All posts by Barry Johnson

Barry Johnson has edited and written about the arts in Portland since 1979.
General, Visual Art

Hey, wait a minute Mr. Postman

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Mister postman look and see/You got a letter in your bag for me

Yes, Art Scatter DOES get mail. Most excellent mail, thank you very much. For example, Scott Wayne Indiana sent us a key. Well, not exactly a key (“this is not a key”), but an image of a key. You can see at the left, right? And can you make out what it says? “Do not duplicate.” And what did we do? Just moments ago with a couple of clicks? Mr. Indiana waved the red flag right in front of us, and we couldn’t resist. Anyway, we like Mr. Indiana’s impulses, so we are not obeying the key, and we pass along his invitation to further disobedience. At his website, Mr. Indiana explains how.

We also received a note from Jeff Jahn at Portlandart.net, which he says is now in it’s third year. Art Scatter feels your pain, Mr. Jahn. Three years on the WWW must feel like … well, we could only imagine because we’re only four months in and that feels like… well, we have no idea. Anyway, he directed our attention to two interviews, one with LA art master Ed Ruscha and one with photographer Justine Kurland, and he was absolutely right. It was smart of Arcy Douglass to ask Ruscha about his use of diagonals in his work, and his answer, it has to do with trains (which will be coming up in a relativity post in August — trains, I mean!), was excellent. And Ryan Pierce’s take on Kurland is long and digressive and deep. She’s going to be a great addition to the art world here.

We’ve gotten two recent notes from Alyssa Rosso at the Tacoma Art Museum, which we admit to thinking is a pretty terrific museum, especially in its coddling of Northwest artists. The first is a call for submissions to the museum’s 9th Northwest Biennial. The deadline for you artists out there is July 26, and you have to work through some special entry site. We recommend going to the museum’s website and figuring out things from there. Alison de Lima Greene, cuurator of Contemporary Art and Special Projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will be helping the museum’s Rock Hushka sort through the entries. Good luck! The second email simply lists the museum’s fall shows: recent acquisitions of a surrealist bent (including work by Salvador Dali and such Northwest artists as Morris Graves, Claudia Fitch, Anya Kivarkis, and Karen Willenbrink-Johnson); a Donald Fels collaboration with sign painters in India (which couldn’t sound more interesting); and the responses of Western artists to the Ottoman Empire. Hey, see you in Tacoma!

Finally, Art Scatter has made some very wise purchases at the Studio 333 open house before. Very wise indeed. It’s now called the Boxlift Building, but the artists, and we counted 15, are still conducting the open house. The details: 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday, June 14, 333 NE Hancock St and MLK Blvd. (with a music, wine and hors d’oeuvre reception). And thanks to Boxlift for letting us know about it!

Barry Johnson, Environment, General

A planning thrill ride with Fregonese, Koolhaas, Krier

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According to the number crunchers at Metro (Portland’s regional government, for those keeping track outside Oregon), metropolitan Portland, which includes five counties in Oregon and two across the Columbia River in Washington, will reach a population of 3.85 million by the year 2060. The population now is roughly 2.1 million. And if the area continues to grow at the rate it did from 1960 to 2000, that rises to more than 6 million.

If you are in the planning business, and John Fregonese is, this is important news, because big change ahead means more planning! Fregonese spoke Monday night at the Bright Lights Discussion Series, sponsored by Portland Spaces magazine and moderated by editor Randy Gragg, and one of the first things he referenced was that figure. Not because he’s looking for work, but because it lends a certain urgency to the work he’s doing with the Big Look, Oregon’s attempt to improve its land-use framework, still seen as a model nationally, but now a bit old and proven to be short on flexibility. Especially with hordes of new residents lining up to come here.

