CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Review: 4 Men Only

At Conduit Dance Studio March 2–3

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 03, 2012 at 01:00PM 1 Comments

Photo: Wayne Bund

4 Men Only, a showcase of four solos by four male choreographers at Conduit, began as a phone call from the New York dancer Bob Eisen. He was coming through town and wanted to perform; was anything happening? So was born a rough but rewarding night of dance that is perhaps better thought of as a workshop bringing together four choreographers who share more than just their gender.

The first half of the night—featuring first Gregg Bielemeier, a long-time Portland dancer and a founder of Conduit, followed by Eisen, a similarly prominent Chicago and now New York dancer and co-founder of the performance/workspace Links Hall Studio—was the rougher half. Both men’s performances dealt with their advancing age. Bielemeier paid a tongue-in-cheek, old queen tribute to Joni Mitchell before transitioning into a somewhat confounding, lip-synching, drag performance to the rebellious teen metal of Khz’s “Let It Go,” which embodied all the awkwardness of watching your gay uncle do drag at a family reunion. Eisen went through a somewhat traditional contemporary dance to a Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration, but roughed up the edges, like holding a deep lunge until his body shook. The whole time his gaunt face contorted gruesomely to the song with the expressiveness of a claymation parody of an old man.

Both spoke to the struggle an aging body poses in a profession dependent on physical vigor and acuity—a rich question, indeed, although both felt rather long and underthought. Ironically, both men also literally had trouble with when and how to exit the stage, though I’m guessing it was more a production kink than a deeper metaphor.

Whereas the first half lingered on age, the second and more successful half probed love. Meshi Chavez, in white pants and a dusting of baby powder, continues to develop as a Butoh performer. His slow, minimalist performance, consisting mostly of minor movements of the arms and face, seemed pulled from him by some grander exterior force that locked our focus just as it coaxed him across the stage. Most captivating was his face, which possessed a certain newborn quality, expressing a deeply existential yet indeterminate intensity that bordered pain, wonder, and intensity—fitting for what was ultimately a love poem titled “Une fleur pour mon amour.”

Then Greg Sax turned the night on its head with an athletic, multimedia performance titled “what is not still…?” that played with the scripts we read during the early stages of a relationship. Diving onto stage, he proceeded to intermix highly physical dance with dialogue that progressed through the stages of flirtation with an offstage interest: “Hi!”, “What kind of music do you like?”, “Is this working for you?”, “I just want you to be happy.” At each stage, the music shifted and he unrolled a narrow screen from the ceiling upon which an image of himself dancing was projected, until the real Sax was dancing with three projected Saxes to a mashup of three Gillian Welch songs—the real Sax in a state of romantic befuddlement, saying, “I think I see you. And I like it. I think.” Though still bumpy, the piece was conceptually and visually rich and has great potential.

For more about Portland arts, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Dance, Review, Modern Dance

Barak Marshall

The award-winning Israeli choreographer of MONGER talks about storytelling, overcoming ethnic tensions, and helping audiences “get” dance.

Posted by: Aaron Scott and Anne Adams on May 14, 2011 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

On Tuesday, White Bird Dance will present Barak Marshall’s MONGER, a dynamic physical-theater piece that depicts a group of servants scrapping and scuttling to please their abusive mistress. Culturephile caught up with MONGER’s creator, Barak Marshall, for a little interview about this intriguing piece, and the philosophies that inform his larger vision.

The detailed gestures in MONGER really mimic the movement of people who are “on the clock.” Jumpy and perfunctory. Where did you pick up this repertoire of gestures?

I see movement as words so I search for the gesture or phrase that expresses the emotion, word or subtext that I am trying to get the dancer to “speak” with his or her body. Much of the gestural work is drawn from the daily pedestrian as well as folkloric gestures of my own Yemenite-Jewish heritage.

The choreography in MONGER doesn’t seem to have an obvious principal dancer, and yet the woman in the reddish dress seems to be the de-facto principal, demanding just SLIGHTLY more attention than the rest. Is this an expression of a natural hierarchy or “pecking order” that emerges even among supposed equals in a work force? (Is the woman in the red dress a sort of “alpha-maid?”)

