CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Review: Her’s A Queen and DEEP Aerobics

Neal Medlyn strips pop stardom naked

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 10, 2009 at 11:00AM 0 Comments

Photo: Kenneth Aaron, Courtesy of PICA

Neal Medlyn and Pea Pod search for pure milky whiteness.

Within ten minutes, Neal Medlyn’s exploding candy g-string struck me in the chest. But honestly, how else would a mock Britney Spears tantrum end?

Medlyn, whose previous pop deconstructions include Kanye West in the collaboration “Why Won’t You Let Me Be Great!!!” and Prince in “Neal Medlyn’s Unpronounceable Symbol,” took on the image of arguably the most important female pop act of this past decade, Britney Spears, in “Her’s A Queen,” part one of his Britney/Hannah Montana epic (his words, not mine).

He began as Britney circa 2005 to 2008—insane, strung out, generally off-putting. Strutting around in a nightie, he cried out non-sequiturs such as, “Hello Sacramento!” “All I wanna do is drink beer and cause damage,” and another line that this family-friendly site can’t print (but can link to easily). Carmine Covelli, his drummer in other productions, pranced around the stage in inside-out shorts and a hat shaped like a bear acting out the part of paparazzi, snapping photographs that were displayed on a screen behind them. Then Medlyn launched into screaming rendition of Spears’ newest hit (and one of the least veiled double-entendres in pop history) “If U Seek Amy” over a new metal mix. As the song came to a close, Medlyn lifted up his nightie, exposing his candy thong, and ripped it off, causing candy shrapnel to pelt the audience, and then did a hand-stand to expose his penis as Medlyn demonstrated that most infamous aspect of the pop breakdown: the endless barrage of pantyless paparazzi photos. Basically, Medlyn did everything short of shaving his head and beating up an SUV with an umbrella in reenacting Britney’s breakdown.

After a wrestling match between Covelli and Medlyn, the show took on the surreal tone it would use for the rest of its duration; a fallen pop star version of Alice in Wonderland. Covelli, as a bear spirit guide/child of Medlyn named Pea Pod, aids in Medlyn’s journey to find purity, that great milk whiteness, a nostalgic time that probably never existed to begin with. Through this, they interlocked their bodies, and even had a purity ring ceremony with an audience-participation cuddle party. This is where the show somewhat stalled for me. If the point was to satirize the over-the-top Christian bent that pop music has recently taken and the sexual marketing of pop music through virginity (the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana, Britney Spears’ early career), it was made well, as Medlyn illustrated the absurdity of the purity ring and the cuddle party expertly, but the joke overstayed its welcome and the point was long made before the performance moved on.

After this, though, the experience became much more hallucinatory, as Medlyn left Pea Pod, which caused Covelli to break into a fuzz-backed performance of Justin Timberlake’s Britney break up classic, “Cry Me A River,” a song which marked both severely damaged Britney’s viability as a pop star, and launched Timberlake to the SNL-hogging force of nature he is today. After this, Medlyn stabbed Pea Pod in the stomach, causing a stream of Bit o’ Honey candies to fall out (he’s a bear, you see, so his stomach would be filled with honey).

It got pretty hazy after that as Medlyn returned to Britney train wreck mode, doing “Gimme More” covered in rubber snakes in an homage to another famous Britney performance and eventually realizing his folly with Pea Pod which led to a raucous “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

Medlyn did an incredible job of analyzing depths of Britney’s pop star psyche that I doubt she ever even realizes she has. His Texan drawl even helped to add an air of authenticity to the proceedings, as it only seems right that a Southerner could portray Spears. Most importantly, though, did he do justice to Britney’s media-fueled rise to fame and subsequent downfall? Completely.

Following that performance was Miguel Gutierrez, who collaborated with Medlyn on the acclaimed Last Meadow, and his Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics aka DEEP Aerobics. This consisted of Gutierrez dressed as an Jazzercise-ready version of Dr. Frank N. Furter leading a group of TBA-goers in their eighties athletic apparel best in a series of body-movement activities, such as jumping around, self-fondling, and parades throughout the theater. Basically, if DEEP Aerobics were a class offered locally, it would be knock out kickball as Portland’s next great excrcise fad.

