September 2006 Archives

"In the shadow of a big tree, another tree cannot grow.” -- Constantin Brancusi’s reply to his mentor, Rodin, when Rodin suggested that Brancusi become his assistant

Throughout Paradise NOW! Matthew Day Jackson begs, borrows and steals from a variety of sources, among them Dorothy Iannone, Constantin Brancusi, Iron Eyes Cody, the Black Power movement, his mother, the Jackson family homestead in Malmo, Nebraska and, if my suspicions are founded, the Rebuilding Center right here in Portland. These disparate sources coalesce into an exhibition that unfolds like the whirlwind trips through history offered by “credible” institutions and tourist traps alike.

Jackson’s press release indicates that he “expunges the sins of the past while wrestling history’s demons to the ground.” Apparently, making his mom look silly is integral to this process. I made the decision to begin my tour of Paradise NOW! in the small annex off the main space which forms a sort of video art cave. I consider the bulk of video art to be an esoteric form of torture, so I ensconced myself in the video annex with a certain gritting of the teeth, determined to watch each video all the way through, regardless of length, editing or lack thereof, quality of image etc. It took 13 minutes for Jackson’s mother to sufficiently beseech some nebulous “powers” of the four cardinal directions to bless her son’s art, while outfitted in a purple batik wrap over classic mom wear--a pink t-shirt, sweatpants and sneakers. Jackson’s mom is perhaps the most archetypal American mother imaginable. She appears to be middle-class, middle-aged, middlebrow, of average length and width for a woman of her 50-odd years. She recites the lines of her incantation with a seriousness that makes you believe she means it, but with a lightness that suggests that her performance was motivated more by an accepting, slightly indulgent love for her artist son than personal compulsion. She brings to mind the phenomenon of empty-nest homemakers taking up New Age spirituality and the awkward way white Americans of Christianity-influenced cultural backgrounds interpret some of the more intuitive religions of foreign cultures, arranging an office cubicle according to the principles of Feng Shui and such. I had to assume that any artist who possesses the sophistication necessary to land a slot in the Whitney Biennial also has a finely tuned sense of irony in his conceptual toolbox, whether or not he chooses to create art using it, and is thus aware that his mother, an endearing but supremely unromantic figure, looks a little absurd self-consciously performing a sacred ritual in sneakers. Her role, however, is complicated and deepened by the video’s relationship to the rest of the female figures in the show.

Jackson begins the exhibition with his first art purchase, a print entitled Statue of Liberty, by renowned German artist Dorothy Ianonne, showing the titular sculpture reinterpreted as a naked goddess figure with undescended testicles and a rather phallic torch along with the words to the well-known, unrealistically idealistic poem engraved in the statue’s base--”give me your tired, your poor, etc...” Jackson has photocopied a fax from Iannone giving him her blessing to include the print in the show and praising his work in a upbeat maternal tone broken only by her admission of having recently caught a “dreadful flu.” Jackson also shows a large-scale photograph of a female figure in a wooded area clearly inspired by Ianonne’s print. This woman holds a crystal-topped staff in place of a torch and she has her eyes closed with open eyes painted on her eyelids. This metaphorical mask and magic wand indicate that the dumpy figure is a source of mysterious spiritual power, while her trendy blond twig keeps consumer culture in the picture.

The other video, also clocking in at 13 minutes, stars a man whom I assume to be Jackson himself. He plays both the careless litterer (read: colonialist) and the soulful Native litter victim in a surreal retelling of the classic public service announcement Keep America Beautiful, in which litter provokes a single tear from an otherwise stoic Native American. Or does it? My research revealed that this PSA stars the ironically named Iron Eyes Cody, a man who passed as Native American and acted in scores of Hollywood films before an investigative report by the New Orleans Times-Picayune revealed that his real name was Espera DeCorti, that he was the son of Sicilian immigrants, and that the background he’d invented for himself was a myth. Jackson manages to present a multilayered critique of the way both Native American people and Native American identity have been used by the white man for a wide range of purposes from the horrific to the banal. Throughout the installation, Jackson makes a point of implicating himself in the racial crimes of the past. He points a wooden cannon at a figure identified as a Native American Chief; the barrel is a rotting pillar from his family’s Nebraska homestead. I was inspired to consider the storied history of the name Jackson in America--Andrew Jackson, Stonewall Jackson, Michael Jackson, Samuel L. Jackson.....oh wait, those are slave names. Suddenly the Black Power fists scattered throughout the installation made a little more sense. Jackson is trying to cleanse his karma. He sees the angry ghosts of racial injustice murmuring just below the surface of our increasingly Rome-like empire. A photograph of a black fist attached to a multicolored wooden arm emerging from a pile of charred wood while a mushroom cloud explodes in the background illustrates this idea with a clarity that’s a little heavy-handed.

The whole installation is a little bit Kountry Kosy. There’s a lot of unstained wood--a wooden boardwalk, vaguely native woodcrafts, huge pieces of driftwood, a framed picture of a log-cabin fort in the woods. If you ignore the electric ghosts writhing in the foreground of that image, along with a few other sour notes, the installation feels like the kind of place you pull up to after hours on the freeway to stretch and pick up a cup of weak coffee. But what’s Brancusi’s Sleeping Muse doing here? With a spike through its head? Or his Bird in Space cleverly camouflaged as a multicolored piece of wood? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. It probably has something to do with appropriation. Here, as always, Brancusi’s forms look great and Jackson employs them to striking visual effect.

The PSA video ends with a scene in which Jackson lights some torches in an empty warehouse. As the space darkens, we watch them slowly flare and burn out into pairs of white dots...we are in a sweatlodge, we are being watched by the eyes of our ancestors and the ancestors of those whom our ancestors fought. It sets a meditative mood, and, had I entered the video room last, I would have spent it meditating on the way the different groups that comprise my genetic stock exploited and were exploited by one another. But, since I entered the video room first, I spent it wondering about Matthew Day Jackson’s relationship with his mother.

Paradise NOW! is open Wed. - Sat. 12-6 through October 7, along with The American War, several works of video art and a mysterious cross-cultural homage to the aesthetic of the shut-in that delivers yet another rebuttal to Clement Greenberg’s lofty ideals. All at the fabulous Corberry Press art compound at 18th and Northrup.

Jessica Bromer

photo credit: Serena Davidson

The other day at Corberry Press, I picked up a pamphlet promoting and explaining Red76’s Travelers and Record Sound System: A Meditation & Sound Collection Center. By reading it, I discovered the following: To fully participate in this project, I should bring a CD of songs that I’ve internalized in some manner to the former site of Peacock Dry Cleaners. These songs will be played for other visitors as well as those within range of a small frequency transmitter. The project is democratic in nature and is intended to provoke conversations about democracy. It was inspired by Sam Gould’s experience of having the Leonard Cohen song Famous Blue Raincoat stuck in his head. Refreshments would be provided on-site. This all sounded good, but what to bring?

I had gone through a bit of a Leonard Cohen phase myself. On the eve of my 2001 move to Philadelphia, my friend John had presented me with a burned CD of songs he’d recently written, including a small gem consisting mainly of the repeated lyrics: When Jessie goes away/who is going to play/Leonard Cohen all day/...and like it? I could bring this.

Or, perhaps I could honor John’s artless style while providing something with a little more popular appeal, maybe Daniel Johnston or The Mountain Goats. And why not include something with personal significance from the other end of the musical spectrum, like Salt’N’Pepa’s Push It? The list grew and grew. Realizing that I would want to discuss whatever I eventually chose on the PICA blog, I narrowed my list down to two songs, each of which had resonated with me during a period in my life--middle school and high school--when my worldview was very much in flux.

1990--The cultural landscape was dominated by pegged pants, sculptural bangs, Milli Vanilli and Color Me Badd. I was in hell (7th grade in a conservative, fundamentalist Christian small town community in semi-rural Pennsylvania). One day my friend Mario invited a few of us down into the blacklit basement of his mother’s house on Main Street to share a discovery that would change the way I viewed the world above: The Dead Milkmen’s Metaphysical Graffiti. My favorite song on this album starts with the band members pretending to try to catch an airplane that’s flying by, being informed by a sound engineer that they’re being recorded, then deciding to keep the bit of audio in the song. It’s called Methodist Coloring Book and it goes like this:

You’ve got a Methodist Coloring Book/and you color really well/but don’t color outside the lines/or God will send you to hell/ cause God hates war/and God hates crime/but what he really hates is people/who color outside the lines.

