CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

meet & greet

Meet PICA’s New Artistic Director

On the cusp of her arrival at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Angela Mattox talks about her big vision—and her first impressions.

Posted by: Aaron Scott and Anne Adams on Aug 17, 2011 at 04:00PM 3 Comments

How did your relationship with PICA begin and develop? What were some key moments or contacts that drew you into the fold?
I’m hired on September 1—so I’m not quite in the fold—but basically I’ve been very familiar with the organization throughout my career, and I’ve been attending TBA, PICA’s annual Time-Based Art Festival, for the past four years, so they’re colleages, close collaborators. TBA has definitely become a place where my fellow colleagues and I converge every September to see what’s new in contemporary art, and it’s definitely become a hub and a highlight for all of us in the field. I feel very fortunate that I can be a part of it.

PICA’s vision is also very close to that of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, where I was Performance Art Curator for the last eight years. We share the same taste for innovation, and our contemporary visual art department dovetails a lot with PICA’s community and offerings. Yerba Buena has had an ongoing dialogue with, and respect for, PICA’s previous Guest Artistic Directors Cathy Edwards and Mark Russel, too.

Each time I’ve seen TBA, I’ve been excited to engage with certain artists from their lineup. For example, I first saw [dancer] Gerome Bel at TBA, and then I thought, “I have to bring him to to San Francisco.” In my experience, PICA’s always ahead of the curve in terms of discovering new artists and new work.

Which artists are you most excited to see this year, and why?
Rachid Ouramdane is a French choreographer of Algerian descent. I just saw his solo in France, and I was so glad that Cathy was planning on presenting his brand-new piece, World Fair. It’s very urgent and political, and it will provoke. The experience lingers with you, you can’t stop thinking about it. I see this piece as emblematic of my commitment to experimental work that’s really political, provocative, and compelling.

Kyle Abraham, from the east coast, is a young choreographer based in New York, and he’s seriously one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen in my life. Extraordinary. He works with really rich concepts and ideas. He’s doing two pieces for TBA: Radio Show, and a solo with just him. Don’t miss either the full-length work, or the solo. I think it’s one of the strongest excerpts of a work i’ve seen.

Kate Gilmore, a New York–based performance artist, is really interesting, and she’s already gotten Whitney Biennial recognition. She’ll be dismantling a clay cube. I’m excited to see it. Her work really captures my imagination. One of the treasures of PICA is Kristan Kennedy; some of the stuff she’s bringing to this year’s TBA is fantastic.

For me, the concept of The Works is one of the most exciting things that PICA does. It’s so extraordinary. Where else could that combination of visual arts and late-night programming work? This confluence of food, art, and culture in social environment—it’s amazing. And with these kinds of provocative works, I feel like people need a place to talk about it, to download and debate, have a drink and process what they’ve engaged with. I love that.

Going forward, what’s your big-picture vision for TBA?
What I look for is risk, experimentation, surprises in content or form. I’m looking for visionary and bold artists who are willing to explore new directions, and explore the issues that are relevant for our cultural moments—artists who feel timely. Of course, those qualities can manifest in different disciplines.

I’m also interested in young artists, and I’d like to continue the trend at PICA of taking risks on young artists before other established presenters have presented them. That said, I’m also interested in masters. I think that having a mix of generations is really important, and I love how the TBA festival provides a framework. Different points of view, different styles, all in the context of a festival. I love the collision of diverse ideas coming together.

I’m partial to artists who aren’t afraid to provoke—who are willing to push, provoke, and explore. A contemporary art center has to be a platform for urgent ideas and forms of expression; also humor, and play, and discovery…. PICA exudes a sense of discovery, and I find that really exciting. And Portland audiences are so curious, excited and engaged. They’re really ready to be provoked and engaged. That impresses me, and it inspires me.

In your career so far, what’s one accomplishment that best exemplifies your approach?
I would say on the broad side, I really revitalized the performing arts program at YBCA. I grew an internationally renowned performance arts program there. That’s my pride and joy, though I didn’t do it alone. I made an effort to support new work by new artists, and I tried to reassert the commissioning at YBCA. Like PICA, I took risks, supporting new work that I hadn’t necessarily seen.

What’s a misstep that taught you a lot?
When I moved to San Francisco from New York, I naively thought that audiences would be interested in any work from outside, and I certainly presented works that didn’t resonate w audiences like I’d hoped. I wouldn’t call that a misstep necessarily—I still believed in the artists—but you have to engage with the audience, and ultimately that’s part of the work. As a curator, it’s not enough to get a great artist from out of town. You really have to communicate why a work belongs in a festival, put it in context. Otherwise, audiences may not take the risk to come out. Years ago, that was really important for me to learn. As a result, a lot of the work I’ve done in the bay area is about audience development, bringing people out.