Fregonese’s discussion wasn’t all that radical, primarily a restatement of the principles governing the Big Look, a short and flattering account of Chicago’s planning process (not to mention Denver, both Fregonese clients), and some cautionary notes about the cost to Portland of standing still. What gave it some urgency for me, though, was the Nicolai Ouroussoff story in the New York Times magazine about urban planning and building (without urban planning) in China, specifically the coastal town of Shenzen, which has grown from a little fishing village of a few thousand to a city of eight million or so in the past 30 years. That’s eight million. Ouroussoff’s story is interesting for its account of this frenzied growth, not all that uncommon in China, where a huge rural population is shifting to the cities, but also for the “values” it contains. More about that later. Finally, I was also considering a rousing defense of New Urbanist Leon Krier by Roger Scruton in Journal magazine, a publication of the Manhattan Institute. I started to type that the Manhattan Institute is like Portland’s own Cascade Policy Institute, but it’s much smarter than that, though its eagerness to battle “collectivism” in all of its real and imagined forms is similar. Both are important for they way they send you back to check your “arithmetic” on various issues (the Cascade Politicy Institute, for example, hates light rail, accommodating bicycles and the Eastbank Esplanade).

So, just to recap the introduction: Fregonese on contemporary planning processes; Ouroussoff on China; new urbanism. If we throw them together, what do we come up with?
Continue reading A planning thrill ride with Fregonese, Koolhaas, Krier →

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Bob Hicks on Drammy night

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NOTE: This was in the comment section to the post below, but I’ve moved it up. It’s Bob’s account of Monday night when he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Drammy committee, which dispenses awards to the local theater community.

Ah, Barry. Thank you sincerely for tooting my horn, although that headline’s a bit over the top. My impression of last night’s Drammy Awards is one of humor and grace, and I believe I’d feel that way even if I hadn’t been pulled into the midst of it. (I confess to feeling just a little like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn peeking in on their own funeral.)

I’ve made fun of Portland’s penchant for standing ovations in the past, but let me tell you, standing on a stage and actually receiving one is a heady and discombobulating experience. It felt like a blessing, and we can all use as many blessings as we can get. But I am more than willing to leave the experience from this point on to actual performers, who after all, put their emotional lives on the line every night.

And now let me point out that my little corner of the awards ceremony at the Crystal Ballroom was just that: a little corner, as it should be, in a large and generous evening that celebrated the accomplishments of Portland’s lively theater community. And “community” is right: This was an evening of both polish and spontaneity, with an air of genuineness that overly scripted events like the Oscars can only wish they could recapture.

Mom-and-daughter co-hosts Vana and Eleanor O’Brien set the mood by inviting all the presenters to tell a joke, and so they did, from the corny to the blue to the downright hilarious. My favorite was a yarn about a couple of tekkies and a stage manager who are stranded on a desert island and stumble across the inevitable genie in a lamp, who grants each a wish. After the first two have themselves whisked off the island to lives of leisure and wealth, it’s the stage manager’s turn. Looking at his watch, he says, “I want those two back here in 10 minutes!” The house erupted.

The evening had its serious moments, particularly from best-actress winner Luisa Sermol on the ways the nine Iraqi women in “9 Parts of Desire” got inside her skin, and from supporting actress Michele Mariana (Fraulein Schneider in “Cabaret”) on the links among theater, family, courage and politics. But in general this was a lovefest – a far cry from the awards’ early days, when they were called the Willies, and when booze-fueled actors and directors were as likely to boo a selection from the crowd or pull a Marlon Brando and refuse an award as to cheer the winners. Those days had a certain bravado, a certain unpredictability, a certain rough-cut charm. Last night had, as I said, humor and grace. It was like the difference between the Ride of the Valkyries and “The Magic Flute.”

I liked the way the awards reflected the diversity of Portland theater: a dozen of 39 total awards for the city’s biggest company, Portland Center Stage (half of them, including an outstanding production nod, for “Twelfth Night”), seven (including an outstanding production for “Grace”) for the lean and vital Third Rail Rep, and a liberal smattering for smaller companies ranging from the musical-centric Live on Stage and Broadway Rose to such adventurous alternative troupes as defunkt and Sojourn. The rewards represented the validity of varying approaches to the art of theater: the traditional resident-theater professionalism of Center Stage; the high-quality, low-rent professionalism of Third Rail; the tradition-bending adventurousness of the smaller companies (Sojourn won the third outstanding-production award for “Good,” an original, site-specific show that took place in a car dealership).

Someone asked me after the ceremony if I’d ever been an actor. No, and I never wanted to be. Nor did I ever want to be a playwright, or a director (although now and again I DID wish I could re-direct a show). I was never in competition with the people who made theater; I was content to speak for the audience – to start a conversation, really.

