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City Guide - Seattle - Culture | ||
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Culture Although Seattle's theatre scene is considered one of the most dynamic in the USA, natives notably prefer home-grown culture to that from outside the state and a look through the city's listing and review tabloids will not in all likelihood produce names that you have heard of. Exceptions are the internationally acclaimed Pacific Northwest Ballet, glass art's Dale Chihuly, rock's Ann and Nancy Wilson from Heart, maestro Gerard Schwarz, Kurt Cobain's widow Courtney Love of Hole, sax man Kenny G, actor Tom Skerritt and writers Ann Rule and Tom Robbins. British travel writer Jonathan Raban has also made the Pacific Northwest his home and written affectionately about the quirks of the region's natives. The Seattle Opera's season runs from August to May and both the Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Seattle Repertory Theatre run from October to May. All three perform at the Seattle Center. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra plays from September to June at Benaroya Hall. Ticketmaster (tel: (206) 628 0888; website: www.ticketmaster.com) sells tickets to all cultural events, as does Pacific Northwest Ticket Service (tel: (206) 232 0150), while Ticket/Ticket (tel: (206) 324 2744) sells half-price day-of-show tickets to theatre, music, comedy and dance events. Listings can be found in free tabloids, such as The Weekly and The Stranger. Music: The Northwest Chamber Orchestra (tel: (206) 343 0445; website: www.nwco.org) performs everything from Beethoven to Mozart to Debussy at different locations in the city, some of them open parks. Philharmonia Northwest (tel: (206) 675 9727; website: www.philharmonianw.org) performs downtown at 1119 Eighth Avenue. The Seattle Choral Company (tel: (206) 363 1100; website: www.seattlechoralcompany.org) performs seasonal music events in different locations, while the Seattle Opera Company (tel: (206) 389 7676; website: www.seattleopera.org) performs at the Seattle Center Opera House, 321 Mercer Street. The Seattle Symphony Orchestra offers a wide range of musical events at Benaroya Hall, 200 University Street (tel: (206) 215 4747; website: www.seattlesymphony.org). Theatre: Performances of popular Broadway hits are on offer all year round at Broadway at the Paramount, 911 Pine Street (tel: (206) 292 ARTS or 2787; website: www.broadwayseries.com or www.theparamount.com), and other classics at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, 1308 Fifth Avenue (tel: (206) 625 1900; website: www.5thavenuetheatre.org). More contemporary work can be seen at The Empty Space Theatre, 3509 Fremont Avenue North (tel: (206) 547 7500; website: www.emptyspace.org), and the Intiman Theatre, 201 Mercer Street (tel: (206) 269 1900; website: www.intiman.org). The biggest theatre company, the Seattle Repertory Theatre (tel: (206) 443 2222; website: www.seattlerep.org), plays at the Seattle Center on 155 Mercer Street. The Repertory Actors Theatre, 1122 East Pike Street (tel: (206) 364 3283; website: www.reacttheatre.org), puts on plays in different locations. The Seattle Children's Theatre is at Second Avenue North and Thomas Street (tel: (206) 441 3322; website: www.sct.org). Dance: The Century Ballroom, 915 East Pine Street (tel: (206) 324 7263; website: www.centuryballroom.com), specialises in salsa and swing dancing. Seattle's Olympic Ballet Theatre (tel: (425) 774 7570; website: www.olyballet.com) performs in different venues. The world-renowned Pacific Northwest Ballet (tel: (206) 441 9411; website: www.pnb.org) is based at the Seattle Center Opera House, 301 Mercer Street. Film: The City Center Cinema, at Sixth Avenue and Union Street (tel: (206) 622 6665), shows mainstream American films, as does the GC Cinerama at 2100 Fourth Avenue, although this is also a main venue during the Seattle Film Festival. GC Pacific Place is a mainstream multiplex at Sixth Avenue and Pine Street (tel: (206) 652 2404). Foreign and alternative cinemas tend to be on the Capitol Hill, such as the Harvard Exit, 807 East Roy Street (tel: (206) 323 4978), and the Landmark Egyptian, 801 East Pine Street (tel: (206) 323 4978). The best-known Seattle-based film, Sleepless in Seattle (1993), starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, was set in a Lake Union houseboat. Cultural events: The Folklife Festival is an international cultural celebration of note, taking place over Memorial Day weekend at the end of May in various venues of the Seattle Center. There are roughly 1000 performances, representing 100 countries, and presenting traditional and ethnic dance, music and storytelling. Visual arts and folklore exhibits highlight the work of many Northwest communities, in particular the Native American. Seattle also has an International Film Festival, which takes place in May and June at various cinemas around the city (tel: (206) 324 9996). Literary Notes As part of the Wild West and the Alaskan Gold Rush, Seattle is not known for its literary history until the Beat generation of the 1950s onwards. Writer Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) lived here briefly, while Jack Kerouac (1922-1969) passed through after a three-month stint as a fire-watcher in the Cascades in 1956. Poet Theodore Roethke taught at the University of Washington, along with native Seattle writer Richard Hugo and the more famous Raymond Carver, who once lived on the Olympic Peninsula. The best-known Seattle-based popular novelist is Tom Robbins, however, author of Another Roadside Attraction (1971) and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976). British travel writer and novelist Jonathan Raban lives in the Pacific Northwest and has written extensively about the area, as well as Seattle itself, particularly in his 1999 Passage to Juneau, where he made wry observations about the 'Scandinavian rectitude' of the natives. David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars (1994) was set in the misty San Juan Islands and was recently made into a film. Annie Dillard wrote The Living (1992), a romantic tale of the Pacific Northwest set in the late nineteenth century. Now, there are an increasing number of crime writers using Seattle as a setting. Best known is Native American writer Sherman Alexie, whose book Indian Killer (1996) concerns a serial murder of scalped white men in the city, contrasted against the trendy coffee bars and misty scenery. Curiously, the Seattle area has also launched internationally known, offbeat contemporary cartoonists, such as Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook's Comeek), Matt Groening, originator of The Simpsons, and Gary Larson. |