12 Minutes Max

This beloved short-form performance lab for new and experimental works was originated by On the Boards in 1979 and handed off to Base in 2017. Led by a different pair of community curators each round, 12 Minutes Max auditions are open to artists at all career stages working in dance, music, theater and more. For decades, 12 Minutes Max has been a launchpad for new artists and a testing ground for longer works—so much so that it’s inspired similar programs across North America, including Vancouver, B.C., Chicago and Houston.

12 Minutes Max: Edition Three is curated by Rasheena Fountain and Miss Texas 1988 and will feature works by Niecy Chong, Lou Chow, Marissa Niederhauser, Alexandra Romanyshyn, and Maisy Neill (GLITTER & GRIME). Purchase tickets here.

12 Minutes Max is a low-tech showcase. Selected works can be up to 12 minutes long; each artist/group will receive a $150 fee. Check out our 12 Minutes Max Guidelines for details. 

Support for the 2025-26 season of 12 Minutes Max at Base comes from John C. Robinson.

12MM Edition Three Curators

Miss Texas 1988 is a Seattle drag artist, performer, host, writer, and all-around creative oddball. She dabbles in everything from the silly to the sublime with curiously crafted costumes and climactic characters. Catch her as a cast member of Tush, The Sunday Sip, Lashes, Glory Hole, Jawbreaker, and as the host of High F@ggotry. You can also find her rampaging around as a reporter for The Stranger, and on OUTtv as the winner of Camp Wannakiki Season 5!

Rasheena Fountain is a multidisciplinary writer, performer, and educator who centers environmental advocacy and justice in her work. She has received fellowships and support from the Jack Straw Writers Program, National Audubon, and Sundress Academy for the Arts. She has partnered with the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) to highlight Black environmental stories through interviews, writing, and performing eco-poetry. Fountain is the author of Starfish Blues: A Memoir. Her short film, Dropped Down Blues, debuted in the "How We Carry Water" 2024 exhibit at PRAx. In 2025, she released, In the Aftermath, a blues guitar and poetry performance set partly recorded as a participant in the Jackstraw Artist Support Program. She has performed at the 54th Northwest Folklife Festival and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Fountain has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, an M.A.Ed. from Antioch University Seattle/IslandWood, and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, where she is focusing on blues performance and environment as a PhD candidate in English.

12MM Edition Three Artists

Niecey Chong (she/her) is a Seattle-based dancer and choreographer working across commercial dance, street dance communities, and educational spaces. Her practice is rooted in Black American dance forms, maintaining the connection between movement, music, and cultural context. She approaches her practice as a cultural surrogate, examining how these forms are taught, performed, and preserved across different spaces. Her current focus is redefining value systems in dance, prioritizing authenticity, individuality, and movement rooted in lived experience. As co-founder of The Arete Project, she develops integrated training programs that equip dancers with technique, cultural knowledge, and sustainable practices.

Lou Chow (he/she/they) holds a BA in Dance and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies from the University of Washington. Tracing transnational translations of culture, they untangle histories of coloniality to bring embodied knowledge to the surface of artistic practice. Researching the intersections of dance, community, care, and health, they cultivate community amongst Queer BIPOC populations. Working in mediums like dance, textiles, painting, photography, and writing, they endlessly seek new ways to expand their artistic practice. Aiming to pour knowledge back into their local communities to make the arts accessible to all. In 2025, they received the Husky 100 and Herring Phelps Scholarly Activism Award. Lou currently writes for Seattle Dances and teaches dance to kids and adults at the Miller and Montelake Community Centers.

Marissa Rae Niederhauser (she/her) has been practicing dance for 43 years & making dances & body based work in film, performance art, noise & installation for 22 of those years. She received her BFA in Dance at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, WA. After 14 years dancing in Seattle in the early 2000s she explored the broader world of dance while living in NYC, Melbourne, Berlin and Portland, OR & recently has returned "home" to Seattle. She enjoys sharing the deep work of the body not only as an artist but also as an instructor of dance, Gyrotonic Exercise® & Pilates.

Alexandra Romanyshyn (she/they) is a Seattle-based dancer and philosophy professor. Their work centers questions of identity, disability, and the self, stemming from their own experience of chronic illness and its complicated relationship to dance. They have performed in dance festivals including Full Tilt, Seattle International Dance Festival, and Seattle Festival of Dance and Improvisation.

Maisy Neill (she/her) and Leah Russell (she/they) are friends and collaborators—this is their debut as GLITTER & GRIME. The duo is passionate about exploring feminine rage and resilience and breaking expectations of what it means to be a woman in a patriarchal society. Through story-telling, they investigative a practice that explores rigor and physical challenge. Both artists are highly inspired by club and rave culture, and the transformative healing that comes with sweating to a beat in community.