I come from an agnostic, scientific family, but I grew up with a lot of kids who felt comfortable announcing that I would be spending eternity in a lake of fire for no greater crime than believing in the Paleolithic Era. To their credit, they frequently coupled this revelation with an attempt to steer me toward Jesus, usually through awkward, slightly unnerving youth group activities. The Dead Milkmen articulated my nascent awareness of the hypocrisy that fundamentalism of any kind breeds as they suggested a relatively peaceful way to combat the things we disagree with in this world: satire. I remember that immediately after listening to this album, we went back outside just as a parade was marching down Main Street. There were Shriners wearing fezzes riding around in miniature cars. The Shriners are an organization that helps disabled children, but we didn’t know that. Other than their predilection for clownish antics, they were indistinguishable from the Rotary Club, the Elks, the American Legion, The Mount Joy Town Council, in other words, the patriarchy. They symbolized the old-fashioned values that The Dead Milkmen were holding up for scrutiny through their lighthearted reference to the mortality of an American icon of neighborly, wholesome commerce. Inspired, we attacked the Shriners with the weapon that 12-year olds wield most ably; we made fun of their outfits.

1994--My friend Shaun and I logged a lot of miles that year driving around in his family’s pick-up truck listening to the Dead Kennedys’ first single California Über Alles. First released a year after we were born, California Über Alles, which simultaneously skewers the political far right and far left using an irreverent mixture of symbolism drawn from the Holocaust and Orwell’s dystopic masterpiece 1984, still felt fresh to a pair of 16-year olds whose views of the horizon were checkered with cornfields. In fact, the subject of the song, ultraliberal Jerry Brown’s presidential aspirations, was never out of date for long. The man just kept on running, most recently in ‘92. The Dead Kennedys employed the same verbal weaponry as the Dead Milkmen, but cut deeper. DK singer Jello Biafra once commented that the band’s name wasn’t intended to belittle America’s de facto royal family. Rather, it was a bittersweet commentary on the death of the American Dream. The fact that this subtlety was lost on both the majority of the band’s critics and the majority of their fans wasn’t that important to Jello. He put artistic expression first and didn’t care that much what people thought of him; in other words, he was a perfect role model for teenagers. And the song’s giddy, aggressive tempo fit perfectly into the emotional rollercoaster of adolescence. There was something deeply satisfying about speeding along back country roads chanting Mellow out or you will pay! along with Jello impersonating Jerry in the nightmares of conservatives. And deeply disturbing, too. Shaun and I had a ritual wherein he would drive extremely fast until I would ask him to slow down, not because driving 80 miles an hour on winding roads full of blind turns and small mammals was just plain stupid, but because I was “nervous.” He would comply and we would thus acknowledge that our temperamental differences didn’t preclude mutual respect. After we graduated, I fled to college and discovered feminism, among other things, while Shaun became more deeply entrenched in small town life. The next time we saw each other, I pointedly ignored his macho driving, instead taking issue with his confederate flag bumper sticker. By the end of the evening, we had both realized that the conflicted relationship we were bound to have as 18-year olds would pollute our memories of the symbiotic relationship we’d shared as 16-year olds, and made a tacit agreement to let the friendship slip away.

I have a picture of Shaun, taken on my 17th birthday, in which he is proudly tugging at the bottom corners of his t-shirt to create a legible, emphatic square which reads “Dead Kennedys: Too Drunk to Fuck.” This picture makes me more nostalgic than any other in my photo album, to feel the loss of adolescence most acutely and I’ve just now figured out why that is. It highlights the thin, vulnerable thread that connected me to another person at a time when new forms of connection felt revelatory. Shaun and I shared almost nothing except a political belief, a sort of anti-religion--not Satanism but, rather, a radical rejection of the notion that anything was sacred. According to our ad hoc religion, everything was fair game, open to interpretation, and ready to be used as raw material. And California Über Alles was its 23rd Psalm.

Thanks for helping me suss that out, Red76! I’ll stop by when Travelers and Record reopens (Wed-Sat 12-6 through October 7 at 403 SW 10th Ave) and write about that experience too.

Jessica Bromer

photo credit: Serena Davidson

click here for more photography by Serena Davidson

Photography by Serena Davidson

A completely spontaneous photo shoot in collaboration with Brad Adkins. I brought my camera along to photograph what I thought might be another walk in the park. Instead he asked me to collaborate in a photoshoot with him. I wasn't anticipating a portraiture session, and didn't have along my usual tools for that kind of shoot - but I said yes in the spirit of artistic creation and community. Very different from my usual portrait sessions! He acted as director coaching the person in front of the camera. We chose a blank background together and there was no need for additional positioning or further beautification. While people usually hire me for the talent of portraying them in the most genuine and complimentary image - this shoot was all about capturing something non spectacular and very very simplified.

posted by laurabecker

it's been really hard for me to post about my final tba experiences, perceptions, and reactions. it's my own fault i guess - by not keeping up i allowed everything i went to (crispin spaeth, trevor paglen, speculative archive, spalding gray, johanna billing, corberry press, and more) connect to everything else in my head, and now there's just too many connections and interrelated thoughts for me to unravel my lasting and possibly interesting impressions. in the meantime i've had to face up to my denial that the festival is actually over and that my everyday life no longer includes the concentrated inspiration and artistic analysis and philosophizing of those recent days and nights. i've also returned to keeping up on the less inspiring news of the world (the legalization of torture, the global religious infighting, the crapfest of campaign season...)

sigh.

but before i forget my tba memories completely, though i have no conclusion and feel no sense of resolution, i will note the following -

after the slideshow and lecture by trevor paglen, i started thinking about the notion of reconnaissance, a main topic of his research. trevor is interested in the secret reconnaissance missions as part of the larger military programs - satellites, stealth planes and weapons, secret prisons and bases - that are completely hidden from the public (and supposedly costing us $30 billion dollars). surveillance and spying resonated with me on the national and political level, but also just served as a really interesting final choice for my last day of TBA. i started this festival trying to be really open-minded, and quickly closed in on my feelings and rumblings of protest and political/national/global awareness as i reacted to so many of the various works. but at the same time, as the days wore on and i started picking up on the more intimate and personal signals, i was drawn in and welcomed and touched by the more quiet moments.

so when thursday night came and brought with it night vision goggles to watch the hot and steamy "dark room", a pretty empty auditorium to seemingly spy on the non-characters in johanna billing's remote yet tenderly spare films, and then a theater full of fans aching for one last glimpse straight into the secret thoughts and fears of spalding gray...well, it left me pretty vulnerable. something about seeing these completely different pieces, all of which focused on human relationships while depicting feelings of being utterly alone, pulled and pushed on my heartstrings and truly opened me up to what is in some sense the ultimate experience of the festival - hearing the very same thing in comletely different languages (dance, film, theater) all at once. it truly felt like secrets had been shared, dark depths revealed, mysteries divulged. if someone had spied on me that night they would have witnessed someone worn raw in a good way by the emotional impact.

In Baghdad, it’s Shock and Awe, but in New York City, it’s Terror. “What’s in a name?” asked Juliet, fatally underesimating the power of labels, “that which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” In 1956, Chairman Mao proclaimed, “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend,” inviting the Chinese intelligentsia to offer some constructive criticism of his communist policies. Naive intellectuals answered in droves, allowing Mao to pick them off like flies; those who got off lucky were sent into exile.

When Harrell Fletcher re-photographed every picture and every piece of wall text in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, brought the results to America, and recreated his view of the museum in art venues across the country, he invited the American art-viewing public through the looking glass. He invited us to see how we, through our representatives, Our Boys circa 1970, looked to the Vietnamese, as we were making the world safe for democracy, wreaking havoc, and inciting terror.