How will your approach change between curating for the Bay Area (ethnically diverse) audience and a Portland (much higher percentage white) audience?
It’s a relevant question to ask, and it’s something i’ve definitely thought about, because you can’t curate without thinking about who your audience is. You’re always asking yourself: Who am I curating? Who is on stage? who am I privelaging? One of the things that I love about PICA, is that they’ve presented a diverse group of artists over the years, from all different backgrounds all over the world. By accomodating local, national, and international work, PICA does its best to reflect the cultural diversity that’s the reality of our world, and I’ll do the same. Just because it’s less racially diverse in Portland and it’s smaller, won’t change my values in terms of cultural diversity in the program.

PICA—and Portland—typically face a lot of challenges financing art. Are you prepared to do a lot with a little?
Oh, yes. I’ve worked exclusively for not-for-profit arts orgs, and you’re always trying to do extraordinary things with limited resources. As programmers and curators, our job is to support innovative artists whether there’s a lot of money involved or not, and its’ incumbent upon administrators to be just as creative as artists, and work within limited means to be creative, innovative, fluid, and economically resourceful. Those are values that have been embedded in all the works that I’ve done. You’ve got to. PICA has always kept itself adaptable. Not footing the overhead of a main theater helps—being itinerant in terms of their festival. PICA is super scrappy, and does a lot with a little. It’s an amazing staff there, and i’m gonna learn from them as well.

First impressions of Portland?
It feels like people live a very balanced sort of life here; they’re passionate about their work, but also food, art, and the outdoors—engaging with nature. The pace may be a little more calm than i’m used to—but also looking at it from the outside, I’ve seen an extraordinary entrepenurial energy. Self-starting businesses and people who have a vision and make it happen. Having lived in NYC and LA, I think those are places where it’s harder to make things happen.

I’ve moved a lot throughout my career, so I’m used to moving, showing up in a new place and gradually coming to understand the culture, the people….I have to, to understand how the work I’m going to present will or won’t resonate. It’ll be a lot of observation for me this first year, eating and drinking and being out, getting to know the culture so I can guide the vision more closely. One of the advantages of my being in Portland year-round, is that I can curate more programs and dialogues throughout the year, and create more opportunities for local artists to engage with audiences. I can go deeper with individual artists and projects by coordinating residencies, and by focusing in depth on an artist and allowing an audience to get to know that artist, and have a richer dialogue with the work.

It seems like an interesting cultural moment right now in Portland, a really vital time to be here. The culture feels very open to me: progressive, innovative, friendly. Coming up for brief visits, people are warm and friendly and curious. Of course my big dilemma right now, is which neighborhood to live in. Any suggestions?

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!

Add a Comment »

Tags: TBA, TBA 2010

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Five Questions
with Ronnie Bass

It’s not too late to catch The Astronomer.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Oct 11, 2010 at 12:00AM 0 Comments

Almost a month ago, Rufus Wainwright strode onto the Schnitz stage, kicking off the TBA in a candy-striped velvet coat he’d borrowed from Gus Van Sant. Two weeks later, Blackfish let strains of slide guitar lapse into the Imago silence, to close the festival’s final live performance. But if you thought TBA 2010 was over —au contraire.

Several gallery exhibits at The Works have been open ever since, and will remain through next Sunday, October 17. This means there’s still time to take in The People’s Biennial, and maybe even get answers for the questions it raises in Kristan Kennedy’s special Sunday presentation and walk-through with Harrell Fletcher, David Rosenak and other contributors. You can still behold the bold sapphic futurism of Yemenwed, stroll through Storm Tharp’s High House —or enclose yourself, as I did twice, in the quiet dark confines of Ronnie Bass’s inner-space odysseys The Astronomer and 2012.

As minimal music tensely ticks along at less than one beat per second, Bass holds a conversation with a blanketed form, drills holes in moon-rock, and stargazes at the vast universe from a closet-sized room with a cot in the corner. After enjoying these video visions and his live performance at Drum Machine, I bumped into Bass by The Works’ beer-garden honeybucket. “It’s kind of peaceful in there,” he observed. “I don’t think anyone’s used it.”

Your songs contain a dialogue between a hesitant voice and a reassuring one—but both voices are your own. Do you think of these as a father and son? Or as one person, parenting an inner child? Any general thoughts on parenting or self-parenting?

