For 36 years, the Northwest New Works festival could be counted on to showcase dance, theater and musical performances ranging from strange to funny to sublime. With 2020 and all its accompanying woes, the showcase ended. But after a five-year hiatus, it’s back.
Curated by Seattle theater On the Boards, the emphasis was always on new works — sometimes just-hatched, it seemed. But the point was providing an incubator whereby Northwest artists (Seattle, Portland, Vancouver) could bring works-in-progress out of the rehearsal studio and into the stage lights. The resulting feedback — whether through critical reviews or audience reactions — was vital in letting them know what was and wasn’t working.
Art x NW (formerly ArtSEA) is a weekly arts and culture newsletter from Cascade PBS. Read past issues and subscribe for more.
In previous years, the atmosphere was amped up and a little edgy, with audiences curious to see what stumbled and what soared among the 16+ experiments in performance. Skimming reviews from earlier decades, I found multiple uses of “mixed bag,” but those writers always go on to talk about the standouts that blew them away. In my own 2007 review for The Seattle Times, I wrote: “As with all festivals, there are things you certainly could’ve lived without seeing … but NWNW still feels like a place where you might be witnessing the next big thing.”
Over the past 20 years I saw many exciting performances at NWNW, including by Degenerate Art Ensemble, Waxie Moon, Cherdonna Shinatra — and a rainbow-striped, coffee-cup-brandishing dance by Mark Haim that I still think about 12 years later. Plus: NWNW was the origin of my fangirling for choreographer Crystal Pite.
This year’s revived Northwest New Works (June 12-14), curated by arts mavens Kemi Adeyemi, Roya Amirsoleymani and Fox Whitney, is smaller, featuring seven performances over one weekend (an eighth performer had to cancel). As in past years, contemporary dance is heavily represented in the mix, including a piece about Black queer femme love by Seattle’s Akoiya Harris. Also on deck is longtime local performer Ilvss Strauss, a clever storyteller who presents a tale of close listening courtesy of a “brat-green rabbit” named ñ (enye).
According to On the Boards executive director Megan Kiskidden, she’s bringing NWNW back due to popular demand, as well as her desire to foster artistic risk taking in a time when performers are feeling pressure to tailor work specifically toward funding opportunities. “I, for one, want to live in a world that is both beautiful and a little weird,” Kiskidden recently wrote, “and NWNW allows artists the platform to make work that does just that.”
Did you feel the earth quake? There’s been a lot of ceremonial groundbreaking lately — a tectonic shift of the best kind: bringing forth new spaces for arts and culture.
< The Garfield Super Block project officially broke ground this week, after years of planning. The reimagined community park next to the high school will include new pathways and playgrounds and plenty of public art. That includes seven “Pillars of Promise,” commissioned artworks commemorating the seven cultural groups who lived in the Central District prior to the neighborhood’s redlining. The plan is to open in spring 2026.
< Another ceremonial groundbreaking took place in Lake Union Park, for the Northwest Native Canoe Center. Led by the United Indians of All Tribes Foundation, the project will bring a Welcome House and Canoe Carving House to the southern shore of Lake Union (on the west side of the pedestrian bridge). On site, carvers will showcase this ages-old Coast Salish art form by way of the thriving contemporary community of carvers.
< As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, Bellevue College broke ground on its new art facility this month, setting forth on a multimedia space due to open in 2027.
< And coming up, the long-planned makeover of Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center will have its kickoff and community open house on June 26. Among the many improvements in the works, the new arena will blend more seamlessly with the Seattle Center campus, serve as a venue for arts and entertainment events (in addition to high school sports) and create a new plaza for the Memorial Wall.
Designed in 1949 by 17-year-old Garfield High School student Marianne Hanson, the wall honors 762 local high school students and alums who died in WWII. I walked by the wall and admired its neoclassical lines on many a lunch break when the Cascade PBS offices were next door — and I’m happy it will receive more prominence. Set to be completed in 2027.
We now turn to Cascade PBS copy chief Gavin Borchert, who shares a few music recommendations, all with a theatrical bent. Take it away, Gavin!
Early in Patsy Cline’s career, schlepping from city to city, from one juke joint and dive bar to the next, was just part of the game. But for Cline, one gig in Houston — a city she’d never before visited — was made less lonely when she ran into superfan Louise Seger. They got to chatting, and thus began a correspondence that ran to hundreds of letters in just the short couple of years before Cline’s 1963 death.
Always ... Patsy Cline (1990) is the musical revue devised by Ted Swindley from that true story. In Taproot Theatre’s bighearted production (extended through June 21) the starring role is played by NY-based performer Cayman Ilika, who soars her way through a couple dozen of Cline’s hits while backed by a four-piece band. Seattle’s own Kate Jaeger plays Seger, and together the two women — one a divorced mom and electrical engineer, the other a glamorous but hardworking chart-topper who was nevertheless expected to keep up with the ironing — bond and thrive in a time and place where women didn’t often get to tell their story.
Moving from old-favorite songs to brand-new compositions, check out Seattle Opera’s Creation Lab (June 13 at 7:30 p.m.; June 15 at 2 p.m.), a four-course, pay-what-you-wish sampler of 20-minute operas, all written by emerging Northwest composers and librettists paired for the occasion.
These operatic stories are told from refreshingly novel points of view: a survivor of the Salem witch trials; Italian renaissance women composers; an astronaut in an existential situation a la “Space Oddity”; and chestnut trees struggling amid the American Chestnut Blight.
But if your favorite point of view is inside a truck, you’re in luck. The Seattle Chamber Music Society kicks off its big Summer Festival next weekend with the first of 18 free outdoor concerts aboard the popular Concert Truck. Rolling up for performances from Downtown’s Pier 62 to Bainbridge Island (June 20 - July 3; times and locations here), the Transformer-like truck pops open on one side to reveal chamber musicians playing inside. Over June 20 - 21, you can catch the roving concert hall in Wedgwood, Bellevue, the Chinatown-International District and Magnuson Park. BYO blanket and picnic. — G.B.
Thanks, Gavin!
Lastly, a reminder that Black Arts Legacies: Season 4 is rolling out! Our second artist reveal is Henry Jackson-Spieker, whose immersive sculptures are as cerebral as they are physical. Born and raised in Seattle, Jackson-Spieker is interested in tension: in terms of the taut nylon cords and delicate glass he incorporates into his work, as well as how it feels to navigate public space as a Black person. His spatial installations invite bodily participation — to look up, step over, or edge by.
Watch and read the profile, and for bonus points, note the shirt Jackson-Spieker is wearing for his sit-down interview.
Looking for more regional arts coverage? Check out Art by Northwest, a new television series on Cascade PBS, featuring artists from all over Washington.