Harrell Fletcher’s The American War is about words as much as it is about images. It’s about the subtle, sometimes invisible linguistic choices that can determine the way horrifying images are understood. The American War is about more ideas than could possibly fit into one review, defying review as it compels review. Looked at straight on, it’s barely art at all, but it crowds the viewer’s peripheral vision, meaning vision in the imaginative sense, with more ideas, images and feelings than any one person can truly process alone. It’s a conversation piece.

The last thing I wanted to do this afternoon, after a long day of work, was walk to 18th and Northrup to look at images of horribly disfigured children. I was motivated to go by the friction of contrasting opinions, discovered through reading and conversation. Whose side was I on? I needed to find out.

I work in an environment strewn with newspapers; everyday, I’m surrounded by images of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Noble Eagle, but on my lunch break, I usually opt to just escape into the world of the Living Section, evaluating the advice of the newest crop of Dear Abby's, rearranging things I already know in the crossword puzzle, checking out celebrities’ musings on their own sex appeal or the sex appeal of other celebrities. But on Friday, I read the A&E, which is a little meatier. I work with a friend who does volunteer work with refugees and keeps a close eye on global human rights violations. Always looking for areas in which our interests converge, I pointed out DK Row’s positive review of The American War to her and said, “You should go to that.”

She was unconvinced and counter-pointed out a short Willamette Week review comprised mainly of probing questions about the ethics of the show. I didn’t know how to respond, so I started talking about Sherry Levine. I explained that Sherry Levine had appropriated other people’s artworks, re-photographing famous photographers’ works and exhibiting them as her own, most notably Walker Evans’ images of poor sharecroppers. This is art nerd / Walter Benjamin / Marcel Duchamp / postmodern / poststructuralist brain candy, I acknowledged, but it brings up some humanistic questions too. Levine’s gesture highlights the way in which Evans has used the less fortunate to further his career, casting them as actors in a drama that he directed and that largely took place in an entirely different milieu than the one in which his subjects lived. He was working for the Farm Security Administration documenting the Great Depression. By 1981, when Levine was entering her appropriative phase, his work had become famous, and a part of art history. A few cultures equate photography with soul-stealing and this belief never seems less silly than when a photographer is actually garnering money or acclaim from exposing another’s careworn face, and, by extenstion, his or her soul .

When I arrived at Harrell Fletcher’s The American War, the curator of the visual arts component of TBA, PICA’s own Kristan Kennedy, was gallery sitting. We started chatting about the show and some visitors who were milling around seized this conversational opening to initiate an exhaustive dialogue about the ethical implications of Harrell Fletcher’s The American War. I listened to opinions on the work, theirs and Kristan’s, for what felt like an hour before making it in to check it out myself. The conversation was pretty interesting, and it seems only right to share some of the visitors’ views, particularly since they (a hard to date, but probably 50-ish couple, a woman and a man) seemed so disturbed that the issues they saw as being essential to debate about the show weren’t being discussed in the press. I pointed out that someone had raised the question of exploitation, but the woman thought that the real issue was colonialism. Fletcher had gone to another country, taken what he wanted, returned to the security of home and repositioned it according to his Western paradigm, an art paradigm no less. The man found Fletcher’s decision to present the War Remnants Museum as “his” art to be selfish and unnecessary. He questioned why Fletcher hadn’t simply arranged to have the War Remnants Museum tour the United States on its own, why he had taken a more personal, possibly sneakier tack. They pointed out that if he had done something like this within the United States, with say, a Native American history museum, he would have wound up in court.

One thing that became apparent during this conversation was the way a viewer’s age influences this exhibition’s impact. Kristan and I couldn’t remember the war in question; the frustrated visitors could. The man said that he couldn’t see the exhibition as commentary on the situation in Iraq because he didn’t see the war in Vietnam as history, as something that was truly in the past or in any way resolved. I suggested that perhaps Fletcher didn’t see the work as art, but was using his position as a famous artist with access to museum-like spaces to draw the public’s attention to something he considered worthy of consideration. Kristan stressed the validity of the piece as an artwork against both my sympathetic interpretation and the visitors’ hostility. Thus debriefed, I entered The American War.

It’s what you’d expect, just totally horrifying pictures of people being victimized by American GI’s and deformed children of Agent Orange. There’s one particular picture of a soldier holding up the remains of another human being that can only be described as a pelt. The soldiers mouth is open making an expression. I’m not sure if its laughter but the caption indicates that it is, then adds, “In my feelings I wonder whether he could have been a monster or a human being?.” I don’t want this picture in my head--I’m still trying to forget it. I’m not surprised at this level of cruelty anymore, but I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it pictured so vividly. The captions are the reason to look at these pictures. The Vietnamese label loss and horror differently than Americans. A chart of statistics reads:

3 million killed
4 million injured
2 million affected by chemicals
500 infants malformed
170,000 old people get lonesome as their children or relatives were killed during the war

The captions are photographed separately, with the bottom edges of the photographs they belong with often visible in the top of the frame. Fletcher highlights his subjective viewpoint, his presence as observer, by recreating pictorially his act of seeing, looking at the photo and then the caption. He highlights the caption, giving equal weight to language and image, because, it seems, language is the key to this exhibition’s status as art. Fletcher created The American War with different intentions than the architects of the War Remnants Museum. He didn’t want to only show what happened in Vietnam from a Vietnamese perspective; he wanted to show himself in the process of trying to understanding what the Vietnam War meant to the Vietnamese. There’s a humility in that gesture that’s inextricably mixed up with the inherent selfishness of claiming anything, popular assumptions that an exhibition space for art is a rarified realm and the American cultural tradition of white male entitlement.

I left the show feeling that Fletcher’s intentions are honorable. He’s bitten off more than he can chew, but that’s what good artists do sometimes. Consider Maya Lin’s Vietnam War Memorial. Many veterans hated this idea at first--a big black slab. They wanted something literal, accessible, figurative. But, slowly, the wall’s power became obvious. People could find the name of their lost loved one. They could make a rubbing of the name and take it home. They could see themselves reflected in the wall, in the act of honoring the dead. Fletcher’s Memorial also draws on the power of words and reflections.

History is written by the victors, but no one won the Vietnam War just as no one won the American War. Fletcher has wedged himself in the crack between these wars, made a human-sized hole, and invited us in.

Thank you for bearing with me through my very long review,
Jessica Bromer

(aside: well better late than not, eh? As Mr. Berra said, "it ain't over till it's over." 360 more days til TBA 07! Forthwith, a re-view of TTD at The Works last week.)

The lineup of Ten Tiny Dances for TBA's Works that Mike Barber put together this year exemplified what makes the format--work made in the round on a 4ft. by 4ft. stage--so perfect for this kind of cabaret setting. Spatial tininess challenges choreographers who are up to the task while temporal tinyness keeps things swinging right along, upping the entertainment value. And entertainment value is what I sometimes forget when thinking about TTD. I have seen some extraordinary work built for this circumscribed space, work that truly addresses the confines of the space while transcending them.

And so when work that is light entertainment, like Gaelen Hanson's one-liner jig with a whiskey bottle (x4) singing "our love is fair to middlin'" and Julie Atlas Muz's ebony-and-ivory piece involving body paint, black light, and a gentleman dancer inserting a flag in her upended I-don't-know-what, I might enjoy, but am underwhelmed.

Bebe Miller addressed the space with a piece that was as low-key and contained as something one might perform in an elevator between floors, a thoughtful, hopeful little sketch. Concentric Tango addressed emotional containment with a meditative piece in which the dancers deliberately looked away from each other and down, their bodies in conversation, the female dancer's mile-long leg intertwining with his and unfurling again.

Dim Sum Puppet Opera offered the tiniest dance of all, a ceramic hand puppet performing a restrained fan dance around the the pagoda-hidden head of the puppeteer, nothing more. As a curatorial decision, the inclusion of Dim Sum was brilliant.

In contrast were expressive or intense releases of energy (almost expressionist...can I use that word to describe dance? oh, I just did) in pieces including the comic theatricality of Juliet Waller Pruzan and Stephen Hando whose piece found them stranded on a raft as part of a corporate training session, Angelle Hebert's piece danced (amazingly) by Karla Mann wherein the manic Mann (outfitted in a corset and cap that somehow managed to scream straighjacket anyway) intensely and repetitively flapped and flopped, grinning and eventually oblivious of Phillip Kraft who hacks away at her stage with an axe until it is only a foot square (making it the second tiniest dance ever).

