Pandemic: Viral Videos
Tuesday, March 4, 8 PM, Northwest Film Forum
More info and tickets HERE.
Feeling lucky? Email promotions@thestranger.com with PANDEMIC in the subject line for a chance to win tickets to NWFF this year!
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
Pandemic: Viral Videos
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Dancing About Life
Dancing About Life
Cyrus Khambatta's Literal but Exacting Choreography
by Melody Datz
by Melody Datz
Two dancers in tight, blood-red minidresses face each other in the center of the stage, eyes locked, moving in small circles to the eerie sounds of plucked cello strings. At the center of the dancers' slow orbit is the central device of Vice and Virtue: a single apple held by dancer Ellen Cooper. Cooper alternately offers it to fellow dancer Meredith Sallee and yanks it out of reach, Sallee reaching and yearning, Cooper pulling back with rigid gestures, an almost evil look in her eyes. The wavelike rhythm of their back-and-forth is hypnotizing, and the snow streaking through the night sky outside Cyrus Khambatta's backyard dance studio heightens the feeling of being stuck in a fairy tale.
As a choreographer, Khambatta's work is very literal. Sometimes artists translate an aspect of the human experience into dance with corny and vapid results, but Khambatta's mature, intricate, and exacting choreography—combined with his eclectically trained dancers—prevent these pieces from falling into that trap. Jeremy Cline's capoeira background, for example, lends a time-stopping quality to the long, sweeping jumps that repeatedly take Vice and Virtue dancers from the floor to the air and back again.
The theme of the evening's second piece, Interview with the American Dream, is equally heavy. At the height of the American recession, Khambatta selected random numbers from a phone book and asked the first person to pick up the phone what he or she thought about the American dream. Responses ranged from "I think the American dream is having your cake and eating it too" to "I don't have time for this shit!" (Khambatta did not include that one in the piece.)
The dancing in Interviews, punctuated by recordings of those conversations, reinforces these sentiments with grim representations of struggle and frustration. In contrast to Vice and Virtue, the dancers are stony-faced and detached, dressed in gray and black and isolated from one another even as they dance together in diagonal lines across the stage. Movements are repeated in quick succession with dancers rolling across the floor, making generic hand gestures ("I see you," "call me," blowing kisses), lifting and dragging each other across the stage, and dancing in pairs in a sort of pissed-off tango. Interviews is driven more by the music and recorded quotes than by the choreography, which is not as captivating as Khambatta's work in Vice and Virtue, but is thought-provoking nonetheless. Kyle Williams's sharp partnering and firm, snappy head movements show off his Latin dance skills and add a crispness to the piece, while Alexandra Madera's tiny frame and dreamy gaze bring a hopeful innocence to an otherwise dark and stormy mood.
The third piece in the show, Love Story, was not included in the previews but will be accompanied by footage from interviews about love with various community members, including Donald Byrd of Spectrum Dance Theater and Tonya Lockyer of Velocity Dance Center. After its one-night premiere in Kirkland, Khambatta's company will take its apples and dreams on tour through the Pacific Northwest and India. 
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Hop Scotch
Hop Scotch
Friday, April 18 - Saturday, April 19, Fremont Studios
Go there! Drink there!
Buy tickets online and use promo code THESTRANGER to receive three extra tasting tokens. Buy tickets HERE.
Monday, February 10, 2014
How to Find the Best Grill Restaurant in Sand Point Seattle
If you need some good food coming from a great place, it
would be easy to pick out a grill restaurant where you can order almost
anything you like. There are a lot of restaurants of this kind, but how do you
know you are dining at the best place in town? Here are some really good tips
to finds the best grill restaurant sand
point Seattle has to offer.
Go to a place with the most irresistible menu. Find a
restaurant that serves the freshest dishes by using locally and organically grown
ingredients. This will not only ensure that you get a fresh order, but a recipe
with excellent quality in general. With food of this quality, you will surely
have a great dining experience. Look for a restaurant that can give you a
number of options for your meal. Also look for a place the serves food that the
kids will love.
Comfortable dining is also one thing that you should be
looking into. A great restaurant does not only give you good food, but also a
great ambiance as well. This will allow you to relax and have a good time while
devouring a sumptuous meal. Your dining experience would be all the more
incredible if the staff and crew are very accommodating. Customers really find
it off if a restaurant has very hostile servers or personnel.
