TeenTix Blog Dance

The first thing you hear at the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s performance of The Seasons' Canon at McCaw Hall, and the thing that sticks with you throughout the rest of the performance, is the sharp and dynamic choir that begins Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields, the first of three works. Constructed of eleven voices, the choir accompanies the ten-part operation with religious hymns from the 18th and 19th centuries. The songs are simple but elevated by crisp tenor voices, later joined by the winding sopranos and altos. Pacific Northwest Ballet company dancers in Twyla Tharp’s Sweet Fields™. Photo © Angela Sterling, 2024.

Due to the power and excellence of the music, the linked dances sometimes feel like they accompany the score, instead of the other way around. The choreography is creative, switching between blue-toned, lighthearted vignettes and brooding, funeral-march-inspired processions. Visually, most of the dances work quite well. Tharp’s fast-paced, complex actions are sometimes lost in their technicalities, but the overall, folksy theme and the duality of celebration and death make for a series of enticing pairings.

In the 21st century, the possibility of supernatural disasters constantly looms above us. Each year, we are subject to more and more unprecedentedly catastrophic events, an aspect of environmental collapse that threatens the livelihoods of thousands. It’s almost surreal, except for the fact that it isn’t: this is the new world we live in. These devastating occurrences, along with how people and the media react to them, are part of what’s examined by slowdanger’s SUPERCELL. An hourlong quintet performance that questions human attraction and passivity towards environmental events. I was lucky enough to partake in the self-reflection involved in watching the show, presented by Velocity Dance at 12th Avenue Arts from March 21 to 24, and the experience left me contemplative, to say the least.

My journey began in a crowded foyer filled with chattering Seattleites. As the sun set, we made our way into the theater, and the change was drastic. In an instant, we were transported from the brightly lit, corporeal world to a hazy realm of darkness. Two sheets of sheer cloth hung down from the ceiling and the yellow-tinged shine of a pale red cast mesmerizing shadows through them. On the stage, five performers lay together in the shape of a star, each bearing a large, see-through sack full of what seemed to be water, connected to those beside them by a complex entanglement of rope.

Aside from the ferry’s foghorn, there’s rarely a reason for things in Edmonds to be loud. It’s a quiet suburban town with overly nice drivers and a median age ten years above the national average—that is to say, it’s not the place you’d expect to find an experimental dance/theater/martial arts performance on a Saturday night. But there it was: a half-full house at Edmonds Center for the Arts and Radical System Art’s eight-person cast who brought more energy than this writer’s ever seen in her sleepy town.

The show, Momentum of Isolation began, even before the brief curtain speech and the extinguishing of the house lights, with a man typing at a desk. Unbeknownst to the audience at that point, he’d soon become the main focus of the show, the continuing plot that tied together other seemingly disparate stories. One scene included a depiction of online dating, followed by one dancer trying to woo another, providing brief comedic relief. Another featured the ensemble falling in and out of step with each other. Going into the show with no clue of the performance’s themes, it was at times difficult to parse the significance of scenes or moments. One had the sense that things were supposed to be profound, that the audience was supposed to feel something or react a certain way, but at times the jarring effects and mixture of movements seemed blended beyond coherency. Until checking the website and finding that this performance was “centered around the themes of loneliness and social isolation,” I struggled to describe the overall sense of the show. Photo Credit: Emilie Bland

For this month, TEDS Aamina and Kyle have a special treat for you. An April Editorial in the format of an NYT game of Connections (Learn about the game here)! See the key below to see what events the Newsroom is covering this month.

Youth

The sun’s coming up in Seattle. As the evenings grow lighter, cherry blossoms bloom, and March brings us closer and closer to the equinox, now is the perfect time to step out into the near-spring air and go see some art with your TeenTix pass. This month, the Newsroom’s slate of reviews covers gothic theater, pluralistic choreography, classic musicals, and local comedy: a plentiful and varied spring spread!

Over at Dacha Theatre, Mikhail Bulkakov’s “gothic Soviet fairytale” Master and the Margarita is coming to the stage. Opening on March 22 and running at 12th Avenue Arts on Capitol Hill, the play is perfect for audiences who want to be entranced by magical realism and pulled into hilarious satire. A perfect partner to Dacha’s production is The Moors at Seattle Public Theater. This play, running from March 22 to April 14, promises even more gothic goodness, this time entrenched in the mystery of the English moors. Between unexpected arrivals and the secrets of old houses, The Moors will bring a rush of intrigue into your month.

This February, in honor of Groundhog Day, the events that the newsroom is reviewing shed light on the dilemmas that have come to define the human experience: Who am I? Does joy come from continuity or change? Will there be another six weeks of winter? Though the fact that we continue to struggle with these questions can feel disheartening, we can also relish the fact that we, like so many of our ancestors, have the opportunity to untangle the complicated web of human existence.

