Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble drew its name from a 1937 exhibition held in Munich – 650 Weimar-era works, including those by Chagall, Kandinsky, and Klee — which the Nazis considered depraved. DAE would’ve rated high on that particular Richter scale. Driven by dancer/director Haruko Nishimura and composer/conductor Joshua Kohl, DAE is inspired by fairy tales, anime, noise, punk, comics, avant-garde cinema, and protest art forms like butoh, which balances the exquisite and the grotesque. While known for large-scale, intensive performances that unfold in industrial landscapes, DAE can astonish even in a “safe” museum setting, populating galleries with hanging gardens of auditory viscera, voluminous wraiths of cascading tendrils, hungry ghosts with two-foot long tongues, and ice-cream truck operating rooms. DAE’s latest project, Predator Songstress, is a series of six interdisciplinary portraits of defiant anti-heroines — embodied by Nishimura’s slow, afflicted postures — whose voices have been stolen. The music, sometimes performed with invented instruments, sometimes just with invented voices, is worth the price of admission. But every detail, from wardrobe to light, is menacingly beautiful.
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