Writing is a solitary adventure. Theater is a social art. As a writer, that excited me – that sense that art can rise from collaboration, from the unspoken spaces between. It excites me still, and I am happy to have left The Oregonian’s theater chair in the intelligent and capable hands of Marty Hughley, whose eye and ear and voice compel his readers to approach the stage with an open and curious mind.

I would like to thank Gretchen Corbett for her generous words of introduction, Richard Wattenberg for his kind essay in the Drammy program, the entire Drammy committee for coming up with the audacious idea that an award might be given to a critic, and that wonderful roomful of theater makers who so generously showered me with the grace of their good wishes. And I would like to officially apologize to the fine young actor Taylor Caffall, who won a supporting-actor award for his work in Alan Ayckbourn’s “Garden,” and to whom I mistakenly referred, in an admiring notice way last fall, as Taylor “Calfall.” Enough said.

General

Hail, Bob Hicks!

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Monday night at the annual Drammy Awards, Art Scatter’s own Bob Hicks received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Drammy committee and, by extension, the Portland theater community. And for once, we’re not going to make jokes about it because we really do think it brings honor both to Bob and to the theater community itself and that’s no joking matter. To the theater community because it recognized the value of the smart, insightful, carefully (even beautifully) written prose that Bob directed at the art and craft of theater in Portland and the state over a sustained period of time at The Oregonian. To Bob, because for a critic to be held in this high esteem means that he (in this case) offers something both highly useful AND compassionate. The only group not represented, the third side of the triangle, is the readers, and I know that if they organized a committee, they would have agreed with this award — we are so much better off in so many ways for having read Bob’s reviews.

Of course, all of this sounds so past tense. Awards are that way, after all: celebrations of past achievement. And Bob is also about the other side of the timeline. We can look forward to many more of his considerations of life in our place ahead. And not just on Art Scatter! Somehow, that’s comforting to those of us who have read him for better than 30 years. Keep ’em coming, Brother Bob!

For a look at the award ceremony and a full list of this year’s winners, we direct you to Bob’s successor in all things theater at The Oregonian, Marty Hughley, and his account on Oregonlive.

While we’ve got you at Oregonlive, we’ll direct you to a book review by another Scatter-fellow, Vernon Peterson, and his review of Dreaming Up America by Russell Banks. We strongly suspect that there is a Director’s Cut of this review floating around on Vernon’s computer. Wouldn’t you just LOVE to read it here?!?

How much more self-referential could we be? Well, fortunately we’ve just about exhausted our capacity for self-examination. We do know of some posts that are brewing, though. Portland Spaces magazine had another of its Bright Lights Discussion Series events last night, and planner John Fregonese, who is leading Oregon’s Big Look task force, was there with some words of wisdom about the FUTURE (we shudder as we type the word!). So we’ll get to that pretty quickly. And a couple of other tasty topics are still simmering away.

Environment, General, Music

Scatter’s got fly IQ, Mahler 9 and other numbers

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We are SO species-centric. It’s all about US, homo sapiens, and when it’s not about ALL of us, it’s about our specific, little cultural norms. The buzzing you hear in our cognitive apparatus? We’re it. Buzz. Buzz. More buzz.

I’m referring particularly to the Discovery.com post entitled “Dumb Flies Live Longer Than Clever Ones.” The key finding of the University of Lausanne study: “negative correlation between an improvement in a fly’s mental capacity and its longevity”. And what was the “improvement” in the fly’s mental capacity? Why, a course of study, Pavlovian in design, that “taught” the flies to connect certain smells with food. The life loss was significant. Natural flies live 80-85 days; the smart flies only 50-60.

The researchers accounted for the lifespan deficit with an obvious, to them, conclusion — that increased neuronal activity drained their life-support systems. Not so fast Swiss scientists! What about the Pavlovian training itself? The rewards and punishments. Learning “unhelpful” connections. The sheer fly confusion. The sheer fly coercion. That takes its toll — ask any high school student — and by itself could account for early death. I’m only half-joking.

