Category Archives: Dance

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

For OBT, a season to give you the Wilis

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By Bob Hicks

The world of ballet has its share of exotic creatures, from lovelorn swan-women to a magical firebird to a princess who takes a hundred-year nap.

Lithograph by unknown of the ballerina Carlotta Grisi in en:Giselle. Paris, 1841. Image was scanned from the book "The Romantic Ballet in Paris" by Ivor Guest. Wikimedia Commons.But no one seems quite as oddball, or as eerily sympathetic and nasty at the same time, as the Wilis, those sad young spectres of girls who were jilted by their lovers before their wedding day and now spend their nights madly dancing young men to death before fading off into the sunrise.

Tuesday night, Oregon Ballet Theatre threw a little party in its studios to announce its 2011-12 season, and one of the highlights of the lineup is Giselle, the venerable story ballet in which the Wilis rose to fame.

Here’s the new season lineup:

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Journalism, Music, Poetry, Theater, Visual Art

Tuesday Scatter: arts world in brief

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  • Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam
  • Closing the books: Powell’s layoffs, Looking Glass R.I.P.
  • Patrick Page plucks praise from “Spider-Man” carnage
  • In the room with Egypt’s fierce cultural protector
  • Alexis Rockman and good news at the Smithsonian

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By Bob Hicks

Hot licks and good times with Andy Stein, Padam Padam: My old friend and neighbor Jaime Leopold dropped me a note about his friend, Andy Stein, a fiddler who can often be heard on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. “Andy has been compared to jazz violinist Stephane Grappelli and he’ll be performing in a duo with Conal Fowkes, a Wynton Marsalis alum and wonderful pianist from New York,” Jaime said.

Jaime wanted me to know this because Stein will be performing Feb. 19 at Tabor Space. And as it happens, Jaime’s own band, Padam Padam, will be opening. If that sounds self-serving, I suppose it is a little bit, but mostly it’s not, because Jaime simply loves music, and when he knows good music’s coming ’round the bend, he likes to spread the word. If he says Andy Stein is worth going to see, I’m taking him at his word.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Music

Gotta dance: movin’ it in the backyard

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Portland's Backyard Blues Boys: something to dance about.

By Martha Ullman West

At Mississippi Pizza a week ago last Friday, I saw one of the most musical dance performances I’ve seen in years, delivered with all her heart by a dancer named Sadie (last name unknown), age about five, as she was propelled to her feet by the equally heartfelt music of the Backyard Blues Boys.

Pigtails flying, jumping up and down in perfect rhythm, spinning around at will — children are marvelous improvisers — this little girl could have had no idea, or at least I hope had no idea, what the musicians were playing and singing about in songs like Saint James Infirmary and their own Rainy Day Blues. What she did know was that that sound, those rhythms, compelled her to move.

So what do we mean when we say a dancer is musical?

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Mary Oslund’s infinite possibilities

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Mary Oslund Dance Company. Photo: John Klicker

By Martha Ullman West

For Mary Oslund, the child’s sense of infinite possibilities has never ended. How else could she have made Childhood Star, her stunningly beautiful new piece, in which she seamlessly mixes every form of movement that has touched her life as a dancer and choreographer?

Commissioned by White Bird, for which we owe them our everlasting thanks, Star premiered at PSU’s Lincoln Performance Hall on Thursday night. (It repeats tonight and Saturday.) Like most of Oslund’s work, it is first and foremost about dancing itself, and an ongoing exploration of what the human body can accomplish aesthetically. It contains, of course, the movement vocabulary Oslund has developed over several decades – long-limbed extensions, geometric shapes, duets involving contact between dancers that initiate movement phrases – but there is also a breakthrough here: a new musicality, a softening of phrasing, a balancing of the emotional and the intellectual that make the piece achingly lovely to watch.

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Dance, Film, General, Martha Ullman West

O bleak ‘Black Swan,’ flying from reality

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When Hollywood decides to depict a specific trade, dramatic license usually trumps veracity. Think all those cop movies truly depict an average day in the life and thinking of a policeman? How about the hilarious world of newspaper hacks in the likes of The Front Page? Black Swan, the new horror film with a ballet backdrop, is no exception. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West argues that if you think this is what the ballet world is really like … well, she can get you a very good deal on a bridge in Brooklyn.

