CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Review: Gossip’s “A Joyful Noise”

Album out today and record release concert streaming live at 6:45pm!

Posted by: Julie Reposa on May 22, 2012 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Today, Portland band Gossip (formerly “The” Gossip) releases its fifth studio album, A Joyful Noise, on Columbia Records. To celebrate, the band is streaming their record release concert tonight live from NYC’s Terminal 5 beginning at 6:45pm. As if that’s not enough for the Portland powerhouse, they’ll also be on the Late Show with David Letterman tonight.

Since its formation in 1999, Gossip has evolved from riot grrl roots to bluesy garage punk to recent forays into electro-pop on 2009’s Music for Men, but along the way it has never failed to incite your body to move, whether a simple bop or all out dance. With the new album, the urge is still there, but Beth Ditto’s fierce vocals, drummer Hannah Billie’s thrashing beats, and guitarist Brace Paine’s ragged riffs have been replaced by the kind of glistening post-disco pop music that Madonna would be proud to call her own. The sweat, lust, betrayal, and blustery abandon of the earlier albums are absent, and it’s difficult to hear exactly what Billie and Paine’s contributions are due, to the pro-toolification of A Joyful Noise. It sounds like Ditto’s solo debut as a disco diva. However, it’s important to remember that since Gossip’s start 12 years ago, it’s had a battle cry that simply proclaims: “… Our mission is to make you dance, and if you’re not gonna dance, just stay at home and listen to the oldies station." Though A Joyful Noise is all nightclub glamour in place of basement punk grit, the band unequivocally stays true to this mission statement.

Beth Ditto has slowly risen to feminist-icon status because of her fierce, unapologetic persona, which is in full force here. In the very first lines of opening track "Melody Emergency," you get the feeling that Ditto is preempting the inevitable backlash by impassively purring "You got a head on your shoulders/ You got a bone on your back/ So you’re not a rock and roller/ And there is nothing wrong with that.” There’s no ambiguity with this album: it’s pure dance pop, made glaringly obvious on the polished synth, steady beats, and dramatic chorus of lead single “Perfect World. “Get A Job” features a bitter-sounding Ditto chiding spoiled rich girls, and begins with an awkward pseudo-rap that’s only slightly less uncomfortable than Liz Phair rapping on her last album. “Move in the Right Direction” is the album’s standout track: It’s a self-affirming, club-thumping disco anthem that could easily be mistaken for a Cher song (See the new video for "Move in the Right Direction" below). “Casualties Of War” starts off with a cool beat and a plucky bass riff, as Ditto’s wispy croons swell into a sugary chorus. Ditto has stated that she listened to nothing but ABBA for a whole year before making this record, and their influence is most prominent here, as well as on the down-tempo breeziness of "Into the Wild.” The album hits a lull after this, offering up a few uninspired filler tracks. It recovers near the end with the electro-funk of “Horns” and the disparate "I Won’t Play," where an indignant Ditto spews contempt at a former flame. It’s the only song on the album that recalls the brasher vibe of past albums.

Music critics will likely turn up their noses at this album, flagging it as proof of a band trying to jump ship on their designated genre for the glittery pastures of the Top 40. Longtime fans might declare this a sell out. Considering Ditto’s iconoclastic nature, though, my guess is that she doesn’t care. After all, this band never succumbed to the posturing and self-seriousness that some of their contemporaries in the punk and indie scenes chose to embrace. Gossip just promised to make you dance. Although they’ve defected from the indie/punk rock ranks to make a record that sounds half a world away from their start 13 years ago in Olympia, they still make good on their promise—this album will make you dance.

Check out the brand new video for "Move in the Right Direction" below, or stream A Joyful Noise at gossipyouth.com.

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Tags: music, Review

Review: Portland Center Stage’s Anna Karenina

Portland Center Stage’s brisk, lush production captures the spirit of the book but, thankfully, not the length. Playing through May 6

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Apr 19, 2012 at 03:00PM 0 Comments

Kelley Curran in Kevin McKeon’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, playing through May 6 at Portland Center Stage. Photo by Patrick Weishampel

Just as every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to quote the opening sentence of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, every theatrical adaptation is unhappy in its own way, too. Not to say that there aren’t many wonderful adaptations, but just that the adaptation process is a struggle that, much like a family, involves fights, oversights, and sacrifices, from which few exit unscathed.

