Weekend Arts Fix: Closings, News, and Events

Cornish College of the Arts' Fall dance concert at the Broadway Performance Hall

This weekend is a big week for closings: the Intiman's Abe Lincoln in Illinois finished its extended run Thursday, the Satori Group's Artifacts of Consequence is sold-out through its close on Sunday, and finally there's Macha Monkey's Nancy, Frank and Joe which closes up down at Freehold tonight (tickets $12-$15). Macha Monkey has always been good, and that's one I'm sorry to have missed.

Playwright Paul Mullin's collaborative "living newspaper" play, It's Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper About a Dying Newspaper, is closing Sunday, up at North Seattle Community College. The play has garnered some stunning attention, including an NPR feature on Friday that prompted Mullin to send out a press release taking aim at the lack of risk-taking on the part of the city's larger theatres (more power to him):

If this coverage by NPR proves one thing it’s this: the rest of the nation actually does give a damn about what we do in this city. They actually do care what happens to our newspapers, and they actually do want to know about what kind of original theatre we’re doing here, what stories we’re telling, uniquely, as Seattleites.

What they don’t care about, what they will never care about, is how carefully and exquisitely we craft a restaging of some chestnut from the canon, or the play that knocked ‘em dead off-Broadway last year.  And this isn’t because those stories aren’t good, it’s because those stories aren’t uniquely ours.  Seattle theaters that dedicate themselves exclusively to craft and the canon and providing a local outlet to New York’s latest exports are museums. And Seattle will never have as good museums as New York, Chicago or LA.

One of Tony Morgan's illustrations for "Throwing Bones," Sat. at Pilot Books.

Also closing this weekend is Cafe Nordo, a twisted but delicious dinner performance featuring a super-talented cast who received some bad news this week. According to the Slog, there's been some problems with getting a certain tax exemption which could eat into their meager earnings, so if you have a chance, try to make it to the show.

You have two interesting opportunities for dance this weekend. First, the talented people of Manifold Motion are producing a showcase of their and their collaborators' work, at the Canoe Club through Sunday. Also, Cornish College's dance department is presenting their fall dance theatre concert at the Broadway Performance Hall at 2 and 8 p.m. today. Tickets are $10/$5 students, and for that you get to see the next generation of dance and choreographic talent coming out of Seattle.

Finally, today at 3 p.m., Pilot Books--the courageous indie lit bookstore hidden upstairs at 219 Broadway, is hosting a talented duo from Portland, Oregon: writer Anthony Alvarado and noted illustrator Tony Morgan present their recent collaboration, Throwing Bones, an illustrated collection of short-stories in which each artist in his own medium developed the content independently of the other. Alvarado's writing frequently twists itself around clever concepts, from a fragmentary biography of a literary outlaw to the moral questions arising from using the dead in ad campaigns, unfolding opposite Morgan's richly detailed illustrations.