Let me ask you a question. What was the last TBA Festival event that had one (and only one) idea in its head: to entertain the masses with frenzied song-and-dance enthusiasm, and send you home with a mile-wide grin? None in recent memory come to mind, which makes Pink Martini and friends’ Saturday night performance […]
Performance
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Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People Redesign Dean
Eric McNatt When Hollywood legends die, they leave behind a body of work that’s almost more important to those left behind than the legend’s actual life story. The movies of Garbo, or Monroe, or whomever are almost like a magic trunk of forgotten costumes. They can be pulled out, dusted off, and inhabited for a […]
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REVIEW: Young Jean Lee, The Shipment
Paula Cort I was admittedly tepid about playwright Young Jean Lee’s 2007 TBA offering, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a show that seemed as though it was trying to push buttons I don’t actually have. Her new show the The Shipment, in which the Korean American Lee set out to examine the African […]
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REVIEW: Meg Stuart + Philip Gehmacher, Fri Sept 4 @ PCPA Newmark Theatre
There are moments in Meg Stuart and Philip Gehmacher’s “Maybe Forever” that you may never forget. The slow spread of Gehmacher’s arms, sunward, as a soft guitar crescendoes. A wrenchingly expressive duet between the dancers that bubbles with a darkly sexual subtext. Then there’s the other 80 impenetrable minutes of this show. The question is […]
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Back to Back: The Complete Transcript
We didn’t have room in the paper to print the entirety of Marjorie Skinner’s interview with Back to Back Theatre‘s artistic director Bruce Gladwin, but the whole thing is online: Check it out. Back to Back’s small metal objects, which will place a headphoned audience on risers in Pioneer Square to watch mic’d actors with […]
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Tiago Guedes: Materiais Diversos and Um Solo
In the least successful line of Bob Dylan’s otherwise devastating “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” the narrator, while describing the hallucinatory events he’d witnessed, reports that he “met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow.” Never a sentimentalist, it’s hard to determine how Dylan intended this rendezvous with Roy G. Biv’s altruistic, feminine purity to […]
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Forced Entetainment’s Quizoola
This six-hour ambling little thing was engaging enough for a while, but I don’t think it fully shows off the “groundbreaking” aspects of experimental theater maker Tim Etchells. The premise: Etchells and two other dudes sat in a room with some Christmas lights strewn around and stacks of paper with thousands of questions written on […]
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Superamas: BIG 3rd Episode (happy/end)
I’ve been sitting on this Superamas blog post for two days, hoping that in sleeping on it–and sleeping on it again–some strikingly intelligent or insightful way to describe this show would occur to me. That did not happen. As far as I can tell, this bright, superficially stunning show sets up several scenes and then, […]
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Strip Mall Transcendence in L’Effet de Serge
The Imago Theatre is my least favorite TBA venue. Granted, the sound is better than at PSU’s Lincoln Hall, but the seats are uncomfortable, it’s always freezing, and the women’s restroom has curtains instead of doors so you can never tell if the stalls are occupied. Somehow, though, my least favorite venue manages to house […]
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Tim Etchells: Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First
I think people at this year’s TBA festivities have been spoiled by the likes of Mike Daisey, Daniel Beaty, and other folks who, while certainly subversive and cutting-edge and blah-de-blah-blah-blah, also offer up plenty of good old fashioned straightforward entertainment to keep you engaged. How else to explain why more than a dozen people simply […]
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Saw Something, Saying Something
Here is a brief survey of topics in Mike Daisey’s new work, If You See Something, Say Something: Airport SecurityThe Department of Homeland SecurityThe Trinity Nuclear Test SiteApocalypseThe Rand CorporationHerman KahnThe Neutron BombPickpocketingWorld War TwoGeorge Washington’s Farewell AddressThe Worst Hamburger in the World Looking over this list, you might think this performance would be a […]
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Mellman! Everett! Sexercise Live!
Even though it features a video of Neal Medlyn humping a mattress while wearing a tight blue unitard, Sexercise Live! isn’t really performance art. It’s purely performance or purely art, depending on your perspective. My perspective (and rightly so in my opinion) was drunk. From that perspective, I was perfectly comfortable, sitting in the darkness […]