Which is why the success of Seattle writer Kevin McKeon’s adaptation of the classic at Portland Center Stage, directed by Chris Coleman and running through May 6, is no small feat. McKeon manages to condense Tolstoy’s sprawling masterpiece about a woman whose love rattles the prison of her social situation into a brisk, ensemble-based production that captures the tragedy of the original, adds a slightly anachronistic humor, and—the gargantuan length of the original be damned—does it all with intermission in under three hours. Whew!

As quick summary, Anna Karenina, considered one of the greatest novels of all time, tells the story of a married, aristocratic Russian woman who falls in love with another man, eventually abandons her husband for him, struggles with her consequent exile from high society and inability to visit her son, and ends tragically. Meanwhile, two contrasting couples serve almost as alternate endings: Anna’s brother’s wife accepts his philandering and they move past it in a mutually agreed upon ignorance of sorts, and that wife’s sister marries a painfully honest but existentially awkward man for love and the two come to respect each other.

In order to cover all the explication of the novel, McKeon uses a clever fix of ensemble narration: one character says one line and another says the next, often taken straight from the novel. Combined with Coleman’s incredibly tight blocking—they’re 89 costume changes between the 17 actors in Act One alone!—the story unfolds like clockwork.

Fascinatingly, McKeon’s method recalls another powerful ensemble performance currently running, Portland Playhouse’s Brother/Sister Plays. While Brother/Sister’s ensemble narration creates a sense of the mythological from the everyday (read our review here), Anna Karenina’s creates an overpowering sense of inevitability—Anna cannot escape the fate of her social position no matter what she does. And it has the same unfortunate side effect of somewhat distancing the play from its emotional impact. It’s not until the end, when Anna is on stage alone with no further narration, that the emotion of the story becomes truly palpable, building to crescendo with the force of a, well, steam engine.

The grand marble pillars of the set, the intricate costumes, and the evocative lighting (designed by G.W. Mercier, Miranda Hoffman, and Ann Wrightson, respectively) are utterly gorgeous. At points, the theater appears all the world like a Maxfield Parrish painting, if he’d romanticized his fellow Victorians instead of Grecian maidens. But though the costumes are period, McKeon doesn’t make the same overture with the language, which is surprisingly modern and adds a layer of humor to the tragedy that keeps the play fresh—although I think Downton Abbey has shown that you can include zingers while staying period appropriate, as opposed to taking McKeown’s at times almost Clueless route (e.g. “Fuck the privilege”).

The humor is amplified by Keith Jochim, who practically steals the show as Anna’s husband Karenin, playing him with the emotionless dryness of a bureaucrat who doubts nothing and schedules everything—even sex. Kelley Curran, who had to learn the role in less than a week after the original actress took ill, plays Anna with an inner steel that devolves to paranoid hysteria by the end. Michael Sharon plays her lover, Count Vronsky, with turns equally seductive and slimy, devoted and selfish. And R. Ward Duffy stands out from the ensemble with affable charisma as Anna’s cheating brother, Stiva.

All in all, under Coleman’s able direction, it’s an epic, entertaining journey through a classic. We can just be thankful that McKeon wasn’t paid the same way as Tolstoy: by the word.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

Portland Cello Project: Two-Night Album Release at Doug Fir

PCP plays an all-ages matinee today at 5, followed by their second evening show at 9
—Review by Camille Grigsby-Rocca

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Apr 14, 2012 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Last night was the first in a two-night album release blowout by Portland’s prodigious, genre-defying string ensemble, Portland Cello Project. In fitting with the group’s history of cello-ifying everything from Britney Spears to Pantera, their new album, Homage, out May 1, is a collection of hip-hop covers interspersed with classical compositions.

