I was getting cold and beginning to wonder if the dancers were ever going to show. Rumor had it they would be here at 7:00 p.m., on the corner of Broadway Avenue and Olive Way, doing something outrageous. It was 7:22. A balding cop stood on the sidewalk, talking into his radio, maybe waiting to catch the same show. I’d heard about them–buskers in wild costumes who shimmied, shouted, and flashed their underwear in the US Bank plaza on Friday nights. I’m a reflexive fan of any street performance that doesn’t involve burnouts with acoustic guitars. I wanted to see the dancers.
I asked around at nearby shops and a cashier said they wouldn’t start until 8:30, but they’d do their routine for at least a couple of hours.
Video artist Doug Aitken was scheduled to talk about interiors, his new installation at the Henry Art Gallery (featuring Andre 3000 and a Tokyo auctioneer), from 7:00 to 8:00. I bombed down to the Henry on my bicycle, but the lecture hall was already packed to fire-code capacity. I ducked into the gallery to look at the installation (a carefully edited, mesmerizing work juxtaposing human percussions–handball, tap dancing, rapping–with images of spare urban architecture and sprawling nighttime cityscapes) and cranked back up to Capitol Hill by 9:35–just in time to catch two sweating, costumed men walking away from the US Bank plaza, boom box in hand.
The pair wore shredded ’80s dance assemblages–pink leg warmers, ripped fishnets, sweatbands, a football jersey–and I asked if they were, in fact, the Dancers. The gentlemen (Drew and Jeff, collectively known as Streetbeat) said yes and sweetly offered to do a few more routines for me to watch. They are Cornish dance students (one incoming, one outgoing) and they drew a quick crowd by thrusting, prancing, and dry-humping to Paula Abdul and doing an amusingly drugged-out interpretation of Escape Club’s “Wild, Wild West.” Jeff climbed across the glowing ATMs and bounced off garbage cans while Drew bopped along, giving the crowd a studied, steamy, deadpan stare. Their moves are sexy, funny, and completely unsubtle–an excellent choice for Friday-night sidewalk performance.
Streetbeat has been flashdancing the US Bank plaza for the last four Friday nights, with new costumes and routines every week. They make a modest profit and the police have been decent enough to leave them alone. Broadway needs more genuinely interesting buskers who aren’t stoned honkies shrieking along to “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Go Streetbeat!
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Three quick news items: Theater Babylon is on hiatus–the board has eliminated all staff (including its artistic director) and will spiral into gnawing self-reflection for the foreseeable future. Theater Schmeater has announced its third annual playwrights’ contest, deadline May 1. Live Girls! Theater has found new digs in Ballard after three years in Pioneer Square. Huzzah.
