All posts by Bob Hicks

I've been observing Portland and its culture since 1974, for most of that time as a writer and editor at The Oregonian and the Oregon Journal. I finally left The O in December 2007 so I could spend more time hanging around coffee shops and catching up on good books. My journalistic wanderings have led me into the worlds of theater, dance, music, the visual arts, literature and food. I'll continue writing about those and broader cultural subjects for Art Scatter. They're terrific windows onto the great mysteries of life, and thinking about them makes the mendacities of our wayward national political culture a little more bearable.
Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music

Lithe Talented Dancers wow Large Smelly Boy

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obt_emeralds

“Did you notice how the first lady soloist started dancing just with her hands?”

Intermission had just begun Saturday night at Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s season-opening performance, which had so far consisted of the company premiere of George Balanchine’s green dream of a dance, Emeralds. Mrs. Scatter had scarpered to the coast for one of her intermittent weekends of popping corks and doing crafty stuff with her girlfriends, and Mr. Scatter was in the company of the Small Large Smelly Boy, two weeks shy of his twelfth birthday and taking in his first non-Nutcracker ballet.

“No, Dad,” the SLSB replied patiently. “It was her whole arms.”

So it was.

Those arms belonged to the highly talented Yuka Iino, the fleet princess in this picture-book of a ballet to Alison Roper’s imperial queen.

Premiered in 1967 and seeming older than that (this is definitely a pre-Beatles universe onstage) Balanchine’s ballet is a visual stunner: Karinska’s glittering emerald costumes; the spare vivid set with its falling sweep of white drapery and its lone elegant chandelier high above the stage; the astonishing lighting (originally by Ronald Bates, executed here by OBT’s masterful designer Michael Mazzola) that reminds me somehow of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series, with its conceit that there are old worlds and new worlds, and that in the new ones everything is brighter, more vivid, more cleanly outlined, and the air seems alive.

But the SLSB, freshly showered for the occasion, isn’t looking at the set. He’s looking at feet. This boy is an observer (and, I think, more a classicist than a postmodernist), and he’s captivated by something that’s captivated millions of people for almost two hundred years: toe work.

obt_speak“How do they dance up on their toes like that?” he asked. “Do they have to work a lot to do it? That must be hard!”

“Yes,” I replied. “That’s called dancing en pointe. It’s very hard. You have to practice for years and years. Even professional dancers keep practicing it, all the time. Dancers are athletes, did you know that? They have to be as athletic as anybody in a sport, plus they have to be artists.”

“How do they know what to do?”

“Well, the dancemaker, the choreographer, decides on how they’ll move to the music. There are five basic positions that your feet and legs can take, and then there’s lots of variations and different ways you can combine them. But it all starts with those five positions you need to learn. And you work on those all the time.”

I was afraid the SLSB might be bored by Emeralds. It’s hardly the cutting edge of contemporary ballet, after all, and although I love Gabriel Faure’s music, it can be deep and reserved. Perkiness is not its game.

I shouldn’t have worried. My son’s attention was perfectly focused through this long dance, absorbing it, homing in on particulars. He caught the importance of the shoes in absorbing the impact of the weight and pressure on those elevated feet. (Later, watching Dennis Spaight’s fluid and sassy Ellington Suite, he was also impressed that the dancers can dance in high heels.)

The second act of this expansive evening of dance consisted of 10 shorter pieces, in whole or in excerpt, from the company’s history — including one, a scene from The Sleeping Beauty, performed by the young dancers of the company school. This is OBT’s twentieth anniversary season, and it kicked off with a celebration of the company’s past, although with a gaping hole: For reasons that I don’t understand (I know he was asked) the program includes no dances by James Canfield, artistic director for the company’s first fourteen years.
Continue reading Lithe Talented Dancers wow Large Smelly Boy →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Ulsh is out, Stowell gains leverage at OBT. Now what?

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A day before the season opener, the turmoil at Oregon Ballet Theatre has taken an unsurprising turn.

Photo: Lambtron, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.Jon Ulsh, the embattled executive director, is out. Artistic director Christopher Stowell picks up some of his role, and chief operating officer Doug Wells will assume day-to-day management. The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson has the story on his Portland Arts Watch blog.

