On Wednesday evening the Pacific Northwest Ballet presented its third Choreographers’ Showcase, featuring the work of company members Kiyon Gaines, Stanko Milov, Jonathan Porretta, and Olivier Wevers. This was the first time I had attended one of these performances and I was surprised both by the level of dance-creating talent that exists within the ranks of the Ballet and the degree to which the choreography reflected the sensibilities of the dancers who created them.

Jonathan Porretta’s Jubilant, a large ensemble piece set to the music of Bond and Miles, was well-articulated, highly energetic, and classically elegant. The unusual combination of Balanchine-like movement and what sounded like Baroque club music reminded me of Porretta’s riveting presence on stage. Stanko Milov set a series of three pas de eux, entitled Heartfelt, to his own piano composition. Dancing in one of them himself, the piece conveyed his warmth, gravity, and Old World charm.

Olivier Wevers contributed two works that manifest his mercurial stage presence as well as his ability to dramatically interpret dance in diverse musical styles. X static, set to early-music inspired dances by Thomas Adés, demonstrated virtuosity in a wide range of tones and modes. It was the rare successful ballet piece that incorporates humor and the avant-garde. His second work, pigment, was a minimalist solo set to a traditional Japanese folk song and danced by Ariana Lallone. Subtle and expressive, it was further evidence of an impressive choreographic talent.

Corps dancer Kiyon Gaines, less familiar to audiences than the Principals who preceded him on stage, closed the evening with a longer, larger ensemble work set to music by Astor Piazolla. More that any of the other pieces in the program that night, the quality of the movement was met with a strong compositional unity. Its uniqueness made me wish I could have returned to see it again, but alas, this event takes place only once each year.

When the Frye reopened under new management 8 years ago, it was with an exhibition of the paintings of the Norwegian artist Odd Nerdrum: dramatic, oddball fantasies of a post-nuclear world where retro-primitive tribes battled for supremacy, a stylistic melding of Rembrandt and Bladerunner. Such an exhibit would have been unthinkable in the old Frye, which rarely if ever featured art that was edgy or topical, let alone represented on the international art scene.

But Frye regulars who became accustomed in the years since to a steady diet of technically accomplished representational painting, both contemporary and historical, have another round of adjusting to do. The new Frye has made a decisive shift towards the contemporary mainstream, where painting is seen as merely one media amongst many, form can be subservient to content, and content is often confrontational or obscure.

Chief Curator Robin Held has also reinterpreted the word “representational” (still held up as a key Frye value), to include photography, video, and even – curiously - text art, like the giant wall-mounted vinyl letters “Swallow Harder” by artist Mark Mumford that greet visitors to the current show. Mechanically-produced imagery, in fact, holds sway nearly everywhere in the museum at the moment, from the exhibition of architectural photography by Candida Hofer in the rear galleries and hall, to the Krohn Collection show itself, where the vast majority of the works on view are either photographic or photographically-derived.

A further nod towards recent trends in the wider art world is the underlying theme of the current Swallow Harder show (as none-too-subtly suggested by the title): Sex, gender identity, and homoeroticism. Images of cross-dressing, bodily fluids, and sex acts, are plentiful, along with closely-related references to celebrity and rock-and-roll. Ironically, many of the strongest pieces in the exhibit have little to do with these themes, which may be due to the dangers in choosing work based on subject matter more than artistic merit, or may be pure coincidence.

It may also be purely coincidental that a majority of the best works on view are by local artists rather than those from abroad, but it is an encouraging sign nonetheless for boosters of the Seattle scene.

Two works can be selected as representative of the high and low points of the exhibition. On the plus side of the ledger is a gilded ceramic pickle jar by veteran Seattle artist Jeffrey Mitchell, a spotlit baroque extravaganza that purposely mimics the look of a vintage Italian reliquary (unlike which, his vessel is eloquently empty) with a dense tangle of surface ornament that amusingly mixes plant forms, anchors, elephant heads, and chains, all given the faux-precious treatment of a gold glaze. Though the curator finds links here to the homoerotic thread running through the rest of the show, the average visitor merely revels in the craft, humor, and visual delight, not to mention irony. Pickle jar, indeed.

At the opposite end of the spectrum of artistic success we find a large, nearly monochromatic painting by Los Angeles artist Matt Greene entitled Lair of the Hessians. Hung in the same gallery as Greene’s sophomoric ink drawing of a troop of generic, overly-endowed female nudes, Hessians depicts their equally absurd male counterparts. Behind the enormous dripping, brown silhouette of the trunk and roots of a tree, anonymous, long-haired figures are sketchily depicted, their placement arbitrary, their actions indecipherable, with disembodied hands, weapons, and guitars appearing here and there as though clipped from another picture. The painting is as inert as an object as it is empty as a statement, suggesting, in an overgrown-adolescent way, a sort of Goth, rock-and-roll forest cult, which the artist presents in a sloppy, cartoon version, far too feeble for its overpowering scale.

