From classical ballet and avant-garde burlesque to puppetry and gay Bigfoot, Seattle performers take pleasure in disrupting whatever kind of programming you think you might be getting, turning a genre on its head, or throwing the whole damn stage out the window. More than simply entertainers, these performers are dramaturgs and world-builders whose work blurs the boundary between theater and visual art, dance and installation, ritual and nightlife, the viewer and the viewed. These are the provocateurs who will not let you be bored in your seat.  atm/overdraft Credit: Frank Correa Kit Wyatt and Hannah Simmons, the duo behind atm/overdraft, seem to be everywhere all at once, suddenly. It’s notable, since they only began performing as “overdraft” a few months ago (and have been getting a lot of calls ever since—Bumbershoot is up next). Their debut at Once Removed 02 this past June took place in an empty house in West Seattle, where they moved like apparitions in ponytails, ripped tights, and yellow heels—passing through hallways, wedging into doorways, and contorting across kitchen counters in a slow-motion ballet. For a few hours, their bodies became part of the site-specific art, forcing visitors to step over them or stare back into the big, unblinking eyes painted on the mesh covering their faces. There’s something about those masks, as well as the boudoir aesthetics and incredible athleticism of overdraft’s improvisational choreography, that is utterly intoxicating. A little kinky and terrifying, too. Wyatt and Simmons both started out in ballet. Wyatt dropped out of school in sixth grade to study ballet full-time, going on to dance professionally in New York. Simmons followed a similar trajectory, performing with ballet companies in Frankfurt and Boston before moving to Seattle. They found themselves dissatisfied with ballet for similar reasons. “It can be a struggle to exist holistically, as queer people, inside this—at least on the surface—super-heteronormative structure with really strict gender roles,” Wyatt says. “[In ballet] there’s a tendency toward erasure of any body type complexity. There was a lot of self-erasure.” Though he earned a degree in dance dramaturgy and dabbled in modern dance, Wyatt was often bored and frequently “retiring.” Things clicked, finally, when he discovered the Academy of Burlesque in Seattle. Simmons, who holds degrees in both dance and mathematics, also discovered burlesque in Seattle. When the two were paired together for a burlesque Christmas show in 2022, the chemistry was instantaneous and atm was born. Four years and a lot of ass, titties, and money later, their offshoot “overdraft” was conceived as a family-friendly version of their act. But overdraft feels like more than that. It’s a new kind of embodied, site-responsive performance art that’s weird and fresh. It turns voyeurism on its head and turns discomfort into titillation. AMANDA MANITACH Heap Troupe Credit: Eric Hanson We’ve all had scary and frustrating experiences on the road, whether screaming in psychic agony behind the world’s worst driver or nearly being clipped by a distracted motorist while riding a bike on one of Seattle’s busy roads. The experience of getting around in a big city is fraught, whether on foot, two wheels, or four. No one is better at communicating that tension than Kara Beadle, movement artist and lead collaborator of Heap Troupe, an interdisciplinary performance group they cofounded with musician Andy Zacek. Featuring a rotating cast of collaborators, Heap Troupe’s performances build an alternative dystopian universe where bikes, cars, and humans all meld into one another. A typical Heap performance is interactive and site-specific, calling attention to the space taken up by cars while imagining a different reality. Their props help, too, whether it’s tiny toy cars, hub caps used as fans, or bikes artfully lifted into the air like dancers. Beadle’s fascination with car culture grew out of their Texan upbringing, where commuting in a motor vehicle was a way of life. Frequently carsick, Beadle moved to the bicycle haven of Seattle nine years ago, and it opened their mind to a different world. After suffering multiple accidents as cyclists just trying to share the road with cars, Beadle and Zacek were inspired to start making art that investigates the ways that car supremacy has taken over cities and our lives. Their biggest project to date is HeapRide, a three-hour guided group bicycle ride where audience members hopped on bikes to watch pop-up performances along a route that wound its way through Seattle. For Beadle, the investigation and embodiment of various modes of transportation involves a mix of humor and sincerity, at once balletic and aggressive, to open a deeper dialogue about the seriousness of a corporate-fueled culture that worships cars. “I wanted to get back to humor,” says Beadle, “so that people can look at a kind of caricatured abstraction of what they might do in their car, see that reflected back in themselves, and think, oh, like, why am I doing this?” JAS KEIMIG Scott Shoemaker Credit: Bronwen Houck When people are familiar with Scott Shoemaker’s work, it’s usually via his signature Ms. Pak-Man [sic] character. Since the show’s 2014 Re-bar debut, Shoemaker has taken Atari’s prima donna to the stage on the regular, recasting her as a late-stage Judy Garland–esque barfly who’s more interested in eating pills than dots and is forever teetering on the brink of her cabaret comeback. Others may know him best for his drag-burlesque Halloween show, Uncle Basement’s Attic of Horrors!, which debuted last year at Theatre Off Jackson and will return this fall. There’s also Scott Shoemaker’s War on Christmas, reprising for the ninth year this December and packed with comedy, songs, dancing, video shorts, nudity, and whatever fresh cultural grievance can be squeezed into a holiday special. Or maybe they know him from Scott Shoemaker’s: Probed! (the colon is pronounced aloud), involving gay Bigfoot, gay ghosts, and gay aliens, while sprinkling in nods to Star Trek and Unsolved Mysteries—slated to return to the Intiman Cabaret in the spring. Maybe it’s all of them. Since Shoemaker has spent more than 20 years performing in Seattle’s underground theaters, we have plenty to remember him by. The man is dramaturgically prolific. Working alongside longtime life partner Freddy Molitch, aka Freddy King of