Mark Haim’s X2: Remarks in passing
I quite liked the first half of Mark Haim’s X2 at On the Boards. It is an inventive use of space and time all linked by Louis Andriessen’s music De Tijd (Time), inspired as much by the Confessions of St. Augustine (which form its text) as by Morton Feldman. I’m much less keen on the second piece.
The Working Artist: Spotlight on The Cabiri
The Cabiri unite teamwork, effort, sweat, and concentration to pursue their art and hone it to its finest. That the group are not regularly celebrated by Seattle’s performing arts pundits, much less by Seattleites at large, strikes me as a miscarriage of justice. With their emphasis on creating spectacular shows for all ages of people, The Cabiri deserve a much larger and much more faithful following
Before the rhytidectomy
Assuage their vanity with tools of
rhetoric and anything
they pay to hear; sacrifice
the flesh as a halal butcher
hangs carcasses
to a commercial god.
Joining disciplines with a Hyphen: Catherine Cabeen Company at Velocity
One of the difficulties of assembling an accurate history of jazz is dealing with the subject of improvisation. Lacking a real system of notation, improvisation passes from teacher to student through direct practice alone and is difficult to reproduce. Dance also shares this problem. While there are various systems of notation for dance, these often narrow the range of expressive options rather than opening them up. Yet with a bit of humility and a sense of playfulness, one can approach the subject of notation as a playground for inspiration.
BOOST Dance Festival: A Showcase of Seattle’s Diversity
Dancers face the very same challenges as theater groups. Rehearsal space, performance space, support funding and so on. But quite unlike their counterparts in the theater, dancers tend to gather together out of necessity and fix their problems from within. Marlo Martin rose to a challenge in 2010 by starting the BOOST Dance Festival.
Hollow Earth Radio and Nonsequitur bring trio improvisation to the Chapel
In improvisation, duos are a sort of conversation. Big bands are something like a game of follow the leader. In a sense, improvising trios are a combination of both. They retain much of the conversational intimacy of a duo through a kind of shared leadership of conversation that rarely if ever occurs in the classic quintet format, or even in the quartet. Many things can happen in trios that would be virtually impossible in another format.
The Bureau of Drawers brings back the comix tabloid to Seattle
Now that bandwidth has hit a safe plateau where consumers can download massive picture files at will, it makes sense that someone would bring back the free comix tabloid. That is exactly what Seattle’s Bureau of Drawers have done.
In the Land of Make/Believe: tEEth Bring Their Magic to On the Boards
Using the barest of elements in extraordinary combinations, Make/Believe produces visually and sonically striking imagery that grows and grows in intricacy, the way that music grows from the simplicity of a heartbeat, or language itself grows from scratches and dots on a Sumerian jar. Make/Believe is a succession of gorgeous images revolving around the idea of what it means to communicate, not only with others but also with oneself–or what one takes oneself to be.
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