WINTER/SPRING 2022
ON THE BOARDS
DEAR ART LOVER, It has been a while since we’ve sent a brochure your way—and it is because we are now, finally, supremely confident about kicking the doors open wide and inviting you in to experience live art with us. It’s going to be weird. It might take a while for us to get used to each other again. But it will be worth it, we promise. This January through May mini-series of performances reflects on our shared challenges over the past few seasons, and celebrates our ability to be together again. Celebrate with us! Subscribe! Attend! Gather! We can’t wait to experience art with you once again. See you in the lobby, Betsey Brock Executive Director We’re happy to welcome back the public to our theater spaces. In an effort to keep our community safe and in compliance with Washington State’s vaccine mandate, all visitors must show proof of a COVID-19 vaccination to join us here at On the Boards.
ON THE BOARDS TEAM BOARD John Hoedemaker, President Jasmine Jamillah Mahmoud, Vice President Tom Israel, Treasurer Zack Hutson, Secretary Davora Lindner, Past President Aseem Agarwala, Jeanie Chunn, Jeffrey Fracé, Corey Gutch, Tina LaPadula, Mireya Lewin, Lance Neely, David Taft, Emily Tanner-McLean, Kate Murphy, Mary Ann Peters, Spafford Robbins, Jennifer Hintz Roberts, Jimmy Rogers, Robert Stumberger, Heather Wilde, Bill Way, Tyler Engle, Tom Israel, John Robinson, and Norie Sato OFF THE BOARDS ADVISORY BOARD Carol Bobo, Dorit Ely, Jerry Fulks, William Gleason, Karen Guzak, David Holt, Lorna Jordan, Mark Kantor, John Kucher, Marge Levy, Robert McGinley, Gene McMahon, H. Stewart Parker, Dave Roberts, Carlo Scanduzzi, George Suyama, Virginia Wyman STAFF Betsey Brock, Executive Director Rachel Cook, Artistic Director Nabilah Ahmed, Associate Producer Richard Bresnahan III, Technical Director Kyle Brisby, Operations Manager Stefanie Fatooh, Patron Relations Specialist Ari Kaufman, Associate Technical Director Annie Liu, Associate Producer Berette S Macaulay, Curatorial Fellow Pamala Mijatov, Director of Community Engagement Yashar Shayan, Director of Digital Strategy & Innovation Charles Smith, Administrator
The following organizations support art and artists at On the Boards with valuable relief funding that allows us to continue to serve our mission over the past year.
COVER IMAGE: DANA MICHEL: CUTL A SS SPRING (PHOTO BY JOCELYN MICHEL)
On the Boards continues to demonstrate its artistic vision for the future of its building as a flexible hub for contemporary performance that blurs genres, creates intimacy between audiences, and fosters connection within the creative community. This winter and spring series of performances contains an intimate collection of three linked experiences. The Palindrome Loop brings together interconnected performances by dance artists Faye Driscoll, Dana Michel, and experimental sound artist Pamela Z in a white-cube gallery setting in the Merrill Theater, between January and May 2022. In The Palindrome Loop each of the three featured artists takes the stage to perform alone using their own body, sound production, and mundane objects, such as a lemon, ice, ropes, and articles of clothing. There are layers of loops across each of the works in the project, including pulleys or ropes hung above and around the audience in Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space (January 20–23); vocal sounds are live-sampled, repeated, and layered in Pamela Z’s Other Rooms (May 5–7); and physical acts of circling the audience in Dana Michel’s CUTLASS SPRING (May 19–21). The Palindrome Loop is an invitation to experience works that, taken together over the course of five months, embody the cycle of life. Visit ontheboards.org to read more about this compelling exhibition-within-the-series, the artists, and their practices, and what loops them, and us together. Rachel Cook Artistic Director
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THE PALINDROME LOOP January–May 2022
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PHOTO BY MARIA BARANOVA
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Faye Driscoll: Thank You For Coming: SPACE Jan 20–23 Thursday, January 20, 8pm Friday, January 21, 8pm Saturday, January 22, 8pm Sunday, January 23, 5pm January 20: Artist conversation following the performance
Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Space is the final performance in her celebrated Thank You For Coming series—which includes Attendance and Play. Driscoll considers theater one of the last secular social spaces, where the vulnerability and complexity of human interconnection is made palpable. Space unfolds within an intimate installation, wired for sound and upheld by pulleys, ropes, and the weight of others, where Driscoll appears alone with the audience. Through an alchemy of body, object, voice, and live sound, she builds a moving requiem for the human body and conjures a world that is, like ourselves, alive and forever changeable. The trilogy summons the unnamed forces that surge between the artist and the viewer in order to create a communal realm where our experiences are heightened and questioned. View Faye Driscoll’s Thank You For Coming: Attendance on OntheBoards.tv. Faye Driscoll is a Bessie Award–winning performance maker and “a postmillennial postmodern wild woman” (Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice). Thank You For Coming is the umbrella title for a series of works that Driscoll began creating in 2012. Her work has been presented nationally at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Art Center, the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, MCA/Chicago, and BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music, and internationally at La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, and the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens.