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One Night Only: Echo Gap

video works from 9 Portland artists

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 09, 2009 at 12:00PM 1 Comments

Echo Gap. A Video Show curated by Modou Dieng.

Tonight is Echo Gap, a one-night show of video art by ten Portland-based artists curated by WorkSound’s Modou Dieng at Valentine’s (232 SW Ankeny) at 8:30 PM. Artists include Arnold Kemp, the new chair of PNCA’s MFA program, Jeff Jahn, critic and editor of PORT, PNCA professors David Eckard and Stephen Slappe who have work respectively in Call + Response at Museum of Contemporary Craft and PICA’s TBA:09 Festival right now, Kelly Rauer, who just did a very good installation at The Manor group show, plus Sari Carel, Posie Currin, Sean Carney, and Hannah Piper Burns.

In the context of the video work currently on display at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival, it will be interesting to see what Portland brings to the party. Looking forward to it.

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This Ain’t No Chewing Gum

Kalup Linzy onstage at the Works

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 09, 2009 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Photo: Courtesy of PICA, photographed by Wayne Bund

Never underestimate the power of Labisha. Kalup Linzy, in a sundress and a dark wig, grabbed a hold of the audience at Washington High School and never let them go. There was standing room only for a half hour before the show even started, as everyone crowded in to see the artist who, judging by almost every piece of promotional material, is the de facto spokesman for this year’s festival.

He opened with “Sampled and LeftOva,” which sounded like a lost track from Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and Inner Visions days. Instead of the heavy auto-tune, record scratches, and vocal distortions of the recorded version, his live performance was boiled down to the lyrics and the often sad, hilarious, and poignant story he told.

This continued through the rest of the show, too. Linzy moved through soul and funk during the show, singing from the perspectives of his Conversations wit de Churen characters, and reverently sticking to the conventions of the genres he sang in. He sang a parody of Otis Redding, “Sitting on the Edge of My Couch,” about waiting for a man to come over and closed with a cover of Tina Turner’s version of “Proud Mary.” The music of the original songs sounded like something you’ve already heard in your childhood—each could just have easily been sung by Aretha Franklin, Beyoncé, or Diana Ross (the double-entendre soaked lyrics from the perspective of a gay man would make quite a Whitney Houston performance).

Just as the Churen series is a loving twist on the conventions of a soap opera, portraying the raunchiness of real phone conversations, Linzy’s lyrics often cut to the chase where a normal R & B song would dance around the issue. Instead of using euphemisms to describe why a man is no good, Linzy just says what we’re all thinking: F*** you. Who asks “what’s love got to do with it?” They think what Linzy sings: “What an a-hole.”

While much of the vocal disguising and manipulation present in his videos and recorded work was stripped away live, some of it persisted in a voice modulator in pianist Ben Darwish’s mic. As Linzy would sing about a no-good trade, Darwish would come in as the male character in the song with a put-down speaking with a parodically masculine low voice. For the best number, “Chewing Gum,” which is sung from the perspective of several Churen characters as a conversation about a night out, Linzy invited audience members to come sing the refrain from the female character’s view, “This ain’t no chewing gum,” using the high-pitched modulation. The funny part about Linzy’s modulation is how normal it seems now. To an audience in 2002, maybe, it could distract a listener’s attention. Listen to the radio today, though: Black Eyed Peas and Kanye West are using the same voice distortion effects that Linzy’s been using for years, making them into integral parts of hit records. Linzy’s technique to parody mainstream music and separate himself from it has ironically become one of this decade’s defining sounds.

Through the voice changes, the costume changes, and the wig changes, Linzy had the goals of a true performer in mind. He simply wanted the people who came to the Works to have as good a time in the audience as he was having on stage. Rest easy, Mr. Linzy—we did.

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Review: robbinschilds C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate exprience)

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 09, 2009 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

View Slideshow » Illustration:

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

View Slideshow » Illustration:

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

Today at 1 PM is the last day to see robbinschilds C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate exprience) at The WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. Take a late lunch to see this duo’s performance which I am hoping will use various spaces in and around the Washington High School building, since the first of three performances they did took place in the room in which their piece of the same name created with A.L. Steiner is installed.

