Watching Predator Songstress last night was a reminder that every movement is a movement against society. I expected to see the push and pull between people and the controlling power, as Joshua Kohl said “re-appropriating the tools of totalitarianism for personal liberation,” set in a dystopian fairy tale. While you can clearly see the work in the framework of a totalitarian society, keep in mind we live in a “democratic” society, the songstresses’ experience is just another Tuesday night for me.

Before sitting down for a drink in the lobby, the only thing I knew about Jarvi Kononen was that he had never been to an On the Boards performance. As part of the OtB Ambassadors Program, I am taking my role as the liaison to a foreign country literally and am using my +1's to bring strangers to On the Boards for the very first time. Like the older cousin who passes you that first joint, I'm interested in exposing people to something that might not be their cup of tea, but just might end up changing the way they look at the world.

38 weekends ago I lost my mind. A bad trip. I awoke in an elastic semblance of my life, one that was permeable, one in which I could peer into flexing interstices of space, the gaps between reality’s essential structures. I clamored for order in a realm where opening doors yielded more doors opening, where scrolling proof of my identity spilled liquidly from the screen of my iPhone, where each sibilance I emitted would scuttle across the ceiling like a cockroach. The living room and couch upon which I laid writhing was a construct of my mind, or perhaps its interior.

Who hasn't had nights like that? Where you go all the way down the rabbit hole, googling connections between war criminals running guns and 7-11 Redbox machines. I recently had no connectivity in Burien while I was briefly between homes, and I discovered Redbox: last chance for entertainment before Albertson's closes. Redbox videos targeted to those bereft of even the barest of services, messages to whole groups of society who had flipped their lid, blew their cool, staying along Meyer's Way watching tiny TVs with batteries in tents.

With its unsettling silence that permeates every sound, every word and gesture, biograph, last year was pretty//sh*tty is a wonderful work of art. 

It begins with a cinéma vérité-style video (or is it acting?) of a stereotypical "Bad Boy." A woman (playwright Young Jean Lee) directs him/orders him around. She asks him personal questions that he seems uncomfortable answering. She tells him to take a shower and to wash his balls and his ass, then she tells him to take a piss, and he reluctantly complies as we reluctantly observe. The accompanying text says something about reversing the male gaze. I suppose this is intended to be transgressive, or a critique of pornography. There is definitely nothing sexy about it.

The smell of rain, whales’ gaze, deep breathing, harmonic, gasp. This syncopates everything.

Somehow Whale, the Symbol becomes Whale the Portal. There are songs of whispering. There is belly. There is undulation. There is water. There is opening. There is a throughway and a way through.

“And then there is a sound the world has never heard.”

Something is shaken out and up from the earth. There is a beat that is beyond our ability to hear—a stirring, a shaking, a clear PULL.

I appreciate the small-breasted jiggle of modesty that is occurring here. The slapping stride that allows sound in—there is so much that permeates. To be in the audience of SHORE is to be impregnated in a dream. Something will come—full of breath and the sound of footfall to make you make your insides feel full.

I can see the creator humbled by herself. The drums, the billowing red, the blinking eyes, the harmonic.

This is a dialogue of moving bodies. The swish of arms in coats. Frozen fingers. Pantylines. This is real.

In profile, I can feel how heavy Emily’s eyelashes are—the catalyst, whose body moves as if commanded to.

SHORE: A Curated Reading
Catalyst Artistic Director: Emily Johnson

Emily begins with gratitude to the Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and Hugo House for co-creating the event with her. Then she mentions how nice it is to be back in Seattle after 10 years away and introduces the first reader.