In preview, last night’s performance included a lively rendition of Outkast’s “Hey Ya,” soulful interpretations of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” and Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” (supported by Steven Bak, who blew the audience’s collective mind with his vocal range), and covers of hip-hop tracks by artists such as Jay-Z, Lil Wayne, and Kanye West. In true hip-hop form, a vinyl edition of the album will be released on April 21, including a bonus track: long-time crowd favorite “All of the Lights.”

Jumping from the Mission Impossible theme song to celebrity-cellist Gideon Freudmann’s somber and evocative “Denmark,” the group transitioned seamlessly from genre to genre—and the audience followed eagerly, swaying silently from side to side for one song, madly jumping up and down for another, or belting out the vocals to “Rolling in the Deep” (luckily, Bak was louder). After tonight’s show, PCP hits the road, taking the cello to the people nationwide.

Portland Cello Project performing Kanye West’s "All of the Lights” at the Crystal Ballroom.

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Tags: Review, music, Doug Fir

Radiation City’s Cool Nightmare

Review by Kit Mauldin

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Apr 13, 2012 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

Singular sources can sometimes offer almost infinite inspiration to artists and musicians. Neil Young famously buys guitar after guitar for the unique songs hidden in each; British sound artist Matthew Herbert routinely selects unorthodox subjects for his dance floor experiments (his latest, One Pig, needs little elaboration). In Radiation City’s case, mining the mystique of a dying upright piano for all its worth becomes the starting point for Cool Nightmare, the follow up to last year’s acclaimed debut. Over the album’s brief duration, the band wastes no time setting scene after scene and finding a home for every filtered, fiddled-with sound coaxed from the upright’s vertical strings.

Radiation City excels at elegant dialogues between genres, effortlessly weaving Roland 808 cowbells under classic Latin rhythms; layering shoe-gaze coos over spring-reverbed jangle. “Find it of Use,” their first single (with an accompanying music video where they destroy their piano muse—see below), is a year of seasons unto itself, blooming into sunny bachelor-pad boogie, moving into a shivering, decadent, desperate sprawl for its climax, and then transitioning back again. And however much the acrobatic synth bass in “Winter Blind” sounds like it could’ve been lifted from the Menomena songbook, it effectively underpins a baroque doo-wop shuffle and then waltzes right into a big room of minor-key call and response for its powerful bridge.

Lizzy Ellison’s voice maneuvers varied terrain within the album’s short length, and, listening to her navigate and adapt, we can hear her torn between the carefree twee of any number of the superficial, insubstantial female vocalists of late and the bold clarity of earnest 70’s icons such as Joni Mitchell or Stevie Nicks. Guitarist and part-time vocalist Cameron Spies fares a little better, consistently settling into the well-worn tenor of so many of his indie-rock peers.

Cool Nightmare is a tidy statement perfectly tailored for the growing population of attention deficient files-haring junkies of Portland and beyond, sweeping us off our feet and kissing us goodnight before we even finish our lunch break.

Radiation City / Find It Of Use from Andrew Sloan on Vimeo.

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Tags: Review, music

Review: Kidd Pivot’s Dark Matters

Dancers defy physics in a mesmerizing exploration of the unknown forces that manipulate us. Tonight is closing night.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 17, 2012 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Peter Chu plays a puppeteer manipulated by his puppet. Photo: Christopher Duggan

Despite drawing inspiration from an unseen element physicists postulate to make their model of the universe work, the dancers in Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM’s new performance, Dark Matters, at the Newmark Theatre, seem entirely unencumbered by the laws of physics. Their bodies float through space and slide and roll across the ground like they’ve never known gravity or friction. “I wanted to try to find a way to make dark matter dance,” said choreographer Crystal Pite during a Q&A after the show, and dance it does.