A similar contrast between work which substitutes bombast for content and work which presents intriguing ideas in a compelling form is provided by two photographic treatments of oral sex. Chicago artist Jason Salavon employs the currently fashionable technique of computer sampling to create a composite image based on averaging 76 close-up photographs of oral sex, with the blurry, result image being no more interesting for all that trouble than any large, fuzzy photograph made by the old-fashioned method of pose, point, and shoot. The only interest here (besides the fact that the artist writes his own sampling software) is how hard it is to make out what is actually going in, but so what? Explicit and amorphous does not equal profound.

Seattle artist (and resident of the TK Building) Steven Miller hits a home run with his very different take on the same sex act. Instead of the banal linkage of penis and mouth, Miller has created a series of large-format, high-focus portraits of naked people (mostly male) being splashed with cold milk, here clearly a stand-in for the exchange of bodily fluids.

Miller is highly accomplished at using strobe light to capture the kinetic, sculptural effect of lots of white fluid splashed with force on a resistant body, as well as provoking a variety of extremely expressive responses from his subjects. In the sample of three images included in the current show, one lets out a whoop that seems halfway between pain and pleasure, another closes his eyes as the milk completely covers his face like a white mask, while the last raises his head backwards and drinks with abandon from the descending stream. The milk appropriately seems both invasive and exciting, as well as beautiful in its own right as a form, but is it something we want on our own naked skin, just at the moment? The dilemma of sex in the age of AIDS has rarely been as skillfully evoked.

Local artists Clair Cowie, Patrick Holderfield, Scott Fife, and Leo Saul Berk are also represented with impressive works, particularly Fife’s cardboard, disembodied head of Mies Van de Rohe in the entrance rotunda and Holderfield’s masterly drawing from his Raft of Medusa series. But a comment I overheard from a museum visitor clarified something that I had been wondering about myself. “Isn’t this place getting a lot more like the Henry?” someone asked their companion. Up until last year, the Frye was always known as the one local museum that marched to the beat of a different drummer, choosing to ignore certain contemporary trends in favor of a conscious specialization, a cultivation of one corner of the art garden.

Now the Frye is joining the crowded field of other local venues that highlight the Art of the Moment, like the Henry, COCA, Western Bridge, and ConWorks, not to mention the newly expanded SAM-to-come. Since the now-elastic definition of representational seems far too vague to alone distinguish the new Frye, will the future bring even more blurring of its role vis-à-vis its counterparts, or will it continue to be a place with its own distinct identity? One hopes that the reborn Frye moves forward with more than a passing glance to its past.

Why do revolutionary movements – whether in politics or in art – invariably become the domain of slavish adherents who treat their formal devices as part of an established orthodoxy rather than a means to some end? As I left the performance of HKPG’s (High Kindergarten Performance Group) Computer at On the Boards last Sunday, my brother – trying to think of something positive to say – remarked, “It is really interesting that people are still doing that sort of thing.”

Computer is set in a sickly, lime-green place that looks to be an office. Its seven actors go through ninety minutes of recitation, movement, and song. There is some dialogue but much sheet cake, hard candy, M & Ms, Barbasol, Mountain Dew, and sugary fake-blood that inevitably get splattered across the stage. A contemporary work of Absurdist theater, it presumes to be an allegory of consciousness based in today’s dehumanized workplace.

The actors employed a familiar bag of tricks lifted from Beckett, Ionesco, Pinter, and lesser practitioners of the medium. But Computer was ultimately little more than a compilation of gags; part Karen Findley and part Laugh-In. The work of their Absurdist predecessors was, of course, grounded in a well-considered epistemology and existed in a time and place where such a radical restructuring of ‘theater’ could address the broadest of subject matter, effectively raising questions about our understanding of a rapidly disintegrating world. Those were the days. Last weekend, in the hands of HKPG, the artistic form felt hopelessly vague and out of date.

It is important to note that elsewhere this type of play has evolved significantly since the time of Beckett and his contemporaries. Artists such as Richard Foreman, the Director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York City, have emphasized a more sophisticated, philosophically based language to explore action and premise in our consciousness. More significantly, his plays are dramatic compositions with a constant element of surprise – something that never once surfaced at On the Boards last Sunday.

