Review, NW New Works Weekend #2: A sublimely goofy 'Buffoon' and a dance-driven video game

Grab a ticket if you can to Sunday's almost-sold-out Mainstage Showcase at On the Boards' Northwest New Works Festival. Two items on the bill make it clear Seattle is hitting a peak of dance-theater activity — and the other two have much to offer.

The Offshore Project's "The Buffoon" comes equipped with a tasty, jazz-spiced chamber score composed by cellist Dylan Rieck and some "sculptures" by Sean M. Johnson that are more akin to trick stage props.

The oddly prancing title character (Ezra Dickinson) is surrounded by a cadre of swaggering figures who are either aiding him in his follies, or thwarting him, or some combination of the two. And the objects attracting Dickinson's interest are a chair that becomes his tumbling partner in a dance that's always going off balance, and a table that does the impossible.

Choreographer Rainbow Fletcher has concocted a delightful, slightly ominous world for Dickinson's sublime buffoon to inhabit. If Dickinson's companions — Fletcher, Jonathan Betchtel, Benjamin Meersmen, Randall Phillips — have a Weimar Republic flavor about them, that may be because in their other life they're members of the Can Can Castaways.

Laara Garcia/Pseudopod Interactive's "Sakura Rising" was eye-popping in a different way. It brought frantic life to a "video game" featuring warring mythical figures with names like Bi-Polar Bear and Dextera the Deceiver.

What made it more interesting that any video game I've ever been talked into playing was the live-flesh factor: gifted dancers in wild get-up (by Eric Aguilar), interacting with light-, sound- and video-schemes of manic complexity. (Music and sound engineer Eli Hetrick gets top credit here.)

What made it funnier than most video games was the running commentary of the two players (Shannon Erickson, Max Kraushaar) who started at cross-purposes — "OK, you wanna play?" "No" — and wound up in a place neither of them could have imagined.

Also funny: Heather Stockton's wildly gyrating, neon-lit and apparently lethal hair-braid.

"Embracing the Inevitable," a duet performed by Lingo artistic director KT Niehoff and Alia Swersky, was pure dance: quiet, artful and ultimately spooky and forlorn. In dim light, the two women flung their arms out, wrapped them around themselves or gripped their own hands at an angle, sometimes in tandem, sometimes out of sync with each other, never touching each other beyond glancing contact.

As they migrated across the stage, they crossed through beams of light and seemed to react, sometimes uncomfortably, to a syncopated electronic score punctuated by distraught breaths and whispers (composed by Scott Colburn). Though their affinities were clear, their impending separation was clearer.

Corrie Befort's "Cut Chalk" didn't hang together as satisfyingly as the other three mainstage offerings, but it did feature one fine sequence in which six dancers were guided in their moves by a music ensemble whose only instruments were their hands and feet.

As for the Studio Showcase, it brought some high-tech wizardry to weak material: high-school sexuality and peer pressure in The Satori Group's "The Making of a Monster" and granddaughter-grandmother relations in Erin Leddy's sweet but sentimental "My Mind Is Like an Open Meadow."

Charles Smith latched onto a topic more interesting in his motor-mouthed slide show, "Today I Am a Zionist," which juxtaposed land-claim controversies in the Middle East (complete with a performance of the theme from "Exodus" on the hammered dulcimer) and land-use issues in Seattle history (the Denny Hill regrades, the building of I-5).

Disease, terrorism and tea partyers came into it, too, along with a lot of non sequiturs. "Zionist" is an excerpt from Smith's upcoming "My Arm Is Up in the Air." Maybe with more work, it will gain a tighter focus.

Focus was one thing charismatic stripper Lily Verlaine had at her command in "Magpie": a sly, beautifully danced piece that turned several burlesque standards on their head. For one thing, she put on as much as she took off. The piece's title alludes to the lady's appetite for film, which winds up festooning her entire body. I thought I had a fair idea of what Verlaine could do — but once more she surprised me.

And she may surprise us all again when she brings in Pacific Northwest Ballet's Olivier Wevers to choreograph one of the pieces at her upcoming Triple Door show on Bastille Day.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com