Category Archives: Dance

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Martha Ullman West on the Ghost of Nutcrackers Past

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Nobody knows her Marzipans from her Sugarplum Fairies as well as Martha Ullman West, the distinguished dance writer and charter member of Friends of Art Scatter. We here at Scatter Central are pleased as holiday punch — and with the right additives, that’s pretty darned pleased — to turn our space over to her for some insights into Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “The Nutcracker” and the long line of Nutcrackers leading up to it. Read on!

When George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker premiered at New York City Center in 1954, critic Edwin Denby reported that a “troubled New York poet sighed, “I could see it every day, it’s so deliciously boring.” I thought of that remark while viewing the same choreography, excellently danced, when Oregon Ballet Theatre opened its current run on Friday. I think the poet, not named by Denby, but possibly W.H. Auden, must have made his backhanded comment at intermission, following the first act party scene. I don’t know if he ever went back, but I have, again and again, in many versions, including a Nutcracker God-help-me on ice, and the boredom becomes less delicious each time.

So on Friday, my mind wandered a bit — well, more than a bit — during that family party, notwithstanding adorable children in their party clothes, naughty Fritz and dancing dolls, all of whom performed just as they should have, harking back to the ghosts of Nutcrackers past — specifically James Canfield’s at OBT and Todd Bolender’s, which is still being performed by Kansas City Ballet. Both Canfield and Bolender (who danced in Balanchine’s 1954 production) have enlivened the party considerably, the former with mechanical dolls that are somewhat reminiscent of Dorothy’s companions in the Wizard of Oz (and they accompany Marie on her journey, in Canfield’s case to the palace of the Czar) and the latter with hordes of small boys galloping around the staid gathering tooting toy trumpets, and less formal social dances than Balanchine’s.

Nevertheless, there are elements of Balanchine’s party that I love and look for, particularly the Grandfather dance, which begins in stately decorum and concludes with a lively little pas de deux by the Grandmother and Uncle Drosselmeier, here performed by apprentice Ashley Smith and principal dancer Artur Sultanov, who will be seen in later performances as the Sugar Plum Fairy’s Cavalier. Moreover, his Marie is performed by a little girl and not an adult dancer pretending to be one. Julia Rose Winett, who danced the role on Friday night, has a jump that makes you think she has springs in her slippers. She can act, too. You know she’s scared to death during the battle of the mice and toy soldiers, even though the Mouse King really doesn’t look very frightening.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, General

The smooth meets the idiosyncratic: Skinner/Kirk+Bielemeier

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Let’s just say we’re about to face-plant along a truly scouring patch of financial gravel road. Let’s just say. And those responsible for the emotional health of the citizenry (who would that be exactly?) start looking for a way to cheer us up, bread and circuses before we become an angry mob. Who should they call?

Here’s a vote for Gregg Bielemeier, because nothing brings a smile to your face faster than a Bielemeier dance. His dances are a little like those old Tex Avery cartoons, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny, with maybe a little Fantasia thrown in to class up the act a little, the amusing bits of Fantasiaanyway. They have their own madcap illogic, the same happy spirit, the same invitation into an absurd world. And at the end of the day, or the show, they are gentle somehow, too, even Utopian a little bit. We dance, and that is good.

As I was grinning through the “+Bielemeier” contribution to the Skinner/Kirk+Bielemeier dance concert, which runs through Sunday, Half of Some, Neither of Either, I finally just clicked my pen and put it back in my pocket, leaving the note-taking to someone else. I just wanted to connect to the jazzy mix of David Ornette Cherry’s winsome music and Lyndee Mah’s scatty vocals, to Bielemeier’s own madcap solos, to the sweetest duet imaginable from Habiba Addo and Eric Skinner, to the funny little bits and general joy of living tossed off by the rest of the dancers as if they didn’t have a care in the world.
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Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Thursday scatter: church blues, high spirits, NW Biennial

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So, what does a possible breakup of the Episcopal Church in the United States have to do with the price of tickets in Portland? Nothing, maybe. Then again, maybe something, after all.