I think of the dialogues as being between people, or the ones that I have created. It may be father and son, astronomer and nervous friend or any other variation. The dynamic is always similar: one person has a special knowledge and is ­consoling someone in need of guidance.

I’m currently working on a project with Tommy Hartung. We’ve been talking about using a disembodied voice via a shortwave radio. One issue that we’ve had is in how to keep the read of the voice as predominantly human without limiting other possibilities.

I didn’t originally think of the dialogue as as a self-parenting situation, but that read makes sense because of how minimally my characters are developed and how one-tracked/minded they may seem. They are almost the simplified representations of internal phases, but that’s also similar to the way that I make my stories, my sets and my scores. I always prefer the essential idea of something over its complex form.

The numbers you cite in your work, fall somewhere around your age—late 20’s to early 40’s. At one point you say, “I’m almost 35 now,” and at another you say, “The moon now hangs at 42. If we leave now, we might break through.” I’m reminded of Pink Floyd’s “No one told you when to run; you’ve missed the starting gun.” Am I right in guessing that your work depicts progress in relation to age?

I have never thought of it in relation to my work, but there absolutely is a thematic connection. You often hear a similar theme in hip-hop, and in social utopian philosophy, especially in that of Charles Fourier. As different as these forms may be, they all discuss a very similar thing: an escape from our current existence of oppression into a new world. Within hip-hop, it’s a world of lawlessness and extravagance. Fourier sees a refined way of labor and life. Waters and Gilmour don’t really depict a result, only the idea of leaving.

I did try to keep the numbers near the 30s to imply planetary alignment; a sign for the right time to act, but it is a coincidence that it corresponded to my age or ages. Beyond my age of 35, which will happen in the year 2012, the rest of the numbers were chosen because they rhymed with the words that I was using: 29 with time, 42 with through…
<br?

It seems like the title Leaving The Shed could indicate agoraphobia, shyness, alienation, and/or creative Insecurity. Do you personally struggle with any or all of these?

I have been accused of agoraphobia because I like to work in small spaces. For me, a small space holds the most potential for work and privacy. I think of the time that I’m making art as a hiding-out or as a retreat. My characters have a similar cocooning phase before their great idea or action. Also, within film, a small space (for me) alludes to the optimistic potential of a vast external space elsewhere.

I do have issues with alienation and creative insecurity. It’s part of being an artist.

Do you think you would enjoy actual space travel? Are you fascinated with the real thing, or just the metaphor?

I would not at all want to space travel. I have to make artwork. I am interested in science and technological advancements and space travel fits into that. In The Astronomer, I never thought of their destination as outer space, it is only that a cosmological sign prompted their journey. For me, their destination was an area that they could carve out within a space that has already been scripted with its own order. The optimistic aspect is that they would be able to live independently from, and simultaneously within, this scripted order.

Do you think the world is going to end in 2012?

Two big events are supposed to happen around that time: a giant solar flare and the flipping of the Earth’s magnetic poles. Scientists say that it could be devastating; but my answer is no, I do not think that the world is going to end. The sense of foreboding in my work is coming from my own observations of our current economic and social conditions. Within this nation, I predict a future of class division that will be several times more severe than what is currently occurring. It’s the nature of late capitalism emmeshed with corporatism. I’m not here to fight it or to change it. As an artist, I can only present it and propose questions. Any answers are fantastic renditions.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Art, outer space, modern, The Works, TBA 2010, TBA, five questions, 5 questions, Film, music, Ronnie Bass

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: The People’s Biennial

Ten Questions inspired by the most questionable exhibit in The Works.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 29, 2010 at 04:20PM 2 Comments

As you may or may not know, TBA isn’t quite over. For the first half of October, the gallery installations at Washington High School (aka The Works) will remain open for viewing.

The biggest single attraction is actually an extremely diverse gallery show called The People’s Biennial, featuring works from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Dakota, Arizona—and the quaint and quirky state of Oregon. A multimedia hodgepodge featuring everything from children’s drawings to hoarders’ collections to “outsider” works to documentary film footage about bees, not everybody knows what to make of the collection, but everybody wants to talk about it. It’s a showcase so varied that it seems—for lack of a subtler term—random, and curators Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann seem to have crafted a mission statement that simultaneously dismisses the arts establishment, and exalts the unknown, perhaps on merit of that status alone.

“There’s good crazy and there’s bad crazy,” says a hotdog vendor whose favorite TBA vis-artist is Storm Tharp. “Some of the ‘outsider’ stuff, if it’s just unusual, but it’s not really inspiring or interesting…then I don’t see why they picked it. Just because someone is emotionally disturbed, doesn’t make them an artist.”