The experiment most likely to succeed, that I wanted to see executed more faithfully and at length was instigated by Emily Stone who had her dancers and musicians improvise on a score called solo replay. With interesting movers like herself and Kathleen Keogh, and intensely listening musicians like Jonathan Sielaff and Luke Wyland, there was plenty of heavy improvising talent here. Dancers and musicians entered and left the 4x4 arena, at times riffing off movements that came before, but the piece needed much more time to develop, the throughline became murky, and I wanted the musicians to more directly engage the movement (either through movement of their own or through sound) throughout. Can't wait to see it happen again.

The perfect marriage of addressing spatial constraint and entertaining the masses was danced by three members of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Each comic character had his (or her) awkward dance routine performed solo and with great bravado (a fuck-yeah!-tittude) to the brilliant accompaniment of one company member on an enhanced washboard. The incredible thing about the piece, though, was when the same dances were layered in pairs and finally a trio, with surprising overlaps and intersections in the movements that made them 35% funnier and more interesting than when performed solo. Huzzah.

--Lisa Radon

by Anna Simon

Perhaps the most pertinent things have already been said about Blinglab’s The Untold Misadventures of Lewis and Clark, and my own thoughts will seem like a refrain to the chorus of groans heard around town. But understanding why things don’t work is often better than knowing why they do, so here’s my take.

Presented as a traditional puppet show, Misadventures sought to show us the seedier side of the two explorer’s journey, I suspect to deconstruct the revered American legend that has been force-fed to us Northwesterners for the past couple years. I have great respect for Marne Lucas and Bruce Conkle’s other projects, and I love puppets in all their stiff, animatronic splendor. But I’m also something of a Lewis and Clark buff, having retraced the trail and written the ol’ undergraduate thesis on the subject. There’s much to capture the popular imagination in their story—some sexual, mostly non. Thomas Jefferson commissioned Lewis to explore uncharted territory recently attained from the Louisiana Purchase. Jefferson wanted to find a river route to the Pacific enabling inter-continental trade. It was also a scientific journey and an ambassadorial trip—time to meet the neighbors! Clark was chosen as co-commander by Lewis and often gets more publicity, but Lewis’s sensitive, mysterious personality combined with his wildlife drawings and poetic descriptions of the land make him ready dramatic material.

Blinglab centered their show around the idea that Lewis was gay and lusted after Clark. I’m not from the northwest, but I’d never heard this before, nor even contemplated it. (Scholars agree that Lewis was depressed and maybe a bit manic. He was a loner, and after the expedition ended, he fell into a deep depression.) Homoeroticzing the pair is the silly glue that’s supposed to hold the performance together amid quirky vignettes. These expedition funny facts are crudely, painfully translated into puppet sketch comedy but do not add up to a show. I, as others before me, did not make it past intermission.

Misadventures used historical information without regard to context and threw it into a sex-drugs-racism-imperialism-etc. soupy mush. Yes, it’s true that Clark had a black slave whom the Native women slept with for “black magic.” It’s also true that York was treated as a free man on the expedition and voted with the other guys on group decisions. Clark did unknowingly prescribe poisonous Thunderclappers to relieve constipation, but that was the state of medicine at the time. Charbonneau, Sacagawea’s French fur-trapping husband, was a dim bulb and disliked among the men—he also won Sacagawea (who was already a prisoner of a tribe) in a gambling match when she was fourteen, before they ever came across the expedition. Taken out of context and blown-up these tidbits unfairly ridicule the past for its cultural shortcomings. It felt too easy and glib. Re-examining history from different perspectives is essential, but Blinglab’s only point seemed to be, “Isn’t the past just ridiculous?” without further insight.

Neal Medlyn, Totally Nude

There was a rumor going around that Neal Medlyn might take his clothes of, so of course everyone was there.

Neal delivered not one, but two inspired performances at the WORKS, first- standing alone on stage, bright light streaming from behind him cutting a glaring line around his fleshtoned uni-tard in his one man show NEAL MEDLYN WILL DRINK POISON UNTIL HE DIES and the next as belting out R.Kelly hits with cohort Kenny Mellman. What Neal does - is hard to describe, not quite stand up - his all out assault on the buffoonery of pop music and pop culture kept the audience on their tippy toes, their eyes alight - their jaws unhinged with laughter. He pushed his body through too tight clothes, making awkward and tiny movements while turning gags and tricks and ticks into grand illustrations of our sad but heroic bodies.

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

After a long TBA coma I have begun to feel the nascent threads of inspiration wending their way through my daily life. As I remove coats from my closet and catch up on laundry, I pull vagabond programs from pockets and smile as the image of a body in movement or a face lit in stage lights flashes in my memory. Snatches of song and bits of dialogue continue to resonate in my mind, long after the performers have made their way home.

photo credit: Serena Davidson

And home is a strange and delicate thing. I am thinking of Bebe Miller’s “Landing Place,” and the small house that was constantly in danger of the activity that surrounded it. How fragile it seemed, set beneath the stomping feet and rolling bodies. It was as if the tumult and turmoil of our daily lives could crush the tiny thing. I feel like one of those dancers, holding myself out, teetering forward again and again until a shoulder or hand is placed beneath me- supporting me and carrying me. I’m home now, more often than I am out among you and I am wondering where my home will shift. Where, in the rolling tide of this world, I will find a safe harbor to place it.

I have taken away this sense of humanity from the festival. More so than I have from any other. Whether it is Nature Theatre, explaining the grace of our daily actions or Stan’s Cafe, piling us one by one into mounds of association and identity or Jerry Quickly, seeing the deep and undeniable humanity in his Iraqi minders, I wonder why the best of the festival this year (in my opinion) was steeped in this need to remind us of our human core.

Jerry Quickly- God, I wanted more than anything to embrace that man as I watched him tell it. Because, his show wasn’t necessarily couched in politics, though there was that; rather, it was couched in what it means to be a person in hell making connections with other people. There is a place in war and death and destruction when suddenly we are all raw. We are all made up of the same finite and destructible stuff. That is when we are equal and war and hatred make less sense than they ever did. Jerry Quickly walked on the moon. Thank god we have poets to come back and tell us that it doesn’t just look like a bright blue marble from up there, but that it looks like peace and loneliness and we better start doing something about it.

Strange how the festival was book ended in such a lovely way. It starts with a woman who looks up at the moon, dreaming and thinking of home and ends with a man who has been there and thought he’d never make it back.

“Hello. Excuse me. Can you tell me where I am?”

Posted by P.A. Coleman

"Me"

To see more TBA photography click here: Serena Davidson Photography

"What if every cell in our bodies (100 trillion) at once has the potential to invite being seen choosing to surrender the pattern of facing a single direction while perceiving all of the space in which I am performing (and time is my music...all of my movement is music)."

What could entrance a writer more than a dancer for whom writing forms the basis of every dance? Above is the basic "what if" on which "Room" is based. "Room" is the piece Deborah Hay choreographed for her most recent Solo Performance Commissioning Project, performed during PICA's TBA Festival by PDX dancer/choreographers Linda Austin and Tahni Holt. (To back up a step, read these statements (down the page under Deborah Hay's Concept) that each participant in the SPCP had to consider before applying.) Hay initiates a body performance with a query, a word/head launch point like the one above, starting with a "what if" that is usually, as she puts it, "preposterous." She said yes it is "preposterous" that she would say "every cell" when there are 100 trillion, "but the fact that it is preposterous makes it a delight. I still ask because it's interesting."

And her asking is what makes her and the work she does so interesting. She asks questions that she knows cannot be answered. "My body is bored by answers," she said. "I want to keep the dancer in a place of curiosity and engagement." For example, "When I go into a studio, I notice I have a front. I point it toward some point in the room that I determine is the front. Why is that?" This makes work that is so different from so much more immediate than the, as Hay puts it, "look at me and do what I do" school of choreography. She credits John Cage for allowing her to ask questions larger than those coming from her own experience. I have a "lack of interest in self-expression."