The ballet’s board says its decision isn’t a response to the overwhelming vote of no confidence in Ulsh by staff and dancers. But once the company’s letter of concern to the board became public, something had to be done — and this seemed the most likely outcome.

Development — read, fund-raising — apparently will become mainly the board’s responsibility. How it handles that task will be crucial to the company’s success.

Stay tuned. This story isn’t over.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Visual Art

Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls

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Portland loves process — a politician here can barely duck out for coffee without holding several public meetings first to thrash out which coffee shop she should hit in which geographically underserved corner of the city — and that extends to its arts scene.

Mar Ricketts, master kitemaker and fiber artist, in his Southeast Portland studio.Lectures, tours, workshops, open rehearsals: If it’s a behind-the-scenes peek, we’re there. It’s not enough just to see the finished project. We want to know how it got there.

What was the idea? How was it built? What were the stumbling blocks? Was getting there really half the fun?

In the visual arts, something else kicks in, too: sweet reassurance.

Galleries and museums intimidate a lot of people. They don’t know the language. They might know what they like, but they suspect the cognoscenti would laugh at them. In galleries, they think they’re getting the once-over (and in a few, they are): Is this person a potential buyer? Does she count? Is she worth my time?

It’s not so much that people are afraid of wrestling with tough ideas, it’s that they’re afraid they don’t know the rules. They’re not specialists — and in the minds of the many, the art world has become the province of the anointed few. (In certain rigorously theoretical cases, of course, this is true.) Add to all this the sense of mystery — the popular idea that with artists, something magical happens, beyond the ken of mortal souls — and it’s little wonder that fear keeps people outside the gallery doors.

In fact, the actual making of art is usually a tactile, pragmatic, hands-on thing; down-to-earth in a sometimes literal sense. For all the metaphorical calisthenics in writing about art, artists themselves tend to be practical problem-solvers: What is this thing that’s wormed inside my head, and how can I work it out? Most artists grapple with chance and improvisation more than most of the rest of us, but the good ones do it with method and structure. In spite of C.P. Snow’s famous lament in The Two Cultures (or maybe in support of it), the worlds of art and science aren’t all that far apart, at least in a rudimentary sense. Both involve hypothetically based searches for truth, and in that search both find beauty.

Andrea Benson, weaving yarns in encausticSo let’s take the pressure off and take a relaxed look at how this art stuff really works. That’s part of the idea behind Portland Open Studios, the annual fall tour of artists’ studios across the greater Portland area. In its 10th year, the event includes 100 studios (they’re juried in) and runs the next two weekends: October 10-11 and 17-18. Most studios are open both weekends; the Web site has details.

It’s always fun to see where other people work. I visited three studios before the kickoff, and each represented a different approach to the artist’s workspace.

Bonnie Meltzer‘s studio in North Portland is a storybook sort of place, a small building steps away from the back door of an old farmhouse on a double lot that also holds gnarled fruit trees and a pretty terrific vegetable garden. The studio strikes a balance between orderly and cluttered, with all sorts of tools that a home handyman would be comfortable with, and a motley collection of globes destined to find their way at one point or another into her mixed-media works. A deck outside the studio is set up for sawing and bashing at big pieces of stuff.

Encaustic artist Andrea Benson works from a small studio at Troy Studios, a big brick former commercial laundry building in industrial Southeast Portland that’s home to about 25 artists. She can bike or walk there from her home, and likes having a separate space. A few blocks away, Mar Ricketts, whose fabric pieces range from aerodynamic kites and mobiles to temporary structures for big outdoor events, works in a big single-story space that allows plenty of floor room for laying out his sometimes gargantuan pieces. His studio isn’t a recycled industrial space: It is an industrial space.

Continue reading Portland Open Studios: what’s behind the gallery walls →

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Language, Music, Visual Art

China, Wordstock, studios, ballet: What a weekend!

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Days at the Cotton Candy #4, copyright Maleonn

ABOVE: “Days at the Cotton Candy #4,” copyright Maleonn, in China Design Now. INSET BELOW: “Graphic Design in China,” poster for the 1992 exhibition, copyright Chen Shaohua. Both photos courtesy Portland Art Museum.

