On The Boards -- On The Move -- Seattle's Premier Performance-Art Space Is Experiencing Pleasurable Growing Pains

Since On the Boards came into being in 1979, its former ballroom-turned-performance space has been many things to many people.

Dancer Bill T. Jones turned the balcony into a launching pad and made his entrance with a flying, 12-foot leap.

Seattle music wizard Norman Durkee rolled a 1942 Mercedes-Benz onstage, rigged it with a keyboard, and communicated to the audience from the front seat.

Belgian choreographer and former farm girl Karin Vyncke stapled chicken wire to the walls and covered the floor with a carpet of white chicken feathers.

Such changes of decor are practically a cultural imperative at On the Boards. Tucked away on the second floor of a 14th Avenue community hall, the walk-up space is a grand chameleon - a blank canvas that lovingly accommodates the bizarre, the daring, the idiosyncratic visions of artists from around the world.

Low-budget and off the beaten track when first created by six local artists, the organization has grown into a pivotal Seattle institution, a place where the risky best in contemporary dance, theater, and multimedia performance - from Laurie Anderson, Spalding Gray, and Ping Chong to Wayne Madsen, Pat Graney and Mark Morris - have been "sneak previewed."

But On the Boards is no longer one of Seattle's best-kept secrets. It's become an internationally respected avant-garde hot spot, with artistic and managerial credibility that extends from the Northwest to the East Coast, even to Berlin and Tokyo.

Finishing up its 11th season, OTB is still growing in quiet but substantial leaps. Out of all proportion to the modest size of its home venue (which seats only 250), this year OTB linked up with much larger U.S. and European arts centers to commission an ambitious, expensive new piece by the internationally renowned Wooster Group.

Just recently the Northwest Area Foundation rewarded the impulse with a three-year, $249,000 grant thatwill allow OTB to underwrite new works with Northrup Auditorium in Minneapolis and Iowa City's Hancher Auditorium.

But in the precarious world of nonprofit art, new opportunities are always freighted with new challenges. As its stature increases, can OTB keep faith with the localperformance artists it vows to serve? And will it find room for the bigger audiences and shows it is generating?

"On the Boards has really grown extraordinarily," observes David White, founder-director of the National Performance Network, an alliance of alternative performance centers including OTB.

"They're really a major player now, not just because they bring things into Seattle, but because they send Seattle artists out to the rest of the world. They are very respected."

John Kilacky, performing arts director of the prestigious Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, agrees: "I love that place. It's a special institution, and everything they do is permeated with love and respect for artists."

OTB's longtime program director Mark Murphy says the organization's rising status hit him last year, at a meeting in Lisbon, Portugal. Murphy was there to confer with the eight other U.S. and European presenters of "Brace Up!", the new million-dollar-plus adaptation of Anton Chekhov's "The Three Sisters" by the Wooster Group. (It opened at OTB in March.)

"I looked around the table at these major arts producers," Murphy recalls. "Some of these guys had commissioning budgets of $40 million a year. Our entire budget was under $400,000. But we were part of the team, and the others trusted and respected us enough to let us host the show's world premiere. They knew we really cared about the work."

General manager Andrea Wagner, an OTB staffer since 1980, also senses a shift. Says Wagner, "The organization was started out of a sense of isolation, by artists of many disciplines who wanted to collaborate and didn't have a place to do it.

"Now we're in the middle of a network. Artists from around the world want to come here, because they believe it's an important place to perform."

OTB has indeed plugged Seattle into the global avant-garde touring loop.

Up to 50 proposals stream in weekly from far-flung groups eager to appear in OTB's annual New Performance Series, which presents the cream of the experimental crop. That's because of the buzz among artists who have already played at OTB. Famous or fledgling, they all seem to adore the place.

Before he was starring in films ("Swimming to Cambodia") and on Broadway ("Monster in the Box"), Spalding Gray was bringing his hilarious monologues to OTB.