Joy Harjo will be at Seattle Town Hall on February 27, a poet known for her writings on reconciling the past with the future as we all ask ourselves, how do we remember the past and our heritage without idealizing the pain in our history? Also taking inspiration from history, ArtsWest is running Born With Teeth from February 1 through 25. The play depicts queer, fictionalized depictions of William Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, capturing the conflict experienced by all queer people and the erasure of their history while celebrating queer joy and excellence.

It's wintertime! Even in Seattle's bleakest months of the year, vibrancy and inspiration are definitely not gone from Seattle’s arts scene. This month our writers will be putting on their explorer hats and experiencing art from around the globe. So join them on experiences ranging from Indonesian Gamelan to Nordic sculptures to contemporary Seattle experimentation.

Seeking to disrupt and reinvent, NextFest NW 2023 at Velocity Dance is a celebration of experimentation. Northwestern artists Maximiliano, Kara Beadle, Danielle Ross, and Sophie Marie Schatz present a singular yet cohesive experience from dancing, movement, and light. NextFest runs December 7-9 + 14-16, so don’t miss the contemporary event of the season at 12th Ave Arts.

At On the Boards’ show Make Banana Cry, the audience is part of the stage. It is an uncomfortably post-modern, avante-garde performance disguised as a simple dance and fashion show, set on a runway stage. Performers strut down paths patterned with Buddhist swastikas, in various states of dress and undress, holding a collection of props and using them in different ways. Sometimes they march slowly—sometimes to the point of unmoving—and sometimes they are explosively radiant in their color, movement, and expressiveness. Under the helm of producer/performer power duo Andrew Tay and Stephen Thompson, the six performers are accompanied by an ever-changing set of soundtracks, consisting of everything from Miss Saigon to frantic pop songs to what seems to be the rhythmic beating of helicopter propellers. This collection of sounds and cues is not random but very intentional, for the show is meant to be an out-of-the-box method for paralyzing a largely white audience with symbols and themes commonly associated with the appropriation of Asian cultures. The auditory design and wild costume choices enhance the discomfort put upon the audience. However, as the show experiments with imagination, it also discovers that entertainment and creativity do not always go hand in hand.

Upon walking into the theater, audience members are handed plastic foot covers so their shoes don’t scuff the stage; these remain on for the entirety of the performance. Then, the audience examines various items such as Chinese checkerboards and towering sculptures of oversized cup noodle packages before taking their seats. The audience then sits in silence as the performance slowly begins, and then rapidly escalates. The performers march, run, or crawl down the runway toting a variety of different props and wearing strange costumes that bend the definition of clothes. The costumes are continuously weird and eccentric—sometimes coherently so and sometimes like a jumble of the strangest outfits ever worn. The actors confront, speak to, and hand things to audience members, who are scattered around in clusters of rows throughout the stage. The goal of the actors throughout these interactions is to challenge the audience’s beliefs and ideas via motifs. However, the boldness, force, enthusiasm, and nakedness of the performers often serve less as vehicles for metaphor and more so as a visceral shock to the “universal Western prejudice” mentioned by the show’s program. As the show veers off the rails, the performers’ goals are put on display: to illustrate a history of racism against Asian cultures and to boast their own Asian-ness in pride. The show’s themes are pleasantly startling but the execution of them is ultimately unsustainable.

This November, as the clocks fall back and the rain keeps falling, we at the TeenTix Newsroom are turning our attention to tradition: maintaining beloved ones and forging others that are fresh and new. With a TeenTix pass this month, there’s plenty of time to both return to classic stories and explore contemporary ideas.

At Seattle Rep, Little Women runs from November 10 to December 17, a staging of Louisa May Alcott’s adaptation of her own 1868 novel. Following the aspiring writer Jo March and her three sisters throughout each of their lives, Little Women centers on the joy of family. But the cozy community fun doesn’t stop with the play itself; the run includes dates with a Winter Market taking place in the Rep’s lobby, a double feature date in collaboration with SIFF Uptown, and more.

The stage is dim– lit only by a soft white glow. Nine actors breathe in a haunting, rhythmic chorus. Their bodies sway to the chugging of the train. The rise and fall, the side to side, calls to mind deep-seated nostalgia, the feeling of travel that, as a child, felt never-ending. As Passengers progresses, the Seattle Repertory Theatre stops feeling like a theater. The acrobats stop being just actors, their daring stunts transform from just circus spectacle. The audience is pulled into a heart-wrenching and deeply human story, told masterfully with the bodies of the performers. Circus is used as a creative device, where the stunts come second to the story. Passengers is one of the most uniquely beautiful things I have ever seen.