At first blush this morning’s news in the New York Times that a small group of conservative bishops has declared itself divorced from the American branch of the church (though not from global Anglicanism) doesn’t seem to have much to do with the world of art. The dispute seems to be mostly over American Episcopalians’ welcoming of gay and lesbian parishioners, and conservatives’ continuing disgruntlement over the ordination five years ago of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire. The temptation is to scratch your head over how, in a supposedly sophisticated spiritual communion in the year 2008, homosexuality can still be a bitterly divisive issue, to declare that 20 years from now the children of the breakaway churchmen and churchwomen will be similarly scratching their heads trying to figure out what in the world their parents were thinking, and move on. Their church, their problem: Every great social movement has its backwater of protest.

But. If this really goes through, almost inevitably there will be lawsuits over which faction owns church property when a local church breaks away from the larger group. And because churches enjoy tax-exempt status, the possibility of spillover to the nonprofit world isn’t out of the question. When this fight hits the courts the question of why churches aren’t taxed will be raised in a lot of quarters. And although we all complain about the lack of public support for the arts, the fact remains that our local and national governments do provide nonprofit arts groups (which in a city like Portland means just about all of them) with the very big financial advantage that nonprofit status entails — a public underwriting, in the fine print of the ledger books, of the arts and other community-based endeavors. Don’t expect, in our current atmosphere of bailouts, defaults, rising unemployment and scary recession, that this form of public spending won’t be challenged, too. Especially amid the rising libertarian movement, which looks suspiciously on any and all hands it thinks might be dipping into its pocket.

With the recession already coming down heavily on arts groups — for instance, Oregon Ballet Theatre has dropped live music from the majority of this month’s performances of The Nutcracker, a major step backward for a company that’s been making a name for itself nationally — an added hit in the tax and underwriting pocket could be devastating. And don’t think it can’t happen. A few years ago a judge on the Oregon Coast decided that the tax breaks to a small community theater in Lincoln City weren’t legal. If he’d prevailed (he didn’t) the entire structure of arts support in Oregon would have been jeopardized. So, onward, cultural soldiers. Don’t take anything for granted. Keep in touch with those city council members and state legislators. And keep making your case.

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On a bubblier note, a friend points out that Prohibition ended 75 years ago Friday — on Dec. 5, 1933 — and we’ll drink to that. The 18th Amendment, which ironically put a lot of the roar into the Roaring Twenties, had gone into effect on June 16, 1920, and had the effect mainly of manufacturing a lot of criminals out of previously law-abiding folks. It also led to a thriving moonshine industry, the possible naming of the great Li’l Abner character Moonbeam McSwine (and the comic strip’s house tipple, Kickapoo Joy Juice), and those eventual twin pillars of American pop culture, the movie and song versions of Thunder Road.

So, celebrate — quietly, moderately, enjoyably — tomorrow night. We’re putting a bottle of Saint-Hillaire 2004 Blanquette de Limoux brut in the Art Scatter refrigerator right now.

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It’s no secret that the old Oregon Biennial was about as high on Bruce Guenther’s list of priorities as his shoelaces: Asked once what he’d like to do with the Biennial, the Portland Art Museum‘s chief curator grinned and said, “Kill it off.”

Eventually, he did.

But if the state of Oregon doesn’t have a broad-overview showcase of the visual arts any more, or even the more narrowly focused showcase that the Biennial became before it quivered and died, the Pacific Northwest does. Today the Tacoma Art Museum announced the featured artists for its ninth annual Northwest Biennial, and followers of the Portland art scene will recognize a lot of the talent.

