Bite into Teeth this Weekend at On the Boards

Last night I went to see one of my favorite new Northwest dance companies: Portland's Teeth. I first saw them in 2007 at On the Boards'  Northwest New Works program—I loved their freaky humor then and had pretty great expectations going in this time. I wasn't disappointed! The company brought both wit and terror to the stage, along with live-feed cameras, straight-jacket costumes right out of Tim Burton's The Night Before Christmas, and a gorgeous sound track. The show is strange and scary and blatantly ugly, but it hangs together quite well, and has its touching moments too. During one of the funnier moments, when the tallest, baldest male dancer starts eating a strip of blue tape he's recently stuck down the back of the stage, a man in the audience started laughing quite loudly. In typical Seattle fashion, heads were turning nervously--was it cool for someone to be laughing so loud during a dance performance? And the guy finally said, so that the entire theater could hear, "It's okay. It's funny." Then he started laughing some more, and others finally joined him. It wasn't an intended part of the performance, but it may as well have been. It seemed that Teeth too hoped to loosen us up and get us to laugh at the weird way humans behave, whether on stage or off.