Let’s start with that installation. A carpeted geodesic dome is cut away to reveal a pile of television sets displaying video of a rainbow color-coded contemporary dance travelogue. The two dancers, Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins, dressed in bright monochrome perform movement sequences in a series of locations shot so beautifully that quarry, freeway, canal, parking lot, desert make equally cinematic backdrops for movement that is mechanical, mundane, joyful, but most often executed with a kind of flat, matter-of-factness (and yes, I know I’ve used that descriptor twice in two days). In blue, the dancers flop backward onto floating mattresses in a pool then flip over into the water while on another television they crawl out of the surf. In purple they lie prone on a great rock reaching across one another, retreating. In red, they meander slowly through a desert landscape or stand at the edge of a freeway performing an interlocking mechanical arm movement. In yellow they run hand-in-hand down a road. In white, they dance in a parking lot at night. In green, they curl of in the scoop of a tractor or walk across a downed tree in a forest. Sometimes two televisions at opposite ends of the pile show two blue segments simultaneously, so the pool and ocean segments might run concurrently. Sometimes, the monitors show simply a solid bright color, sometimes a windblasted rock or pile of junked cars absent dancers. Sometimes the footage is run backward or sped up. The result is a crazy quilt of American landscape and movement that responds directly to the warm rock or cold sand on which it is performed.

robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner: C.L.U.E.
09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA
Photo by CaroleZoom

The juxtapositions of images on the different televisions are as interesting as the movement sequences in their environments. And the soundtrack by Kinski that ranges from rockin’ to atmospheric colors (!) our experience of each dance fragment because it loops at a different rate than the videos. A bouncy dance (hot pink) on a deserted highway reads as exuberant with a rocking song and hopeful/melancholy with a moodier track.

This installation is one of the best pieces at The WORKS and one of the more interesting examples of dance on film I’ve seen in that it succeeds at capturing site-responsive dance while creating a viewing experience that exceeds that of viewing document because of its multiple channel presentation.

The performance we saw in the space on Monday was much more contact improv-y and task based than the work shown in the videos. The dancers (aqua) began by slowly laying out all of the costumes in a rumpled rainbow across the floor in front of the installation. Contact improvisation? The dancers worked on the floor each responding the the touch or movement of the other. Task-based? One highlight was one dancer supporting the other as she traveled all the way around the classroom, walking on the chalkboard tray. It was thoughtful, connected dance that set a few rules then responded to its situation, including a room crowded with people who sometimes became part of the dance. It definitely made me want to see more, which is why I’m headed back to The WORKS today at 1 PM.

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Review: Robert Boyd’s Conspiracy Theory

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 08, 2009 at 04:00PM 1 Comments

Conspiracy Theory, Robert Boyd. still.

Robert Boyd’s two-channel video work, Conspiracy Theory, collages found footage concerning conspiracy theories on AIDS, the New World Order, UFO’s and 9/11 set to a happy dance track. There are plenty of talking heads warning of secret master plans and predicting doom cut in with footage from sci-fi movies, the planes hitting the Twin Towers, and other newsreel-esque snippets.

Boyd’s work is currently on view at PNCA‘s Feldman Gallery for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival.

I was instantly reminded of Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99: Alien Anomalies Under America which deals with similar themes of conspiracy, fear, control, applied to a different topic: American imperialism in Central America. Baldwin’s 1991 film used found footage (more interesting found footage) to create a story of aliens taking refuge under the earth’s surface.

Brody’s aims are more limited, essentially offering a buffet menu mashup of conspiracy theories as delivered by their proponents and occasionally illustrated.

The big reveal comes in footage of Mario Savio, the 1960’s Berkeley activist, here sounding like a 1930’s labor organizer: “There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part; you can’t even passively take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who own it that unless you are free the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

The piece pivots on this (inspired) speech. Boyd is half criticizing the conspiracy kooks (“And that was the first time I was abducted by an alien.”) and half saying the kooks may be kooky but they’ve got one thing right: “forces” are controlling the “machine” and at least the kooks are doing something about it. Are you?

I haven’t been reading the interviews curator Kristan Kennedy has done with her artists before I write about their work. This time I did. Boyd isn’t interviewed, but submits a list of ten films, a list he calls “Conspiracy Countdown.” It is more than odd that Baldwin’s film doesn’t make this list which offers both documentary (I was tempted to put that in quotation marks") and feature film. Is it possible that Boyd is not aware of the film that seems to have directly inspired his own?