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PHOTO BY THOMA S STEENL AND
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Pamela Z: Other Rooms May 5–7 Thursday, May 5, 8pm Friday, May 6, 8pm Saturday, May 6, 8pm May 6: Artist conversation following the performance
Pamela Z’s performance evenings combine live electronic processing, sampled sound, and rear-projected video to create a spectacular multi-medium event. An early innovator of live digital looping techniques, Pamela Z processes her voice in real time to create dense, complex sonic layers. She uses MAX MSP and Isadora software on a MacBook Pro along with custom MIDI controllers that allow her to manipulate sound and image with physical gestures. Her live works combine experimental extended vocal techniques, operatic bel canto, found objects, text, and sampled concrète sounds. This is Pamela Z’s first performance at On the Boards. Pamela Z is a composer, performer, and media artist whose performances range in scale from small concerts in galleries to large-scale multi-media works in theaters and concert halls. She also has a growing body of installation works using multi-channel sound and video. Pamela Z has toured extensively throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan and has been presented by The Kitchen, NYC; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF; REDCAT, LA; and MCA Chicago, the Whitney Museum, the Diözesanmuseum, Cologne; and the Krannert Museum, IL.
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PHOTO BY JO C ELY N MIC HEL
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Dana Michel: CUTLASS SPRING
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May 19–22 Thursday, May 19, 8pm Friday, May 20, 8pm Saturday, May 21, 8pm Sunday, May 22, 5pm May 20: Artist conversation following the performance
Canadian artist Dana Michel last appeared at On the Boards in 2016 with Yellow Towel. This breakthrough performance referenced how, as a child, she draped a yellow towel on her head to emulate the blond girls at school. Rich Smith from The Stranger wrote about Yellow Towel, “Michel’s movement reflects the intensity of this psychological struggle—everything she does is strained and erratic-seeming, her limbs look like they’re being electrified at different times.” On the Boards will present her newest work, CUTLASS SPRING. « when you’ve spent a lifetime holding back in one area, surely it’s holding other areas back. time to unravel the knot that i didn’t completely realize existed (yes i did). why i can’t touch people when i? why i get confused when there’s more? why i freeze now ? what are the consequences of all the holding? what other casualties have there been? » — Dana Michel Dana Michel is a live artist. Her works interact with the expanded fields of improvisation, choreography, sculpture, comedy, hip-hop, cinematography, techno, poetry, psychology, dub and social commentary to create a centrifuge of experience. In 2014, she was awarded the newly created ImPulsTanz Award (Vienna) in recognition for outstanding artistic accomplishments, and was highlighted among notable female choreographers of the year by the New York Times. In 2017, Michel was awarded the Silver Lion for Innovation in Dance at the Venice Biennale. In 2018, she became the first ever dance artist in residence at the National Arts Centre, Canada. In 2019, she was awarded the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art (Kuopio, Finland). Based in Montreal, Michel is an artist supported by Parbleux.
