TeenTix Blog - "olivia qi"

Pianist Adam Neiman is a painter of sound. No note is too brief for him to color, and no piece is too simple to spin vivid images of. At the Seattle Chamber Music Society, Neiman’s program of Ravel and Rachmaninoff miniatures wasn’t monumental, but he brought out their charm. Sensitive and meticulous, he treated the audience to a jewel box of a performance—intimate, quaint, and restorative.

If McCaw or Benaroya Hall is like the Climate Pledge Arena, the Seattle Chamber Music Society is like The Vera Project. It’s smaller and focuses more on educating audiences. The audience members, who are mostly elderly, know each other on a name basis, and I got a nametag at the entrance.

On Sunday, January 28, 2024, we gathered again at On the Boards, dressed in our iconic MIRRORBALL outfits, to celebrate Arts Access and Youth Empowerment at our annual celebration of all things teen-- The Teeny Awards.The 2024 Teeny Awards was sponsored by foundry10, the Seattle Center, The 5th Avenue Theatre's Rising Star Project, and the Meany Center at the University of Washington. The award ceremony featured performances from local teen arts programs including Velocity Dance Center's Youth Choreographer's Club, the Village Theatre Institute, Washington State Arts Commissions Poetry Out Loud, and Three Dollar Bill Cinema's Reel Queer Youth! These performances reminded us of the wide array of talent throughout our community.

Our awardees this year represent our first cohort of "20 Under 20" Outstanding Teens, each of whom were nominated by arts leaders in TeenTix's network of Arts and Community Partners.The speeches from all of our winners were truly inspiring to all the youth and industry adults at the event. The community vibes were amazing and we had a lot of fun meeting many people for the first time in-person again! The Teeny Awards are back and bigger than ever, continuing to highlight the teen leadership in the Arts and Culture scene.

Thank you to our host, On the Boards, our incredible awardees, and the network of TeenTix supporters out there. Here’s to the next generation of the Teeny awards! The 2024 "20 Under 20" Outstanding Teens Julia Bradler from The 5th Avenue TheatreClaire E. from Powerful VoicesIrie from Powerful VoicesSayaan Nagpal from Powerful VoicesGavin Muhlfelder from KNHC c89.5Augustin Vazquez from The Vera ProjectAthena Davis from Village TheatreDaphne Bunker from TeenTixDaleceana from Speak With PurposePeter Ahern from Speak With PurposeMiles Hagopian from Speak With PurposeKyle Gerstel from Penguin ProductionsFish Harrison from ACT TheatreOlivia Qi from Seattle OperaLeila Neidlinger from Seattle RepEthan Mayo from Seattle Rep

Content warning: suicide, abuse

A pressing story of love during harsh times, A Thousand Splendid Suns is finally ready for its world premiere at Seattle Opera. The work, commissioned by Seattle Opera in 2015, is written by Seattle-born composer Sheila Silver and librettist Stephen Kitsakos. Based on Khaled Hosseini’s book of the same name, the opera is an epic tale set in Afghanistan from 1974 to 2001. Suns is unforgettably intense, a gripping story brought to life by heart-wrenching music.

After centuries of suppression, the Indigenous American art of tattooing is resurging. Native people are increasingly getting traditional tattoos that empower and connect them to their heritage; the exhibit Body Language at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture spotlights this movement. Body Language: Reawakening Cultural Tattooing of the Northwest is guest-curated by Dion Kaszas, a Nlaka'pamux cultural tattoo practitioner. The exhibit features tattooers from the Tlingit, Nisga’a, Naida, Heiltsuk, and Nlaka’pamux tribes. It effectively, albeit repetitively, teaches the viewer about tattoo art’s resilience and practitioners through photos, artifacts, and plenty of wall text.

Body Language is laid out to teach the viewer of the history of Native tattooing, before focusing on its significance in the modern age. The exhibit’s first section is hardly about tattoos—it’s about boarding schools, crests, potlatches, myths, and labret piercings. Pairing physical artifacts with photos and text, the exhibit paints a picture of the culturally rich and socially complex lives of Native people on the Northwest coast.

Epic, exciting, and innovative, Tan Dun’s 2018 masterpiece Buddha Passion refuses to be categorized. It’s an oratorio—a huge musical work for orchestra and voices, typically religious and without costumes, sets, and staging—but it’s almost an opera as well. It’s Western classical music, but it’s also Eastern religious music. It’s sung in Chinese and Sanskrit by both white and Asian musicians in America. It’s ancient and avant-garde, simple and opulent, lyrical and percussive. The massive work, which calls for a full adult choir, children’s choir, symphony, five singers, and a dancer, is a patchwork of inspirations working in harmony to preach love, forgiveness, sacrifice, and salvation.

It’s little wonder that Buddha Passion is a fusion of many styles as the composer is a man of many labels. The Seattle Symphony describes the Chinese-born, American-based Tan Dun as a “shaman and showman,” and he’s also a prolific composer and conductor.

Climate change is real and dangerous, but you do not need this article to tell you that. There is an abundance of scientific knowledge about environmental collapse, so why is it so hard for our society to develop cultural responses and policies that prioritize the environment? Patte Loper, the artist behind Laboratory for Other Worlds at the Bellevue Arts Museum, takes French philosopher Bruno Latour’s stance: we need art to translate scientific data into political knowledge. In the “Laboratory”, Loper experiments with connecting the human world and other worlds of plants, animals, spirits, and land. She uses her distinct visual language to encourage unity between humans and nonhumans, proposing a spiritual solution to climate change.

“There is another world but it is in this one,” reads the Paul Éluard quote on the wall facing the exhibit’s entrance. Entering the exhibit, I understood that Loper’s art belongs to that other world, the world of nature. Loper’s three Paintings for Trees (2022), which look like silver scraps on sticks, hang on a wall behind little sculptures of clay, cement, glass jars, dirt, and wood. These little sculptures are Plant Companion Devices (2022), a Painting for Plants (2021), and Lichen Incubator (2022). The Plant Companion Devices are relatively small and made of clay and sticks, and some have a tangled mass of cardboard reminiscent of tree roots. The Lichen Incubator drips water through bendy tubes into glass flasks for a rock or piece of wood. Patte Loper's Laboratory for Other Worlds, The Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh, PA) 2019-2020. Photo courtesy of Mark Woods Studio.

There’s a mountain of historical Chinese art, and many people are familiar with its loose inky style. But what lies beyond the mountain? The answers, present in the Seattle Asian Art Museum’s Beyond the Mountain exhibit, are thought-provoking performance art, painting, photography, and multimedia installations. The exhibit is organized around five themes and five artists. The themes are combinations of a traditional motif and concepts gaining traction in the modern world, with names like ink/protest, artifact/culture, proverb/nature, landscape/cityscape, and landscape/escape. Beyond the Mountain shows how contemporary Chinese artists react to a modern world while staying rooted in tradition. Furthermore, it shows how their Chinese art breaks national boundaries, becoming internationally relevant in the face of globalization.

ink/protest