Mahler 9 Not to be Art Scatter-centric or unduly self-referential or too much like a Swiss scientist, but we read with interest a recent review in the New York Times of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by critic Anthony Tommasini and noted that he had not taken to heart our own musings on the limitations of connecting biography to music. Frankly, I just don’t see what Tommasini has added to the discussion other than that he was pleased that Lorin Maazel’s clear or “Apollonian” approach seemed to work just fine with such “intense and transcendent” music. He spends most of the article rehashing the upsets in Mahler’s life at the time he composed the symphony and converting that biography into quasi-musical description: He imagines Mahler by turns gazing into the abyss with resignation and then sneering at death — in the music. I maintain that this is simply silly: Point to me the moment that you think he’s sneering at death and I will come up with an equally colorful, biographical and unprovable “explanation”: He awoke from his nap with a crick in his neck, for example. OK, maybe not colorful exactly. Or poetic. But it may be every bit as true as the “sneering at death” line.

94 in 4 To keep to our Scatter-centric theme: Our very unofficial record-keeping system at Art Scatter has revealed that we have been in existence something on the order of 4 months and we’ve formulated 94 posts. We’ve been SO busy! (Admittedly, some of these posts were merely stating the obvious: Hey, the server was down!) We’ve gotten lots of response, much of it positive (thank you!), and that has kept us bent to our chores. Is it possible to do somewhat longer, free-ranging “takes” on the web and find willing readers? Are we the right “Swiss scientists” to conduct the experiment? So far, the answers would be, in order, “yes” and “I dunno…maybe”. At any rate, we’ll keep at it this summer, though perhaps not at the same rate due to vacations, weddings, new grandchildren, anniversaries, grilling catastrophes, and other transitions. Stay tuned!

Barry Johnson, Books, General, Theater

More clowns gone wild via Carol Triffle

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Thanks to Carol Triffle, this is an unplanned Part Two of the previous post on Monica Drake’s recently published nove Clown Girl and Triffle’s play at Imago The Dinner. To make utter and complete sense of it, insofar as that’s actually possible, you’re going to have to take a peek at the original post, below, which is fairly long. If you’re like me, though, you’ll just charge on through THIS post, figuring things out on the fly, and then decide whether or not you want to spend yet MORE time on clowns later! But really, that’s false advertising, because the posts aren’t about clowns themselves, they are more about the creation of clowns.

After I had written “Clowns are wild,” I sent the link to Ms. Triffle, just so she’d be up-to-date on the slanders and misapprehensions about her play that I’d committed to digital eternity. She was kind enough to respond, and here’s part of what she said in two pieces:

It’s funny that you wrote about the book Clown Girl because Chuck Palahniuk wrote the introduction to that book and his book Choke got me thinking of doing a show about the etiquette of dining. I haven’t read Clown Girl but I will.

So, for starters, a coincidence chain, with Chuck Palahniuk in the middle: Choke to The Dinner, Palahniuk to Clown Girl, (and then my connection of Clown Girl to The Dinner). This is common enough in Portland, I suppose, this overlapping, and part of the reason for an emergence of a certain “Portland style” or “approach” or maybe “embrace” — that I would venture to say that involves a mix of risk-taking, craft, humility (with self-confidence), consciousness of the social (both in the form of the audience AND of the work’s context), and, well, we might go on, but this is the subject for a Ph.D. thesis perhaps, not a parenthetical paragraph in a post about other things.
Triffle continues:

Like the line Dolores says in The Dinner “I fall down and then I get right back up again” that is my description of the human condition. The funny part is that she does it over and over again with not much success. Lecoq once told me to stop walking into walls and do what comes naturally. I did think of Lecoq while writing and directing this play. [A] Lecoq clown has a risky rawness that exposes our inner naivety and desires. Lecoq showed me that movement and timing can sometimes say as much as words.

Falling down and getting back up, yes, and from a certain perspective, it can be hilarious. Or “funny” as in “interesting.”
Continue reading More clowns gone wild via Carol Triffle →

Barry Johnson, Books, General

Conan, and we don’t mean O’Brien

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Sorry, but this is a post about Conan, and I’ll understand completely if you want to click right past it. It would be possible these days, when pop culture and pulp culture are respectable fields of academic study, to gussy up the attraction that Conan the Cimmerian had for me during several weeks in the early 1970s. But no. I’ll give it to you straight: Conan was simple and visceral and I was entering a world that was complex and, um, mental. I would only learn later just HOW mental, believe me. Simple and visceral: to face the enemy, destroy him and then on to wine, sex and song.