The first half of the show tells the story of a puppeteer whose simple, humanoid creation of cardboard, tape, and pins comes to life. Expertly manipulated in a Japanese Buraku style by several dancers dressed like ninjas in black velour, the puppet becomes increasingly clingy and aggressive, until it finally attacks its maker. Puppet and puppeteer destroy each other, leaving the black-clad puppeteers to clean up. While the puppet narrative is dark and ominous—its cinematic lighting and sound design giving it the feel of a sci-fi horror film—the puppeteers quickly devolve into B-grade kung fu slapstick, ultimately tearing down the set, the lighting, and the backdrop, leaving a naked, destroyed theater.

The act ends with a hint of what’s to come: one of the black-clad puppeteers starts to pull and push the fallen original puppeteer, danced by Peter Chu, bringing him to life just as he did his puppet. Originally trained as a gymnast, Chu moves his lithe, lanky frame with impossible grace. Bending, folding, and rising like he is being pulled, isolating and floating body parts like they hang from strings, he gives complete illusion that he is a marionette danced by the puppeteer. The duet is so spectacular, his control of his body so masterful, that audible gasps and ahhs escaped from the audience.

While visually stunning and conceptually rich—Who really is puppet, and who puppeteer? What sort of unknown forces are at work pulling our strings?—the first half also felt slow and not fully thought through. The ominous nature of the puppet narrative didn’t quite mesh with the later slapstick kung fu comedy. During the Q&A, Pite said that she wanted the puppeteers to subvert and undermine the show. An intriguing idea, but I don’t think they’re quite there yet. At least, not in the first half.

The second half is a complex, mesmerizingly beautiful series of dances that further explores the themes of unknown forces, control, and manipulation. Mixing modern dance elements with freestyle, improvisational, and street/rave dance styles, the dancers manipulate themselves and each other like puppets, getting tangled up in human puzzles that are simultaneously cooperative and competitive. They flow like water, twisting around each other; popping, locking, and isolating body parts; rolling across the floor. We can hear their exhales, but their movement is so graceful and light that rarely do we hear their feet and bodies touch the ground.

In the final duet, the last black-clad puppeteer (Sandra Marìn Garci) removes her suit, and Chu reverses the roles of their last duet, manipulating and dancing this shadow that had earlier manipulated him. Slowly they begin to help each other to dance, their equally long, slender limbs pulling, twisting, and flowing around the other as something akin to love builds between them. It is a truly breathtaking and glorious performance to watch.

Few dance performances can sustain two hours, either on the part of the audience’s attention or the physical capacity of the performers. But Kidd Pivot’s expert artists—bolstered by a cinematically rich lighting design and soundscape of loops, fades, and effects—held the audience rapt, needing no strings to make our emotions and imaginations dance.

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Tags: Dance, Review

Review: Shakespeare’s R&J

A gripping adaptation that makes Romeo and Juliet fresh again. Through March 18

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 10, 2012 at 11:30AM 2 Comments

Sean Powell gives a stirring performance as the lovestruck…Mercutio? Photo by Casey Campbell

I’m not a big fan of Romeo and Juliet. Like most, I read it in high school and have seen more traditional productions and adaptations than I care to remember: Romeo and Juliet: The Musical; Romeo and Juliet Take Miami, starring Leo and Claire; Romeo and Juliet: Inspired by Gwyneth Paltrow’s Breasts; although thankfully not Gnomeo and Juliet—at least, not yet. For me, it comes down to the fact that it’s near impossible for the greatest love story ever told to rise far enough above its own overdone cliché to strike contemporary audiences with the power it no doubt once possessed.

So I don’t say this lightly: Google map Hillsboro’s Venetian Theatre, get in your car, and go see Bag&Baggage’s production of Shakespeare’s R&J before it’s over next weekend. Like no adaptation I’ve seen, it re-instills the raw, dangerous, thrilling, and emotional poignancy that the story lost somewhere between Gounod’s opera and Dire Straits’ “A lovestruck Romeo…”

The premise seems simple: four Catholic schoolboys discover a banned copy of R&J and proceed to act it out, each playing a number of roles. But playwright Joe Calarco, despite adding almost no new dialogue (the boys’ daily routine is established through simple choreographed pantomime), creates a nuanced and heart-wrenching story beneath the story.