Pants, Shoemaker’s Shoes and Pants Productions constantly cooks up hysterical, fucked-up concepts born of absolute whims, all loaded with old-school pop-culture references, tons of improv, detailed set design, original musical numbers, and fabulous, high-production-level costumes! They’re jaw-achingly, feels-like-you’re-having-a-stroke funny, with one-liners that’ll linger in your skull for… well, in my skull’s case, decades. The best part is that all of this queer, marvelous Kafkacity is just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more inside the maze of Scott Shoemaker’s bizarre brain, and we get to live in the same city where he’s unraveling it all, in song, on stage, all for us. MEG VAN HUYGEN Shadow Girls Cult Credit: Ethan Chiem The Seattle-based shadow puppetry and projections duo Shadow Girls Cult uses old-fashioned 2D shadow puppets, overhead projectors, human silhouettes, and other analog tech to create puppet phantasmagorias that make you feel as though you’re watching a dream unfold in real time. Last year was a big one for the Cult, also known as Cass Bray and Zane Exactly. Their full-length show UNRAVELING was awarded the 2025 Henson Foundation Workshop Grant and toured nationally. UNRAVELING used hundreds of layered shadow puppets and blended elements of sci-fi, noir, and classic horror into a kind of surrealist smoothie that explored what happens when things fall apart. This year, the Cult has been developing a new full-length show, Water Is Easier to Swallow, while creating shadow worlds for Theatre Battery’s Jar of Fat and Washington Ensemble Theatre’s Blood/Sucker (both look dagger-sharp). They’re also developing an interactive installation for Base Camp Studios 2 in the fall, so watch this space. Bray and Exactly’s impact extends beyond their own productions. As coproducers of Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam, they have helped cultivate one of Seattle’s most distinctive homes for puppetry and experimental performance. Their work draws from a deep well of theatrical traditions while speaking directly to the fragmented, image-saturated, emotionally complicated moment we happen to be living through. Few artists are creating work that feels so handmade and so strange—or so perfectly suited to the weirdness of the now. BESS LOVEJOY Eric M. Acosta/unpoetry Credit: Corbin Louis Eric M. Acosta is the sweet and twisted mind behind unpoetry, a curated multi-artist, multidisciplinary monthly performance series that has run a little shy of four years now. I’ve been lucky to watch unpoetry evolve from its infancy into the fleshed-out and artistically realized beast it is today: a platform for disembodied poetry and writing, performance, dance, noise music, and other weird shit Acosta cooks up with his featured artists. The first unpoetry got its start in a bar and has since taken place at Jack Straw Cultural Center, in coffee shops, and in galleries. Poets have read work in front of taxidermied animals. Noise musicians have gotten down on the floor with dancers to let the mic catch what it will. Installations of recordings have lived alongside intricate lighting in spaces intersected by labyrinthine semi-walls of sheer curtains. Another way Acosta has defined it: “unpoetry is art practicing art.” Over the years, unpoetry has held regular performances at the Frye Art Museum, during which local artists are asked to respond to the museum’s current exhibitions using ekphrastic techniques. The next Frye event, on September 17, features sound artists Tom Scully and María Dolores A. Matienzo, dancer Noelle Chun, and videographer Eyerot. Now unpoetry even has a sibling series, _poetry lab, which features performances by interdisciplinary artists and is hosted regularly at Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar. A filmmaker, musician, and poet in his own right, Acosta has two collections available, Motion Flesh and underbelly, and another, Celestial Dentist, on the way in October, published by Idle Hands Press. If you’ve seen a show at 12th Avenue Arts or the Broad lately, he’s likely had a hand in building stage settings or any of the dozens of things that go into making a show a success. He’s constantly creating, and he’s constantly helping others create. KATIE LEE ELLISON Timothy White Eagle Credit: Sunny Martini Many people have religious baggage, but Timothy White Eagle took his and turned it into something profoundly beautiful. As a mixed-race infant adopted into a conservative white Mormon family in rural Washington, White Eagle has spent a lifetime negotiating identity, belonging, and the spirit in the sky. His multidisciplinary work reflects that journey and spans genres, from immersive performance and installation to photography, sound, and other unclassifiable genre-bent forms of storytelling. Binding his hybrid practice is the thread of visually striking ceremonial ritual—the kind that fascinated White Eagle as a child in the Mormon church, and that he later explored as a student of spiritual practices taught by Indigenous mentors, radical faeries, and a pagan community who laid the foundation of an artistic practice grounded in openness, healing, and some very irreverent nightlife. In 1995, he opened the Coffee Messiah, a Capitol Hill coffee shop by day and home for freaks by night that hosted the dusk-till-dawn, avant-garde Cabaret of Despair. His performances and installations have been presented at On the Boards and Town Hall Seattle, at La MaMa and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival in New York, as well as internationally through his collaborations with renowned performance artist/playwright/singer-songwriter Taylor Mac. Last year, White Eagle was named the inaugural Green-Duwamish Artist in Residence for a pilot program developed by the EPA. During his yearlong residency, he and a group of collaborators developed an expansive body of work culminating in Once Wild River. The exhibit didn’t merely skim the history of the Duwamish; White Eagle walked its banks, gathered its medicine, documented its Indigenous caretakers, and performed rituals of wildness, sickness, and healing. Icon, queen, faerie, mystic, reformed Mormon, class clown trickster-goofball, sage: White Eagle is an artist who broke all of God’s molds, and we’re richer for it. AMANDA MANITACH Return to the 2026 Genius Awards page. 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