This was a boy’s fantasy, I suppose. No planning ahead, no negotiation, no “meaning.” Cunning was allowed, perhaps, but not reflection: Conan was Peter Pan with muscles and a serious libido, and reading Conan was a momentary escape from the fate of adulthood. Robert E. Howard, his inventor, sketched a world with enough space for my imagination to start percolating, where I could dispatch my foes without a second thought. And then, pretty quickly, it came to an end, the stories exhausted, and I moved on and started slipping into an adult world that Conan would have put to the sword — and for good reason!

This came to me as I read Seth Schiesel’s story in the New York Times about a new Conan video game. Schiesel must have his own Conan intersection, because he knows the material. Early in the story he quotes from a key Conan text, “Queen of the Black Coast,” considered by Conan connoisseurs to be absolutely prime Conan.

Let me live deep while I live. Let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.

Except that Howard was never content himself.
Continue reading Conan, and we don’t mean O’Brien →

General

Tuesday wet scatter: Call it Snass

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The Chinook word for blackberries? KLIKAMUKS, with the accent on the KLIK. Actually, that’s Chinook Wawa, the trading language of the Northwest coastal tribes and French traders, and not proper Chinook, which pronounced the M as a B, all this according to George Gibbs’ dictionary of Chinook Jargon (or Wawa) published in 1863.

The Chinook tribes of the Lower Columbia, among the largest concentrations of native people in the United States, were diminished and then practically wiped out by successive epidemics of smallpox brought to them courtesy of Europeans. That’s why we don’t hear the hard K’s of Chinook mixed into the free consonants floating around around our favorite coffeehouses. Very few people speak the language, though tribal leader Tony Johnson is attempting to revive it.

Chinook Wawa came up recently in a conversation with Margot Voorhies Thompson about her painting show at the Laura Russo Gallery (never worry! a post is in the works!). Thompson, whose art was greatly influenced by calligrapher/polymath Lloyd Reynolds, was thinking about the loss of languages worldwide as we talked — which implies the loss of cultural experience, the ways that one culture adapts to its surroundings and creates something distinct. It’s akin to the extinction of a species, Thompson suggests: We lose the “DNA” of those creations, that history, those experiments, when a language dies

Thompson and I aren’t the only ones thinking about that problem, of course. Last month representatives of tribes around the country met with language experts to discuss the disappearance of their languages and the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Faye Flam wrote about it. Flam suggests that when Columbus ran into the Western Hemisphere something on the order of 300 languages were being spoken in the United States. But this seems like a very low number, especially if the experience of Columbia tribes is any indication. Chinook Wawa was necessary because of the number of languages spoken in the Northwest. Even along the lower Columbia River, the dialects of various tribes generally considered “Chinook” were very different, according to Rick Rubin’s account, Naked Against the Rain: The People of the Lower Columbia river 1770-1830. George Gibbs, by the way, argued that Chinook Wawa was an “invention” of the French, suggesting that it had so many Chinook words because of the French traders at Fort Vancouver, but Tony Johnson believes that it existed before contact with the French exactly because it IS so Chinook dominant (with some useful French — like CALLIPEEN from CARABINE for rifle — and English words added along with borrowings from other Northwest tribes).

Somehow this June morning, after a drenching overnight drizzle that almost resembled actual rain at times, the Chinook Wawa word for rain sounds just about right to my ear. It rhymes with “moss”: SNASS.

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Visual Art

Monday chatter: Naipaul, Tharp, Moje

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Here is poet Derek Walcott on novelist/essayist V.S. Naipaul, both sons of the Caribbean and Nobel-decorated literary lions:

The plots are forced, the prose
sedate and silly
The anti-hero is a prick named Willie
Who lacks the conflict of a Waugh or Lawrence
And whines with his creator’s
self-abhorrence

Nicely done! According to the Guardian, their antagonism stretches back to the ’70s, and it was mostly fanned by a Naipaul essay that praised Walcott’s early
work. Which must mean he hates the later work, right? Anyway, Walcott goes after Naipaul on the usual grounds — that he embraced the “Raj” of the English literary tradition, became a snobby pedant about it, then roamed the Third World trashing the traditions he found there. But Naipaul’s House for Mr. Biswas was good! (Turn about on the superiority of early work is fair play.)

