. I don’t want to approach the choreographic process in the way paint is traditionally made: to grind up the pigment into a powder and dissolve it in oil. I would like to create a whole where each piece is its own individual whole.

Paint a picture of the opening of Into the Void.

A completely empty space. Klein had a very famous installation called The Void where he literally whitewashed a whole gallery and advertised this event so well that 3,000 people showed up to see nothing. In his mind, in his words, they were coming to see a positive energy which he had infused the space with, but some cynics saw nothing. So I’ve really been thinking about the idea of emptiness.

There will be a white floor that runs under the feet of the first row of the audience to the back wall, and then straight up the back wall. Sort of like a photographer’s seamless paper, so there will be this clear space in the middle. To either side of that, the space will be draped in black, so the central void will also hopefully be a gateway or door.

One of the reasons we’re using the white floor and backdrop is that we want to really saturate the space with an approximation of IKB. The lighting and digital media artists are experimenting with that color, and there will be three dancers who will use their painted bodies to dance. To create a painting in time and space.

Into the Void is at On the Boards from Apr 28–30.

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Tags: Dance, On the Boards

A Frankenstein Story by Crystal Pite

Big-deal Vancouver choreographer returns to On the Boards with an angry puppet in tow.

Posted by: Laura Dannen on Feb 16, 2011 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Bad puppet Crystal Pite’s Frankenstein story Dark Matters opens at On the Boards on Feb 17.

Vancouver choreographer Crystal Pite has made the trip across the border three times in the last five years to perform at On the Boards. Seattle has a thing for her.

‘She’s probably one of our most…I don’t want to say popular, but adored art-dance makers who’s been here over the last several years,’ said OtB artistic director Lane Czaplinski. ‘There’s an explosive quality about her choreography.’ According to an OtB preview on Pite, she approaches each new project by taking a universal concept and asking, Can I make a dance out of this? This weekend’s performance of Dark Matters is no different: Aside from the allusion to the “dark matter” and dark energy of the universe—the great unknown—she also plays with the familiar Frankenstein story, as her troupe of Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM dancers, all in black, manipulate an angry puppet that turns on its maker. In the preview below, you can see how graceful the man-machine collaboration is.

Dark Matters has toured Europe, with a stopover at the Venice Biennale, and will be taped for ontheboards.tv. It’s an experience that translates in different mediums and venues, but there’s something about seeing it surrounded by avid Pite fans that sounds right.

Dark Matters is at On the Boards from Feb 17-20. Note: This show uses strobe lights.

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Tags: Dance, On the Boards