IN THE PAL
600 HIGHWAYMEN: A THOUSAND WAYS (Part Three): An Assembly
PHOTO BY MARIA BARANOVA
March 3–6 & March 10–12
Obie Award-winning 600 HIGHWAYMEN present A THOUSAND WAYS: An Assembly, a timely and intimate return to togetherness.
March 3–6 & 10–12 Multiple performance times each day; check ontheboards.org for complete schedule.
A Thousand Ways: An Assembly is the final experience of award-winning 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s triptych of encounters between strangers. Each installment of the series, which has been experienced by On the Boards, plumbs the essence of performance, bringing people together in the creation of a moving live experience. The work explores the line between strangeness and kinship, distance and proximity, and how the most intimate assembly can become profoundly radical.
A Thousand Ways (Part Three): An Assembly brings together an audience of twelve strangers to construct a unique and intimate theatrical event. Using a stack of instructive notecards and a few simple props, this small group of people collectively recount a timeless story of perseverance—of audacity in the face of uncertainty. This elucidating experience invites participants to consider each other—individually and collectively—and the significance of their coming together after so much time apart. This is an invitation. Will you attend? 600 HIGHWAYMEN (Abigail Browde & Michael Silverstone) make live art that, through a variety of radical approaches, illuminates the inherent poignancy of people coming together. In addition to On The Boards, their work has been seen at Centre Pompidou (Paris), The Public Theater (NYC), La Jolla Playhouse (La Jolla), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), Dublin Theatre Festival (Dublin), Onassis Cultural Centre (Greece), Bristol Old Vic (UK), Salzburg Festival (Salzburg), and Theaterspektakel (Switzerland). They are currently Associate Artists of IN SITU, the European platform for artistic creation in public space.
March 24–27
Created by Timothy White Eagle and The Violet Triangle
PHOTOS BY STE VEN MILLER
ON THE BOARDS COMMISSION
Timothy White Eagle: The Indigo Room
“Beautifully Meditative” — Michael Dale, Broadway World
Thursday, March 24, 7 pm Friday, March 25, 7 pm Saturday, March 26, 7 pm Sunday, March 27, 4 pm Creators: Timothy White Eagle, Paul Budraitis, HATLO, and John Kendall Wilson Sound artists: Crystal Cortez and Lori Goldston Development funding by: Western Artist Alliance/Advancing Indigenous Performance and 4Culture Project Grant
The Indigo Room is an immersive, part-improvisational, part-ritualistic new performance and installation work by the well-known Seattle-based Indigenous artist Timothy White Eagle and his team of collaborators, Paul Budraitis, HATLO, John Kendall Wilson, Crystal Cortez, and Lori Goldston. Audiences will experience a live work that explores the sacred elements of life, death, and grief on a journey to mysterious depths. This new performance and installation work are by nature process-based, iterative, and generative. TWE and his collaborators use their COVID-era research as a series of development experiments both online and live to adapt The Indigo Room to each specific time and place it is performed. On the Boards’ building will be filled with carnivalesque reliquaries staged throughout the space each combining storytelling and universal mythology into fantastic sculptural elements. White Eagle is a mixed-race, undocumented, urbanized Indigenous American artist and storyteller who was raised by adoptive white parents in working class Montesano, Washington. His art practice rises from a decades-long exploration of traditional ritual and embodiment practice. He crafts experiences and objects designed to heal both creator and audience. He was the recipient of the WAA/AIP Launch Pad award in 2019 as well as a Seattle City Artist award in 2020. Timothy toured as an artistic director and performer with MacArthur Genius, Taylor Mac on his Pulitzer Prize finalist “A 24-Decade History of Popular Music”.
Feb 10
Kyle Abraham / A.I.M: An Untitled Love
PHOTOS BY CARRIE SCHNEIDER
Presented in partnership with Seattle Theatre Group at the Moore Theatre
Tickets are only included with full series subscriptions, single tickets must be purchased through Seattle Theatre Group.