Hay has been focusing on solo dance. She believes that the art of solo dance is relationship which she describes with her Whole Egg Theory. The egg is cracked into a bowl. The performer is the yolk. The egg white is the space between the performer and the audience (the edge of the bowl). If you shake the bowl, the yolk moves around and energizes the egg white. She's interested in that space between.

She shared that the highest compliment she'd ever received about a performance was when William Forsythe said to her, "You brought me to a level of attention in myself that I love, and kept me there."

The Deborah Hay chat was a highlight of TBA because it did what a good chat should, provide the fantastic opportunity it provided to pull back the curtain and get a look at process through which and the armature on which these performances of "Room" were built. That Hay has traversed miles of conceptual territory beginning in her Judson days, is made evident through her work, yes, but what a treat to also be privy to the thinking and the work behind the dance that has developed through her years of experiment and deep attention. It's this kind of chat (workshops too) from which PDX artists working in all disciplines can take something away to inform their practices. Thanks PICA.

--Lisa Radon

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

Posted by Scott McEachern

This is a wonderful piece that explores the effects of humans on the natural world. From the moment one sees the stage, an opening surrounded by local plants bucketed in dirt forming an artificial wetland, there is no question about the beauty of the production. The four dancers arrive on stage, one at a time, and dance to minimal music that is designed to be background, to mimic the sounds of nature (and later, the urban environment). The first third of the play is devoted to evoking the patterns of various animals: fish, birds, without the interference with humans. The dancers move in formation, touch each other lovingly, and settle into a rhythm of continuity. It is beautiful and lovely and leaves one aching for a better natural world. Because one knows that the second half of the play is a long meditation upon the destructiveness of humans. There is the interference with natural migratory patterns by the urban environment—the birds are forced to forage for food in the midst of a construction site, their formations are interrupted and often destroyed, they become scavengers and their community breaks down into squabbling and individualism. The dancers masterfully create (or un-create) the environment around them, as they move the natural landscape around them, signaling an interaction with nature that humans have long since given up in favor of an antagonistic relationship with birds, plants, the environment. The production highlights how far humans have gone to wreck havoc on the natural patterns.

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

click here for more TBA photos: Serena Davidson Photography

Posted by Scott McEachern

In the chat on Thursday, September 14, 2006, with The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, the most compelling thing that Pavel the director said was that he had conceived of the dance as an anti-narrative, and to that end he decided to use dice to determine the form of the dance. The dice, for him, introduced a level of chance that took him away from received notions of theater and dance—he decided upon the form of the production rather than the narrative. Once the form had been determined through the roll of the dice (and the rolls decided everything: from the number of scenes to the number of actors in each scene, to the number of movements each actor performed), the troupe went about constructing the dance within that chance-derived structure. It highlights the role of luck in our lives, how seemingly connected events are actually circumstantially related, and spotlights the drama inherent in the movements of our everyday existence—what Pavel called the “spectacle of the everyday.”

In the production of Ballet Brut, the audience sits in very close quarters and when the production begins, a curtain is drawn about six feet away from the people in the front row. So everybody is very close and then the actors come out, one by one, in front of the curtain. We can hear their breathing, we can see their every detail. And this, for me, resonated with something that came up in their chat: that is, the production is an examination of the spectacle of the everyday. The production was built on small gestures: a hand behind the head, a smirk, a sway of the hips, a flutter of the hands. While there wasn’t a traditional narrative, the gestures built up tension, the glances between actors helped create a sense of expectation for an end, which comes in spectacular fashion. So it is a spectacle, I realized, when the stage is filled with local dancers who mimic the pattern of dance-gestures that the actors have developed over the course of the dance. A disco ball descends, a ballerina pirouettes in the seats opposite and behind the stage dancers who move with frantic grace and energy. It is a climax without much of a message, and that is quite all right, and much of the point.

It’s really hard for me to imagine any more sublime calling than one to become a hot humorous trapeze artist. The Wau Wau Sisters’ last act, in which they swung from trapezes to in leopard-print, really blew my mind. That evening with them, James Tigger! Ferguson, Julie Atlas Muz, and Taylor Mac was, for me, hands down the most exciting event at this year’s TBA, in terms of the crazy things our bodies and our imaginations can manage.

That said, the chat with the five of them plus Zebra from Portland’s Sissyboy may well have come in second. It involved far fewer props, more clothes, and was generally more sedate, but it was a great pleasure to hear these six people talk about their art. For those of you who missed it, here’s a pretty extensive summary.

The moderator began the chat with a question about the concept of “New Burlesque,” a term to which the performers responded with mild antipathy. They each expressed a degree of discomfort with overtheorizing their craft, but spoke with a great deal of intelligence and insight about it. Julie was particularly uninterested in titles; she said, “Say whatever you want about me, but I can’t let it define my work”. Tigger explained that his art drew its energy from the spontaneity of acts that just happened in the back of a bar with real people, and that deconstruction was absurd because it was precisely this looseness, lack of codification and definition which made the art vital. There appeared to be a general discomfort with and dislocation from the term, and several of the performers admitted that they had researched it before coming so they would have some idea what it meant. Adrian Wau pointed out that it was generally externally applied and that while they had the critical background to understand the relationship of the term to the postmodern era, it wasn’t particularly helpful to them. They did indeed have the critical background to discuss these issues and to theorize extensively in this brief conversation.

Despite the discomfort with the concept of a clear movement, they were all aware of a something special going on on the streets of New York, of which they were a part. Julie said that for her what New Burlesque meant was having an international family with a shared aesthetic, which she said, was comprised of a love of glitter. The Burlesque has traditionally been a low art form, and she insisted that such terms are inherently restrictive. “Hallelujah,” she said. “Put me in the gutter.” Julie also pointed out that it’s a little fallacial to call burlesque new, since it’s always been a presence in some form. Tigger added, “It’s all so ridiculous and absurd that you want to dress it up and fuck with it.”

The moderator asked about what he saw as an underlying sweetness in these performers’ intentions. He said that they seemed less aggressive and ironic than their predecessors. Julie replied that in a press release she had written of her colleagues as the “most outrageously loving artists in NYC.” Tigger added that, “Outrage without love is just not interesting.” He spoke of his love of his audience, as well, which he explained as a basic form of respect. “I never want to be above entertaining,” he said.

Adrian spoke of the cultural need to make a burlesque of all sorts of things in the world, to go to ridiculous extremes to unravel what we think we know. She called this aesthetic “deep and broad,” extending into a variety of arts. Zebra said that he felt that people no longer trust the mainstream media and are looking for some kind of happening that will get them out of their homes and speaking on the streets. There was a sense that this particular incarnation of the burlesque grows, to some degree, out of a sense of political outrage.

Zebra pointed out that this form of burlesque, unlike those of past eras, is not exploitive, but is really about empowerment. Taylor Mac compared it to the Playhouse of the Ridiculous but sweet, “not ‘fuck you we’re gonna celebrate,’ just “we’re gonna celebrate!’” Tanya said that they were all familiar with the era of anger, but found themselves in an era where it was more fun to be sly and sneakily witty.

She also said that in a time when there are images of the body everywhere, it’s curious that the actual body is so much more shocking. While kids might see Victoria’s Secret ads on TV everyday, the actual female body in underwear seems to have a subversive power that can escape objectification by exposing its own clumsiness along with its beauty, its awkwardness and humor.

Tigger replied, “It’s about putting the human being back inside the genitals.” But Tanya clarified her position further, saying , “It’s more about the fun we have inhabiting our bodies with their sweat and smells and muscle.” Zebra added that for him it was about “epiphany” which, he explained, means it is about high art. “We’re bringing the collective consciousness back up,” he said.

In response to a question about the serious political material that entered their acts, Taylor Mac said that he believed it was braver and more personal to approach the political through the personal, because in this way both the self and the political situation our exposed. Zebra said that when performance becomes preachy it is no longer art but “really good graphic design.” However, he said that he has a strong social conscience and feels it is more important than ever to get like minds together in a room. He said that he considers himself an entertainer before an artist, but that he’s angry about the state of the world and believes that people need a visceral experience and are ready to “expand beyond Fox News.”

The moderator asked the Wau Wau sisters specifically about the feminist bent to their work. Adrian replied that while she applauds feminists who bring their politics explicitly into their work but that for her feminism simply pervaded what she did, and that while she wouldn’t ever call it feminist she also wouldn’t say it wasn’t feminist. The moderator commented that “it’s possible to be inherently political without being explicitly so.”