“[My grandson] draws just like that,” said another visitor to one of the displays. “We should get his work in a gallery.”

Indeed, in an exhibit that strives for inclusion, one wonders what the criteria for EXclusion must be. That’s the first of many questions that the Biennial raised over here at Culturephile. We thought we might as well share our musings with you, The People:

1. In such an inclusive exhibit, what pieces were EXcluded, and on what grounds?

2. Does this exhibit contend that “art is everywhere?”

3. Pantheists have been reported to say, “God is in everything—so why go to a church?” By the same logic: If art is everywhere, why go to a gallery?

4. If someone has acquired a well-preserved collection of artifacts, does that person become that collection’s “artist?” Or, to put it another way, where does “found art” end and “collection” begin?

5. There is undoubtedly an an art to educational filmmaking. But there is also an art to baking a pie. Fixing a car engine. Cutting hair. Should everything that can be done artfully, be displayed as “art?”
If so, is there enough gallery space and curatorial initiative in the world to sustain all the world’s “art?” And if not, where do we draw the line between vocation and inspiration?

6. Haven’t modern gallery-goers ever seen things like historical artifacts, amateur paintings, hoarders’ collections, or ethnic subject matter?
If not, do they lack families and friends, neighborhoods and yard sales, where they would naturally encounter such things? And what does that say about the segregation of society?

7. Will everyone who makes Lego spaceships, be thrilled that a gallery features a Lego exhibit, or be miffed that their work hasn’t been “discovered?” Or to put it another way, where does hobby-crafting end, and art begin?

8. Should every kid be proud that kids’ artwork is represented, or should every parent feel insulted that the display in the gallery so closely resembles the display on their home fridge—but offers no forum to their kids? Aren’t all kids special?

9. How did the masterful, precise black-and-white paintings get in this mix? Aren’t they too classically artistic?

10. Is the Biennial’s ultimate intention to set an example to galleries to host more off-the-wall work, or is the point to get arts appreciators to look outside the proverbial box more often?

Please feel free to supply your own answers, or add more questions to the pile. Or, if you have yet to visit the exhibit, get over there. There’s a lot to see.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Art, Galleries, galleries, folk art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works, social practice art

TBA 2010: Claudia Wraps Up

phile under: TBA 2010

In no particular order … 10 odds and ends about TBA10

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 20, 2010 at 07:40AM 0 Comments

1. Attention museums of America: Somebody needs to give the Wooster Group a lot of money and permanently install There Is Still Time…Brother. Seriously. This work (about seeing and not seeing) needs to be seen. (And maybe not moved around so much, as evidenced by the opening day technical snafus.)

2. Children of the Sunshine is stuck in my head. Still. Thanks, Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

3. My favorite overheard conversation: Three presenters were discussing Mike Daisey, offering lots of favorable comments about his politically strident piece. Then a pause came, and one of them ventured “But it could be about 20 minutes shorter.” Some nodding followed, and a shorter pause, at which point someone else responded “But are you going to tell him that?!?” Nervous laughter ensued; conservation over.

4. I miss the food already. Wouldn’t PoMo like a visiting restaurant critic …. please?

5. My favorite snarky quote I am allowed to attribute: during another noontime chat, Conor Lovett (can enough good things be said about the man?) was asked whether the French try to claim Beckett, an Irishman who wrote much of his work originally in French. The low-key (and Irish) Lovett, without missing a beat, responded with a mischievous smile "I think the French seek to own him in a way the Irish couldn’t seek to own him … because they (read: “we”) do own him." Every international festival needs to make fun of the French just a little, no?

6. Right after some museum spends a lot of money to acquire There Is Still Time…, can we turn our attention to getting Cathy Edwards a full-time artistic directorship or curatorial position somewhere? Pretty please? This woman is one of a very few contemporary-minded directors who really gets where the field is at. She needs a suitable platform.

7. But, then again, the French can be pretty great. My single favorite audience-artist moment came during Jérôme Bel’s Cédric Andrieux, when the house lights came up and Andrieux watched us watching him watching us…and we were all smiling, like finally, we’d just met the love of our lives…

8. Best art metaphor, courtesy of the Wooster Group’s Elizabeth LeCompte, who said of the agonies of directing live art: “Theater’s like life, ‘Why can’t I get some perfection here?!’”

9. During the first noontime chat, Cathy Edwards said of her programming that she was struck by how “many artists in this festival have created an intimate space for the self to be shared.” There are a lot of ways to contextualize an event like TBA, but that line seemed like the best summation. It’s funny how the quietest works often create the loudest reverberations.