Michael Brophy (that’s his highway scene above), Linda Hutchins, Victor Maldonado, Stephanie Robison and Susan Seubert all made the cut of 24 (from 543 entries), as did Tannaz Farsi and Chang-Ae Song of Eugene. All of the others are from Washington state, mostly Seattle: Rick Araluce, Gala Bent, Jack Daws, Eric Elliott, Sarah Hood, Denzil Hurley, Robert Jones, Michael Kenna, Doug Keyes, Isaac Layman, Zhi Lin, Micki Lippe, Margie Livingston, Deborah Moore, Susan Robb, Ross Sawyers, Scott Trimble. No one from Idaho or Montana was chosen.

The picks were made by Tacoma museum curator Rock Hushka and Alison de Lima Greene, contemporary curator for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. You can zip up the freeway and see the show between Jan. 31 and May 25.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Environment, General, Theater

A.E. Doyle and tearing down Portland’s past

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Over at the valuable Portland Architecture blog, which helps keep the city’s designers and planners on their toes, Brian Libby has started a fascinating conversation that’s well worth checking out. It’s about the flap in little upscale Dunthorpe over its school board’s desire to tear down the 1920 Riverdale Grade School and replace it with something fresh and contemporary. Libby and a long string of commenters have created a stimulating conversation on just what historic preservation means — on why it’s important, how old buildings can be transformed for new purposes, when it might be OK to replace a good old building, what a historical presence in architecture means to a community. So far, the consensus seems to be: Keep the building, remodel it for modern needs, make it green, add on if necessary. Well, that’s the consensus on the Portland Architecture blog. It still doesn’t seem to be the consensus on the school board.

Beyond the general interest that Art Scatter has in architecture and planning, I find this conversation interesting because the school was designed by A.E. Doyle, Portland’s most significant architect of the early 20th century, and the subject of a good new historical biography by Philip Niles, Beauty of the City, which I happen to have reviewed for The Oregonian: You can read the review, due for print publication this Sunday, here, on Oregon Live. Central Library, the Benson Hotel (and the Benson Bubblers), the Meier & Frank department store (now Macy’s), the Reed College campus, Multnomah Falls Lodge — Doyle’s stamp is all around the city and its environs, and Niles’ book helps explain both how that came to be and why it’s a good thing.

So, save the Riverdale School? My gut says yes, even though I’ve never been inside it, and, frankly, I don’t know in what ways the school board thinks it inadequate. Maybe its members know something none of the rest of us do. But from its pictures it looks like a classic old building, with great light and a simple layout that would seem easy to reconfigure — and even add on to, if necessary. Yes, it might need seismic upgrading, but hundreds of buildings have gone through that: Drive through the little Oregon wine country town of Dundee, on the way to McMinnville, and you’ll see a school that’s been successfully and sensitively earthquake-proofed in the recent past.

I’m aware that a community is a dynamic thing and that preservation, wrongly applied, can be romantic mummification. I can understand the frustration that Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe must have felt over the weight of history pressing down on design in Europe, shackling it to the past. But that’s hardly the case in the United States, and especially not in a region as young and still raw-boned as the Pacific Northwest. We’re building all sorts of new stuff (far too much of it, unfortunately, in the sprawling subdivision cookie-cutter style of the rest of the nation) and we don’t have a lot of history to give away.

So weigh in on this thing. Check out Libby’s link at Portland Architecture: It’s a lively example of what can happen at the intersection of design, politics, money and community involvement. And give Niles’ book about Doyle a spin. For anyone interested in how cities grow (and this city in particular), it’s a good read.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Clive Barnes: It won’t be the same without you

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Too late we get around to noting the passing of Clive Barnes, the urbane, entertaining and zestful dance and theater critic who died Nov. 19, at age 81, from liver cancer.

Barnes, who arrived from England to become dance critic at the New York Times in 1965 (he added theater to his duties two years later) was truly a working critic: He was still filing reviews to the New York Post two weeks before he died.

A friend in New York who knows I rarely see the Post passes along this warm and truly lovely tribute from his friend and Post colleague Michael Riedel; may we all deserve such a sendoff when our own time comes. Deborah Jowitt’s memory of Barnes in the Village Voice is worth reading, too.

