- Physical Education
Fact: January in the Pacific Northwest is gray, dark time. Luckily, indoor kids have these performances to look forward to in the new year, while we wait for the light to return:
Allie Hankins, who Suzette Smith profiled last week, will launch Physical Education this February, along with Keyon Gaskin, Lucy Lee Yim and Takahiro Yamamoto. The project aims to demystify performance through a series of lectures, reading groups, and, per the group’s Facebook page, “straight-up sweat-it-out DANCE PARTIES.” From our profile:
Hankins employed plyometrics, continuous high-intensity jumping exercises, every week in an attempt to gain the strength to perform her own rigorous choreography. But during our interview, she seemed comfortable, even excited, at the idea that she might have fallen and failed that day at Conduit—or at any performance—and that if she did, it might all just be part of her work.
“The last night that I performed, everything seemed to come together into this really wonderful moment. There was the wedding happening in the room above me and the ‘Chicken Dance’ started playing. No one would look at me. It totally failed. The whole fucking thing crumbled! All suspension of disbelief was gone, because everyone was like ‘WHOA, we’re in the building with this poor girl with the “Chicken Dance” happening.’ Right after that—thankfully—was the part where I wrestled 80 pounds of red fabric.”
Speaking of profiles, Profile Theater, which just wrapped a season dedicated to the works of Sam Shepard, is switching gears in 2015, to produce a series of plays by Sarah Ruhl, perhaps best known as the playwright behind In the Next Room, or, The Vibrator Play.
Finally, anyone who loves comedy should be paying attention in the new year to the weird, great things coming out of Kickstand Comedy Space, in the basement of Velocult—yes, the bike shop basement comedy space that sounds like a punchline. Go there! Kickstand’s soft open included a brilliant, varied safe-space open mic from Lez Stand Up, and Earthquake Hurricane, a weekly show hosted by Bri Pruett, Alex Falcone, Curtis Cook, and Anthony Lopez, which you should show up for if you enjoy laughing. January in the Pacific Northwest is grim as fuck. You should give yourself a present every day to make up for it. And one of those presents should be laughter.