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Quick notes on a Thursday evening:

CHINA DESIGN NOW. I took a much too rapid walk through the installation at the Portland Art Museum this afternoon, and this show’s going to be a dazzler. It opens Saturday and runs through Jan. 17, and you won’t want to miss it. The sheer eye candy is amazing: China’s surge into the 21st century grabs hold of the nation’s traditional love for brilliant color and reshapes it in amazing ways. The show, which originated at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, is barely a scratch on the surface of the new China. But, my, the things you see! An important show for Portland because of the Pacific Rim connection, it’s also a whole lot of fun. I have a short table-setting preview in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and D.K. Row, the O’s lead art critic, will analyze the feast soon. Look for both.

Graphic Design in China, poster for the 1992 exhibition. Copyright Chen ShaohuaWORDSTOCK. Portland’s annual writers’ frenzy heads into its big weekend at the Oregon Convention Center with talks, workshops and publishers’ booths Saturday and Sunday. About a zillion Northwest writers will join such A-list types as James Ellroy and Sherman Alexie. Jeff Baker ran a good preview last week in the O. Willamette Week had some good interviews with participating writers on Wednesday, and I had a handful of interviews with participating writers (young adult novelist Rosanne Parry, mystery man Pierre Ouellette/Pierre Davis, Pendleton Round-Up historian Ann Terry Hill, poet Mark Thalman, kids’ writers Dawn Prochovnic and Brian Martin) in this morning’s Washington County edition of the O. The Wordstock Web site has the schedule; should be a kick.

PORTLAND OPEN STUDIOS. This weekend and next, 100 artists’ studios across greater Portland will throw their doors open and welcome visitors. You can see who, where and when here. I should have a bigger piece posted in a few hours. Grab your map and make your plans.

OREGON BALLET THEATRE. Time to forget the offstage drama and remind yourself of why we care about this brilliant troupe of dancers. This retrospective program, which opens Saturday in Keller Auditorium, features George Balanchine’s celebrated Emerald plus excerpts from a whole lot of highlights from OBT’s own history: Dennis Spaight’s Gloria and Ellington Suite; Trey McIntyre’s Speak; Bebe Miller’s A Certain Depth of Heart, Also Love; Julia Adam’s il nodo; Yuri Possokhov’s La Valse; James Kudelka’s Almost Mozart; and artistic director Christopher Stowell’s Eyes on You and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That’s a knockout of a program. Details here.

DOROTHEA LANGE IN OREGON. In the late 1930s the great photographic documentarian took a large number of photos of Oregon farmers and farm laborers for the federal Farm Security Administration, and the results are a rare combination of art, history and social comment. A selection from those 500-plus images has just opened in the Littman Gallery at Portland State University, and it should be worth going out of your way to catch. The campus paper, the Vanguard, has the story.

CLASSICAL RADIO’S FUND DRIVE. I’ve spent a fair amount of the last few days in my car (don’t ask), and that means I’ve been listening to a fair amount of classical station KQAC during its fall fund drive. Is it my imagination, or has it been a little harder than usual to shake money out of the tree this time around? Seems like every hour the station’s been falling short of its announced goal. I like this station. I wish it were more adventurous in its programming — I’d love to have a more liberal dose of contemporary and even 20th century stuff in the mix — and I shudder every time I hear a listener’s comment that classical music “soothes” them, as if it were some sort of handy on-demand muscle relaxant. But KQAC is an extremely important part of the city’s cultural fabric, and on the whole it does a good job, and it should succeed. Spare a buck?

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, General, Language, Poetry

Monday event: I met a traveller from an antique land

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UPDATE: Ixnay on Thursday’s bell-tower raising. Word arrives that the tower hoist at Central Lutheran Church (see below) has been postponed a couple of weeks because of some last-minute troubles that the structural engineers will have to sort out. Something about board & batten siding and a connectivity issue. Sidewalk superintendents will need to rejigger their schedules.

Harald Schmitt's 1991 photo of Lenin deposed.

China Design Now, the big exhibit from the Victoria and Albert Museum about the waking of the sleeping giant, opens Saturday at the Portland Art Museum, and that’s got me thinking about the rise and fall and rise of civilizations.

We are at war in the Tigris and Euphrates, the once-verdant “cradle of civilization.” We are also at war in Afghanistan, the destroyer of empires. More pragmatic Americans, looking to the inevitable shift of world power toward the east, are trying to figure out a best-scenario future that has us looking something like Scandinavia or the Netherlands. Russia, so recently brought low, is still a shambles but is beginning to shake its fist again.

