On April 1 the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center begins the third year of its Enter Stage Left performance, series, which accompanies its annual Strait Art exhibition of north Peninsula artists. Set against the backdrop of the lively and diverse exhibition by 44 artists responding to a theme titled Slivers of Silver, the Enter Stage Left offerings will explore four realms of creative performance pursued by artists in Juan de Fuca country.

On four Friday nights during the exhibition’s run the series will present theater, cinema, circus/burlesque and virtual reality.

FOUR WOMEN

A One-Actor Play by Rebecca Redshaw

APRIL 1 - 8 PM

While preparing to situate her mother in an Alzheimer’s facility, Christina finds three letters and a photograph that will change her life. Ferreting out the history of a mystery soldier pictured in that photograph, Christina writes to three women whose letters she has chanced upon with hope of uncovering a secret past. As her mother’s memory fades, she writes to her as well in hope of finding out the truth.

FOUR WOMEN, by Port Angeles author and playwright Rebecca Redshaw, reveals the four women’s tales through the voice of Marianne Trowbridge. In a one-act intensive, the octogenarian actress recreates all four women, each of whom holds a piece of the puzzle to a woman’s struggle for truth in life.

Trowbridge has had a distinguished career in community theatre for almost seven decades, playing such varied roles as Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, Ethel in On Golden Pond, and Vera in Mame. She has numerous credits as a director and choreographer, as well.

Redshaw has penned six plays and is working on the completion of her third novel. This is her third production at PAFAC, which remains a favored local venue for her intimate stagings.

Virtual Expression and Immersive Art

Its users, called Residents, interact with each other through cyber proxies called avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world (which residents refer to as "the grid").

With already more than 20 million registered users the phenomenon is matriculating into the government, corporate and academic sectors as a medium for meeting and work productivity that vies to replace the bricks and mortar office with virtual interactions conducted from remote locations such as home.

An Evening of

Far West Videos

The Telltale Heart is a retelling of the eponymous Edgar Allen Poe short story of a paranoid madman obsessed with an old man’s “vulture eye.” Created on her computer with a stop animation technique using crude video, still photographs and bold text titles that narrate the story, artist Sarah Tucker has created a work with the look of a silent film from the Expressionist era of film’s infancy a century ago.

The live piano accompaniment of yesteryear will be updated by the in-house musical samplings twirled by dj ShmeeJay to heighten the emotions engendered by this creepy tale.

Sarah, husband Scott and daughters Zoe and Celeste appear on the other side of the lens as a pioneer trapper family in a second offering —the world premier of Why Don’t We Disappear, a nine-minute short written and directed by Tristan Seniuk.

The title is the refrain from “Gone Again” — a song by the Seattle Indie group The Mt. St. Helens Vietnam Band — and drives the loose narrative that might be described as a cinematic tone poem set in the pioneer era.

Shot in luscious high definition in woods near Port Angeles and in a magic grove of the Hoh rain forest, the production used local talent from the greater PAFAC family, as well as professional actors and crew from Seattle and Hollywood. The action follows the flight of a young couple being pursued by the sinister “Messengers,” a monocled paternalistic posse played by Harris Verner, Ed Bedford, David Haight, Lou Sarna and the late Jim Butler.

Cirque de Bohème on Beaver Hill

Cirque de Bohème is a performance art troop that has been the mainstay for The Bohemian Lounge, a gathering place favored by the Peninsula’s Millennial hipsters with a distinctive sub-cultural flavor.

Spearheaded by Anami they have transformed a warehouse space that once housed a muffler shop off the Tumwater truck route with a vaudevillian variety show that transpires there several weekends a month.

Performances draw from a panoply of circus arts such as stilt walking, trapeze and fire manipulation. A second focus is on the stylized dance ofburlesque as well as narrative arts like puppetry, film screenings, poetry and story tellingoften accompanied by the beat of DJs spinning spirited music.

Their Enter Stage Left show will sample their performance potpourri adapted to the more intimate space of the Webster House and spilling out beyond against the broad vistas that stretch out from Beaver Hill against the setting sun.

Upcoming Events

FOUR WOMEN

Virtual Expression and Immersive Art

An Evening of

Far West Videos

Cirque de Bohème on Beaver Hill

ArtPaths: Portfolio 2012

At Outside Season Opening.