10. I hope I see you all for TBA 2011…

Add a Comment »

Tags: performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Offsite Dance Project

Two Japanese masters coax the audience beyond the comfort zone.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 19, 2010 at 11:00PM 3 Comments

Zan Yamashita/Ezra Dickinson

“Lefta foota! Lighta foota! " barked Yamashita, as Dickinson furiously kept pace with his dance instructions, dipping and leaping and falling in a complex choreography.

Every now and then, Yamashita would go slower. “I drew a circle with my pen,” he said, speaking of frustration in the writing process. At another point, he described a haunting memory he had, of seeing a cyclist killed in a traffic accident. He also described his constant quest for individual expression and technical excellence in dance. And then he unleashed another blast of commands.

This piece seemed to be working on at least a couple levels: one, there was the aforementioned artist’s struggle. Two, there was the dancer’s struggle, to keep pace and fulfill orders. The third struggle— whether an intentional element of the piece, or just a function of circumstance—was communication and translation. Though Yamashita was speaking English, his strong Japanese accent and rapid pacing challenged the audience to concentrate harder, to strain further into the classic gap between sender and receiver to actively grasp the message.

“Work for it!” the piece seemed to say. “Meet us at least halfway!”

Yukio Suzuki

“Why make us stand in the rain?” was the unanimous unasked question, as we trekked several blocks from PNCA and huddled under too few umbrellas in the bricked, littered enclave behind Bridgeport Brewery. Yukio Suzuki lay sprawled across a second-story bannister, light hitting his soaking white limbs and shirt, as Wayne Horvitz’s crystalline, haunting soundscape pierced the sheeting downpour.

He was doing something. He was blowing up a white balloon. The shadow of man, bannister, and ever-enlarging balloon fell on the far brick wall. The balloon consumed the head, and we beheld, briefly, a balloon-headed man. The balloon was let go and drifted gracefully to the ground, like a profound thought that briefly expanded and quickly passed.

(Oh, the balloon as poetic objet. Romantic, yet totally unsentimental, due to its simplicity of shape. And with so many symbolic implications! Spherical = universal or whole. Floating upward = transcendence, optimism—or unattainability. Expanding = growth, hope. Popping = fragility, temporariness. The Red Balloon, 99 Luftballons, The Boy In The Bubble.)

Suzuki slung himself over the bannister and began to move along the catwalk toward a wooden staircase. Many of his motions dramatically over-swung, and others jerkily corrected. His overall bearing began to feel very familiar: If he wasn’t depicting a drunken reverie, he could have fooled me.

As he half-fell down the steps, Suzuki seemed the most poetic kind of drunk, interspersing his stumbles with flights of grandiosity. At one point, legs sprawled below him, he outstretched his arms and bobbed his head, stiffly pantomiming a symphony conductor. All the while, the rain sparkled and drenched, under a gradually darkening sky, which, as you can imagine, was wildly cinematic, and probably answered the question “why…?”

Suzuki landed at the foot of the stairs, danced haltingly in the courtyard, and then sprang up a ladder on the adjacent wall. He was on the roof. On the corner of the roof, now shirtless and sinewy, and majestically oblivious, he let out a howl of volatile triumph, and violently heaved down the chimney.

We’ve all born passive witness at times, to other people in the throes of physical or emotional intensity. We’ve held back their hair, or held back their fists, or talked them down from the rooftops and given them a towel to dry off with. This performance evoked those moments, but relieved us of the responsibility to mitigate, letting us simply thrill at the otherworldly spectacle of a human being exhausting himself in a bender of transcendence, danger and despair.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Dance, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: AndrewAndrew
and Wonderlust

How’d you like The Works last night?
Choose your own review.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 19, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Last night’s show at The Works, featuring Eastern-bloc marshmallow peeps Wonderlust and iPad-wielding Poindexters AndrewAndrew, may or may not have given you what you needed. Culturephile can review these two acts for you, but first you must choose your own adventure:

I EXPECTED A DANCE PARTY
Wow, that dance party was some mad crazy good times. Those DJ’s were almost like…performance artists! The girls wore these matching outfits with head-scarves, and they had these cute little dance moves they would do together, and they even sang for a minute, and it sounded pretty good. Their stuff was really wild—it was like Klezmer, and Bollywood—there were tubas and clarinets and most of it was pretty danceable, but it definitely also had its own flav-ah. And they had projections of slavic scarf-patterns, and like, snapshots of Russian or Polish families sitting around their living room. It was a pretty cool little setup, I must say!