This morning I ran across the compelling image above on Art Knowledge News, announcing a show at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin of photographs by Harald Schmitt, who documented the social turmoil in Eastern Europe and China in the latter 20th century. This one, taken in Vilius, Lithuania, is titled simply Lenin, thrown from the pedestal.

And that reminded me of another visit from a ghost of empire, this one in a famous poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written in 1818. Happy Monday! Anybody feeling heroic?

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter’d visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp’d on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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n16769Also fast approaching for Portlanders is Wordstock, the celebration of writing that sprawls over the Oregon Convention Festival this weekend. And that got me to thinking about the series of fine profiles written lately by Jeff Baker, The Oregonian’s book editor and lead critic, of some key Northwest writers. If you’ve missed them, they’re well worth your time. Baker has a way of opening up a writer’s heart and mind:

  • Tess Gallagher, the fine poet, who lives in Port Angeles and still guards the legacy of her late husband Raymond Carver while continuing to expand her own rich body of work. Read it here.
  • Portlander Katherine Dunn, maybe the world’s greatest writer about the art of boxing, whose struggles with her long-awaited next novel are legendary in literary circles. Read it here.
  • Seattle’s Sherman Alexie, maybe the best-known Native American writer alive, who likes a good laugh and loves a good fight. Read it here.

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Our friend Jane, who is executive director of the Architecture Foundation of Oregon and who sometimes leaves funny comments on Art Scatter posts, passes along this tip:

The bell tower, on the rise.Sometime on Thursday the shorn-off Central Lutheran Church tower, a lamented landmark in close-in Northeast Portland that had taken a Lenin-like tumble, will rise again. Good news!

The frame was prefabricated at Western Wood Structures and delivered a week ago to the church site at Northeast 21st Avenue and Schuyler Street for reassembly in the church parking lot. (That was after a 14-month delay while wading through the building-permit process.) If all goes well, the frame will be hoisted into place sometime between 9 and 11 in the morning on Thursday. Be there if you want to watch the fun. Things are looking up!

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Theater, Visual Art

Sweetheart, get me rewrite: We just hit an iceberg!

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The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history

Above: The Titanic, proud prowler of the ocean, steaming into history. Inset below: The Titanic’s bow, as seen from a Russian MIR I submersible. Wikimedia Commons.

As you may have noticed, American newspapers are in a spot of trouble these days. Bad economy, sinking circulation, this newfangled thing called the Information Superhighway … the troubles just keep piling up.

So I’m always interested in seeing what our best and brightest newspapering minds are doing to stop the bleeding. The New York Times has this thing it cleverly calls The New York Times Store, because it’s, well, it’s run by the New York Times and it’s a store. As in, a place where you can buy merchandise that you probably don’t need but that might be fun to have, anyway. A sort of readers’ boutique.

The haul is tasteful, and handy if you need to score a quick birthday present for a happily retired stockbroker uncle in Montauk. It’s a little New York-centric, but that’s OK: Derek Jeter memorabilia, Yogi Berra signed baseballs, Authentic Yankee Stadium “Freeze-Dried Grass” Sod (!), Babe Ruth baseball jerseys. Looking westward, Edward Curtis prints seem to be a popular item. So are crossword puzzles, executive-desk knickknacks … you get the picture. The store’s a good idea: When the ship’s going down, any little bucket on deck helps.

About that bucket.

The other day I flipped to the back page of the arts section and saw the latest come-on from the Times store.

THE FLEET IS IN

AMAZING SHIP MODELS

the headline screamed, and there at the top was a photo of a splendid-looking model of The Titanic.

Ttitanic bow seenfrom Russian MIR I_submersible/Wikimedia CommonsJust $249 for the 32-inch edition, but let’s go whole hog: You can get the 40-inch model, complete with “accurate crow’s nest, metal propellers and railings, and intricate cranes, ventilators, ladders, funnels, steam pipes, benches and skylights,” for $379. It’ll look great on your mant …

Hold on: A newspaper’s selling a model of The Titanic!