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Review: Brody Condon’s Without Sun

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 08, 2009 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Without Sun, Brody Condon. 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA. Photo by CaroleZoom

“This is going to be the best video ever,” says one of the “actors” in Brody Condon’s video Without Sun, now on view at the WORKS at Washington High School for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival. “I wish it would stop ’cause I want to just watch it.”

The “it” he is referring to is his experience having taken an unnamed psychedelic drug and turned on the video camera. Brody Condon has edited together footage found on the Internet of “individuals on a psychedelic substance.” They roll on the ground or kneel flopped over a sofa or face the camera and fidget. They moan, they laugh, they talk in circles. Whatever else is going on, they are clearly experiencing a disconnection between mind and body.

In Sunday’s live performance of Without Sun at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College, Condon made the inspired choice of a further disconnection: actor Russell Edge performed the voice and dancer Linda Austin performed the movement from the video. The only prop was a white cube. There was no soundtrack. Edge stands behind Austin, his face is expressive as he yells, mutters, queries incoherently, and laughs maniacally. As she wove her arms and body through the movements Austin held her face expressionless: when Edge laughed, Austin’s body convulsed but her face remained placid. Both Edge and Austin were perfect choices here, Austin because she was able to keep “dance” out of this and matter-of-factly execute the movements, and Edge because he was able to capture this range of roles pretty brilliantly.

These layered disconnections between body and voice and even emotion and expression further exaggerate the user-initiated disconnect via psychedelics. At the same time, bringing an audience into the room with these stand-ins for the “actors” plays up the void between those who recorded and uploaded the original footage and the audiences they might have imagined for that footage of their highly personal experiences.

While viewing the video feels like partnering with the “actors” in their own self-initiated exploitation, viewing the performance made space for me to appreciate the pacing, humor, and sly juxtapositions of Condon’s editing.

Naming the piece for Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Condon is suggesting that his piece deals with travel, memory, perception. He presumably refers in a facile way to “trip,” but more interestingly to the desire to turn on the video in the first place to record the experience—to provide an objective, external version of events that the “actor” can compare with his or her interior version or memory. “I just want to watch it.” Consider the gaps between any subjective version of events and the events themselves made acute under these circumstances.

Best line of the piece: “’Cause my hair is cold so some are going to be like that.”

See Without Sun at the WORKS at Washington High School, SE 12th and Stark.

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Between Us

TBA: Tyler Wallace & Nicole Dill at The Works

Posted by: Alexis Rehrmann on Sep 07, 2009 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

I walked up to the WORKS this evening and settled onto a cold patch of sidewalk behind Washington High School to wait for newly BFA’ed PNCA graduates Nicole Dill and Tyler Wallace to drive up.

Today, the two woman drove around Portland, performing Between Us. They recorded the car trip with a live-broadcast webcam at betweenuslive.com. At 9:01 the little compact car pulled into the grass lot behind the WORKS building.

Their car trip, and the conversation inside, was now broadcast movie-screen size on the side of a large truck behind them.

The TBA description of Between Us tells us that these two young artists are interested in “interrogating the ways in which staying connected impacts the fluid dichotomies between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism.”

I mean, sure. I get that.

Wallace and Dill have captured those dichotomies by playing with scale: the small-screen grainy voyeurism of the webcam, the large-screen glamour of the projection, and the warmth of two figures illuminated in the glow of a front cab light.

But the best parts of this project, I thought, were found outside that conceptual explanation. It was the late-night-slumber-party, last-day-of-camp feeling brought on by the setting and the dialogue.

The audience drifted out across the lawn, a bit bundled against the newly chilly fall night and hushed in the dark, as if we’d all stayed up late to see a movie at the drive-in.

The dialogue between Dill and Wallace I found refreshingly guileless: kitchen-sink stories about middle school embarrassments, first kisses, grandparents, best friends … the types of stories, those partial secrets from our pasts, that seems to only get told in a surplus of time: on road trips, at slumber parties, around campfires.

We tell them to new friends and old, to lovers and strangers. There was something meditative and gentle in listening to Dill and Wallace tell theirs to us—not at all alone in the dark.

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Tags: Theater

Review: locust’s Crushed

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 07, 2009 at 08:00PM 0 Comments

locust: crushed 09.07.09 at the Works 2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA Photo by CaroleZoom.