Riedel says Barnes was deeply influenced in his early days by the mercurial and brilliant British critic Kenneth Tynan, and that explains a lot: the passion, the omnivorian taste, the wordplay, the ability to follow his own opinions wherever they might lead him, the sense of fun. It was Barnes who, in a review for the Times of a production of “As You Like It” whose cast included Meat Loaf, famously referred to the rock star on second reference as “Mr. Loaf.”

For nine years, as lead critic in both dance and theater for the Times, Barnes held the country’s most powerful critic’s chair in two disciplines. In 1977, when the Times ordered him to choose one or the other, he instead bolted from the Pillar to the Post, accepting the tabloid’s offer to let him keep writing about both. And there he stayed, no longer in the Times spotlight but free to do what he wanted.

I met Barnes only once, and so briefly that it hardly counts. It was a dance concert in New York, on a night when the New York critics were out in force, a coalescence that can have deadly effect. At intermission the mass of critics rushed to the lobby and began lobbying one another, feeling each other out for their opinions, trying out lines on each other for possible use in their reviews later that night. Barnes stood, not aloof, but apart from the crowd, infinitely genial, greeting when greeted, but not taking part in the tribal ritual. He was, as Riedel notes, “ever a gentleman”: pleased, briefly and apparently genuinely, to meet a writer from the hinterlands. Professionally, the show was inside his mind. You got the feeling that he simply didn’t care what anyone else thought. He would end up writing what he thought (as it turned out he liked the program, while recognizing it was no barn-burner) and that was that.

And isn’t that the way it ought to be?

Barry Johnson, Books, Dance, Film, General

The weekend: “We scattered til our head hurt”

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Mercy, mercy, did we scatter this weekend! We scattered til our head hurt, we scattered til Michael Chabon uttered the last sentences of his lecture Sunday night, we scattered back in time as we watched Mary Oslund’s Bete Perdue, we even scattered at the now-only-newish Bond flick Quantum of Solace. The latter was hard. How many words were actually in that script, anyway? 500 or so? If that? Dear reader, we scattered anyway. We were scattering fools.

The return of Bete Perdue: I went to opening night of the re-dance of Mary Oslund’s spring show. I’m in favor of re-dances, by the way. For those who haven’t seen the choreography, which let’s face it, is 99.999 percent of the metro area, it’s a chance to come in from the cold. Those of us who have seen it get another look — and memory being what it is (a miracle, sure, but so totally unreliable), we need it.

I posted on Bete Perdue before, so I’ll just add a few thoughts: 1) I thought Oslund had changed it some, eliminating some longer solos, replacing them with more group dancing. The eagle-eyed Martha Ullman West said it was longer by 10 minutes, but I didn’t clock it. 2) Friday night it might have been danced more crisply. My operant theory: Go to the last night of a local dance performance, and you will miss opening night jitters/mishaps and second night emotional troughs. 3) I noticed the Obo Addy-Katie Griesar music more than I had before, and I mean that in a good way. I understood it as an organizing principle of the dance, and enjoyed its subtlety and rhythms (Obo!). 4) Individual dancers didn’t respond directly to those rhythms, but the dance as a whole did. Oslund moved our eyes around the stage more or less quickly by the rhythm of her animation of groupings of dancers. A very sophisticated effect. 5) The two amuse-bouche that opened the program were captivating — funny, quick, then deeply felt. Made me want a meal of small plates. Here’s the Catherine Thomas review on OregonLive.
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Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Kidd Pivot’s got the power at Kaul

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Let’s say you’re in Portland and you don’t anything on for tonight, or maybe you have something on, but you’re dreading it. Or Saturday night. If you are in that circumstance, then Art Scatter suggests that you drop in on Kidd Pivot, at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. It’s that good.

Kidd Pivot is the brainchild of Crystal Pite (rhymes with kite), a Vancouver, B.C., choreographer, who danced with Ballet B.C. and Ballett Frankfort, where she worked with William Forsythe. She founded Kidd Pivot in 2001, though she continues to choreograph for other companies.

