S.E. Barcus

Review of On the Boards’ Northwest New Works

June 4-6, 2026

By S.E. Barcus

Anyone go to On the Boards’ Northwest New Works this past weekend?  Their final program for their 2025-26 season, it was eclectic, experimental, and high-quality — all in typical OtB fashion.  Six great works were presented – although it should have been a lucky seven.  When Executive and Artistic Director, Megan Kiskaddon, announced that, sadly, one group of Canadian friends from north of the border (Joanne Park and Colby McLean), couldn’t make it due to “Visa conflicts,” it was met, understandably, with healthy booing from the audience, given the state of things in our country today.  But guess what — the six 20-minute pieces we did get?  Most-if-not-all of the awesome groups performing – including performance artists, dancers, musicians, actors, DJ’s, choreographers, videographers, sound and lighting designers, movement artists, composers, and costume and fabricating artists — for this weekend, hailed from Seattle, directly.  Talk about supporting local artists!

Starting us off was a “game-design-theater-group” (?!), Swim Pony, with its Artistic Director, Adrienne Mackey, here serving as writer/performer for her, Elegy for a Former Best Friend.  This piece made us a part of the story, about the loss of a close friend, with our lines up on the screen. Yes. “Our” lines. “The audience” and random, brave members of it, were a part of the very projected script.  Which proved a clever, and successful (were their plants?), way to engage an audience, and achieve ye ol’ goldmine of “audience participation” — but in the “controlled manner” of a script (as the writer explains, was the whole reason she loved theater in the first place…!).   I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone set up a process/game within just a few minutes that could run so smoothly that it allowed for the performer, HERSELF, near the end, to literally leave the stage – (and thus her own performance!).  She left us there all alone to finish the work.  Left the performance to a volunteer and us, the audience, for the conclusion!  She just … left us! (Ahhhh! “We lost our best friend!”)   This was all sweetly and expertly set up for a positive and safe ending, that assured bravery from our volunteer and compassionate, fun support from the audience.  (Oh — and the fact that this Millennial volunteer had absolutely no clue how to use the old cassette tape recorder – or what it was? — was pretty hilarious.)  I don’t think Augusto Boal nor Viola Spolin ever did this, so … big thumbs up! Other artists involved included Dramaturg and Videographer Nick O’Leary (with funny bleeps on video in the beginning, keeping us guessing about context), and Sound Designer M.L. Dogg.

Two trans artists, Meysha Harville and Mare Hirsch, then came out singing and rapping beautifully to a groovy freaky light installation in the second work, gig // assembly, exploring trans visibility, that was confused and conflicting in bodily movements at times, but loving and confident in others, with nice bits of humor to bookend the middle section of singing and miming/dancing a metaphorical conflict within the illuminated, colorful tubes in the middle.  (The audience was perhaps too enthused by the “participatory aspect” of the opening work. When Harville asked a scripted, rhetorical question, he got an immediate, loud, and confident response from an audience member. He had justa moment of pause and surprise, then continued on with the work, which put us back into a vicarious, fourth-wall culture, again…! Lol.)  Jess Smith was another collaborator for this work.

Closing the “first act,” was dance organization, Undercurrent, performing their piece, Surface Tension, Co-Directed by Hilary Grumann and Alethea Alexander.  It started like old-school Seattle dance, all butoh-like and almost painfully slow, with the seven dancers in front of one of two spotlights that were both pointed downwards, hanging about four feet off the floor, dangling on long wires that went straight up to the rafters — the only lighting for the piece.   Because the light was concealed behind them, they huddled together as if neanderthals by a fire or something, eerily moving in the (mostly-)darkness, gradually falling down with their collective bodies to the right, then the left.  After a while, this evolves into more normally-paced movements, eventually incorporating the second dangling light, all gradually building in momentum, until by the end, their movements become frenetic and erratically random, all to Composer/DJ Marco Gill’s at times menacing synth-heavy music. 