The opening of locust’s crushed Monday evening at the WORKS for PICA’s TBA:09 Festival featured a video of a hopping locust crushed beneath the boot of a man…followed by two dancers on the floor jerking back and forth like…crushed locusts? This is the only movement in the piece that strays from the main movement vocabulary of a kind of show-hop, the equivalent of hip-hop with jazz hands, hip-hop as filtered through Paula Abdul and/or countless high school dance squads. It’s entertaining, energetic dance, often executed in unison. Danced ably by bodies that knew ballet before breakbeats, it’s less surprising than you’d think that the choreography includes petit battement downstairs while upstairs you might see the one-arm, crank-it-up-and-down or the Morris Day double-arm squawk.

Zeke Keeble does some fine beat-boxing, and choreographer Amy O’Neal clearly has an affinity for hip-hop, which is why segments like the dance-off that devolves into faux violence—one part Soul Train Line, one part West Side Story dance fight—are so troubling. Witness a contemporary b-boy “battle,” and there is good-natured posturing around the pit where the dancers throw down. The dancers are aware, as we are, that this posturing is a watered-down, play-acting version of the kind of violence that hip-hop has tried to replace with words (whether the braggadocio coming out of the dozens of Run-DMC or LL Cool J to didacticism of KRS-One or Chuck D) and dance: from the b-boying that lives on to crumping today (if you haven’t seen the film Rize, do it). In appropriating what was originally an urban black dance form and having the “battle” devolve into pantomimed violence (repeatedly), locust embarrassingly plays into common stereotypes of violent urban youth and comes off not only dissing a form they clearly appreciate, but the community it springs from as well.

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Erased James Franco

An actor, a leather chair, a fern, and a prosthetic leg

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 07, 2009 at 02:00PM 4 Comments

James Franco answers another phone call in Erased James Franco.

There’s a phrase that popular TV chef Gordon Ramsay always uses on the British version of his show Kitchen Nightmares. He walks into some inn with a stone facade with a name like the Pusslewick Arms (you see, the title always has to have the suffix “-wick” and end in Arms) and sees a single chef working in a grease-stained kitchen, dropping individual serving bags of lamb in a boiling pot and plating it by scooping the skin off the top of some four-day-old gravy. Ramsay asks how much this restaurateur is charging for this dish of plastic lamb and days-old gravy. The response usually is a ridiculous amount, around £15 ($30 or so), to which Ramsay wipes his nose with his forearm, furrows his brow and incredulously asks this question: “Are you taking the piss?”

That was my response to Erased James Franco.

Honestly, I think Franco and director Carter’s (no other name; just Carter) main endeavor was to take the piss during this movie, much in the same way Rauschenberg did with his “Erased de Kooning.” Of course, a major difference between the works is Rauschenberg did his erasing on a work from arguably the greatest living artist at the time, while Carter works with James Franco, whose most critically acclaimed individual work was in an action pot comedy. It’s not that Franco is a bad actor (he’s actually quite good), it’s just that erasing him doesn’t quite have the same effect. If this work were done with, say, Daniel Day-Lewis, then you’d see something as off-putting and magnetic as Carter wanted this to be.

The movie itself has no narrative structure. It simply is Franco with a series of props: a red leather upholstered chair, a desk, a brass statue of a head (always turned away from the camera), balloons, a fern, a Franco-created painting, glasses of water, several telephones, and a prosthetic leg. Much of it consists of Franco answering the phones, listening to some barely audible lines, giving a grunt or sigh as a response, and then hanging up. As a seminar in acting through grunts, sighs, and facial expressions, it succeeded.

Then he would take this seminar to other daily activities such as drinking water. He would pick up a glass with a whole hand, then with only a few fingers, and then saddle-horn style spilling the water all over his face in the process. He would then show us the many ways one can eat crackers. I wondered to myself if he would also act out going to the bathroom. The next scene, he was sitting in the chair, looking at the camera, squirming, grunting, and breathing hard for a bit, and then let out a sigh of relief. My question was answered.