For the White Bird series, Pite and her company of six are performing Lost Action (2006). It’s a 70-minute, one-act (no intermission) concert that only lags a little toward the conclusion, primarily because of false ending or two. Until then, though, the action, lost or not, is totally engaging. For this dance, Pite has borrowed a little hip-hop, knitted things together with repeated actions and tableaux and employed a propulsive movement device: The dancers typically run pell-mell through a phrase that stops stock still; then they sprint off again. And even when they are doing slower phrases, they frequently end motionless.

She favors movements of the arms extended or bowed and shoulders, though in one delightful moment a leg extended above a dancer’s head descends in a soft S curved, a remarkable effect, which fortunately repeats! The dance is gestural, definitely, and some of the sections seem to tell a little story. In a recurring motif, a dancer collapses and other dancers stand above him looking down, eventually picking him up and “reviving” him in a sort of “passing” ritual. There’s a little parka section (O Canada!). There’s drama and tension and sadness. The solos are uniformly excellent, primarily because the dancers are, I suppose. Swift, athletic, open to the moment. They partner the same way: You don’t notice the precision at first because they make even difficult moments, and there are lots of those, look easy.

I especially liked the sections for the four men in Kidd Pivot. The specific physical attributes of men are frequently under-realized on dance stages, but Pite takes advantage of the power and speed and abruptness her men bring. Which isn’t to say that the other women are overwhelmed here. Pite is an amazing mover — powerful, agile, quick, bristling with kinetic energy. And Marthe Krummenacher and Francine Liboiron bring some specific talents to the table, one longer and expressive and the other smaller and sharper.
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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Music, Theater, Visual Art

A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm

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(Friend of Art Scatter Martha Ullman West, she who knows a plie from a pirouette like nobody’s business, has recently sojourned in her home town of NYC and brings us back this Big Apple journal from October 21 to November 5, 2008. The city seems familiar, but …)

Can you actually be a tourist in your home town? At times I certainly felt like one on my recent visit to the city in which I grew up, quite a long time ago.

I attended a performance in a theater new to me — the Rose, where I heard a stellar rendition of Bach’s St. John’s Passion by Musica Sacra in a space that is usually relegated to jazz. And I felt so even more when I had to ask not one but two of the hordes of security police on Wall Street to direct me to One Chase Manhattan Plaza, the bank’s headquarters and the location of the Ballet Society/New York City Ballet archives. These are not exactly housed in a vault, but they have been relegated to the fifth floor sub-basement of that temple to Mammon for good reason: a board member of the Balanchine Foundation arranged for donated space.

There couldn’t be a worse place to work– no air, harsh fluorescent lights, a desk that was too high, a chair that was too low. But it was a gold mine of information regarding American Ballet Caravan‘s 1941 tour of South America, the first North American ballet company to go to the region, on a goodwill tour arranged through Nelson Rockefeller by Lincoln Kirstein for the overt purpose of a cultural exchange, and the covert purpose of undercutting anti-American propaganda disseminated by Germany before Pearl Harbor.

I spent two days delving into boxes of documents and photographs, physically uncomfortable, but psychically happy as the proverbial clam. The archivist, Laura Raucher, who has a degree in the science of dance from the University of Oregon, photocopied anything I wanted and spent more than an hour searching the database for the heights of various Balanchine ballerinas, information needed for another project.

A few days later I was at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, for which I daily thank Robbins, whose royalties support arguably the best dance library in the world, looking at film of Marie Jeanne coaching today’s dancers in her role in Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco, created for her before that 1941 tour. I learned that the ballet, a high-speed visualization of the Bach Double Violin concerto, used to be performed even faster than it is today. The library is an extremely comfortable place to work, fluorescent lights notwithstanding, but there you must do your own photocopying and pay for it, sigh. Always something.