There is no principal. I just created various stories on the different dancers. But as the work evolved, her character’s story became one of the more prominent through-lines

You’ve spoken in past interviews about the Isreali/Arab rift, and how your company’s performances have been accepted by audiences on both sides. What aspects of your work communicate with both audiences?

Unfortunately, we don’t have many opportunities to perform for Arab audiences. However, on my first tour abroad we performed for a predominantly Arab/pro-Arab audience. This was in 1995 following the Oslo Accords. When it was announced that we were about to come on stage, an audience of 1200 people started chanting, “intifadah! Intifadah! Intifadah!” Needless to say, we were quite frightened but we decided go on with the show. The piece that we performed was my first work, Aunt Leah, which was a piece I built in memory of my aunt. The piece contains a lot of songs and texts in Arabic since my mother’s family are Jews from Southern Yemen. I open the work with a song in Arabic and the audience started quieting down. In the second part of the work, my mother accompanies the dance on darbuka (Arabic drum) and ends it with an ululation—several members of the audience ululated back. The third section of the work contains a lot of sayings, curses and words of wisdom in Arabic and many of the audience members understood the Arabic and began laughing at the humorous parts. The final section of the work is danced to a piece my the famous Pakisani singer, Nusrat Fatah Ali Kahn. The audience began dancing in the aisles and at the end of the show they gave us a standing ovation. This is one example of how art can speak beyond political lines.

In some sectors of the modern dance community, there seems to be a disregard or even a disdain for narrative—and yet your work has a strong narrative thread. What do you gain by framing a dance work in a “storytelling” context, and what do you risk? How do you answer those who want to distance dance from theater?

When I tell people I am a choreographer many respond with a pained expression and say, “Oh…I don’t really get dance.” I agree. For me, dance must tell a story just like a play, film or novel does. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to communicate clear ideas to an audience. When you decide to tell a story you risk becoming too literal or not being true to the narrative arc that you aspire to present. While I do have an appreciation for post modern dance, sometimes choreographers rely on the abstract to cover up unfinished thoughts and one is left with a case of the emperor’s new clothing.

MONGER will be presented by White Bird Dance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall on Tuesday, May 17. For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Theater, Dance, Interview, Modern Dance,

Review: tEEth’s Home Made

tEEth’s award-winning piece explores the glories and ravages of a long-term relationship. It returns from an acclaimed touring run for a one-night-only performance on Saturday, April 16.

Posted by: Aaron Scott and Anne Adams on Apr 14, 2011 at 02:00AM 0 Comments

tEEth’s Keely McIntyre and Noel Plemmons reinvent the reacharound.

Since Home Made premiered in Portland last November, the piece has toured several cities, scored a big win from Seattle’s On The Boards, and been added to summer 2011 festival bills in Prague, Texas, and Salt Lake City. But in case you missed it before it was “big,” White Bird will sponsor a one-night-only encore performance in Portland this Saturday night.

An image emerges from a blur: two giant symmetrical ultra-close-ups, a man and a woman. Two elbows, two chins. Four nostrils, and we’re almost looking up them. The pair starts to slowly caress each other’s faces, and the camera pans around under the giant stretchy white sheet on the stage, projecting a massive magnification of whatever it sees onto a screen. Hair. Knees. Random expanses of bare flesh moving in dynamic formations. Gosh. Is it hot in here?

This is Home Made —homemade intimacy, that later morphs into torpor, anger, alienation, passion…and back. The two dancers, variously clothed and nude, literally go through the motions of long-term monogamy. Sometimes they’re in sync. Sometimes they’re on autopilot. Sometimes one or both act out in a way that defies interpretation altogether—the kind of inarticulate “WTF” moment that only people who see each other often, and know each other well, ever expose. Because the dancers are virtually the same size, they easily maintain eye contact and show not only chemistry, but symmetry. Whether this is intentional, or a happy accident, it gives a sense of equality and power-balance that is rare in hetero pairings.

