CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

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Talks by Two Photographers Who Document the Otherworldly on Earth

Posted by: Aaron Scott on Mar 22, 2012 at 01:00PM Speech Bubble 0 Comments

If Portland’s endless drizzle has you feeling claustrophobic, there’re two opportunities this week to be transported to entirely different, beautifully alien landscapes—one flush with majestic life, the other exquisitely barren.

Award-winning National Geographic photojournalist Brian Skerry plumbs the ocean deep.

On Tuesday, March 27, the award-winning National Geographic photojournalist Brian Skerry will talk at OMSI’s super-popular Science Pub at the Bagdad in preview of his exhibit, Ocean Soul: Photographs by Brian Skerry, opening the next day at OMSI. Skerry has logged more than 11,000 hours underwater as a diver, exploring and documenting the ocean’s mysterious depths. The result is 20 years of vibrant, stunning photos that reveal a world completely unknown to we landlubbers. The OMSI exhibit focuses on four creatures whose stories portray the health (or lack thereof) of the earth’s oceans: shark, right whale, leatherback turtle, and harp seal.

Stephen Vaughan’s bleak yet stunning photos explore Iceland’s martian landscape.

Photographer Stephen Vaughan, on the other hand, stays on dry land, but he may as well be photographing Mars. Inspired by the exploratory voyage of Pytheas in 325 BC, he journeyed to the desolate reaches of Iceland to survey its volcanic fissures, shifting tectonic plates, vast glaciers, and steaming, sulphurous pools. The environments are so barren that Apollo astronauts used them for field training before the first Moon landing. Yet in Vaughan’s vast, beautiful landscapes, they also seem to throb with pent up energy—still lives of ancient but relentlessly ongoing geological processes. Vaughan will be at Blue Sky on Saturday, May 24th at 2pm to talk about the exhibit.

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Tags: Galleries, Talks, science

Culturephile: Theater

Gracie and The Atom

Catholic school musical thoroughly redeems itself

Posted by: Anne Adams on May 24, 2010 at 01:00PM Speech Bubble 4 Comments

When I was 14, I went to a religious boarding school—and last week, I went back, via Artist Rep’s whip-smart and bittersweet Catholic schoolgirl musical, Gracie and The Atom.

But before I say more, a confession: I underestimated this play. As I skimmed the glowing local reviews, I thought maybe the Portland press was indulging longtime PDX musician and newly-minted playwright McKinley. I imagined Gracie actually playing out as a self-pitying Catholic Annie, with all of the hard knocks and none of the life—or, as a plaid-skirted, pubescent Britney Spears redux, flaunting forbidden fruit under a short hem. I now renounce my cynicism. And if my penance is convincing you to catch this winsome, uplifting play, then it’s a small price to pay.

Gracie and The Atom begins as a newly-parentless Gracie (Beth Sobo) stumbles into the auspices of Our Lady Of Peace, the aforementioned Catholic girls’ school. The story that unfolds, follows Gracie’s emotional trajectory through resistance and rebellion, to eventual acceptance and inclusion. (Mercifully, Sobo plays the lead role very straight, free of any hint of trivializing cuteness.) Meanwhile, all the other (slightly sillier) denizens of Our Lady, struggle to reconcile the tenets of faith with the principles of science. In the words of Gracie’s physics teacher, Sister Lidwina (Emily Beleele), “If atoms are made of mostly space, and everything we see is made out of atoms, we live in a world made of mostly nothing!”

The principles of physics, it turns out, are a rich and expansive source of metaphor. Comments about positive and negative charge, as well as energy, motion, and momentum, are interspersed in the dialogue both as physics lessons, and as winking hints at character motivation. The effect is sometimes goofy, as when the hormonally-charged Angela (Brooke Markham) passionately explains subatomic attraction; and sometimes heartrending, as when the grieving Gracie tremblingly confronts her father’s fate: “Once you burn a log in the fireplace, you can never unburn it.”

Though heavily cloaked in Catholic habit, Gracie ultimately makes an exuberantly agnostic statement—not merely accepting, but actually celebrating the fact that we live in a vast, unpredictable universe, and there’s much that we can’t possibly know.

If heady explorations of quantum theory threaten to bend your Sunday bonnet, not to worry: This show also delivers rollicking rock, touching ballads, girlish flouncing, sisterly solidarity, and a litany of innocent laughs. The acting and singing are brilliant, and the live band expertly and tastefully keeps pace. The minimal staging also provides a nice fluidity and intimacy, although a couple more lighting effects would be welcome (most notably, lightning to accompany thunderclaps during a storm scene).

One final thought: even though teen and tween girls were well-represented onstage, there were very few members of the Glee generation in the audience, and that seemed a shame. Just saying: If you have a yen to take a young female friend to a musical, Gracie And The Atom is bound to generate a positive reaction.

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Tags: Theater, science, musical

CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

Talks by Two Photographers Who Document the Otherworldly on Earth

Gracie and The Atom

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