Continue reading A native scatters in New York: Home sweet … hmmm →

Barry Johnson, Dance, General

Art Scatter goes to dance appreciation class

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Oh man, we left you hanging there for a couple of days with Thomas Hobbes! Art Scatter can be SO cruel. What can I say? We watched some debate. We watched some Project Runway (Leanne won!). We prepared to meet a roomful of students in Linda K. Johnson’s dance appreciation class at Portland State University. We didn’t blog.

Maybe I should say a few words about that dance appreciation class. First of all, it sounds like a great class. Linda, who has been involved in some of the very most interesting projects around the city in the past decade (and more!), including the Halprin fountain City Dance event and overseeing a year of artist-in-residencies in the South Waterfront district, has set up a pretty rigorous course of study. For example, the class sat in on a rehearsal of Swan Lake, which became a sort of lecture-demonstration because artistic director/choreographer Christopher Stowell was so open to explaining what he was trying to do. Their writing assignments sound quite interesting, too, which maybe was where I came in — to talk about writing about dance.

This is something I love to talk about, even though I’ve actually done it far less than I would have liked. Time machine time: In 1978 I wrote about a visit to Seattle by Twyla Tharp’s modern dance company. That was the first time I committed an act of criticism with intent. To publish, I mean. And it caused me a great deal of grief and excitement and a couple of all-nighters spent writing and re-writing and throwing my hands up in despair. How could I possibly bottle in words what I’d seen onstage (not to mention the interviews I’d conducted with the dancers; Twyla wasn’t along on the tour), for consumption in a newspaper (the Seattle Sun, RIP)? Well, I had an excellent guide, who was in the process of developing a deep understanding of newspapers, though he knew even less about dance than I did, and we muddled through.
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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Art Scatter looks back on a dance with a kick

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I thought I’d said everything I was going to say about last week’s White Bird performance of Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet and the Shaolin Monks in this preview piece that ran in The Oregonian. But one friend who was impatient with the show asked me via email what I’d thought. And another friend said she couldn’t take time to post her own response, but if I posted something she’d respond in the comments.

So forgive the lateness of it all, but here we go:

“What did you think of the show?” my friend Sharon wrote. “I thought it could have benefited from some major editing. King does some really creative collaborations, but I found that the monks were much more interesting than the dancers (and he’s got a company of truly beautiful dancers … they just weren’t given a lot to work with). I was hoping for more integration, more story — rather than the flat cultural juxtoposition we saw. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t like what I saw, I just wanted more and I wanted it more tightly woven.”

Another friend quoted her friend on the show, succinctly: “The trouble was, you couldn’t take your eyes off the monks.”

My own view is that something pretty interesting was going on here, and as much as I enjoyed it, I would have enjoyed it more if it had been a half-hour shorter: It was too much of a good thing. Every time I’ve seen LINES I’ve liked the work but felt it really needed to be cut.

I also agree there was no story in this piece, which is called “Long River, High Sky” — I don’t think King does stories. He sets up communities instead, so you get the possibility of stories coming out of it. But he’s not going to do it himself, the way that Balanchine or Tudor or Robbins or Ailey or Bill T. Jones would. I think of King as an explorer, interested in the borders between cultures. Especially in this sort of piece — like his “Moroccan Project” and his “People of the Forest,” a collaboration with a troupe of pygmy dancers and musicians from central Africa — his two cultures meet, mingle, try to find a way to mesh.

That’s what he’s interested in. How, given this meeting of cultures, will a new culture evolve? It’s dance as anthropology — not in the ordinarily conceived sense of “authentic” ethnic dance, but in that awkward, exciting, exploratory moment when two unknowns cross paths and begin to investigate each other. If, in “Long River, High Sky,” we find the kung-fu monks more compelling (and I also find a couple of King’s dancers magnetic on stage), perhaps it’s because we’re less familiar with what they do. And, yes, the monks’ aesthetic of combat is pretty cool stuff to watch.

Anyone else want to kick in on this discussion?