After a bit, they danced not only with themselves but also the two lights, held strongly enough to be used almost as rope-swings.  Undercurrent likes to explore “floorwork technique,” moving and rolling low on the floor, in that crawlspace region of dance, (ah! — or in that undercurrent region of the ocean), which helped them for this section of the piece, since these heavy spotlights — now dangerously swinging like pendulums with large amplitudes — had low points / equilibrium positions that would crush someone’s chest or neck if they weren’t careful.   This fact was expertly utilized to heighten tension — and attention — akin to contemporary circus, showing off their disciplined floor work skills, “ducking” the lights. It also aesthetically highlighted the shadows and close-ups, the play of bodily movements with the light movements, and the black-and-white contrasts, like the stage was some swirling Mapplethorpe photo. Eventually they moved all in sync with each other, finishing it off with a suddenly still spot held on a suddenly still artist — and a blackout.  Nice.  Other Movement Artists involved included:  Danielbi Perdomo, maia melene d’urfé, Leah James Russell, Nicole Flores, and Emma Sumanaweera.  Very cool dance, y’all!

Choreographer Tariq Mitri’s, whole, got likewise freaky, to open “Act 2,” with four dancers at times dancing as a group, at other times as soloists, around a set that was strewn with clothes on the floor and on clotheslines and on dilapidated chairs and tables. If one read that Mitri is Palestinian beforehand, and that the work is about the tension of heritage and upbringing and inherited grief, this set was a bit harrowing given the ramshackle nature of it, and the absolute evil brought upon the people of Gaza and the West Bank these past years.   But if one came in just for the dance, with no context beforehand (like I initially did), other interpretations are also possible.  The highlight of the dance was when two of the dancers spun around with a crazy intensity that felt like tarantellas – one of them combining that energy with Thom-Yorkish freaky arrhythmic contortions.  The insanely fast and out of control spinning must have had expert spotting, as they did not seem to get dizzy and off-balance afterwards.   So, all of this could be seen as a feminist-Doll’s House-like commentary, then, with four female dancers, doing tarantellas, around all that friggin laundry?  There’s also some bittersweet humor at times, as well.  At one point, a dancer wraps a random line of clothes around herself, humorously enjoying them as much as someone with an expensive coat or something.  Our Dance Artist Collaborators, who helped develop this work through improvisation, included Carlin Kramer, Una Ludviksen, Maya Tacon, and Tshedzom Tingkhye. 

Naomi Deckard’s Identity Ballgown was up next, and it was quirky fun.  In the titular, neato, sci-fi-freaky ballgown, that glowed all spooky in sections, at various times to various rhythms, Deckard waxed poetic over humanity’s current travails with a wonderfully dry, near robotic, delivery, and a humor that melded into serious contemplation, at times.   It was all kinda Laurie Andersonesque.  Erica Corwin gets credit for the cool gown’s fabrication.

For our concluding work, Los Angeles transplant, Nia-Amina Minor, dances and beautifully sings, adorned in her freaky phone-cord-internet-wires hula skirt.  She is accompanied by Black Ends, an electric bass (Ben Swanson) / electric guitar (Nicolle Swims) duo — also adorned in the ripped apart wires and boxes of tech, via Costume Designer Janelle Abbott.  They played some crazy dissonant feedback noise-art initially, that evolved into nice tonal-but-still heavy electric music later on (now we saw why OtB gave us the ear plugs! Ouch!), with all three performers together walking in unison, then ending with Minor singing Sun-Ra/June Tyson’s “Somebody else’s world.”  And then, the whole night ended as it began, as she conjured-up audience participation.   We sang, as directed, call-and-response style, such that by the time the hypnotizing refrain came for the last time — with a subtle decrescendo, along with subtly diminishing light, by Designer Amiya Brown — that last lyric, “Somebody else’s idea of things to come.  …  Need not be the only way….”  hit us with a nice, quiet, comforting reminder that for everything going wrong in this shitty world right now, it doesn’t have to be this way.  The seeming barreling future of dystopian A.I. and oligarchy and eco-disaster … “need not be the only way.” 

Where would Seattle be without On the Boards supporting local and regional talent like this, nurturing experimental, freaky new work with their wonderful, open space in Queen Anne?!  Always go to this program, if you want to support our own up-and-coming artists! That is, if you want an alternative to the “artificial,” or the place-less anonymity of social media, or mediated culture that is produced by outside corporations. Support this, if you want a thriving, homegrown CULTURE, that is of the Pacific Northwest, by the Pacific Northwest, and for the Pacific Northwest. (Sorry — I’m gettin’ 250-fever…).

If you didn’t go to NW New Works this year, kick yourself – and then put it on the calendar RIGHT NOW, for next year. … You big dummy….

Copyright 6-6-2026.

Featured image: Undercurrent dancers photographed by Stefano Altamura, from Dance Undercurrent’s website.

S.E. Barcus is also on Facebook.