But it’s decidedly not, and sometimes that’s the fun of what we do. We’re proud of how our events come together—usually on a shoestring budget—so we thought it was time to pull back the curtain and show you a little of our behind-the-scenes action.

One of the skills we’ve honed the sharpest over the years is building out makeshift venues in odd spaces. Though until now, we’ve never built a theater in our own office. For Jeremy Wade’s dance performance this week, we’ve laid a temporary floor, building up layers of foam, wood, and marley. And this is how it went.

*Alternate title: This is how we do it.

Act 1: Color Film 5 (Madison Brookshire) and Field Organ (Tashi Wada)
“The subject of the work is duration, with color as the medium through which we experience it.” – program guide, New Musics

A wall of color is the backdrop for two simultaneous reed organs. The color field almost imperceptibly shifts, meaning you can’t see the increments of change, just the change itself. As soon as you stop looking, everything is different. Wada’s two-organ duet produces a similar effect with an opposing approach; you hear every sustained note, both melodic and discordant, in real time. Because the musical progression is so fluid, however, the emotional responses generated can only be realized periodically. Brookshire and Wada’s works are a brilliant pair and together produce a realization about perception of time and visceral response that is greater than the sum of its parts. Something previously hidden becomes known: the liminal space between hearing/seeing and responding emotionally is suddenly visible.

Act 2: PART (Grouper)
Grouper’s “tape collage” matched with Flash Choir’s vocal instrumentation puts the central focus on the flickering images on the screen. The result is non-narrative (or at least non immediately so) and alternatively lulling and haunting. The staging, whether intentional or not, made the work somehow less accessible; if the use of tape is inherent to the work, it would be intriguing to make the process at least as visible as the choir.

Act 3: Mourning Youth (Claudia Meza)
“…if time passing can only be experienced and digested through memory…then ‘youth’ as a concept will always be mourned” – program guide, New Musics

Memory and reality collide in Meza’s non-mournful Mourning Youth. Powerful, charged images are slowed to iconic speed and paired visually with each other and sonically with taiko drumming and choral response. Meza’s collaboration with Portland Taiko, Flash Choir, Thomas Thorson, Chris Hackett and Allie Hankins is an evolving work; the movement portion was recently added and seemed less integrated than the other elements of what Meza calls a “wordless opera”. Reminiscent of a Greek drama/music video mashup, the performance is charged by searing visuals and heart-pounding sounds, describing the electric physicality and heightened perception of both experienced and remembered youth.

9-4-09 The Works

2009 Time-Based Art Festival, PICA

Photo by G. Wilson

All Rights Reserved, PICA

by Emily Katz
Friday night’s performance at The WORKS, introduced me to the music of a band who I embarrassingly should have seen before. My studio/shop mate, Heather Treadway, who plays rhythm in Explode Into Colors, also designed the colorful jersey jumpsuits and dresses for the performance. I was lucky to peek into her creative process while she and Jane (Janet Pants) collaborated on shape, color, and fabric choices.

The performance switched back and forth between Explode into Colors warming up our ears with their tribal rock, Janet Pants dancing in her very signature way, and video vignettes telling us sweet stream of consciousness tales.
I remember seeing Janet Pants last year, a little while after T:BA, when she opened the show by Cloud Eye Control, Under Polaris, which I saw at Leftbank. I really enjoyed her dance then and this time the enjoyment was the same, even though her movements also seemed to be the same or very similar to what she danced that day, a year ago. There were moments where the video mimicked her modern and beautifully controlled movements, or was it the other way around?
At one point in the performance, Heather joined Janet, and they danced mostly synchronized to the music and each other.
The video portion of the performance was beautiful and poetic. I’m looking forward to seeing more from Chris Hackett.
All the while the band carried the piece forward, I just wish they would have played a music only encore, the crowd wanted to dance too!