Guys: Have you read your back issues? Is this really the image you want to put out there right now? How about a bronzed commemorative pile of molten debris from the Hindenburg? Have you been too busy rearranging the deck chairs to notice the iceberg out there in the fog?

Just sayin’, this might be a tactical mistake.

But I do like the idea of the company store. Lord knows, even in their current state of disarray the newspapers are raking in more money than this blogospheric whiz-bang buggy we’ve hitched our wagon to here at Art Scatter.

Anybody interested in a Mr. and Mrs. Scatter commemorative coffee mug?

How about a Large Smelly Boys minty air freshener for the car?

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater

Saturday scatter: too little time, too much to do

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Josh Kornbuth brings a contemporary edge to Ben Franklin. Photo: Owen Carey

Josh Kornbluth bringing a dash of deceptive comedy to Founding Father Ben Franklin in his solo show in Portland Center Stage’s basement. Photo: Owen Carey

We have truly entered fall, and it’s not just the fireplace weather that tips me off. The sad truth is, suddenly Portland’s jumping with things to do, and Mr. and Mrs. Scatter just can’t jump high or fast enough.

We’ll miss the great Mikhail Baryshnikov and dancing partner, Ana Laguna, and we feel very bad about that. Our friend and cohort Martha Ullman West filed this terrific review of the White Bird show in this morning’s Oregonian.

Just last night we missed several one-time-only musical opportunities: the Portland Jazz Orchestra‘s Buddy Rich show; Indian slide guitarist Debashish Bhattacharya; the promising-looking Paris Guitar Duo; Portland Vocal Consort‘s evening of Handel and Haydn.

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We did see monologuist Josh Kornbluth’s opening-night performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged in the intimate basement space at Portland Center Stage, and given that you can’t see everything, it was a pretty good choice. Kornbluth and Ben will be playing the basement stage through Nov. 22, and I hope they get a good, packed run.

Kornbluth seems a little bit like a more extroverted, less dyspeptic Wally Shawn. He plays the nebbish role to the hilt, borrowing freely from Borscht Belt comic history and the vein of intellectual New York Jewish-radical neorosis that Woody Allen mines so freely. Starting with comic traditions that have served entertainers as diverse as Mort Sahl, Buddy Hackett and Neil Simon so well, he transforms them into a seemingly free-flowing riff that eventually doubles back on itself and makes structural sense.

To hear Kornbluth tell it, he became interested in old Ben when he looked into the mirror one day, inspected his receding hairline, and realized he’d come to look like the Founding Father. So why not do a show about him?

Like a lot of successful one-person shows, Ben Franklin: Unplugged takes its audience on a dual journey: one into the psyche and obsessions of the performer himself, the second into the performer’s discoveries about his external subject — in this case, Ben.

The link is fathers and sons: Kornbluth’s unresolved relationship with his own father, who died when Kornbluth was in college, and Franklin’s tortured relationship with his illegitimate but favored son William, who seemed the apple of his eye until the two took opposite sides on the issue of the Revolutionary War: the father the unrepentant radical, the son the extreme and sometimes ruthless loyalist.

Along the way Kornbluth creates a marvelous supporting character in the aged, accidental scholar Claude and unearths little pieces of fascinating biography in search of “my own Ben Franklin.” The wry blend of famous-man biography and obscure-entertainer autobiography makes for an engaging evening.

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Other stuff to keep you eyes on:

La Boheme. Tonight is the final performance of Portland Opera‘s lively, fresh and winning production of the Puccini favorite, which Art Scatter wrote about here.

A Chorus Line. Musical-theater history at Stumptown Stages. How does this groundbreaking backstage show hold up after 34 years? Mr. Scatter will be there tonight to find out.

The Trip to Bountiful. Profile Theatre kicks off its season of plays by Horton Foote, who died last spring just shy of his 93rd birthday and who is perhaps best-known for his superb screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Becky’s New Car. Steven Dietz’s comedy opened last week at Artists Rep, but I haven’t caught it. I like Dietz, though: He’s been turning out good, well-shaped plays for regional theaters for many years.

A Country Doctor. Somehow Defunkt Theatre‘s season opener slipped past me. I don’t know this play — it’s an interpretation of the Kafka story — but it’s by Len Jenkin, another writer who’s always worth a shot.