At first, the boys attack the roles with the overacting zeal of, well, schoolboys, tossing their one copy back and forth, prancing their way through the female roles, and showing off for each other’s amusement. But quickly the story intrudes into their unexamined identities and relationships and begins to sweep them away. As Romeo and Juliet fall in love in the play, the boys playing their parts (Samuel Benedict and Phillip Berns) seem to fall, too, kissing for the first time with all the trepidation of two star-crossed young virgins at the start of their sexual awakening, lingering on each other’s lips well into the scene change, despite the shouts of “thou shalt not!” from the other two boys, who reel from the taboo.

Although an all male cast could simply be a return to the way theater was performed during Shakespeare’s time, Calarco’s play within a play introduces a homoerotic tension that creates a new subtext to everything said. In effect, two plays unfold at once, and yet the duality paradoxically seems closer to the beating heart of Shakespeare’s original than a straightforward contemporary production. Homosexuality, particularly in a religious all boy setting, creates a forbidden love that resonates with modern audiences in a way that forbidden love between warring families does not. Same sex couples today come far closer to the threat Romeo and Juliet faced of being rejected and even exiled by their families than any opposite sex couple.

Calarco doesn’t stop there, though. From the start, the boy playing both Mercutio and the Friar expresses a latent attraction to the boy playing Romeo, but then is forced to stand by and watch Romeo fall for Juliet (complex, silent drama unfolds between the boys even as they watch the scenes they’re not in). Performed with elastic, electric charisma by Sean Powell, he grows increasingly lovelorn and unhinged, and almost every line he says takes on an uncannily perfect double meaning that adds new charge. When Mercutio talks about how quickly Romeo deserted his first love, Rosaline, it’s like he’s talking about his own abandonment. And in his gripping death scene, as he casts a plague on the houses Montague and Capulet, he condemns too the boys playing Romeo and Juliet.

Meanwhile, the fourth boy, played by Ian Kane, is the sole homophobic holdout. He stands in for much of society then and now, watching with disgust as passions unfold.

Ultimately, none of the boys have the ability to deal with the dangerous intensity of the feelings the play awakens—lust, sensuality, disgust, love, hate. The play becomes so real by the end that it leaves them disheveled, sweating, and deeply changed, and the audience along with it. It’s the simple idea that a play can change a life, like Romeo and Juliet should do.

The stage is spare, but the actors fill it with such energy and zest, particularly during the grandly choreographed fight scenes, that it doesn’t for a minute feel empty. Though young, they all feel like seasoned Shakespearean actors capable of inhabiting his verse with all the added nuance Calarco’s adaptation instills, and they move with finely tuned harmony under the direction of visiting Glaswegian artist Jennifer Dick.

I understand: Hillsboro is a haul. Perhaps make an outing of it with dinner and drinks at the Venetian’s vaulted restaurant. But if you want to understand what it’s like to watch Romeo and Juliet for the first time again, untainted by all the predecessors, make the trip.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Shakespeare

Review: Red

Portland Center Stage’s bold but monochromatic production runs through March 18

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 08, 2012 at 10:00AM 1 Comments

Photo by Patrick Weishampel

We’re reaching the vibrant red peak of what the mayor may as well declare Mark Rothko Appreciation Month. Portland Art Museum’s 45-piece retrospective of the revolutionary abstract expressionist has garnered raves; Third Angle Ensemble will perform Morton Feldman’s meditative homage “Rothko Chapel” this Saturday, March 10; and Portland Center Stage’s production of Red is half way through it’s run. It’s a grand assemblage of the art, the musicality, and the personality of one of the century’s most important artists, who also happened to call Portland home during his formative teenage years in the 1910s (read Portland Monthly’s profile).

But fast forward to the late 1950s, the setting for the Tony Award-winning play Red. Rothko labors on a series of commissions for New York’s Four Seasons restaurant in his sepulchral studio on the Bowery, when he takes on a naïve but earnest young assistant, Ken (a fabrication of the playwright, John Logan). Spanning two years in one act, the play delves into the meaning of art, the role of the artist, the Oedipal changing of the artistic guard, and, to a lesser extent, the relationship between these two men in a beautifully staged production, aptly directed by Rose Riordan, that brushes between exhilarating, provocative conversation and pompous, art history-seminar pontification.