Rather than simply fetishizing the trappings of the avant-garde on stage, HKPG should have tried try to figure out what exactly they wanted to tell us about ourselves.

Chris Bruce’s time in the Palouse has clearly led him to explore the basic questions about what art is and how it works. In the cheerful, low-key style that charmed Seattleites during his tenure as Curator at the Henry Art Gallery during the 80s and 90s, Bruce – now the Director of the Washington State University Museum of Art – spoke last night about the role of cognition and creative thinking in both art-making and art-viewing. Roy Lichtenstein, the witty and referential subject of the current Henry exhibition he has curated, was the ostensible topic of the discussion and his key example of these processes.

Quoting from various neuroscientists, he explained how art – in the words of Susan Sontag – “de-simplifies the world,” creating mental connections he called a “storage of comparables” that allow us to navigate the world in all of its complexity.

As utopian as it may sound, he made a compelling case for art as a means of improving human understanding and repairing our nation’s fractured social environment. The fact that he came to these conclusions in Pullman, WA – a place where, he said, people are much more familiar with wheat and lentils than with art – suggests that there may be more to this theory than we realize.

I enjoyed his local example of three Tom Otterness sculptures placed in the wheat fields near WSU. I could easily imagine people slowing down in their pick-ups, trying to figure out just what exactly was going on in this beautiful golden landscape of rolling hills.

Seattle Opera’s new production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte is greatly entertaining and it is its best effort of the season, if not the last few seasons. In director Jonathan Miller’s capable hands, the old comedy of manners and mores is stripped away and weare treated to a pageant of cynicism, bumbling and human weakness. With the help of some creative supertitling and the addition of cell phones, laptop computers and TV cameras, he is able to bring theaction into the present day with great success. For the majority of the three-hour running time, we’re treated to a lot of broad comedy set to some of Mozart’s most expedient music, all of it taking place on an ultra-contemporary off-white set. Although I’m no huge Mozart fan, I was very impressed with this production.

The premise is simple, the cynical Don Alfonso wagers his two young friends, Guglielmo and Ferrando that their two fiancées, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella, cannot possibly remain faithful to them should they leave town. Don Alfonso creates a pretext for their absence and has them return in disguise to try to wear down their loves’ resolve. In the original, they show up later that day at Fiordiligi and Dorabella’s villa disguised as Albanians. This time around, they transform themselves into long-haired hippie-bikers of sorts who spent a lot of time posing and playing air-guitar. The young men rejoice at having their clumsy advances rejected, but Don Alfonso always seems to have another trick up his sleeve. With the encouragement of their worldly maid (in this case, she’s a “personal assistant”), Despina, the two women eventually succumb to the men’s dubious charms, but they hook up with the wrong guys; Ferrando’s Dorabella falls for Guglielmo and Guglielmo’s Fiordiligi falls for Ferrando. At last the ruse is uncovered and everything returns to normal after Don Alfonso and Despina apologize.

Although the vocal performances of the cast were excellent, Alexandra Deshorties as Fiordiligi was the star of the show. Her voice was clear, strong and wonderfully expressive. The orchestra, led by Andreas Mitisek, generally sounded good and balanced well with the singers, but the strings had a few glaring problems with intonation more than a few times in exposed passages.

The only trouble that I have with this or any version of Così fan tutte is with the work itself. First of all, the four lovers are essentially uninteresting as characters. Aside from the clowning, librettist Lorenzo da Ponte gives them absolutely nothing worthwhile to sing. The characters of Don Alfonso and Despina fare a lot better. They impart their somewhat skewed philosophy of the world as quickly as they can, then get out of the way to let things happen. Structure-wise, roughly the first half of the work is a quickly-paced romp through comical attempts at seduction, but the second half always seems to drag as the female characters find themselves yielding to the charms of these two vague impostors. The ending itself is a bit of a puzzle because once Don Alfonso and Despina’s scheme is revealed, everything magically goes back to normal. To me, this has always been something of a relief, as it injects a little life into a section that has gone flat, but it still doesn’t explain a thing. It’s easy to figure out why critics flayed this work until the mid-20th century, as it is inherently flawed. In some ways, Miller counters these faults in the original. For instance, his emphasis on comedy helps cover the one-dimensional personalities of the romantic leads, but there’s not much he can do about the sagging second half, except ride it out and hope that the music can cover the flagging action.

Despite all of these flaws, Miller makes the absolute best of the material and even manages to entertain all the way up to the cheap seats. This is one of the most entertaining productions I’ve seen from Seattle Opera in the last several years. I only hope that next year’s Don Giovanni will be of similar quality.