This Labor Day weekend, Bumbershoot is back with a wide variety of unconventional arts, like a cat circus and roller skating. Among those peculiar programs is pole dancing, a nontraditional yet empowering art. As a pole dancer myself, I was ready to take a spin and talk to the curators and performers of the show. The Pole Pavillion was a collaborative program created by Aero Space Studios in Oregon and Ascendance Pole & Aerial Arts, right here in Washington.

On Day 1 of Bumbershoot, I got to talk to Ashley Madison, one of the curators of the Pole Pavillion, and co-owner of Aero Space Studios where they encourage the art of pole dancing in Portland. The theme of the program was, “What does pole dance mean to you?” After asking Madison about the theme of the program, she mentioned that, “One of the beautiful things about pole dance is that you can go so many directions with it, and everybody has their own unique style and everybody chooses their path on pole which can be all over the place so we tried to pick a diverse program that showed different styles of pole.” As I watched the performers I could clearly see the diversity of their dance styles.

The month of May is the last month of spring—enjoy it before the hot waves of summer hit us with our exclusive curation of art to experience this month!

If you’re in the business of unfiltered, unscripted stories, then The Moth Mainstage is the May event you’re looking for! Watch five storytellers develop and shape their stories with the Moth’s directors.

The curtain rose to reveal an unlit stage. Fifteen bells hung at varied lengths from the ceiling, and three shallow pools of water were dispersed, mimicking the famous Ganges River. A dancer silently pushed out candles into the water, unhurriedly lighting the stage with a serene atmosphere. This opening set the mood for Ragamala Dance Company’s phenomenal performance.

Founded in 1992 by South Indian-American dancers Ranee Ramaswamy and Aparna Ramaswamy, the Ragamala Dance Company aims to connect the past and present through Hindu tradition and cultural expression. The dance company has toured all around the United States, India, and abroad, with the dance form Bharatanatyam, a prominent South Indian dance form originating from Tamil Nadu. As an art form, Bharatanatyam transports the audience through a spiritual experience informed by Hindu principles and mythology. At the Meany Center for Performing Arts, the dancers performed Fires of Varanasi: Dance of the Eternal Pilgrim, choreographed by acclaimed dancer Alarmél Valli. The show centers around the dancers embarking on a pilgrimage, built on the belief of reincarnation.

The lights dimmed in McCaw Hall's massive theater, filled to the brim with people of all ages, eagerly anticipating the overture of a bittersweet romance and haunting tragedy. There was a distant sound of tuning in the orchestra pit, barely heard over the clamor of excited viewers. Suddenly, a moment of stillness. Then, the thrilling first note of Giselle’s opening theme—an upbeat melody that didn’t prepare the audience for the devastating story that lay ahead. Before the hushed audience, the performers of Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB) waited behind the curtains to present a unique perspective on the famous ballet for the company’s first production since 2014.

The story of Giselle dates back to the 19th century, first performed at the Ballet du Théâtre de l'Académie Royal de Musique in Paris. Theophile Gautier, the original creator of the celebrated ballet, devised the art after reading two old ghost stories: “Phantoms,” by Victor Hugo, and On Germany, by Heinrich Heine. Essentially, the ballet is about a naive peasant girl’s child-like passion for dancing, and a series of tragic events that sentence her to an eternal existence between life and death.

It’s love season and we at TeenTix have many partners we adore (partner venues, that is). We love seeing our partners invest in new works, so we are thrilled to have three world premieres from TeenTix venues this February. Dacha Theatre, a new addition to the TeenTix Pass Program, is debuting the electro-synth musical An Incomplete List of All the Things I’m Going to Miss When the World is No Longer.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, ACT Theatre Core Company member Reginald André Jackson pursued an extensive research project about forgotten Black theatre artists, which has culminated in the production History of Theatre: About, By, For, and Near. The play explores whether the history of the oppressed can properly be shared without expressing oppression.

Before the show begins, sitting in the audience of Thank You For Coming: Space is like being surrounded by an immersive “I Spy” game. The stage is a white rectangle, with two rows of audience chairs around the perimeter, a raised set of tables on one end, and an opening in the seats on the other. Ropes crisscross in the air, tied to chair legs and slung high above on overhead bars. There’s a lemon suspended in the air, microphones, a bundle of leaves, and a bell too, all hanging over people’s heads as theatergoers trickle in from the lobby. A block of clay sits on a corner, and a pair of Doc Martens with wires duct taped to them lie resting on the floor.

Thank You For Coming: Space, created and performed by Faye Driscoll, is an experimental and participatory theater piece that seeks to explore the relationship between an artist and their audience. Driscoll begins the piece by walking into the space and speaking to the audience. What unfolds from there is an abstract, visceral, and deliberately constructed portrait of an artist’s inner thoughts.