Though its topic is classic, this piece feels novel, strange, and sexy. Meanwhile, the music is nothing short of transcendent. Two singers, Luke Matter and Cali Ricks, provide ambient live vocals over a somber, watery piano. The audience could easily get its money’s worth from the music alone—but its marriage to movement promotes an even deeper hypnosis. Repetition, variation and symmetry ever-so-slightly disorient one’s perception of space and time, in the same way that a real makeout session would.

Fair warning, tEEth has one hell of an oral fixation. During the course of this piece, almost everything that can be stuck in the mouth, is—not just obvious parts like fingers, but more awkward fits, like chins, elbows, and whole microphones. Tongues are waggled, mouths are widely gaped, Foley-style sound effects are issued from the orifice. These tricks threaten to snap the viewer out of a moment. Maybe they say something profound, but a few just seem to scream, “Mouth!”

But tEEth’s creative masticating did not seem to fase local avant-art maven Paloma Soledad, who called the work “A must-see; beautiful, crazy, wonderful,” adding, “Thank God for people who do performance art dance! You make the world a better place.” Culturephile agrees. If not the whole world, at the very least, the week.

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Dance, Live, modern, life drawing, Modern Dance

Modern Dance Weekend

San Franciscan, Walt Whitman, ballet-infused…which will you choose?

Posted by: Anne Adams on Mar 18, 2011 at 08:00AM 0 Comments

Well, we’ve had an interesting couple of weeks when it comes to modern dance discussion. In an attempt to cover Disjecta’s three part In Site dance series, Culturephile unintentionally stumbled into a couple Big Dance Dilemmas. Further reflection only brings more questions, and hopefully there will be time soon to wrangle these into a post of their own. In the meantime, this is a busy weekend for the apparently hotly contentious art form.

Check out your options below, then feel free to comment:
What does or doesn’t pique your interest, and why?

~ Danielle Ross & Co. will host the “Alembic Series #12”: at Performance Works Northwest, joined by San Francisco company FACT/SF, which will perform its Consumption Series. Here’s a sample of the piece:

~ Lisa Degrace and Meshi Chavez will present 6 1/2 , a portrait of “a brave and terrified fool,” and Two Boys , a Walt Whitman-inspired guy-on-guy pas de deux, at mOUth (tEEth’s usual performance space)

~ Northwest Dance Project (NWDP), a relatively modern-infused, minimalist ballet company, will present two new works. Watch a video and read more info.

~ Linda Austin, a pillar of the PDX modern dance community, will perform the third part of In Site, a Saturday-afternoon series of improvised works that use Karl Burkheimer’s installation at Disjecta, as their literal and figurative platform. Austin weighed in on Culturephile last week about narrative vs. non-narrative dance performances:

I’m going to side with the idea that narrative can get in the way of the play of presence—-both for performers and witnesses/public. I like to notice things and be in the present moment. I like my senses to be sharpened like an animal in the wild. I like to let the eyes and ears roam, find pattern and beauty in odd moments, take in the reality of people just doing, who aren’t representing something that they aren’t. Like when watching someone climb a tree perhaps. Or if performers are “characters” I like when they wear the character obviously and get to shine through as themselves. I also like to let myself slip away from noticing, go off on a tangent and then come back. Having a consistent narrative through-line seems to align more easily with discursive and logocentric forms, you know, like the novel. I don’t always hate narrative in dance, but certainly, especially in more open improvisational forms, I don’t require it and at times it makes me cringe. I like the freedom of dance NOT to dwell in the sort of middle ground of pseudo-realistic psychology, i.e “acting”. Which isn’t to say narrative elements aren’t fun to play with too. Nothing is a given.
—Linda Austin

And here are some excerpts from Linda’s 2007 piece, Circus Me Around:

For more about Portland arts events, visit PoMo’s Arts & Entertainment Calendar, stream content with an RSS feed, or sign up for our weekly On The Town Newsletter!

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Tags: Modern Dance