AndrewAndrew wore matching clothes, too, and they were a riot! They played a game of musical chairs, and they spun all these total pop-chart classics, like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, which were pretty fun—and I think a couple newer things, too, like some Lady Gaga. They were using iPads instead of usual turntable/DJ type gear, so they could walk around in the crowd. At one point they went on the top balcony, and cued some music from there, which was pretty neat.

One problem, though: the auditorium it was in, had all these rows of seats, and the aisles were sloped, so it was kind of hard to dance in there. It would have been good to have more of a dance floor. But that didn’t stop me!

Choose an ending:
-I danced frantically and maniacally!
-I danced delightedly and dramatically!
-I am still dancing!


I EXPECTED PERFORMANCE ART
Hm. Next to last weekend’s Ten Tiny Dances and yesterday’s Drum Machine, this Works bill underwhelmed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t last night’s artists basically just DJ’s? And not even with turntables or instruments. Just pushing “play.” Sure, they had matching costumes, but Wonderlust didn’t engage the space or acknowledge their audience, and beyond using iPads (a toy Tender Forever just elevated to a whole new level), AndrewAndrew didn’t show us anything new. And all those people trying to dance in the aisles, obscured our view.

Maybe if Wonderlust had played into the oompa-pa cheesiness of some of their numbers with big manic grins, or if they had maintained a disciplined deadpan, that could have given their very basic clogging steps some meaning and tone. Instead, they kept half-smirking, and glancing sidelong at one another to coordinate clunky dance transitions. It felt a little too “school talent show,” and not in a planned or purposeful way.

To their credit, AndrewAndrew worked the crowd—albeit by pressing some pretty failsafe buttons. “Who likes Michael Jackson? Who likes prizes?” We all like prizes, sirs; but some of us also like SURprises.

Choose an ending:
-I retreated to the bar.
-I went home.

“Wonderlust” with an “o,” is a Finland-based duo, NOT to be confused with “Wanderlust” with an “a,” a Portland circus collective fronted by Fall Arts Issue honoree, Noah Mickens. For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: performance, music, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Emily Johnson/Catalyst

The Thank-you Bar

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 17, 2010 at 10:20AM 1 Comments

You know that thing little kids do sometimes when a new person comes into their home, and they want to please and impress the guest so they rush around, showing off their things and themselves?

That daffy, manic energy coursed through The Thank-you Bar, an uneven but compelling dance-theater piece by Emily Johnson, featuring a gorgeous live score by James Everest and Joel Pickard (the two men will perform Sunday night at the Imago; if I were still in town I’d definitely be there). And gradually the shadings under Johnson’s need to please darkened, as it became clear that this work is also about meeting (and destabilizing) expectations on another, more volatile level. Johnson, who grew up in Alaska and is of Yup’ik descent, tells the story of being ethnically outed by a friend in grammar school, and then denying it to her frightened and maybe hostile classmates “to save my own skin.”

These tangled identity politics somehow don’t subsume this surprising work, which hops between moods and modes of storytelling. The (very small) audience first sits in a semicircle, watching Everest and Pickard build a looped score layer by layer. It’s a wonderfully gentle beginning, setting the tone for all sorts of show and tells, communicated through words, music and movement (she is a sharp and surprising dancer, a pleasure to watch). At one point Johnson wheels out a tiny makeshift igloo built of brick-shaped paper lanterns, which she hands out to audience members; we hold them as if holding her imagination in our laps. Later she tells a story of the blackfish, spinning a metaphor of survival and cultural endurance.

At times I wanted The Thank-you Bar to settle just a bit, for Johnson to take a breath and trust in the work’s quieter strengths. The brief, late entry of a fourth performer seemed unnecessary clutter; likewise some of Johnson’s reconfigurations of the space were unwieldy, offering too little payoff. But it’s hard not to be charmed by Johnson and her collaborators, and impressed by the delicate balance she strikes; I’d like to see more, soon.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Dance, performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Young Jean Lee on The Shipment

A conversation with playwright Young Jean Lee about the filmed version of her controversial stage play.

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 17, 2010 at 09:00AM 0 Comments

Last year, TBAers got to see Young Jean Lee’s play The Shipment. This year, you all get to see it again; on the screen, not the stage, courtesy of OntheBoards.tv.

Lee’s bracing, elegant work takes a hard look at race relations, with plenty of uncomfortable moments for its audience. It’s liveness is an essential component: here we all are, sitting in a theater together, for once staring straight at the elephant in the room.

What will it mean for a work like this to transfer to the screen? Lee (always a thoughtful interviewee), was kind enough to chat about it.