Kyle Abraham is one of the most sought-after choreographers and dancers of our time. The bold creator has choreographed for New York City Ballet, NYCB dancer Wendy Whalen, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and more. Abraham’s newest evening-length work, An Untitled Love features a soundtrack from R&B legend D’Angelo. This creative exaltation is a thumping mixtape celebrating culture, family, and community. Recalling his own “love that never waned” for D’Angelo’s catalogue and the R&B/ soul genre, Abraham pays tribute to unity and love in all its facets. The mission of A.I.M by Kyle Abraham is to create a body of dance-based work that is galvanized by Black culture and history. The work, informed by and made in conjunction with artists across a range of disciplines, entwines a sensual and provocative vocabulary with a strong emphasis on music, text, video, and visual art. While grounded in choreographer Kyle Abraham’s artistic vision, A.I.M draws inspiration from a multitude of sources and movement styles.
SUBSCRIBERS SAVE and members save on subscriptions HOORAY—On the Boards subscriptions are BACK and are still the very best way to share a wide range of On the Boards experiences! Because we’re still in a global pandemic, and we want to accommodate for social distancing, only 200 subscriptions are available. When they’re gone— that’s it! Subscribers will have the best choice of showtimes for limitedcapacity performances, and they get first crack at OtB’s seats for Kyle Abraham/A.I.M’s An Untitled Love at the Moore Theater.
Subscriptions
Membership
Subscribe and get priority before single tickets go on sale by December 15 for the best choice in times for 600 Highwaymen and seating for Kyle Abraham/A.I.M.
On the Boards’ membership fuels our mission to invest in artists and connect them to forward-thinking and diverse audiences. The annual support of each member allows OtB to continue its work engaging with some of the most compelling artists and ideas and social issues of today. Since its launch in Fall 2020, membership has changed, and now is a wholly philanthropic program.
Complete Series: $160.00 ——OtB Member Price! (10% off): $144.00 ——OtB Members Price: Artist/Student/ Educator (25% off): $120.00 Pick Three Shows*: $75.00 ——OtB Member Price! (10% off): $67.50 ——OtB Members Price: Artist/Student/ Educator (25% off): $56.25
Questions about your existing OtB membership, or the one you’re hoping to purchase? Contact boxoffice@ontheboards.org, we’re excited to help you out.
*Pick Three subscriptions do not include tickets to Kyle Abraham AIM | An Untitled Love at the Moore Theatre
Unlike last year, no tickets or subscriptions are included with membership — but membership has great benefits! To secure a seat at Seattle’s home for contemporary performance, SUBSCRIBE!
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INDIVIDUAL $60
*Partners and Leadership Members who make a 3-Year Club Committment get a personalized cocktail glass behind the FuBar!
Tax Deductibility (Your gift, less benefits with goods and services)
Roller skating party in the Merrill Theater
Art Champ appreciation dinner and other special events
Complimentary FUBAR beverages
Discounted performances at partner organizations
All-access OntheBoards.tv pass
Early access to Studio Suppers and other special events
10% discount on all FUBAR / OtB swag purchases
Early access to subscriptions and tickets for performances and programs
10% off subscriptions & single tickets
25% off subscriptions & single tickets
ARTIST/STUDENT/ EDUCATOR $35
$75
NEW WAVE (Under-35’s) $150 Or $15 monthly
$400
ENTHUSIAST $500 Or $45 monthly
$850
PERFORMERS CIRCLE $1,000 Or $85 monthly
$2250
ART CHAMPION $2,500 Or $210 monthly
$4750
ART SUPERNOVA $5,000 Or $420 monthly
LEADERSHIP CIRCLE*
ontheboards.org/membership
$650
ADVOCATE $750 Or $65 monthly
PARTNERS*
Membership at On the Boards
Winter/Spring 2022 at On the Boards
Presented in partnership with Seattle Theatre Group at the Moore Theatre
The Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance 100 West Roy Street Seattle, WA 98119 ontheboards.org
@ontheboards
CUT ‘N SAVE!
Jan 20–23 Faye Driscoll Feb 10 Kyle Abraham / A.I.M Mar 3–12 600 HIGHWAYMEN Mar 24–27 Timothy White Eagle May 5–7 Pamela Z May 19–22 Dana Michel