Scatter loves a good literary scrap, and we doubt that Mr. Walcott will manage to wound Mr. Naipaul. I have followed Naipaul ever since Mr. Biswas — admittedly less in recent decades — and I’ve actually enjoyed his excursions to struggling countries around the world. I’m not sure how he manages those LONG quotes without taking notes or employing a recording device, but I’ve found him an antidote to any tendency I might have to idealize the Third World, and I don’t think he’s as Imperial as Walcott thinks he is, though undoubtedly far pricklier in person than I can imagine.

Quick thoughts on Twyla Tharp. The New York Times today has a story about Tharp’s preparations for a new ballet for American Ballet Theatre, mostly laudatory, though it does mention her recent Broadway fiascos based on the music of Bob Dylan and Billy Joel. Tharp’s high-energy, edge-of-disaster, comic approach to dance is firmly part of our internal choreography now, I think, not to mention a certain amount of slinky slithering and attendant sexual awareness. But I wonder: What does a world look like in which a choreographer with her considerable gifts has the financial security to maintain her own company over her lifetime as a choreographer AND work on various projects in Vegas or Hollywood or Broadway, not to mention other dance companies? What sort of investigations was she unable to pursue?

Finally, a couple of in-town mentions. We at Art Scatter strongly recommend that you take a peek at our Scatter-colleague Bob Hicks’s story about glass artist Karl Moje in The Oregonian this morning. Portland is going to be Glass Central this month! And also take a look at Inara Verzemnieks’s story on Horatio Hung-Yan Law’s Tai Chi project at South Waterfront — and Scatter kudos to Linda K. Johnson for her artist-in-residence projects in the district!

General

Clowns are wild: Imago meets Monica Drake

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I’ve been worrying about Sniffles, the star of Monica Drake’s beguiling comic novel Clown Girl. She’s the kind of clown girl you would worry about, though. As her primary clown act, for example, she shapes balloons into religious tableaux — you know, manger scenes, Mother and Child, Annnunciations. She’s aiming ultimately for a balloon replication of Leonardo’s Last Supper. Except that she’s the only one who can “see” these things in the balloons, though her crown of thorns (misinterpreted as a tiara) and her sheep (from the manger scene) are popular with the kiddies. Sniff, you want to say, I’m not sure the religious balloon-tying bit is going to develop into a big clown hit.

But maybe this is the least of her problems. Clown Girl is a close accounting of a series of disasters with Sniffles right in the middle. Sometimes she ends up in the ER. Sometimes, it’s off to the Psych Ward, and despite the writer’s best efforts, you have some sympathy for the medical personnel who think that maybe that’s the best place for her. To quote blues queen Sippie Wallace: “You better get a doctor, honey, have him investigate your head.” Because by that time we’ve gotten a bead on the boyfriend, Rex Galore, the would-be Clown Prince: That just has train wreck written all over it, doesn’t it Sniff? But by that time you’ve already warned her several times. Don’t go on that “clown date” set up by your friend Crack! (Actually, maybe you should think twice about hanging with someone whose name is “Crack”.) Oh, and juggling the fire torches in an overgrown yard at 4 a.m.? I’d reconsider. Especially in your condition.

So yes, I’ve been worrying about Sniffles, because she’s quite sweet actually and vulnerable. She’s that kind of clown — not an aggressively transgressive Cirque clown, a circus clown, a “date” clown or a kiddie clown. She’s an artist clown in a world that doesn’t seem to appreciate such a thing. And though I may think her Kafka bit sounds pretty darn great, it’s a little like the religious balloons — who’s going to “get” your version of “Metamorphosis”? I want to give her career advice. My friends and colleagues know I’m full of career advice, most of it ridiculous. If Sniffles lived in Portland, Oregon, how could she make a living and still exercise her “artistic” sensibilities? Skills: balloon-tying (kinda), juggling (except with fire), a Charlie Chaplin bit (that might end up in the hospital), pain endurance, an intact ethical system, great courage and a knowledge of the classics.

Perhaps because I saw Imago’s production of Carol Triffle’s new comedy, “The Dinner,” last week, I put one and one together, Clown Girl and Imago. At the same time, it finally occurred to me that clowning was a part of nearly everything that Imago does. (I say “finally” because I’ve watched them a lot during the past quarter century or so, and I say “clowning” with a broad definition of the term in mind. Maybe so broad as to render it useless as a description, for all I know. We’ll see.)
Continue reading Clowns are wild: Imago meets Monica Drake →