CLR: For me, such a part of watching The Shipment was watching the audience, and keeping tabs on how my responses did and didn’t line up with other people’s, especially across racial and gender lines. And you talked about this as well, if I remember, particularly how upsetting it could be for you at times. The liveness of the work seems essential to this, and so I’d be curious to hear whether you feel The Shipment is or isn’t changed by video, and what it’s like for you to watch a recording vs. the live work.

YJL: I think the audience is more anonymous in the darkness of a movie theater and therefore less uncomfortable (also they don’t have live actors staring directly at them). But I think the discomfort aspect will always be there as long as there is any racial diversity in the audience at all. I think people will still be uncertain whether they “should” be laughing or not, and be aware of the responses of the people around them. A public viewing in a movie theater is definitely much closer to the “live” experience than watching it alone at home on your computer.

CLR: Did you adapt the production for the screen in any way?

YJL: No. But we worked with the editors to try to give it the feel of watching something in a theater, as opposed to watching a film or sitcom. I asked them to cut way down on the close-ups.

CLR: I’m told that Portland audiences were really moved by the work last year; what do you remember from those performances?

YJL: Portland was one of the best audiences we’ve ever had. People were dying to ask those questions about race, to be challenged in that way. Everyone was weirdly grateful. They kept coming up to us and saying, “Thank you for making me feel so fucked-up.” They were also just a really fun and enthusiastic audience—those people LOVE the arts, it’s crazy. It’s almost like they’re not American.

CLR: Along those same lines, I’d be curious to hear what the experience of touring this work has been for you, and to what extent you’ve shaped and edited it as you and the actors have spent more time with it. Are there things now about the recording you wish you could change?

YJL: The actors get better with every show. I’m adamant that they not get bored, so they’re always doing crazy things to surprise each other onstage. Sometimes I get scolded by my production team. They’re like, “The actors are getting too out of control!” There’s an element of danger to it. Also we frequently have to replace actors for any given tour, so the addition of a new person in the room changes everything and people really have to stay on their toes. The only adjustment we made to the text was adding a rant about Europeans after our first European tour when people kept telling us, “It is strange that Americans still have these race problems. We do not have such problems here in Europe.”

CLR: One gentleman told me that the opening monologue made specific reference to Portland’s racial history; is this so, and if so how did you reach that decision to adapt the piece specifically for its setting?

YJL: He must have seen the show in Europe—we only do that in venues outside of the U.S. Although the standup comedian does reference local sports teams and stuff wherever we go, since that’s a typical standup trope.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater, Film, TBA, TBA 2010

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Radoslaw Rychcik/Stefan Zeromski Theatre

In the Solitude of Cotton Fields

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 09:50PM 0 Comments

Thank god.

For a moment there, I thought I was going to get through an entire contemporary performance festival with no full frontal nudity.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater, performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, life drawing

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: The Extreme Animals Sit Down

Music Is A Question With No Answer,
delivered content with no context.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 16, 2010 at 01:00PM 2 Comments

It’s been almost a week since this show and there’s a reason that I haven’t already posted: I hate panning shows—but The Extreme Animals sat down on the job.

“It’s amateur hour in there,” said one loyal passholder who’d escaped to the beer garden after watching the Animals cue, crash, and reboot Youtube videos, floundering through a half-baked introduction about pop culture. “Everybody wants to ‘go green,’” said Jacob Ciocci, “but my new thing is I wanna go ‘dark green’—it’s like the goth version of going green.” Polite laughter. “There’s a thing in life right now where, everything’s very intense. I call it the ‘new intensity.’” Pause. (Quick—someone dub this guy a “creative” and give him an Eyebeam fellowship!)

Now, I don’t mind “pop,” and I don’t mind Youtube. And I’m pretty fond of wild sociological theories. But in this case, rather than using these tools to build a unique experience, the Extreme Animals repeatedly juggled and dropped them. I blame creatives like Michael Rioux, the man who made #8 of Ten Tiny Dances, for making it look too easy to pop off with the perfect irreverent comment and engage a whole audience. It’s easy for creatives like Rioux, but that’s a function of studied mental agility and years of experience. Their genius enables their spontaneity—not vice versa. It seems like Ciocci got this twisted.

Eventually, the Animals got around to the musical performance, a manic mishmash of samples upstaged by a screaming screen of pop-culture collage and Atari pixel-porn. I know the Beastie Boys were sped up to sound like chipmunks. I know one guitar was played. I know a drum machine was manipulated—but the audience, by and large, was not. One welcome lull, underpinned by a hard-hitting triphop beat, fixated on footage of step dancers wearing white gloves that left glowing trails. This didn’t necessarily make a point, but served as some sort of comedown drug with a slightly more tolerable trip.