Tigger said “We’re putting the femme back in feminism,” pointing out that it’s a traditionally female art form, but that it had become mixed and quirky. Taylor Mac described a party he’d been to where he saw a crowd of gay men watching straight girls take off their clothes and cheering them on. He’d appreciated the moment, and felt it expressed an important focus of the movement, which was more on theatricality and expression than sexuality. The performers all agreed that the movement, as they had experienced it, was deeply inclusive and celebratory of difference.

The general philosophy that these performers communicated was one of joy and tenderness toward their art, their audiences, and their bodies. They are performing because it’s what they love to do and what they are good at, but in order to be honest to themselves and their audiences, their politics show up on stage. Julie insisted that they are deeply pro-American. After all, she said, “I put a flag in my ass and didn’t get arrested!”

Zebra, who was particularly articulate about his take on the art form, summed up the discussion with this memorable sound bite: “It’s not about showing your tits, it’s about unveiling your humanity.”

All of the performers were deeply articulate and insightful people. When I walked into the Q Center and saw them at the front of the room, I was struck by how ordinary they all looked in broad day light and dressed somewhat more conservatively. Rather than decreasing my awe, this fed it. What extraordinary talent these people have! It appeared to me that each of them had found a vocation in what they do, that their personalities, their passions, their imaginations, and their communities had all come into perfect balance to feed these art forms of theirs.

I left a little achy-envious, wishing my vocation had something to do with drag or trapezes. I would like to live as large and as honestly as these six people seem to do. In the mean time, however, their integrity and imagination and intelligence were almost as deeply inspiring to me as the fucking incredible things they can do with their bodies.

Posted by: Taya Noland

photo credit: Serena Davidson

These days, there are as many definitions of postmodernism as there are well, I was going to say Eskimo words for snow, but a little research revealed that 1. Inuit don’t like being called Eskimos and 2. They don’t have very many words for snow. It’s a myth.

Postmodern can mean “self-referential,” “appropriative,” “critical of the mythologizing of the role of the artist,” “from the era after which the succession of ‘modern’ movements in any particular creative field are commonly seen to have ‘ended’” etc. Sometimes, it’s just convenient shorthand for “weird and abstruse.” Instead of saying, “I just finished watching a performance in which a dancer wearing orthopedic shoes twitchily shook a tambourine and occasionally yelled out, ‘Next! Pony!’ or ‘Nest!Pony!’ I’m not sure which,” I simply told a friend who called me immediately after a performance of Deborah Hay’s Mountain, “I’ve been watching postmodern dance.” Which is not to say that I didn’t like this piece; I did. After responding negatively to Jennifer Monson/iLand as well as the more accomplished BeBe Miller Company, I wondered if I could actually like contemporary dance stripped of the eyecandy and high energy antics that helped me access Nature Theater of Oklahoma and Yubiwa Hotel.

When the woman next to me in the theater asked if I’d seen anything else I liked, I immediately replied, “Nature Theater of Oklahoma.” Asked to elaborate, I commented that NTO toyed with conventions in dance and theater by building a performance around props and movements from everyday life. “Like a spoof?” Kind of, but more complex, because it was also using dance to spoof everyday life. “That sounds delightful.”

Then the houselights dimmed, and a woman wearing what looked like a scrunchy made of cotton balls appeared before us, shaking maracas. I immediately noted the spare, beautiful stage lighting, which was employed successfully throughout the performance, the effective costuming choices, the skilled, likable dancers, the way that having the dancers make music to their dancing with maracas, tambourine and chimes was a clever reversal of the usual order of things, but more than anything else, I noticed myself noticing these things and waiting to see if I could become truly absorbed. Eventually, it happened. The turning point was an interlude in which one of the dancers changed into a grimacing troll-like embodiment of the human impulse to torture and kill others of our kind. It was grotesquely comedic, nauseating, but also provocatively pushing whatever buttons packed Romans into the amphitheater to watch people be devoured by lions. At that point, I started to sense the dancers sensing our reactions to them, to feel like they were dancing to me, not at me. It was a conversation, no less interesting because it was without words, except, occasionally “Nest!Pony!” or something equally bizarre. Eventually I became so absorbed in the performance that I didn’t need narrative aides; the dancers’ simple movements commanded my attention like twitching strings before a cat.

This post is getting long, so please bear with me. Or don’t--the review is over, but I wanted to comment on a comment on a post that was written awhile ago, but which I just got around to reading, about Nature Theater of Oklahoma. Self-indulgent? Probably. But isn’t self-indulgence at the heart of blogging? Reclaiming cultural discourse from the squares with word counts, editors, journalism degrees, advertisers, fact-checkers and critical templates? Not according to Bryan Markovitz, who would like us to “describe the methodology and formal techniques that [writers and choreographers] present within the historical context from which they draw inspiration.” Markovitz expressed this idea in response to Kirsten Collins’ post on NTO, critiquing her approach to writing about NTO (which surprised me because I’ve found her posts to be among the most consistently eloquent and insightful on the blog. Singling out her thoughtful piece on NTO over say, my own contribution--comprised largely of musings on such important topics as beards and making out--may have been a compliment of sorts) He acknowledges that what he’s truly critical of is the popular misconception that NTO is cutting-edge theater, adding intriguingly that “Pavol [ Poetics:a ballet brut’s director] is a very perverse fellow.”

It made me think back to the beginning of TBA and James Yarker of Stan’s Cafe saying in his lecture, Why be a professional artist? that his theater group was ignored early on because they didn’t have the right haircuts, the right trainers. Meaning British sneakers. That he learned that artists without a lot of depth can get far with the right look and a knack for hitting the zeitgeist. Nature Theater? has excellent trainers. And as I’ve noted earlier on the blog, powerful, zeitgeist-hitting hair. And yes, the theatrical techniques they employ are likely played out as impetuses for provoking sweeping paradigm shifts about the role of art and artists, at least for those familiar with the history of postmodern theatrical experimentation. And they seem to know that and not care. The fact that this territory is already mapped makes it easier to goof around in. But, I still think NTO is doing something valuable by making theater fun and insinuating the uniquely life-affirming qualities of live performance into the realm of viable entertainment. And their performance inspired me to become more interested in performances of all kinds, including more challenging work.

Markovitz sees it differently, commenting, “My concern ... is how it stalls the real progress toward a new kind of performance experience that might truly change the way we understand live art. This kind of work, which demands highly specialized sites and modes of viewing, has not yet found a way to coexist with the survival interests of the contemporary arts performing circuit, which must sell a very limited kind of culture if it is to survive.” I’m not quite informed enough to venture a rebuttal to that.

Jessica Bromer

photo credit: Serena Davidson

Click here to view more Time Based Art photos by Serena Davidson

Portland loves Ten Tiny Dances. And now we, the audience, have the opportunity to contribute. The last piece, Splinter, was created by Angelle Herbert and Phillip Kraft. They're looking for a name for their company, and would like submissions. Joy! Director Mike Barber clarified that Angelle and Phillip aren't looking for a title for the piece--they're looking for a name for their company.

You can email your smashingly brilliant ideas to Phillip at:
ME_A_TUS_ at COMCAST.NET
(Note: At is spelled out above instead of @ to save Phillip from being buried by an auto-spam blizzard)

Also:
Visit www.tentinydances.org, and see you at the next tiny event!

--Carissa Wodehouse
Freelance writer, enthusiast

Sept. 7
Brad Adkins pens letter to Mr. T. A. Witcher of Brownwood, Texas:
“Dear sir,
I am a farmer. On a good farm, and am 69 years old. Never held a Civil office, and told the President two years ago, wanted Elective or appointed: and have been for many years dissatisfied with both the centralizing tendencies of the Republicans, and the demagogary [sic] and insincerity of the Democrats, who seem to have no great underlying principles. Hence I am allied with the Populist and am a member of both the National and State Committees. Feel little interest any way.”

Sept. 8
Adkins sent in a beautiful shot and scored number three in a match between Astwood Bank and Alvechurch Wanderers played in almost tropical heat. The scores at the finish were Astwood Bank 3, Alvechurch Wanderers 2.

