Performance Art

Greasy Demon Heat Balboa

How to describe this latest project from the Villainaires Academy, co-chaired by two wildly creative, extremely conceptual individuals named Ryan Mitchell (founding member of experimental theater company Implied Violence) and Sam Mickens (formerly of Degenerate Art Ensemble)? Let’s try the press release: “It will be an unstable property; altering in sometimes minute, sometimes dramatic ways over the course of its five-pronged tenure on the earth.” This means the show will run for five evenings, altering its “psychic content” (which touches on the lives of Don King, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jackson) and methods of communications on each. Now from Mickens himself: “It’s definitely not a play, but with lots of experimental theater . . . a lot of text, a lot of weird movement.” Former residents of creative space Luscious Studios, which once threw a funeral—casket and all—for a local artist moving to Portland, Mitchell and Mickens continue to draw no delineations between living and working space at Villville. Their home and psyches are open, and what spills out might be any combination of words, music, gesture, even butoh dance. “An important characteristic of the shows we make is they are impulse-driven and immediate reflections of me and Ryan as people and in certain times,” says Mickens. “All of the shows last year came from a superintense period where both of us were living chaotic and nihilistic lives and at the same time obsessively watching all five of the Rocky movies.” Eager fans of the character should consider the Greasy Demon cycle a precursor to Tuesday’s premiere of Rocky Balboa. You’re gonna eat lightning and crap thunder. Villville, 1534 First Ave. S., 340-2703. $5–$15. 8 p.m. Ends Dec. 22. RACHEL SHIMP