For over a decade, Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble have been one of the most vehemently inspired and largely unclassifiable performance groups. In varying gradations they have been (and are) a new-music orchestra, a dance-based performance-art organization, a punk band, and a bohemian think tank. In the last couple of years, the ambition and execution of their perpetually different works has grown in scale—after a few successful theater/music tours of Europe and large-scale pieces at local arts monoliths like On the Boards and Consolidated Works, they’ve most recently had two one-night, sold-out performances at the Moore Theatre, a venue rarely disposed to accommodate such fringe-culture weirdoes. The first gig, early last year, was a grant-funded show of compositions by a wide and unusual swath of local artists for 45-piece orchestra. The second, earlier this year, was the technically ornate and dream-imagery-soaked performance piece Cuckoo Crow.

Taking as its seed the parasitic baby-displacing bird the cuckoo, the piece ultimately jumps off into all manner of experimental exposition, its fairytale-ish core providing merely a vestigial starting point. Slapstick but utterly horrifying surgeries, ice-cream-truck clowning, aerial tumbling, and human/animation abstraction all inhabit the grim, druggy environs of Cuckoo Crow. At the center of it is the butoh-rooted dance of choreographer and company co-director Haruko Nishimura, who adopts alternately childlike and monstrous characters throughout the piece.

For the first time in their long history, DAE has a strong relationship with a label—local Tellous Records handled last year’s The Bastress, DAE’s most critically acclaimed and widespread release yet, and they have another (including some of the music from Cuckoo Crow) on the way. Furthermore, the frequency and variety of their jet-setting engagements continue to increase, taking the troupe on a mixture of club tours, performance festivals, and high-rent experimental-dance venues. Currently DAE are, among other orbiting projects, preparing Cuckoo Crow for a variety of redesigned remountings, including this Bumbershoot performance. With a perpetually undulating and rearranging lineup, the veteran company is still hungry and mining for ever more rare jewels.