Jon Kimura Parker and the Oregon Symphony. Pianist Parker performs Brahms’ First Piano Concerto and the orchestra plays Bartok’s Divertimento for string and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 1 in what could be a bell-ringer of a season-opening concert series Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Symphony violist Charles Noble, on his music blog Daily Observations, was enthusiastic about rehearsals.

Haochen Zhang. This year’s Van Cliburn winner plays Ravel, Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt and Mason Bates in a Portland Piano International performance at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Newmark.

San Antonio Vocal Arts Ensemble. Don’t know this touring group, but the program of Latin American sacred music sounds intriguing. 7:30 Saturday at University of Portland‘s Buckley Center, 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Salem.

Aspen Santa Fe Ballet. The Southwest troupe performs pop-savvy Twyla Tharp’s Sue’s Leg at a White Bird performance Wednesday in the Schnitz.

Bob Hicks, Environment, General, Television

Nice to meet you, Ardi. See you at the family reunion.

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Meet the family: Ardi, or Ardipithecus ramidus, in the flesh. Illustration: Jay Matterns, Science magazine

Meet the family: Ardi, or Ardipithecus ramidus, in the flesh. At 4.4 million years old, she’s our REALLY great aunt. Illustration: Jay Matternes, Science magazine

As we all know, modern life seems to be zipping around us at something approaching light speed: Whole trends and movements sometimes flower and die before we’re even aware of them. Whatever happened to the New Kids on the Block?

Thank goodness for science, which tends to take a longer, more measured view of things. It was a pleasure to look at the front pages of my two newspapers this morning and make the acquaintance of Ardi, a distant relative, and welcome her to the sort-of human family.

Ardi — short for Ardipithecus ramidus — is our newest oldest relative. At about 4.4 million years, she’s roughly a million years older than our old friend Lucy, who clocks in at 3.2 million. Ardi and Lucy grew up not too far from each other, about 45 miles distant in what is now Ethiopia. (A couple of even older specimens, Orrorin tugenensis and Saheanthropus tchadensis, might stretch the old family tree back to more than 6 million years, but apparently their fossils are too few for paleontologists to make a definitive case for them.)

Ardi stood about 4 feet tall and weighed a muscle-bound 120 — almost a foot taller and twice the weight of Lucy, according to John Noble Wilford’s typically lively and graceful story in the New York Times. (Brian Switek also has an interesting discussion at scienceblogs.com.) But although Ardi was bigger, Lucy was more advanced in most ways we think of as typically human, including walking. Lucy was much more of a stand-up gal. Despite the drawings, Ardi was likely in climbing mode most of the time: Note the stretched-out arms, huge hands, and relatively short legs.

Ardi’s first bones were discovered in 1992 and scientists have literally been piecing together her story since. At long last she’s having her debutante ball, and — speaking of speed — already she’s a star: Television’s Discovery Channel will air a two-hour special about her, Discovering Ardi, on Oct. 11. She’ll be dressed up in fur for the big event.

This morning, before he left for school, I showed Ardi’s picture to the Smaller Large Smelly Boy.

“She lived 4.4 million years ago,” I said. “That’s pretty old.”

“Yeah, but not as old as you,” he replied. “What was it you were doing on the day of the Big Bang?”

For the record, I was trying to take a nap.

Time Line of the Universe Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team; Wikimedia Commons

Time Line of the Universe, with Big Bang. NASA/WMAP Science Team; Wikimedia Commons

Bob Hicks, Cities, Dance, General, Language, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Oregon Day of Culture: Shake your arty booty!

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Basic CMYK
Art Scatter has deep anthropological roots (when we say we’re cultural anthropologists, we’re not kidding) so we tend to think that every day is a day of culture.

But Cynthia Kirk of the Oregon Cultural Trust has reminded us that next Thursday, Oct. 8, is officially Oregon Day of Culture — and that, this being a government project, that “day” is actually an eight-day week that began yesterday and culminates on the 8th.

The ancient and venerable commissars of the Art Scatter Politburo know one place they’ll be packing their lunchbags of borscht and pelmini on the 8th: to The Old Church, where the sprightly Third Angle New Music Ensemble‘s string quartet will be performing a free noon concert of Ernest Bloch’s String Quartet No. 3 and selections from Zhou Long’s Chinese Folk Songs. Regular readers of A.S. may have noticed that Mrs. Scatter has recently become general manager of Third Angle.