Sept. 9
Adkins went to a “speaking” at Sycamore. It rained.

Sept. 10
Brad Adkins, as Professor Megaphone Cook, made an appearance on a white horse which wore a coquettish blue ribbon in its tail. Then he raised his hat, with all the dignity of a real commencer of events, unfurled a white flag and waved it violently. It was the signal.

Sept. 11
Adkins founds Satyagraha movement with Gandhi at a rally that attracted three thousand Indians, both Hindu and Muslim, ‘free’ and indentured, at the Empire.

Sept. 12
Brad Adkins makes a circular, tethered hop of some 140 feet (42 meters) on the island of Lindholm in Denmark.

Sept. 13
Adkins plowed in the morning. Fruit tree agent was there.

Sept. 14
Adkins discovers an unconscious man, suffering from malarial poison and in serious condition floating in a boat two miles above Des Arc on the White River. The man is believed to be Eugene Morgan and may have been on a pearl fishing expedition.

Sept. 15
Adkins penned “The Voyage of the Blue Vega: A story of Arctic adventure” for The Boy’s Own Paper, issue #1443, volume 28.

Sept. 16
Under an assumed name—Roald Amundsen—discovers Magnetic South Pole; wins Finnish marathon (under the nom-de-sport Kaarlo Nieminen)

Sept. 17
Adkins cut some corn and helped Owen Bailey thresh. Plowed some.

--On Kawara

photo credit: Serena Davidson

The smell of mint pervades the room as the dancers swing buckets of wild grasses and play with large rectangles of ultra-light wood that whisper and swish to the floor. This is lovely, and I wish I could say as much about the performance as a whole, but the truth is it lacks cohesion and focus. I’m no dancer, but even I could tell that the dancers were unprepared and under-rehearsed. Someone else on the blog compared them to Tahni Holt’s Monster Squad, which is interesting; I was also comparing them, but noting that while Monster Squad dancers have a rough and hard-hitting movement style, they also have great skill and control over their bodies. In contrast, the performance I saw came across as clumsy and unpracticed. The dancers had no control over the evocative objects they were wielding, which could have been a choice-- but expressing a lack of control is very different from actually having no control. In one case, a dancer sent a rolling square of grass across the floor, then ran to try and catch it before it rolled into the legs of audience members (she didn't reach it in time). In another sequence, all five dancers kicked the aforementioned light-wood flats in the air while laying on their backs, except half of the time the flats fell awkwardly to the floor, and one flat finally broke in half. I am baffled as to why you would incorporate an element into your piece that you do not know how to work with, in the same way I’m baffled as to why you’d attempt to lift another dancer when you are not confident you can pull it off. There were several points where it was clear to me that a dancer had made a mistake and then morphed into another move to cover it up. Was this piece really trying to mimic the flight patterns of birds in non-native environments? What I saw was five people kind of moving like birds and rolling around on the floor a lot. And in one sequence donning tutus and sort of invoking Swan Lake. For no reason that I can fathom, except that swans are birds.

In its defense I will say that a good friend of mine loved it (and perhaps she will comment here as to what she liked). I remain baffled. It reminded me of high school students messing around in someone’s living room, pulling cool looking objects out of the basement and tossing them around, raiding their mom's closet for costumes. I’m all for bringing work that experiments and doesn’t succeed, that attempts more than it can pull off, or that is working hard to appear unpolished and tossed off, but I couldn’t tell what this piece was going for. And honestly, I'm not sure what PICA was thinking when they added it to the TBA lineup.

But, again, the smell of mint in the room was nice, and the grasses in buckets set a nice tone. And Disjecta is looking good.

- Faith Helma

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

Click here to view more Time Based Art photos by Serena Davidson

Or: Considered Soberly, With Help From Leif, Laptop is Kinda Great

“Agck! Q-bert!” I exclaimed delightedly, waving my Cuba Libre at the wallpaper in THE UNIT and instantly dating myself. “What is Q-bert?” my 24-year old friend replied. “You know, he hops down blocks that look like [again gesturing to the wallpaper] but I forget what he’s trying to do, eat things or kill things or get somewhere...?” She didn’t know. Four years were enough to separate our technological cultural memories. When she was old enough to play video games, Q-bert’s moment had passed. I remembered before Atari came home, the Arcade Era, the Coney Island, Wild West halcyon days of Galaga, of DigDug. This must be what Katherine Bovee and Philippe Blanc mean by “micro-nostalgia.”

photo credit: Serena Davidson

The Q-bert wallpaper was inspired (and trippy--a reference to psychedelia and op art?), but nothing else in THE UNIT was exciting. An ornately framed oil painting of an obsolete laptop (correction: Macintosh Hard Disk Icon) was a bit too obvious to be engaging (correction: Now that Leif has kindly informed me that I was, in fact, looking at an obsolete Macintosh Hard Disk Icon, I actually do feel engaged by the way the concepts of mobility and iconography were being explored through a traditional art-making technique, which some might consider to be dead. A parallel between Macintosh graphics and the transitions that swept painterly thinking at the close of the Byzantine era can be inferred. I'm a big fan of comment-accepting forums for this very reason. When dealing with art that works through implication, sometimes it takes a village. Additionally, the trash can was a witty touch. I see now that I was, in fact, in the belly of a laptop. I was in the computer, living Tron. The Q-bert wallpaper was the desktop and may not have been intended to inspire thoughts of Q-bert at all. But I hope it was.) There were some cupboards that everyone who came into THE UNIT immediately opened. Were the spare lightbulbs part of the installation? Was the wool blanket? If not, I don’t recommend leaving them in the enticing cupboards; confusion arose. I liked THE UNIT. It was a comfortable, trippy little sanctuary from the crowded Works, like a tent in the backyard. My friend was unimpressed but didn’t condemn Laptop in THE UNIT entirely, commenting “maybe this makes more sense in Beaverton.”

Back inside the Works, Copy was rocking out on his key-tar. “Who is this?” said Mark Wooley, who had suddenly appeared beside us, handing out flyers for a Joan Crawford look-alike contest at the Wonder Ballroom. “This is Copy” said my friend pointing to a monitor where Copy’s name kept appearing along with patterns evocative of primitive video game technology. “Q-bert!” I yelled, pointing at the sign like it was another piece of the puzzle. “Copy?” said Mark Wooley. “It’s his name,” explained my friend, pointing at Copy. Then we all danced.

Jessica Bromer

photo credit: Serena Davidson

photo credit: Serena Davidson

Click here to view more Time Based Art photos by Serena Davidson

I’m a big fan of my adoptive home in the Pacific Northwest and a big fan of local artists who use their work to refract the way the synthesis of culture and landscape in this region forms a palpable energy, a mood. I love Matt McCormick’s films, Daniel Peterson’s photoblog, M. Ward’s music and Bruce Conkle’s funny, surprising sculptural installations, his “Sasquatch Feng Shui.” I love the way Marne Lucas advertises her bartending gigs with the same casual enthusiasm with which she advertises her photography exhibitions. It’s so Portland, where the term busser/rockstar can be used with only slight irony and self-made men are everywhere, racing to build the most spectacular temple for contemporary art or wandering around dreaming up new ways to convince us that every bloody thing we do is art. The spirit of expansion, initiated with the “God-given”mandate of Manifest Destiny (Mission Accomplished), is alive here with all its invigorating sense of promise and inevitable, messy mistakes.

Lucas and Conkle went out on a limb with this puppet show.

I give it a great big E. In the area where BlingLab’s principals are experienced, visual art, the show was awesome. What was lacking was clear, expertly paced storytelling to give the humor a little more structural support. I hope they try puppet theater again with a bigger team including members with backgrounds in storytelling and stage direction. I’d also like to see them create an expansive installation using some of the elements from this show--the humanoid props, the slight, awkward movements and the prerecorded audio--to form a quasi-historical display. If it weren’t on the other side of the country, I would encourage Lucas and Conkle to visit one of the artistic highlights of my birth home: the Discover Lancaster County History Wax Museum. Here, a waxen Lincoln endlessly repeats one of his eloquent speeches, his literally shifting eyes exponentially compounding the creepiness somehow inherent in all representations of our 16th president. Here, Tony Ourstler’s technique of projecting blown-up, talking faces onto stuffed life-sized rag dolls is put to good use clearing up some of the public’s misperceptions about the Amish. History truly comes alive, or at the very least, comes undead.