Opening with Rothko asking his assistant “What do you see?” as he stares at a painting on the fourth wall between him and the audience, Logan’s script is a combative Socratic dialogue bordering on monologue. Rothko lectures, questions, and rants on the meaning of color, the history of Western painting, and the importance of Nietzsche, Freud, and Shakespeare. But mostly he talks about himself and the purpose of his art. “Just like that, I’m a noun,” he says during one tirade against the commercialization of art bought to match a sofa. “A Rothko….It’s cheaper than a Pollack.”

Ken’s responses, at least in the beginning, function merely as commas between Rothko’s paragraphs, thin stripes between his color blocks. But as time passes, Ken learns from his disdainful master and begins to fight back, accusing Rothko of being “the high priest of art…decorating a temple of consumption,” until finally he trades places and forces Rothko to question himself instead of others.

At times, this intimate portrait of a brilliant painter feels like a sacred glimpse into the complicated relationship between a master and his work. Golden Globe-nominated actor Daniel Benzali, playing Rothko with a bombastic misanthropy that paints a thick coat of narcissism over a desperate need to be understood, captures the troubled nature of a man whose only true relationships are with his paintings—a man to whom selling a painting is like “sending a blind child into a room full of razor blades.” But after a while, his monologues sag under their own weight until it feels like you’re stuck in an art history seminar that simply won’t end.

Unfortunately, the character of Ken, played by San Franciscan actor Patrick Alperone, does little to introduce the human drama that might be the glue to Rothko’s monologues, serving mostly as a sounding board and mirror with little but a tragically absurd childhood story to flesh him out. Alparone shouts his lines with such emphasis that it feels like he’s shooting his syllables out with the staple gun he uses to stretch canvasses. When he finally does get angry, it lacks real strength since he’s been shouting all along.

The sad result for me is a play that feels ironically monochromatic, lacking the tonal and emotional variations and shifting nuance of the paintings that made Rothko famous.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t worth seeing, particularly if you’re a fan of the artist and enjoy lengthy artistic rumination. The set, designed by Daniel Meeker with lights by Diane Ferry Williams, is a layered character unto itself, where you can see the light of the day shift in the high windows, and where Rothko’s commissioned paintings progress and multiply through the play. The interstitial moments between scenes, when Ken is clearing the studio or prepping a canvas, serve as deep breathes between bombasts. One particular scene change, when all the paintings rise and shift like some giant, blood red, Abstract Expressionist, inside-out rubrics cube, is a moment of such beauty it’s almost worth the ticket price alone. And the most powerful, emotional moment in the play is a scene in which the two men prime a large white canvas with red paint in a frenzied duet of sorts set to Mozart’s Symphony No. 25 that leaves both covered in sweat and paint. Although there are no words, it seems one of the few moments where they’re truly engaging each other in dialogue. Which makes one wonder if this play, for all of its heady bluster about art, might have done better to follow the old, clichéd adage: show, don’t tell.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

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.

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Tags: Dance, Review, Modern Dance

Review: Shakespeare’s Amazing Cymbeline

Portland Center Stage’s masterful re-telling hits the plays emotional pressure points, even though the new piano-playing narrator occasionally strikes the wrong key

Posted by: Martin Patail on Feb 27, 2012 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Photo by Patrick Weishampel

For our preview of Chris Coleman’s production from our January issue, click here.

Chris Colemon’s Shakespeare’s Amazing Cymbeline succeeds in making a rather difficult play not merely accessible, but perhaps even meaningful again. The play, which debuted last month in the PCS’s Ellen Bye Studio in the Armory, is an intensely personal and intimate re-telling, eschewing the stately pageantry of so many modern Shakespeare productions and focusing instead on highlighting its emotional pressure points.

The play opens with the Pianist, an elderly black man who shuffles in under the glare of a single spotlight. Uncovering a dusty old piano, he plays a few somber notes and begins speaking, hinting ominously at trouble to come.

