FESTIVALS
Decibel Festival
For the 12th year in a row, director Sean Horton has lined up a world-class bill for Decibel Festival. It’s another bountiful smorgasbord of electronic-music and digital visual art, featuring an exciting array of artists working in techno, house, hiphop, ambient, footwork, night bus, R&B, and other genres. See the full Decibel schedule on our Things To Do calendar. DAVE SEGAL (Starts Wednesday)
Washington State Fair
All the best that Washington has to offer, obviously. Rodeo, rides, food and drink, farm animals, art, culture, children, and gross people. Plus a surprisingly strong music lineup: Patti LaBelle? Duran Duran with Chic? Kool and the Gang? Yes, please. SEAN NELSON (Through Sunday)
READINGS
Joy Williams
Joy Williams broke into the short-story scene in the early 1980s, when it was very much just a boys’ club. Like many of her contemporaries at that time, her stories centered on the loneliness and decay at the center of middle-class life, but Williams’s take tended to be more surprising, more darkly humorous, more biting than the rest. But she’s great across the board. RICH SMITH (Tuesday)
Isabel Wilkerson
When Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, delivers a talk entitled “Our Racial Moment of Truth,” you listen. JEN GRAVES (Sunday)
FILM
Women in Cinema
Leaving aside the organic bummer that such a genderized showcase is necessary in 2015—the indisputable gender inequity of show business is as contemptible as every other industry’s—the work on view is killer. This week: How to Make a Great Documentary with Ondi Timoner, Frailer, Breathe, and Maestro. SEAN NELSON (Through Thursday)
Local Sightings Film Festival Opening Night: Sprawl to Action
The opening night of the brilliant Local Sightings film festival will show short films that look at Seattle present and Seattle past. There’s much to see and much to talk about. CHARLES MUDEDE (Thursday)
ART
Mexico City: Recording the City
This event, part of the excellent Seattle Design Festival, is an exhibition of 10 University of Washington architecture students who created video and sound recordings, drawings, and paintings that tell stories of how people inhabit and interact with a fast-growing, sprawling, gentrifying city with completely inadequate housing for the non-wealthy. Sound familiar? JEN GRAVES (Tuesday)
Genius/21 Century/Seattle
The Frye’s exhibition of more than 60 visual artists, filmmakers, fiction and nonfiction writers, graphic novelists, actors, set designers, directors, composers, musicians, choreographers, dancers, and organizations devoted to the arts in Seattle is an epic survey of 21st-century art production in this city at this time. JEN GRAVES (Opens Saturday. See the full Genius schedule.)
QUEER
Banned! Books in Drag 2015
Nightlife gets all eloquent and stuff at Neighbours. Presented by the Seattle Public Library and hosted by David Schmader, Banned! Books in Drag features an ensemble of drag queens and comedians performing works inspired by their favorite titillating literature. MATT BAUME (Saturday)
FOOD & DRINK
Green Plate Special Garden Gala
This week brings quite a few opportunities to eat delicious food at events that benefit some great organizations doing important work in Seattle communities. But Green Plate Special’s Garden Gala—the proceeds of which will help them continue to educate middle-schoolers about food, gardening, and cooking—stands out. ANGELA GARBES (Friday)
THEATER
The Children’s Hour
In 1952, playwright Lillian Hellman was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and rat out communists. She gave a bravura performance of refusal, declaring, “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.” That same year, she revised The Children’s Hour, her 1934 play about what happens when a malevolent brat suggests that two of the female teachers at her boarding school are lovers. This Children’s Hour starts with dull innocence and ends with quivering, Shakespeare-sized rage. BRENDAN KILEY (Opens Thursday)
For even more events, see our Things To Do calendar.