With one turn of a calendar’s page, 2023 has arrived. For many, the new year is a time for self-reflection. Some might make New Year’s resolutions to look back on their year in review; others might set on the path to a fresh start. For the more creatively inclined, the new year is a magnificent chance to delve deep into who you are and who you want to become through art. If you’re interested in experiencing the myriad of artistic perspectives the new year has inspired in the Seattle community, check out the events covered this month on the TeenTix Arts Blog, curated by the Teen Editorial Staff.

For those of you aching to return to theater after the holidays, look no further for some truly exciting events. Seattle Repertory Theatre is welcoming in the new year by contemplating change and transformation with Metamorphoses, a thrilling new theatrical production inspired by Ovid’s classic epic poem. If you’re looking to delve even further into history, check out History of Theatre at ACT Theatre, a production that seeks to explore and celebrate the rich, little-known history of Black theatre in America. To challenge your social perceptions, consider seeing This Bitter Earth at Seattle Public Theater, a beautiful exploration of racial issues, Queer identity, and modern love.

This year, PNB is once again generously providing TeenTix tickets for TWO (2) performances: Tue, Dec 27, 2022 12:30pmTue, Dec 27, 2022 5:30pm

PLEASE NOTE: Tickets are available on a first-come, first-served basis, subject to availability, day-of-show only, starting 90 minutes before showtime. TeenTix 2-for-$10 companion tickets are not available for these performances. We hope to see you there!

An intertwined collaboration of classic styles and modern ideas drives compelling stories, as told by the dancers of the Los Angeles contemporary dance company, BODYTRAFFIC. The four-part program, presented at Edmonds Center for the Arts on October 26, uses aspects of mid-20th century music and dance to display BODYTRAFFIC’s style and technique while combining modern acting with inventive ideas. In this show of immensely imaginative pieces, the dancers use their bodies to tell emotional and innovative stories of human experiences. Although the impact of the storytelling fades as the final piece is performed, the company’s breath-taking technique is never absent.

Eight pairs of feet peek out from under the rising grand curtain, posed and placed evenly across the stage. Soon, the dancers turn into a gallery of silhouettes as the curtain disappears and the stage fills with light. The music of the famous 1940s jazz singer, Peggy Lee, opens the show’s first piece, A Million Voices. The dancers’ intricate and playful movements aptly convey the rhythmic quirkiness of jazz dance. Quick head turns, subtle heel raises and small articulations of their hands, paired with exaggerated facial expressions, give the piece a cheeky attitude. The upbeat music of Peggy Lee added excitement and peppiness to the dancers, with joyful sounds of a saxophone animating their high-energy motion. The dancers interact with each other in brief moments of tender romance with intimate lifts or quick swing duets. Comedic stories grasp my attention throughout, with water-filled wine glasses being dumped on the dancers by their fellow performers, avant-garde costumes inspired by ‘40s fashion, and theatrical expressions that create a lighthearted scene. The charming comedy soon shifts when the extravagantly dressed dancers clear the stage and one dancer remains. He repeats a locomotive action, moving his limbs in circles like wheels of a train but staying in one place onstage, as if he is stuck in the same movement. His repetitive actions soon turn harsh and rigid as he unexpectedly starts losing his balance and falling to the floor, the soulful lyrics of “The Freedom Train” by Peggy Lee amplifying throughout the theater. He personifies the train in the song, being held back by the obstacle of his own body. After the music ends, he continues this battle with himself in silence. Without the distraction of any music, the audience is pulled into his emotional battle, hearing every breath, fall, and footstep on the stage. It’s an almost uncomfortable experience—the audience has no choice but to endure his painful conflict with him. With the silence and the vulnerability of the solo dancer, I started questioning why the last ten minutes of cheeky jazz was paired with this distressing ending phase. The audience witnesses a moment of solitude where personal struggle and hardship is brought to the surface, directly after seeing a social scene where joy and love thrive. The piece captured how easily personal struggles can be hidden in the chaos of a community, compared to how someone can really struggle on their own. BODYTRAFFIC in A Million Voices choreographed by Matthew Neenan, performed at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in LA. Photo by Rob Latour

Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is most easily described as “beautifully uncomfortable,” though this barely brushes the surface of what the performance really is.

Radio III is a contemporary dance and music performance created by Elisa Harkins, Zoë Oluch, and Hanako Hoshimi-Caines. The piece explores themes of colonialism, and the cycle of life in the past, present, and future through an Indigenous lens. The dances and score portray an Indigenous reaction to the way colonialism affects the way we think about life, death, and the limits put on our perspective. The show’s venue, On the Boards, was an excellent fit for the nature of the performance; the stage is minimalistic in a way that directly complements the performance. Walking into the theater, an open-white space and a foggy haze in the air greets the audience, welcoming us into a dream-like state.