As his opening words fade out, the stage lights brighten on a square, stone slab, set directly in the middle of the Armory’s smaller, underground Ellen Bye studio. It is here that most of the action of the play takes place—beginning with the exile of Posthumus, a man of lowly birth who has married the king Cymbeline’s daughter without permission. Posthumus departs hastily for Rome, leaving his heartbroken wife Imogen to her father’s ire. From here the plot quickly spins off in multiple directions: the Queen’s machinations to get her feckless son installed on the thrown instead of Imogen; Posthumus’ wager against his distant wife’s faithfulness; Imogen’s eventual escape from the castle into Wales; a battle for the very freedom of the kingdom; Posthumus’ pivotal forgiveness of the man who sought to destroy him.

All the while, guiding us through this Shakespearean labyrinth is the Pianist. His music is appropriately minimal—melodic, sorrowful, and sometimes shockingly dissonant—but all too often the Pianist’s spoken explanations of the action onstage feel unnecessary. While some of his interjections are indeed moving—and provide occasional comic relief—it is often as if he is playing the role of a musical Cliff Notes—repeating the action onstage, but not adding to the drama itself. As the play reaches its climax, the screenwriter’s maxim, “Show, Don’t Tell,” frequently comes to mind.

Part of the problem is that the Pianist remains a faceless character from beginning to end. He frequently alludes to the Bard’s thoughts and frustrations (or perhaps they are Coleman’s)—but we learn nothing of the Pianist himself. His tone and dry wit hint at past trauma, but beyond that, his pain (and our sympathy) remains unscratched. Walking out of the theater, I found myself longing to know who the Pianist really was—and, most importantly, why Cymbeline’s story meant anything to him. Juxtaposition—as opposed to clever explication—may have been a more successful tact for the Pianist to take.

But like Posthumus, I find it easy to forgive these sins. The cast and costuming are superb. The staging is exquisitely restrained. And who can forget the particularly realistic looking severed head toward the end of the play. On the whole, Coleman’s resurrection of Cymbeline is a masterful work and one that deserves much of the praise it has garnered so far.

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Tags: Theater, Review, Portland Center Stage

Peter Halley’s Neon Installation Will Tickle Your Brain

At Disjecta through Feb. 25

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Feb 08, 2012 at 04:00PM 0 Comments

Photo credit: Jake Richardson

The geometric cells and conduits of Peter Halley’s installation, “Prison,” at Disjecta buzz with a seeming kinetic energy. Covering the walls of the 3000 square foot gallery and glowing green from neon paint and stage lighting, the layered boxes with their tight parallel lines play with the eye, shimmering and shifting, coming in and out of focus. Though it’s only a laser print on wallpaper, there is an incredible sense of depth that’s constantly oscillating and that, combined with the rushing sound of the forced air system, creates a perpetual sense of motion no matter where you stand.

Given the way the installation toys with perception, I had to ask Halley if our deepening understanding of how the brain processes images plays any role in his work. “I have always been interested in the psychology of perception and new developments in the understanding of the neurobiology of the brain,” said the New York-based painter, printmaker, and writer. “At Disjecta, the perceptual ideas are pretty straightforward. The prison images slowly get larger as they go from the side walls to the middle wall—creating a perspective effect and making the room seem even bigger than it is.”

With solo shows at the likes of MOMA and work in the collections of museums such as the Tate, Whitney, and Guggenheim, Halley is an impressive close to Disjecta’s already impressive 2011-2012 Curator-in-Residence season. “Prison” is a continuation of his exploration of visual and architectural systems—this time wedding “geometry of the social” with “the mall-level transcendence of saturated fluorescent color.” It’s his first solo installation in the Northwest and one of his grandest anywhere. Make sure to catch it before it closes on Feb. 25.