"I always have a good experience there," says Gray, who may return next spring. "The people who run the place are so nice, and the situation is right for the kind of work I love to do - formal but informal."

Actress-writer Tamara Madison-Shaw, one of the many Seattle performers OTB has showcased in its yearly Northwest New Works Festival, was delighted with her run this spring.

"I'm used to going into theaters where they open the door, turn the light on, and say, `Do your own thing,' says Shaw. "At OTB they don't just give you the room, they really support you."

Audiences have also caught on to OTB's charms.

In 1980, the center was lucky to get 25 people to show up for Spalding Gray. Now, says Murphy, subscription ticket sales for the New Performance Series are strictly limited to 500, so 500 single tickets can be sold during each run. Many shows sell out, waiting lists are common, and this year several acts were extended.

But success has created a need for more elbow room. When a work with major pull is booked, OTB offers it at an auditorium with more than a thousand seats - the Moore Theater, the Paramount, or the Meany.

But other OTB events are caught in the middle. They draw too well for the 14th Avenue space, yet don't justify the move to a theater four times the size. In Seattle, there's no in-between option.

Murphy says an ideal seating capacity for OTB would be 350. But seating isn't the only problem.

"We need an elevator so we can become accessible to the handicapped and a dressing room that isn't just a hallway. We also need a higher ceiling and more technical capability. We turn down shows because we can't fit them in."

The facility question is a touchy one for OTB's staff and board. From its inception, the group has occupied the upper two stories of The Most Wishful Sons of Haiti Masonic Lodge. (In a tribute to OTB's resourcefulness, David White calls the theater The Most Holy Order of Wishful Thinking.) The rambling 1906 building is loaded with character, and has a niche in Seattle arts history.

Originally the Danish Brotherhood Society, it later became one of the city's first after-hours jazz clubs. From the '50s it was a busy rental hall, a place for Garfield High sock hops and rock-'n'-roll events. "Billie Holiday once played the old piano we still use," says Wagner, "and Jimi Hendrix performed here as a teenager."

Murphy and Wagner hope OTB can stay put; the group is exploring a long-term lease or purchase agreement that would allow for renovation. But moving to another building or erecting a new facility is not out of the question.

"We want to compare this space, which is very near and dear to us and the artists who work here, with other options," Wagner says. "Our board wants to have a plan in place by the end of the year."

Another sensitive topic is OTB's relation to the local performance community. Big-deal touring projects like "Brace Up!" generate the most media interest and heftiest grants, and more foreign companies are coming too. Some people wonder if OTB is spending too much of its resources on these components and not enough on local artists.

But Murphy points out that other governments often help foot the bill for groups from abroad. Overseas travel costs for U.S. tours, he says, are usually shared by a number of presenters as well as by NPN's Suitcase Fund.

He also insists that boosting Northwest artists remains a top priority. Along with the well- ensconced New Works Festival, OTB also produces "12 Minutes Max," a grassroots work-in-progress series, six times a year. And one of the seven slots in each year's New Performance Series is for a local work, a work that OTB helps to tour nationally. This time it is the Pat Graney Company's latest dance program, "Faith" (June 13-16).

Supporting the home team isn't easy.

"One of our biggest challenges is trying to get as much attention and money for the local projects as for the international ones," says Murphy. "We really are an import-export business. There are some very smart, very talented artists in Seattle who need to be encouraged, nurtured and funded."

According to David White, the OTB has helped alert other presenters to Seattle talents: "I learned about Pat Graney, Wayne Madsen, Robert Davidson through them. They premiered Llory Wilson's piece `This Cordate Carcass,' and two years later it's still touring all over."

Though OTB may be having some growing pains, the organization is bearing them well. It's still a friendly, funky kind of place, with the hip and quasi-hip lounging on the stairs at intermission, and diverse visions occupying the stage.

Seattle's finest alternative arts purveyor is most certainly on the move. But it's hanging on tight to the spirit that created it.