For its 10th and final year, this beloved “mini-festival” is tossing aside the “mini” and going full force for a 10-day performance extravaganza based on the work of avant-garde theater pioneer Richard Foreman. This is how it works: fest organizer Performance Works NW chooses a piece of text from Foreman’s online notebooks of dialogue and thoughts, makes up some random rules (for example, reference the body and use at least one rhyme), and then delivers the instructions to a number of daredevil artists, who get just 10 days to put together a performance. Festivals past have resulted in wildly unexpected multimedia adventures, from a performer pummeling a punching dummy covered in raw steaks to a couple of hysterical drag queens rolling on the floor interacting with direct video feeds. To top off this farewell festival, the nine days leading up to the finale will offer a veritable buffet of events—guerrilla shows, installations, house performances, tournaments, cocktail parties, treasure hunts—that recapitulate all of the Foreman texts used in previous years.
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