When it was David Wightman’s turn to shine with his shredding guitar project Fortress Of Amplitude, he showed considerable chops, looping tricky metal riffs and then harmonizing over them. But Wightman’s mad skillz could not redeem the overambitious presentation, which failed to finish the promised narrative about youth- and celebrity-worship and left plenty of Portland hipsters convinced that they could BS as well or better. Like the falling blocks in a tetris game, the barrage of stimuli kept evening out to null, and eventually piled up to a clunky “game over.”

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Re-Viewed

Romeo and Juliet … take two

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

My first day in Portland, I wrote about my interest in seeing Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet again, an opportunity for reassessment that doesn’t come around as often as you might think.

Well, I saw it again last night.

And…I still don’t entirely know what I think of this R and J, which features a long series of dueling monologues, delivered by two actors, in which the play’s details are badly remembered. So much for clarity through repetition. I should see it a third time, I probably won’t understand a single line; I’ll be too busy battling my memories and expectations.

Several of my original complaints remain—mainly, as my friend and colleague Alexis put it with wrinkled nose last night at dinner (Olympic Provisions, yay!), that the show is “Technically impressive. And light.” And I still found Robert Johanson’s stage presence more convincing and expansive than Anne Gridley’s (who I’ve liked very much in other works), though both are terrifically funny in their absurd—and, at moments, absurdly touching—send ups of bad Elizabethan actors and the half-baked but deeply felt ramblings of various people trying to remember just what the hell happens in the iconic play.

But I was more moved this time by the work’s heart, a bumbling meditation on vulnerability and desire which the actors argue their way through when they finally find themselves facing the audience at the same time. This is the piece, I thought last night. The rest is a laborious framework, one I’m not convinced is necessary.

But. I’m not unconvinced, either. What can I say, I’ve seen about 15 works and written almost 20 posts this past week; the circuitry is beginning to unravel. Long live art (even if badly remembered). And critical confusion.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Theater, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works,

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: John Jasperse Interview

Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 09:23AM 1 Comments

Conducting an interview with John Jasperse is sort of like watching one of his dances. Both are likely to send your brain off into all sorts of satisfyingly far and specific reaches; and yet there’s something surprisingly open and gentle about what you experience.

We spoke earlier this week about Truth, Revised Histories, Wishful Thinking, and Flat Out Lies, which I saw late last year in New York and which opens here tonight. A dance for five performers, with a commissioned score by the marvelous Hahn Rowe, the piece is in some very general way akin to Maria Hassabi’s work, in that it marries a gorgeously precise choreographic sensibility with an unsettling ambiguity of meaning or message.

“All of that stuff about sexuality, objectification, misogyny—at certain moments the show is like a Whitesnake video,” he said, laughing, in talking about the dance’s preoccupations with certain themes. “We own that we are doing that, we’re not trying to simultaneously say, ‘Yes we’re using this material but we’re somehow above it.’ When irony is present as a protective layer, that protective layer is saying, ‘Well yes I’m doing that but I don’t really mean that.’ It’s defensible in a kind of way, what the relationship is. Here it’s much more slippery.”

(As I’ve already discussed, I’m prone to adoring slippery art…)

Yesterday I spent about an hour with the Wooster Group film, There Is Still Time…Brother, which also thrums with images of violence and sex, and asks similar questions about what we choose to look at, and why. Like the Woosters, Jasperse uses various film histories and tropes as source material for Truth.

“Somehow there’s something about it that becomes more real in its artifice than if it were real," Jasperse said of his interest in film, including one brutal and beautiful section in which a slow-motion brawl between a man and a woman unfurls in exquisitely choreographed fashion. “What does it mean that I’m enjoying a depiction of violence? You become uncomfortable, and your discomfort relates to your engagement in it."

Ultimately, how we choose to deal (or not) with this engagement is a political matter, one that Jasperse relates to the many disparate but interrelated crises our society is now faced with.

“People don’t want to engage with that; they want the magic genie to wave the wand, and the world will be somehow different and we’ll fix the problem,” he said. “Nobody wants to acknowledge or wrap their head around what that might mean about our identity as a people and as a nation … if you can’t figure out what the solution is, some people are much more comfortable not asking the questions.”

Other people ask those questions a lot. And then all the world becomes a stage. Or is it the other way around?

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

Add a Comment »

Tags: Dance, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010