Section

Vol. 15, No. 22 Friday, May 27, 1988

2

Seattle Seattle Women in R&B.

CLUB SODA:

GAY

Talking about On The Brink: An AIDS Chronicle.

DIRECTOR GREGORY COLBERT:

p. 18

p. 20

p. 24

-photos.

p. 27

DAVID WATTS:

"Memorials," art, collages, and AIDS.

NEWS CASCADE CUP SOFTBALL:

Womens' Division taking the lead-

Keeping home fires burning: the Northwest New Works Festival

Diane Schenker and Thomasa Eckert.

by John Yohalem

Northwest New Works Festival at On The Boards through June 15

Performance has been the hot thing for about a decade now not so coincidentally, the decade of On The Boards' existence. No one knows precisely when dance began to mean dance/theater as well, when the merger began to acquire its own position and its own following. Neither can we pinpoint with precision when performance art became a distinct heading, when this amorphous thing began to include the work of all the dancers, actors, singers, composers, jugglers, visual artists, and video artists who circulate today under the general marquee of performance.

You may seek it out in quite a range of places. In LA you used to catch it between punk bands at short-lived clubs in the wee hours. In New York you may find it at the Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn, where you'll need a new wardrobe of fashionably outsize cut. In Europe experimental performance will crop up amidst the corps de ballet of some elfin, out of the way opera house or other.

In Seattle the point of collaboration and dissemination tends to be the several series On The Boards puts together at the Washington Hall Performance Gallery, from the internationally famed theater project to the 12-minute appearance of an ambitious local debutant.

The Northwest New Works Festival, which will present six new works in four events at the Washington Hall Performance Gallery between May 19 and

Photo by Joan Barker

June 25, is On The Boards' backward view to its roots as a showcase for local performers.

You wouldn't think an arts organization barely ten years old would have roots so distant they required harking back to. But performance art happened to explode during this same decade. On The Boards, which was founded to present local dancers, soon included visitors from all over, invited to crossfertilize with Northwest talent. They became the Performance Series, the showiest of the company's several offerings and the one that gets the most attention.

The first Northwest New Works Festival, five years ago, presented three choreographers on a single weekend. "The objective was to fill a hole in our programming," recalls artistic director Robert McGinley. "We had a showcase, Choreography, Etc., and we had a Performance Series, but we needed an intermediary step. There was a lot more work that could happen if there was a forum for it.

"The following year we called it a series. We struggled a bit at first to get an audience, but both audience awareness and the quality of work has grown each year. A lot of the performances that premiered on New Works have ended up on our Performance Series or the works themselves have gone on to other cities."

Whole new genres of performance art may arise at the New Works Festival. Robert Davidson created Airborne: Meister Eckhart for New Works two years ago, brought it to the Performance

See NEW WORKS on page 31.

Nickolas Grace and Douglas Hodge.

Losing my head:

Disco Sal in Ken Russell-land

by Ivan Out-Herod Martinson

Salome's Last Dance a film by Ken Russell (at the Metro)

There's not the slightest doubt in my mind that Salome's Last Dance is doomed to failure at the box office the audience for unmitigated camp is just not that large. On the other hand, and it may even have been Ken Russell's intention, this flick is sure-fire fag party material. It may even replace The Women and Centurians of Rome.

Ken Russell is like the party guest who draws you out of yourself by juggling all eight of your heirloom Venetian goblets while feigning Bacchic frenzy. Seizing upon some musical or literary icon, blithely ignoring whatever artistic process actually made the person iconic and, indeed, any and all facts of the case, he wreaks havoc in your head, warping artistic associations with things that have nothing to do with the artist in question, purely to provide cheap, sensational thrills.

And yet I had a good time at Salome's Last Dance. If I was not impressed here by the cinematic intelligence Russell permitted himself to demonstrate in The Devils and in much of The Music Lovers and Women in Love, I did not leave in a cold rage at the waste of talent, money, and ideas so evident in Gothic and Lisztomania. Salome seldom takes itself seriously enough to require that. And most of the film is a simple, silly staging, in cockney accents, of Oscar Wilde's phantasmagoria, Salome best known nowadays as the libretto of Richard Strauss's third opera. I have always enjoyed the unabashed camp of both play

Photo by Vestron

and opera but moviegoers and RusI sell fans who are unfamiliar with the play may be in for an endurance test.

The movie's plot, such as it is, concerns a visit by Wilde (Nickolas Grace) and Lord Alfred Douglas (Douglas Hodge) to a fat procurer, Alfred Taylor (Stratford Johns), who surprises Wilde on his birthday with an impromptu performance of his banned masterpiece the cast chosen from the denizens of Taylor's louche establishment, with Douglas as John the Baptist, Taylor as Herod, three midget Hasidim as the quarreling Jews, several gilded queens playing bitchy Christian disciples, Ken Russell himself as Herod's court photographer, and Glenda Jackson as a supposed cousin of Queen Victoria impersonating the lustful Herodias for good buddy Oscar.

But plot is only an excuse for Russell as for many a better filmmaker. Hitchcock, for instance, used plot as an opportunity to set up stunts and tease his audience, and that is, essentially, Russell's method as well, but he isn't out to thrill, much less tell a story or illuminate character he just wants to titillate us, to play the bad boy. The blonde whores who hump the Hasidic midgets, the muscleman lured into the wings by Glenda/Herodias, the darling little penis that somehow turns up between the princess's legs at the conclusion of the Dance of the Seven Veils, John the Baptist's spit on Salome's face (she licks it off ecstatically) all of this is homage to somebody or something, and it's not to poor Oscar or the creative process.

Imogene Millais-Scott plays the cockney Salome. She's okay, but my money is still on Ljuba Welitsch.