This work was an endurance test for the audience. More than 20 people walked out of the screening I attended, and you could see why. The four-minute sequence where Franco rotates a chair 360 degrees was like the Paul Rudd clean-up scene from Wet Hot American Summer but not played for laughs. The sequence where the camera follows Franco as he walks down a hall and through a doorway, then abruptly stops at a wall is repeated nine times. They were daring us to leave, it seemed. They acknowledged that they were making us watch a guy just walk into a wall over and over again. I stayed due to simple morbid curiosity and the hope that they would give us shirts on our way out of the theater with “I sat through Erased James Franco and all I got was this stupid shirt” written across the front.

Staying would pay off by the end, though. As Franco acted out parts as Rock Hudson and Julianne Moore from other movies, moving through the monologues and wrenching emotion from every word, it was a disconcerting effect—someone who has been so flat and inactive for the past hour suddenly feels and there’s no context as to why. The end is a culmination, as Franco finally stops giving the camera furtive glances with grunts, and he looks directly through the camera out at the audience and repeats the words, “I love you.”

At its most successful, Erased James Franco mined emotion from little to no context at all. At its worst, it was a guy sitting around showing us how to eat crackers.

Which brings me back to Chef Ramsay’s question. Were Franco and Carter taking the piss? I certainly hope they were. If the film was meant to mess with the audience and their expectations, forcing them to squirm in their seats as Franco holds a flashlight in his mouth as he writes on notebook paper for five minutes, and ask them how much nothing they are willing to sit through, it wildly succeeded. If they were actually serious about that, then Erased James Franco was one of the most self-indulgent works I’ve ever seen.

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TBA at The Works: Weekend Overview

Posted by: Kaitlyn Evans on Sep 06, 2009 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Photo: Keri Miller

Waiting in line…

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

Waiting in line…

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

Outside Washington High School.

View Slideshow » Photo: Joshua Schield

“C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner.

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

“Movements” by Ethan Rose.

View Slideshow » Photo: Keri Miller

“Movements” by Ethan Rose.

The past couple of days have been filled to the brim with PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival. I have been reporting from primarily the Works, located in Southeast Portland’s old, abandoned, run-down, and downright awesome Washington High School.

First, on the location of the Works, I must say that it really is an inspired and clearly well-thought-out venue for this festival. For months and months I have driven by it and thought to myself what an interesting, spooky building it was—it’s always had an inexorable pull. Once inside the school it became even more clear to me that this was the kind of place I could learn in. The building has a sort of intriguing and complex nature to it. Simple classrooms were transformed into multilayered and multifunctional, thought-provoking art exhibits. Rooms somehow transformed into new rooms and other rooms, different sizes, different shapes, different moods.

Night No. 1 of TBA at the Works and night No. 2 offered completely different experiences and elicited nearly opposite responses from me. Night No. 1 was this amazing party and celebration—there were people literally everywhere. On night No. 1 I made my way around the first floor of installations and exhibits. What caught my eye more than anything else was the “C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner. Featuring a group of multisized television sets, set inside an almost tentlike geometric shell structure, this installation was not only visually striking, but also quite powerful. While some of the sets presented only singular and static colors, setting the mood and the tone, others played videos of robbinschilds, two movement artists from New York, moving within the space and environments in which they are set and creating a more interactive environment for the viewers.

(Note: Come see them tonight at TBA at the Works for a live performance! See you there at 10:30.)

The night ended with a performance by Gang Gang Dance, the experimental and divergent group from Brooklyn, NY. The school’s auditorium was an interesting place to hold such a show, adding a sort of “watching an art exhibit” element. Even though when it really comes down to it, that is what all music and art does to its audience, this was different than any performance I have ever seen. While the dancing hippies tended to occupy the front of the auditorium, the rest of us were either standing bobbing our heads trying to figure how one moves to this music, or sitting awe-inspired glued to our chairs. I suppose this is to be expected at an event that merges such varying age groups, but more than anything I saw it as a positive and interesting music viewing experience. Gang Gang Dance is really doing something different, something distinct and interesting, and doing it without any air of pretentiousness, which is very refreshing. By the end of the night everyone seemed to be in full-out dance and celebration mode, thankful that TBA had finally arrived.