As for today’s activities, we reprint Ms. Kirk’s press release. Go forth, and multiply across the face of the culture:

It’s October 2, National Arts & Humanities Month and the second day of a weeklong celebration of Oregon culture, culminating in Oregon Day of Culture on October 8 and marking the anniversary of Oregon’s unique cultural tax credit.

Ernest Bloch and children; date unknown. Wikimedia CommonsThe Oregon Cultural Trust organizes Oregon Day of Culture to encourage Oregonians to Celebrate! Participate! Give! in support of Oregon humanities, arts and heritage. Oregon Day of Culture asks Oregonians to consider the every day value of culture in every community.

Taken as a whole or by community, www.oregondayofculture.org comprises a fascinating and compelling bird’s eye view of Oregon culture’s diversity and vibrancy, in just one single week.

Just a few selections from the October 1 schedule:

  • Dedication of Oaks Bottom Mural, RACC, Portland, Noon
  • Ballet Fantastique’s Visions d’Amour – 10 Ballets in Paris, Eugene, 4 PM
  • Coos Art Museum’s Fall Fling for the Arts, Coos Bay, 5 PM
  • Common Ground, outdoor Flickr projection on the OSU campus, Corvallis, 5 PM
  • Teen Mystery Night, Hillsboro Public Library, 5 PM
  • This is Our Universe exhibition, KindTree production, Eugene, 5 PM
  • Sculptor Lee Kelly at PNCA, Portland, 6 PM
  • First Friday, Columbia Center for the Arts, Hood River, 6 PM
  • Street Painting Demonstration, Firehouse Gallery, Grants Pass, 6 PM
  • Music for the Arts, Umpqua Valley Arts Center, Roseburg, 6 PM
  • Celtic Music, Salem Public Library, 7 PM
  • A Ferry Tale, Frog Pond Grange, Wilsonville, 7 PM
  • Groovin’ Hard: Buddy Rich, Portland Jazz Orchestra, 7:30 PM
  • XY&Z: A Word Art Extravaganza, Write Around Portland, 7:30 PM
  • The Dining Room, Lumiere Players, The Heritage Center, Tualatin, 7:30
  • A Chorus Line, Stumptown Stages, Jefferson High School, Portland, 8 PM
  • Jazz at Newport, Newport Performing Arts Center, 8 PM
  • Plus a multitude of evening theater, music and dance performances in Ashland, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Portland, Eugene, Oregon City, Roseburg, Salem, Tigard

—Greek Festival, Portland, All Day

— Caw Pawa Laakni – They Are Not Forgotten, Támastslikt Cultural Institute, Pendleton, All Day

— Linn Benton Community College Hispanic Heritage Month Exhibit, Albany, All Day

— Culture Inspired Art, Coos Historical & Maritime Museum, North Bend, All Day

—Oregon 150 Quilt Show, Benton County Historical Museum, Philomath, All Day

and much, more! Many Oregon Day of Culture events are free!

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Inset photo: Ernest Bloch and children, date unknown. The composer spent his last years at Agate Beach, north of Newport on the Oregon Coast. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Oregon Ballet Theatre: Can this marriage be saved?

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UPDATE: Barry Johnson of The Oregonian has posted this new, vigorous counter-argument on his Portland Arts Watch blog to Nigel Jaquiss’s Willamette Week story about OBT’s shaky financial history (link to WW story is below). The gist of Barry’s new take: Bad weather during “The Nutcracker” WAS a major setback; nothing nefarious was going on; the company has radically revamped the way it does business and has a drastically reduced budget for the coming season. So where’s the scandal?

Ballet shoes, in fifth position

Ballet shoes, in fifth position. Photo: Lambtron, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The internal dissension at Oregon Ballet Theatre just keeps spilling over. Willamette Week broke the story of staff and dancer dissatisfaction with executive director Jon Ulsh, and now WW’s Nigel Jaquiss follows up with this report,which suggests a longstanding financial shambles. The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson followed up on the original story with a couple of good reports in his Portland Arts Watch column. Art Scatter posted its own take a week ago, and that commentary stirred up some impassioned responses in the comments section.

