September 12, 2007

Pullout

Organization Shortlist

by David Schmader, Brendan Kiley and Charles Mudede

Eric Hanson

Genius Awards

People's Republic of Komedy

My God, we've written a lot about People's Republic of Komedy. Over the past two years, the four-man comedy collective obliterated The Stranger's legendary, decade-long, and primarily Giggles-induced bias against local comedy and turned us into relentlessly vocal proponents.

Live comedy is always a crapshoot, and PROK's weekly showcase—Laff Hole, Wednesdays at Chop Suey—isn't immune to bombing comics. But the ultimate worth of any collaborative comedic venture can be calculated by a simple equation: Does it rock more than it sucks? Week after week, PROK's Laff Hole rocks way more than it sucks—a small miracle that's placed PROK members Daniel Carroll, Kevin Hyder, Emmett Montgomery, and Scott Moran at the center of Seattle's blooming alterna-comedy scene. On his own, each of the dudes is funny; together, they're hilarious, managing the remarkable trick of being four twentysomething white guys with identifiably different comedic styles.

Still, a good portion of the success of Laff Hole is curatorial: Along with the PROK quartet, each Laff Hole features a roster of other comics; in a strategy that has created some friction in Seattle's close-knit community of comics (where reciprocal support is compulsory), PROK carefully curates each show, with performers featured on an invite-only basis. Genius. DAVID SCHMADER

Implied Violence

Implied Violence began in 2003 as some students at Cornish College who hated most of the theater they saw—they wanted less banality, more spectacle, so they banded together to make it happen. Now the company is the two-headed baby of codirectors Mandie O'Connell and Ryan Mitchell, with a little help from the friends like technical director Megan Birdsall, sound designer Lily Nguyen, dancers Jessie Smith and dk pan, and musician Sam Mickens.

Implied Violence is experimental theater that doesn't suck and is miraculously unpretentious. Its performances mush up newspaper stories, small talk, and advertising clichés with live music, dance, dialogue in tortured syntax, boxing, blood, vaudeville, hiphop, and, sometimes, feathers and goo, to produce the kinds of wild spectacles its creators want to watch. Mitchell and O'Connell love rigor and codes and seem to have infinite admiration for Gertrude Stein and the Wu-Tang Clan—a smart choice of patron saints for any artist. "We need to change the definition of theater and plays," Mitchell once told me. "Because right now it sucks." He went on to talk about how much he admired experimental playwright Sarah Kane and The Lion King. "Spectacle," he said, "can change the way you think about what's possible in the world." BRENDAN KILEY

Seattle International Film Festival

After 32 years of playing musical chairs with Seattle's cinemas, this year the Seattle International Film Festival finally maneuvered its way into a permanent home: the clean, mildly studious Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, downstairs from McCaw Hall in Seattle Center. SIFF immediately lit up its new screen with some of the most acclaimed foreign films of all time, with the Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films series commencing SIFF Cinema's "year-round film festival."

Time will tell how this PR nugget plays out. In its first year, SIFF Cinema did a whole bunch of things right. First and foremost: canny programming. Lots of folks willing to Netflix all new Hollywood products remain grateful for the opportunity to pay $8 to see The 400 Blows, and SIFF Cinema's inaugural season trotted out a plethora of those special films that demand to be seen on the big screen, from start to finish, in a roomful of strangers.

This year's programming was good, sturdy, and safe. You really can't go wrong with Janus Films (featuring virtually every Oscar-winning foreign film ever made) or film noir (a genre so fetishized even the crap is celebrated by enthusiasts). Coming up this fall: Tony Kaye's abortion documentary Lake of Fire, the classic showbiz noir Sweet Smell of Success, and a retrospective of early Roman Polanski. We can't wait. DAVID SCHMADER

Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center

In one way, Langston Hughes Performing Arts Center is very conventional. It's an institution that celebrates and preserves the tradition of black art (theater, dance, music, film). In this capacity, the organization is not doing anything new but is simply a memory bank for the local and national cultural heritage of black Americans. In another far more interesting way, the institute presents a space, a stage, a platform for current and future black arts. In this capacity, LHPAC is not preserving but participating in the creation of black work. Over the past four years, the organization has been giving more time and energy to the present and future needs of a community that is going through significant changes. This trend is not only seen in its collaborations with the hiphop community, but also with its support of the dreamy speculations of Afrofuturism (Black Science-Fiction Festival) and the vibrant images of the African American Film Festival. Seattle is an intelligent city and so it deserves an intelligent black institution. CHARLES MUDEDE

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