Friday November 13

Bandage a Knife

For the past decade, the home base for Linda Austin has been a barrel-ceilinged former Romanian Orthodox church in the Foster-Powell ’hood dubbed Performance Works NW. It’s the space where she’s hosted everything from her own quirky multimedia works to the annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival and talent show Cabaret Boris Natasha. Austin’s latest project, Bandage a Knife, a wild stew of video footage, power struggles and slo-mo death scenes, is actually a collaboration with experimental musician Seth Nehil, who is also hard at work developing Pacific Northwest College of Art’s first Sound Art class. The inspiration is Seijun Suzuki’s absurdist 1967 cult Japanese yakuza film Branded to Kill—a flick in which contract killers shoot bullets through water pipes and rice is used as a sex aid. “A couple of years ago, Seth mentioned, ‘Oh, this movie reminds me of you,’” Austin says, grinning. Now the pair is deep into rehearsal, Nehil tinkering with a new, live-audio mix of fight-scene grunts while Austin experiments with the work’s five dancers. KELLY CLARKE. Performance Works NW, 4625 SE 67th Ave., 777-1907. 7 and 9 pm Friday-Saturday, Nov. 13-14 and 20-21. 7 pm Thursday, Nov. 19. 7 pm Sunday, Nov. 15 and 22. $10-$15 sliding scale. Reservations or advance tickets required.