BlingLab is halfway to making something revelatory. It’s a good time for cracked out, irreverent reinterpretations of western imperialism and macho entitlement. It’s a good time for puppetry to “grow up,.” to become a vital cultural force. Change is already stirring in the many excellent puppeteers who’ve cropped up recently and in puppetry’s role in protests against the War in Iraq. Pass the peacepipe, BlingLab, and take up your puppets anew.

Jessica Bromer

Nature Theater of Oklahoma has indeed charmed Portland. They've charmed the hip t-shirts right off of us. We've been battling to get in the doors for days now. Is it worth it? Absolutely. Somehow the Nature Theater has developed a movement vocabulary that is made from the awkward slouchiness of the born-in-the-seventies generation. They have exposed our casual code system of flirtation and rejection. The subtle cues of sidewalk stances and accidental sleep-overs are revealed and choreographed with enthusiastic fervor. Is it a betrayal? No, it's a thrill.

posted by amber bell

At the end of the show, two lush red ribbons demarcated the circular performance space or "Room" of the Deborah Hay piece performed here by Tahni Holt (Monster Squad) and Linda Austin (Performanceworks Northwest). One rested on the laps of the front row audience members, drawn up from the floor in one movement at the direction of Tahni Holt at the opening of her solo. One was knotted and twisted at their feet (with a little red sports car at one end) dropped there by Linda Austin as she unraveled it from a giant ball of ribbon that she towed around with her like a little dog.

Room is a solo choreographed by Deborah Hay. This evening featured two "adaptations" (Hay's words) of the solo performed here one after the other by two of Portland's most interesting choreographers/movers. It became a game for me to imagine the movement instructions that made up the score of the piece...instructions that led the dancers to fake tap dancing, little hopeful singing, snapping, and at one point, collapse. Seeing it the second time through (Austin's piece), watching the pieces intersect, overlap, and diverge became as important as the performance (but I guess this makes me an inattentive audience member). At the base of it, Holt's performance was more muscular and intense, requiring attention from the audience, while Austin's performance was sly, subtle, drawing attention from the audience.

One interesting takeaway was thinking about ways of evaluating non-narrative dance that is not meant to make beautiful forms to please the audience, not meant to tell a story. One question I asked is, what makes movement compelling? In a series of movements performed by a dancer, what is it that draws us in, allows us to make a connection with the mover, or simply makes us sit up and take notice? What can the dancer do that will engrave itself on me and stay with me after I leave the theater?

Admittedly it's a question too large to answer fully, but here are some thoughts based on these movements and these dancers. On a tactical level, repetition (building and breaking familiarity), instances of sound in a largely silent performance, direct contact with the audience, contrast in speed and intensity of movements were elements that, in some kind of chart of the energy of the performance, dancerly movement played off non-dancerly would show up as spikes.

At the level of the performer, here, the two dancers' personal styles were compelling for very different reasons, Holt because of the intensity of her gaze, this direct contact with the audience daring them to watch--as well as the intensity of her movement. Even when her movements were more relaxed, you could always feel the coiled nature of her spine that supported even the lazily moving arm. In contrast, Austin is all quiet center, but not in any kind of priestess-like way, more that she makes you trust her movement. She can then play that trust off of the precariousness she likes to explore in her work. Her gaze says, "Well, here goes," or "Let's see," or to the audience, "Well, what do you think?" This makes us collaborators in her performance.

With regard to the piece, the work in the round, the title of "Room," the line both women sang, "You are the only one," the repeated marking of the space, were among the elements that drew the work toward cohesion, giving the audience plenty of material with which to weave multiple interpretations. On the contrary, there were certain odd notes that like the faux French or cabaret singing that didn't want to hang together.

So this is how I evaluate this kind of work, did it hang together? Besides my immediate experience that can be (if the performance is compelling) exciting, disturbing, even fun, did it give me enough to work with for later when I go away and think about it? Is there more there than movement? By this definition, for example, Vivarium Studios piece is brilliant, the multiple elements (video, performance, narrative and non-) hang together perfectly, while ultimately giving the audience plenty of room to do part of the heavy lifting of building their own takeaway. The same can be done on a more abstract level with a body on an empty stage. For me, Room, as a piece, became much more rich when I learned of the primary instruction she gave the dancers for the piece...but that's the story of the Chat.

Early on in the festival...seems like weeks ago, there were two acts that took the audience into the palm of their hand and held us there like babes in a cornfield. Last night another legend of the cutting edge, Deborah Hay, brought a powerful, sublime dancework that draws energy from her young Seattle choreographic collaborators. Going to prove that those who have been working the longest in pushing boundaries, remain the most progressive and truly daring.
To help kick off T:BA, Laurie Anderson brought a solo show into the home of all things tradtiional and boring...the Newmark theatre. She has been making poetics, sound art, film and a deep trances on stage for nearly 3 decades, and this mastery was clear from the moment her gentle voice took time to slowly fill the echoes of music that hung over her star-like floating set. She had no doubts or worries in addressing head on the terrors and sadness of living in an America led by the current semi-fascist regime, in fact you got the feeling she'd lived through it before...because she had, with Reagan, and that made her more succinct and more outraged, and more empathetic in her critique and commentary. Laurie was able to pull feeling from her violin, from her stories and out of the audience in an authentic, unforced way that has missing among some of the more aggressive T:BA acts, or those that might feel that genuine, deep feeling is something not hip or contemporary.
Kiki and Herb also have been working the stage for decades, not quite as long, though they do claim to have been around since the day they sipped milk from a cow that ate Christ's afterbirth. The two performers walk a fine line between bitter satire and truly heartbreaking depth of emotion...and blend their political commentary and rage at the current social order into a complicated character work that has people laughing in a conflicted, sexy, outrageous way. The urge to wish the worst upon our current leader is deep in them, the wisdom to do so in so unexpected and sideways a manner is a sign of their genius and lack of need to prove themselves as a young, hip performance team. Kiki held us, held the audience, made us cheer and cheer as false rhinestones beneath her eyes twinkled fake tears and she sang with breathtaking beauty a ridiculous song about reuniting with her daughter in a grocery store. Cutting edge? Absolutely.
Last night was Deborah Hay's premiere of Mountain, a new work based on her growing fascination with taking the power and unique spirit of dancer/choreographers and adapting their work through her filter. The elegance and spareness of her work was stunning. Earlier in the week we'd seen migrating birds portrayed in a blunt, and obvious manner, with a clumsy desperation. Deborah took for granted that audiences are profoundly able to focus and quite themselves to look quietly and deeply at work that is worth this attention. In one disturbingly funny moment a bullish woman pummels another dancer, a cartoonish dance that was in no way over the top, but still odd to find ourselves enjoying the slaughter. In another moment, a woman dances with a quiet desperation, signaling to us as a song, delicate and fraying is pulled from her on a bare stage, time unrushed.
Is there something to be said for an artform, a genre (contemporary performance) that allows its masters to grow old gracefully? Hell yes, but also, let's offer a wonderful shout of joy for those artists who keep pushing, keep moving forward, and relax into total trust for their powers to hold ideas and visions up to the light, and expect the most from the audience, and allow ourselves to stretch and pull, and laugh and cry, with genuine new passion.
by Jonathan Walters

Today was a light T:BA day.
But, even though I only went to see one show; it was well worth it.
Bling Lab did a wonderful puppet theatre at the yet incomplete Someday Lounge.
The sound / voices were fully recorded, which was a bit odd; and sometimes led to a seemingly odd kung-fu theatre dubbed sensibility, but the ingenuity and creativity in this aspiring work, was delightful. It is straight-forward and honest about its intentions, and the humor / narrative are strong through-out.

Warning though… you might leave humming the psychedelic hymnal of the Lewis + Clark peace pipe velvet buffalo mating call…

Fredrick Zal
Architect | Sculptor | Advocate
http://www.fhzal.com

More TBA photos: Serena Davidson Photography

click here to view more TBA photos: Photography by Serena Davidson