Author: Omar Willey

Omar Willey was born at St. Frances Cabrini Hospital in Seattle and grew up near Lucky Market on Beacon Avenue. He believes Seattle is the greatest city on Earth and came to this conclusion by travelling much of the Earth. He is a junior member of Lesser Seattle and, as an oboist, does not blow his own trumpet. Contact him at omar [at] seattlestar [dot] net
Culture Performing Arts Poetry Visual Arts

ArtsCorps Student Showcase: Watering the Grassroots

Virtually every good citizen is aware of the massive cuts made to arts funding and arts education on a national scale over the past twenty years. Fewer people, however, are aware of the immense disparity between the haves and the have nots when it comes to the education their children receive in the arts. For that reason, programs like ArtsCorps have always been of utmost importance to me.

by Omar Willey 10 May, 2012
Performing Arts Theater Visual Arts

Rouge: The idée fixe

Performance art is not generally known for its sense of humor. For the past thirty years or so it has been tied down quite often to outrage and outrageousness, particularly concerning sex. However there is certainly another thread of performance art that draws upon absurd humor. Julie Andrée T. most certainly belongs to the latter group of artists who value wit and humor over political earnestness.

by Omar Willey 9 May, 2012
Culture Dance Performing Arts Society Theater

The Working Artist Series with The Cabiri: Educating the audience

How does one get into aerial arts, anyway? It is no secret that one of the great problems of the performing arts is creating continuity. Not only continuity of style, and not only continuity of tradition, but also continuity of knowledge among practitioners as well as among audiences. For quite sometime in Seattle it has been fashionable among theater artists to talk about educating their audiences. The goal is noble but difficult.

by Omar Willey 27 April, 2012
Dance Theater

Live! The Realest MC: Posture and Poise

On the surface, Kyle Abraham’s new dance work at On the Boards, Live! The Realest MC, seems to be about gay issues. It is a queer retelling of The Adventures of Pinocchio. The reality, however, is more complex. It is as much about how sex roles, gender and homosexuality are framed largely by the context of race as it is about individual struggle and acceptance. This brings up other questions of race, of course, but in ways that most of the critics of dance and theater–who tend to be white and largely bourgeois–do not care to grasp because such a discussion, too, would prove reality more complex than currently fashionable when it seems easier to reduce it to psychodrama.

by Omar Willey 22 April, 2012
Performing Arts

The Working Artist: Spotlight on The Cabiri—Phase 2

Even those who “support” the arts often treat the making of art like an optional activity in life, something to be reserved for the gifted. It isn’t. Art is not just about being crazy, weird, incoherent, and incomprehensible while expecting money for it. Being an artist requires massive amounts of self-imposed dirty work alternating with almost palpable tedium. This is for all those who do the dirty jobs.

by Omar Willey 13 April, 2012