Find a grill restaurant that opens at your most preferred
time, especially on hours where you are off from work and would want to eat a
handful of something that’s heavy to the stomach and healthy for the body at
the same time. It would be more convenient if you can reserve a table
for everybody. If you want to give somebody a surprise dinner out, it would be
best if you can reserve seats and a table, especially for that event.
The Grill
restaurant Sand Point Seattle has should
have affordable offers on the menu. A place can be considered a great spot to
dine in if they most specially give discounts. Most people would want to go
somewhere they can get a great deal. If they get really good food and pay for
them at a very reasonable rate, that would just be so perfect. Also,
restaurants that help charities are excellent places to patronize. Not only are
you going to enjoy your meal but you are also giving some people the chance to
feel better.
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
The Person You've Always Wanted to Be
The Person You've Always Wanted to Be
A Great Wilderness: Turmoil at an Ex-Gay Camp in Rural Idaho
by Brendan Kiley
by Brendan Kiley
A Great Wilderness, Samuel D. Hunter's bleak new play about a tiny "ex-gay" conversion therapy camp in rural Idaho, has given itself a tough job—to present the zealous Christians who run it as humane, sympathetic advocates for what is clearly an inhumane and unsympathetic cause. Hunter turns the old Christian bromide about homosexuality back on his audience, daring us to love the sinners (or at least some of them) but hate the sin.
He pulls this trick by disappearing the play's only gay kid at the beginning of act one. A new arrival named Daniel (Jack Taylor) goes for a walk and disappears, leaving the adults to wait, fret, reminisce, drink, and argue. With Daniel gone, their one-dimensional, do-gooder masks come off—and it becomes increasingly clear that their version of a supposedly happy, healthy, heterosexual adulthood is nothing to aspire to. With role models like that, any kid in his right mind would run for the hills.
The sweetest of the bunch is Walt (Michael Winters), a gentle older man who has devoted much of his life to counseling boys in the cabin where Wilderness is set. (The two-story set design by Scott Bradley beautifully evokes the doubleness and deceptions at the heart of the story. The first floor is a warm wood cabin with fading paint, a fireplace, and ancient appliances, but it twists upward into a dusty, abstract, and abandoned upstairs—A-frame meets Möbius strip.) Walt grew up gay and is intimately familiar with the suffering mainstream culture doles out to gay kids; he decided long ago that the problem wasn't the culture but the gayness.
"This is all about you," he tells Daniel in the first scene. "Getting you back to who you really are, the person you want to be." Of course, that's the narcissism of ex-gay therapy—you should want to be who we want you to be. When Daniel asks what happens if he doesn't want to be straight, Walt punts the question and suggests they eat their sandwiches.
Daniel was supposed to be Walt's last "boy" before turning the camp over to his bossy ex-wife, Abby (Christine Estabrook), and her husband, Tim (R. Hamilton Wright). But in the chaos following Daniel's disappearance, the adults—including Daniel's mother, an unhappy pastor's wife who shows up looking for her boy—painfully peel back the ways they've been deceiving themselves and each other.
Abby wants to close the camp and sell the property. Walt worries whether his years of Christian counseling did more harm than good, and whether he'd ever really "changed." Daniel's mother (played with an exhausted nihilism, like a character out of Edward Albee, by Mari Nelson) wonders whether her son wouldn't be better off dead in the woods than suffering a life sentence of gayness.
But for all its potential heat, Wilderness leaves a cold and distant impression. Some of that is in the slow pacing by director Braden Abraham, which often creaks but rarely crackles; some is in Hunter's characters, who don't all achieve the depth and resonance he seems to want them to have. The script's liveliest moments are in the few exchanges between Walt and Daniel—the old gay man and the young gay man, both sincere, awkward, and struggling—and in the mother's bilious barbs. In a 2010 interview about a different play, Hunter talked about his mission to write rural, conservative, multidimensional characters: "Especially during the Bush administration, there was this tendency to think that red states were red simply because they were full of idiots. But that's just not the case—it's much more complex than that." A Great Wilderness approaches that complexity but doesn't quite cross the threshold.
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