I hate this kind of story. People’s livelihoods and reputations go on the line. But you can’t sweep this sort of thing under the carpet. The newspapers need to keep hitting the stories; the organizations need to respond openly; the rest of us need to sort it all out and decide not just where the truth lies but also what it means.

The ballet world is an especially complex and partisan one that all too often seems to thrive, and sometimes impale itself, on divisiveness. Like classical music it gets caught up in the great-man or great-woman syndrome, for better and for worse. And when trouble hits — as it has in spades at OBT, where 41 of 56 employees signed a letter to the board questioning the executive director’s ability to carry out his job — the result can be a public relations disaster at the least and a crippling, even life-threatening blow at the most.

I don’t envy the ballet’s board, which has the difficult task of sorting the truth from the innuendo and anger, and then following the truth wherever it may lead. But it has to be done.

A couple of points:

The artistic/business alliance

Any arts group, and a nonprofit one especially, has to do a creative dance between artistic ambition and financial reality. The theoretical division is this: The artistic director pushes for the moon, the executive director or general manager says, “Let me grab my ladder and my butterfly net.” In reality, the partnership has to be vastly more collaborative. The general manager has to be committed to the artistic director’s vision, and the artistic director has to be willing, if reluctantly, to work within the financial realities that the general manager and her development staff can realistically provide.

It has to be a mutual give-and-take. What do we want, what do we need, what can we afford? If we can’t afford it now, what steps do we take so we can afford it later?

The general manager who nods and says “I’ll get you the moon” when in fact he lacks a ladder does the group no favors. The artistic director who refuses to believe the ladder doesn’t exist and keeps demanding green cheese also can do severe harm to his organization.

A question to the board: Have artistic director Christopher Stowell and executive director Ulsh been playing in the same ballgame? Have they been in agreement, or at cross-purposes? Have their expectations been unrealistic, or did they truly just have the bad luck to be steamrollered by an economy run amok? Sometimes good leaders make big mistakes. Sometimes they get caught by circumstances out of their control and their enemies shout, “Aha! Told you so!” Sometimes they’re just not up to the task. Parsing the differences, which OBT’s board must do, is perilous and essential.

Stowell is a special kind of artist — the kind of smart, aesthetically astute, nationally connected person a city the size of Portland doesn’t see every day — and the impulse inside the company, I’m sure, is to want to give him everything he needs to push the company as far and as fast forward as he can. He’s done a remarkable job of that. But has the ballet bought a house when it could only afford the down payment? I don’t know. The board needs to figure that out.

Is the partnership irreparable?

If leadership has made mistakes — and that includes the board as well as Stowell and Ulsh — does that necessarily mean it can’t learn and improve? Or is it truly too late in the game? The astonishing vote of no confidence in Ulsh by three-quarters of the staff will make any attempt at reconciliation daunting.

Did the staff and dancers make a mistake in going public with their concerns? Did they realize the letter would be leaked to the press? Did they leak it on purpose, figuring that was the best way to force Ulsh out — and if that’s the case, is it all over but the shouting? This is the sort of genie that’s impossible to put back in the bottle.

Again, I don’t know the answers. I’m not inside the company, and although I hear a lot of things, it’s difficult to gauge what’s accurate and what’s the understandable result of deep frustration.

If part of the problem is the way that Ulsh and Stowell work together, can that working relationship be improved? I don’t mean, do they get along personally? I mean, is each able to understand his own role in the business relationship, and are they able to separate reality from illusion? Is the partnership between equals? Do they trust each other — and themselves — enough to tell each other the truth, and to understand it themselves? Can they talk clear-headedly about limitations?

It’s a tricky balance. You can’t spend yourself into oblivion, but if you accept the status quo, you can shrivel artistically. Still, growth has to be real growth, without artificial stimulants. And if the bucks aren’t being hauled in, why is that?

I won’t presume to tell OBT’s board that it should hire, fire, or retain anyone. (Well, I will say it needs to hold on to Stowell as long as it can, even if that means getting him some training on collaborating with the executive side. This is, after all, his first artistic directorship, and even if you’re a natural at it, which I think he probably is, there are things to learn.) But the board can’t just hope the trouble will go away. It has to deal with it, and it has to act swiftly — but with careful, hard-nosed consideration.

Can this marriage be saved?

Should this marriage be saved?

We’re all waiting nervously to find out.