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Tags: Art, Review, Disjecta

Slideshow + Review:
Madame Butterfly

Portland Opera premieres Puccini’s melodramatic, lovelorn gut-wrencher.

summary by Anne Adams, review by Aaron Scott

Posted by: Anne Adams on Feb 04, 2012 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

View Slideshow » Illustration:

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

View Slideshow » Illustration:

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

View Slideshow » Illustration:

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

View Slideshow » Illustration:

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

View Slideshow » Illustration:

©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver

Summary

Poor Cio-Cio-San. First she falls for the fickle charms of US Naval Officer Pinkerton, even forsaking her family’s religion, Buddhism, to make herself a more suitable bride to the Westerner. When her handsome blonde boyfriend departs for America, she faithfully roosts in their lovenest awaiting his return, never suspecting that he intends to leave her in the lurch. Against the sunset-hued backdrop of pre-World War Nagasaki, Butterfly gradually realizes she’s been had and succumbs to her shame, eventually committing hara-kiri, a ritualistic Japanese suicide. The nickname Pinkerton has given her, “Butterfly,” becomes an overt metaphor for their relationship: He, the butterfly collector, is compelled to capture a thing of beauty and pin it to a board—nevermind that in the process, he’s stabbing the fragile creature in the heart.

Madame Butterfly opened last weekend at the Keller.
Click through the attached slide show to see Kelly Kaduce’s kimono-clad performance, or read on for Aaron Scott’s review.
—AA
____________________________________________________________________________

Review

Those who imagine opera as stationary fat ladies singing will be delightfully surprised by the level of acting in Portland Opera’s production of_ Madame Butterfly. _Kelly Kaduce’s performance as Butterfly is wonderful, as she shifts from the delight of a newly wed, to the self-delusional defiance of a righteous teenager when others say Pinkerton won’t return (one must remember she’s only 15 at the start), to her attempt at steadfast strength leading up to her honor suicide. And her soprano is clear and gorgeous, her song imagining Pinkerton’s return earning a roiling applause and an irrepressible shout of ‘Bravo!’ from the balcony.

Other highlights include John Hancock as Sharpless, the kind American consul left to clean up Pinkerton’s mess, and Kathryn Day as Suzuki, the protective, plodding maid, who expertly expresses the pathos of her character’s own tragedy: spending three years watching Butterfly cling to her dream, the whole while knowing the truth that Pinkerton will not return. And of course, an almost audible ‘awww’ seeps from the audience every time 3-year-old Finnegan Grab with his mop of brown hair runs onstage as Butterfly’s son (it’s a rare thing indeed to have a child actor the age of the actual character, and it lends a certain magic).

Clocking in at nearly three and a half hours, Madame Butterfly’s length creates almost a shared experiential empathy on the part of the audience: we sit an hour for every year she waits for Pinkerton. There’s a patience presumed that most contemporary plays and movies wouldn’t dare, particularly in the final movement of the second act, when Butterfly, her son, and Suzuki wait silently for Pinkerton, backs to the audience, the only action on stage for a number of minutes being the slowly changing quality of light as night falls (and the splendor of the lighting design on the artfully made set is action enough). But if you can channel Butterfly’s patience, the heart-wrenching beauty of her final song is certainly worth the wait. *
—AS*

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Tags: Review, Slideshow, Opera, preview

Meshi Chavez: …or be dragged

Fertile Ground Festival delivers tense, spooky Butoh with a layered live score.

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Jan 26, 2012 at 12:00PM 0 Comments

Through a visceral solo performance titled …or to be dragged, Portland dancer, butoh performer, and choreographer Meshi Chavez explores the process of confronting the myriad choices life bombards us with. Set in a deep, blacked out theater mostly lit by single spotlights, with a live score of layered and filtered vocals by Lisa Degrace, his performance is stark, pained, and bombastic. He alternates between slow motion and frenetic movement, sometimes seeming to be literally tossed and torn by life’s options, though his white-painted face stays mostly frozen like a mask. Imagine peering into the dark, Butoh-tinted mind of a chronic undecider. Running less than 30 minutes in a studio intimately capped at 25 people, the show is like a quick but vigorous workout to energize you between longer Fertile Ground performances.

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Tags: Dance, Review, modern, fertile ground