• "This Land Is Your Land"

We suggested it this week:

“This Land Is Your Land,” by Seattle choreographer Mark Haim, was a hit at the NW New Works Festival in 2010. The piece for 13 dancers had everything you’d want: bright colors, fashion-runway costumes, nudity, wry comedy, and country music. Its choreography was radically minimal: The dancers just walked, but Haim says more with walking than most choreographers can with a whole truckload of elaborate gestures. Tonight’s show, X2, will feature an extended version of “Land,” plus a new collaboration with design team Lilienthal|Zamora. (On the Boards, 100 W Roy St, www.ontheboards.org, 8 pm, $20.)

The photo above is from act two, "This Land Is Your Land." I regret to say that it has less punch than the original, distilled version seen at NWNW in 2010. It's more elaborated, and there are still sharp, bright moments, but it feels a little looser and more sprawling than the original. Still, it's worth seeing.

The photo below is a sketch of the set design for the first piece, which is much moodier and has some stunning light and set design by Lilienthal|Zamora (I'd link to their actual site, but it seems to be down at the moment):

I don't want to spoil any surprises, but the way L|Z realized the sketch above is a marvel—and required trucking in some very large set pieces from Whidbey Island. Their use of tight, carefully controlled lighting changes to make the set itself feel kinetic is kick-ass. They tame light and bend it to their will like a contortionist tames the body.

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Tonight, at 8 pm at Annex Theater, a kick-ass piece of hiphop/modern dance* by kick-ass dancer and choreographer Markeith Wiley.

Using suit jackets, tables and chairs, and some text taken from Seattle city council meetings, the eight dancers of The Council play out power dynamics and internecine struggle. Wiley grew up street-dancing in Southern California (Long Beach, Inglewood, Inland Empire) before moving to Seattle to train at Cornish and dance in pieces by Ellie Sandstrom, Cruz Control, Saint Genet, KT Niehoff, and gender-queer burlesque artists. Wiley's aesthetic bandwidth is impressively broad, and it shows in his rich dance vocabulary.

Because I don't have a photo for The Council, here's a photo of Markeith:

• The Stranger

Check it out.

*Someone was flipping me some mild shit for using the term "modern dance" earlier this week, saying that the concept of "modern" dance began to be questioned by Merce Cunningham in 1952 and blah blah fucking blah. She seemed to favor the term "contemporary dance." But what am I supposed to say in this context? That The Council is "hiphop/contemporary dance"? Then what's the difference between hiphop and contemporary? Contemporary, by definition, is anything that didn't happen yesterday. The "modern dance"/"contemporary dance" schism is a foolish, academic matter of semantics. And if you stopped someone on the sidewalk in any big city and showed them a video of a Balanchine piece and a video of a Crystal Pite piece, and asked them what they were, what would they say? "Ballet" and "modern." So fuck it—I'm calling everything from Martha Graham to William Forsythe and Christian Rizzo (and probably beyond) "modern dance." At least until a better term comes along that doesn't look ridiculous next to the word "hiphop."

This weekend, the Portland dance company tEEth is at On the Boards. In the past, tEEth has used lavish design (one set looked like plaster walls that had been crumpled, soaked in ink, and molded into shapes by a giant; in another piece, a woman danced on a small wooden platform while a man hacked it to pieces with an ax) but they wrote over email this week that their more recent pieces are "more stripped-down than previous works and more focused on pure movement and sound."

Here's a trailer for the previous piece, Home Made (some mild nudity, if that's a problem for your coworkers):

And here's a harsher, rawer trailer for their new piece, Make/Believe:

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• Salt Horse

It can be irritating when artists sell tickets to their own rehearsal/generating processes. But 1) with over 20 musicians and dancers using Washington Hall as a playground, the 12-hour marathon could produce some worthwhile spectacle, and 2) Salt Horse is a pleasantly baffling dance company with a weird, weird imagination. Their Man on the Beach was like stepping through the looking glass, with a whistling teakettle, an enormous sandpiper with human legs, a writhing creature made of black plastic tubing, and a person getting severely beaten by birds with aluminum baseball bats.

Their Titan Arum pushed even further, into an invented mythology with a disturbing queen, lots of fabric, music by Stuart Demptster, and a tiger.

Their pieces are baffling, in part, because they feel so complete and impenetrable in their strangeness. Each one is like an oddly shaped, ornately decorated box that you can admire from the outside and only wonder what it was built to contain. For Salt Horse fans, tonight's 12-hour play—which you can drop in and out of—will be an unusual opportunity to lift the lid and take a peek.

Performers include Corrie Befort, Beth Graczyk, Mark Haim, Angelina Baldoz, Stuart Dempster, Cherdonna (of Cherdonna and Lou), and a bunch of others. Details here.

The Russian-American Foundation in New York City would like me to tell you that children who aspire to plie at the Bolshoi Ballet Academy should get their skinny little selves over to Bellevue this Sunday for open auditions:

WHEN: SUNDAY, January 15, 2012

TIME: 4:00 PM – 5:30 PM 9-14 (age group)

5:45 PM – 7:15 PM 15 years and older (age group)

WHERE: PACIFIC NORTHWEST BALLET - 13440 Northeast 16th Street, Bellevue, WA, 98005

How do you say "get it, gurl!" in Russian? (Skip to minute 4:00.)

Seattle hasn't seen much of its choreographer Zoe Scofield and her design partner Juniper Shuey lately—during the past few years, they've spent much of their time doing residencies (McDowell Colony and others), performing in prestigious out-of-town festivals (Jacob's Pillow, TBA in Portland), and winning awards from the crowned heads of Europe (including the Princess Grace Award).

Tonight, the zoe | juniper company comes home to On the Boards to present the magnum opus they've been working on for years: A Crack in Everything, which studies The Oresteia (the old Greek story of multi-generational murder within one family) and what it says about cause and effect, violence and revenge.

Seattle has been waiting to see this piece for years.

Though Intiman's corpse has shown small stirrings of reanimation—they hired a young consulting artistic director and are thinking about what, if anything is next—they've surrendered their popular annual show, Black Nativity. Last year, Intiman and STG co-produced the holiday hay-maker based on Langston Hughes's Christmas poem at the Moore Theatre. This year, STG has announced they'll be producing it on their own.

In other news, Benjamin Millepied is retiring from the New York City Ballet to focus on his choreography (which Seattle has seen at PNB). He's 34 years old and probably most famous for his choreography work for the film Black Swan.