Now, for night No. 2 of TBA at the Works I had a more personal, introspective experience. I began night No. 2 roaming around the first floor of exhibitions, as I had done the previous night. Once again, I was only particularly drawn to the “C.L.U.E.” exhibit by robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner; soon I was rushed into the auditorium to see Portland’s very own Explode Into Colors, featuring dancing and choreography by Jane Paik, aka Janet Pants, and the multimedia visual/audio presentation by Chris Hackett of Los Moustachios. It was certainly an interesting collaboration and one that I have a deep respect for. It is impressive when a band ventures outside of what they traditionally do and attempts to incorporate multilayered forms of artistic expression. Thus, no matter what my thoughts are on the end production of the piece, I thought that the concept and the intention were meaningful and creative.

There were, however, moments throughout this show when I was craving something more. So, I snuck out of my seat and decided to venture onto the second floor and check out what it had to offer. Happy that I did, because I came across a little gem—“Movements” by Ethan Rose. As described by PICA, this “sound installation consists of over one hundred altered music boxes, carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment.” The feeling of being inside this wonderland is hard to verbalize but, for me, brought me back to childhood with visions of perfectly beautiful dancing ballerinas. While there is a strong time-based element to this installation, it had a more authentic and more spontaneous feeling than anything else I saw. I was particularly glad to have had this experience on night No. 2, when TBA was less crowded and the Explode Into Colors show was happening, because having no one else around made this installation even more magical.

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Micro Review: Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment

out of the comments/into the light

Posted by: Lisa Radon on Sep 06, 2009 at 09:00AM 2 Comments

Our Editor-in-chief Randy Gragg wrote following micro review of The Shipment at PICA’s TBA:09 Festival in the comments on another Culturephile post. I decided to let it get some air in its own post:

Randy: FYI, Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment stands among my top 5, maybe #1, TBA experiences ever. This Pullman-raised, Korean playwright’s exploration of racial stereotypes was like watching the love-child of Michael Jordan and Bill T. Jones do triple lutzes through an Iraqi minefield for a backboard-shattering reverse dunk. Never have I laughed so hard while squirming so uncomfortably my own stews (or, appropos of Douglas Scott Streeter’s opening monologue, “poop pile”) of white, liberal self-denial. From the opening dance to to a shining acapella “spiritual” of modern black life to the final comedy of manners, it was as polished as anything I’ve ever seen at TBA and dangerous as a razor.

Interview with Young Jean Lee

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TBA Night 2: Explode Into Colors, Janet Pants, and Chris Hackett

Posted by: Robert Runyon on Sep 05, 2009 at 06:00PM 1 Comments

Photo: Julia Kepler

Now that was completely unexpected. Coming into this show, I knew little to nothing about the performers. I had listened to Explode Into Colors, liked the music, and decided that was the draw. According to PICA, Janet Pants was “punk rock in dance form” and Chris Hackett (who also goes by the handle of Los Moustachios) was a video wizard. Maybe he was able to conjure Super 8 from straw or something. Still, The Works called me.

I was happy I followed that call. The combination impressed. It could be a personal bias (toward film), but Hackett’s work absolutely stole the show. Using a series of animated vignettes, each one recalling a wisp of a memory, the films simply would not let the audience go, whether it was the story of tutoring a girl that was obsessed with horses, or Yellow Submarine‘s hand of God coming down to take someone on a journey through the cosmos. Often the issue with a collection of short films is the lack of persistence of a unifying theme; that wasn’t a problem here. Though each story was radically different than the last subject-wise, it was easy to tell it was all part of the same whole. The greatest shame about this piece is that it won’t be on again during TBA.

Janet Pants didn’t exactly recall punk rock in dance form, but definitely turned in solid work. When she adhered more to the narrative of the video, the entire enterprise succeeded, such as her entrance as the girl obsessed with horses, or a dreamlike dance after a story about taking down trees. When she started going off on her own tangents, it became tiring to watch. My friend (who is a dancer) thought her practice of doing the same move for over a minute straight was half-hearted modern dance.

Finally, Explode Into Colors was as good as I hoped it would be. The driving percussion (with two drummers!) impressed and made a great soundtrack for both the film and dancing, and the bass (Was it a bass? It was a six-string tuned low. Does that still make it a bass?) playing stole the show every time it came up. The best portion of the show was the dance after the Beatles God hand short, and the bassist stole that moment with her meandering bass lines.

Overall, the show was a success, and Hackett proved to be an artist I’ll watch for in the future.

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