Goodbye, Lucien Postelwaite
Goodbye Lucien Postelwaite By Marcie Sillman Pacific Northwest Ballet, and Seattle dance fans, will say goodbye to one of the city’s finest dancers this summer. PNB Principal Dancer Lucien Postelwaite leaves the company in June, to join Les Ballets de Monte Carlo. Ironically, Lucien Postelwaite first knocked my socks off in a ballet that was...
New Works at Pacific Northwest Ballet
New Works/Pacific Northwest Ballet March 16-24, 2012 By Marcie Sillman The good news is, you can still get a ticket to Pacific Northwest Ballet’s latest program, New Works, at McCaw Hall. The bad news is, there are still tickets available for the show this coming weekend. That’s bad news, because this program is something dance...
Gauguin and Polynesia at Seattle Art Museum
Few artists present viewers with as many challenges as Paul Gauguin. A colorist of genius, a fearless, pusher of boundaries, and a pioneer apostle for the exotic, what we feel about his work is almost impossible to untangle from what we know about his life. Gauguin himself was more than aware of how his dramatic...
Chop Shop 2012
Chop Shop Contemporary Dance Festival celebrated its fifth anniversary at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center this month with a packed program of 12 short dances. The brainchild of Stone Dance Collective Artistic Director Eva Stone, Chop Shop is just what its name implies: a one-stop opportunity to expose yourself to small slices of contemporary dance by a...
Sean McElroy: “We Are Happy to Serve You”
You can never be sure what to expect from a show at Vignettes, the gallery run by Sierra Stinson out of her small studio apartment on Capitol Hill. Recently artist Victoria Howe completely covered the interior of a closet with white frosting and built nooks stuffed with little cakes (for visitors to eat if they...
Flush with Art: A Visit to Brightwater Treatment Facility
We live, we love, we excrete. The first two topics have been the theme of art through the ages; the last one, not so much. But times change; several millions of dollars of public art have just been unveiled as part of the new Brightwater sewage plant, an enormous state-of-the-art treatment facility serving the northern...
Whim W’him Cast the First Rock in 2012
Whim W’him Cast the First Rock in 2012 January 20-22, 2012 Seattle By Marcie Sillman In the three years since choreographer Olivier Wevers formed his company,Whim W’him, he’s taken on a parade of social issues in his dances: environmental degradation, homophobia, substance abuse. Now, in ThrOwn, one of three works premiered in Seattle January 20-22,...
Joey Veltkamp: The Rainbow Connection
Joey Veltkamp’s body of work has been steadily evolving since he bought his first paints twelve years ago. His practice has increasingly involved toying with the alchemical marriage of meaning and material, but one characteristic of his work has remained constant throughout: that through it he manifests a seductively personal yet nuanced symbolic language, one...
‘Playing Possum’: Walt Kelly at Fantagraphics Gallery
What outlet would Walt Kelly have found for his genius if there were no such thing as the comic strip? A star animator for Walt Disney whose work appeared in classics like Dumbo and Fantasia, a gifted nonsense poet in the spirit of Ogden Nash, a lyrical draughtsman with a flair for caricature, Kelly was...
A Crack in Everything
A Crack in Everything On The Boards December 1-4, 2011 by Marcie Sillman In the brief program notes that accompanied Zoe/Juniper’s new evening length work, “A Crack in Everything”, Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey write that they created this piece to examine the “liminal space between action-reaction, cause-effect and before-after.” In other words, to explore...
Heads Up: George Rodriguez at Foster White
George Rodriguez is brilliant at surfaces, and his portrait exhibition at Foster White Gallery uses elaborate decorative effects as a running commentary on the 10 cultural icons he portrays. The faces of the various characters in the show, all of whom share the name George (Washington, Bush, Curious, Burns, Saint, Jetson, etc.), are mostly treated...
Merce Cunningham Legacy Tour
Merce Cunningham Legacy Tour Seattle, WA October 27, 29 2011 By Marcie Sillman with Rosie Gaynor How do you say goodbye to one of the seminal artists of the last century? After legendary dancemaker Merce Cunningham died in July, 2009, the company he founded embarked on a final two-year world tour. The tour started in...