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By Martha Ullman West

black-swan-movie-poster1Black Swan is not a film about ballet.

Oh sure, there are a few shots of point shoes, not to mention bleeding toes, company class, unconvincing rehearsals of small bits of Swan Lake, and Natalie Portman, who richly deserves for her acting (but not her dancing) the Golden Globe award she picked up Sunday night. She spent two years taking ballet classes, and lost a lot of weight for her role.

But here’s the rub. Classical ballet, and director Darren Aronofsky‘s profoundly Puritanical view of the art form, provide the mere framework for a film about a deeply troubled young woman whose cries for help are unheard, or denied, by a mother who thinks only of herself and an employer who seems only to think about sex.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Felix/Martha goes a-nutcrackin’

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The Snowflakes in the grand finale to Act One of Oregon Ballet Theatre's production of George Balanchine's "The Nutcracker." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

As regular readers may recall, the Small Large Smelly Boy (a.k.a. Felix/Martha) is a lover of the ballet. Not so much contemporary dance — at 13, he’s a classicist at heart — but definitely the ballet. That made a trip to this year’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at Oregon Ballet Theatre a command performance, so off we went on Wednesday night. Mr. Scatter had asked Felix/Martha if he’d like to blog about the experience, and he declined. But in the car on the way downtown, Mr. Scatter struck a deal: Write five sentences about the show after you’ve seen it, and I’ll write the post. Done, with a bonus Sentence No. 6. To maintain the verity of balance, Mr. Scatter decided to confine himself to an equal number of segments. Felix/Martha’s sentences are in bold, Mr. Scatter’s in more quotidian light face. Final performances are Thursday night and Friday noon.

By Felix/Martha and Bob Hicks

1. The music is brilliant, better even than the dancing. The story is compelling, and the mixture of it all — plot, dance and music — forms an arguable masterpiece.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Thoroughly modern Rachel Clara Marie

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Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, shares some modern and classical moments with dancer/choreographer Rachel Tess and rediscovers that the distance between old and new is often whisker-thin.

Dancer Rachel Tess. Photo: Christa Mariottini

By Martha Ullman West

I took thoroughly modern choreographer Rachel Tess to the opening matinee of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker with me on opening day last Saturday, the day after seeing her compelling tour de force of a solo show, Once a Fool…

Dressed in bright blue cotton trousers, running shoes, and a couple of layers of sweaters and tops, backed by an installation of glass canning jars, Tess in a half hour of a capella movement took us in Once a Fool through a soliloquy of rage and regret, gaiety and bemusement, sometimes using jagged angular movement, other times movement as rhythmic and insouciant as an old-time hoofer.

nutcracker_1Whatever and wherever Tess is performing, whether it is in her friend Paige Prendergast’s Breeze Block Gallery last Thursday and Friday, or at Disjecta during a heat wave the summer before last, she has the presence and confidence of modern/contemporary dancers and choreographers who are far more experienced than she.

Or are they? Tess is a Portland girl, who as a child danced Clara in James Canfield’s first Nutcracker for what was then Pacific Ballet Theatre. She danced other roles in his second version for Oregon Ballet Theatre (in which Clara becomes Marie, as she is in Balanchine’s version, and in Canfield’s later, beautiful take, in which she’s performed by a small-sized company member, such as Vanessa Thiessen).

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Keep on truckin’, Scatter: grinding gears with OBT, Polaris, Sophie and Do Jump!

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By Bob Hicks

Shocking as it may seem, sometimes the denizens of Art Scatter World Headquarters don’t give it away for free.

Performers: Andrea Lawhead, Brittany Walsh, Nicolo Kehrwald, Wendy Cohen, Tia Zapp, and Molly Courtney in Do Jump!'s "Greatest Hits for the Holidays." Photo by Jim Lykins“If I can’t sell it gonna keep sittin’ on it, never gonna give it away,” the hard-bitten narrator of the bawdy blues tune Keep on Truckin’ declares. Her hardcore-capitalist sentiment is definitely not the motto at Art Scatter, where we tend to write what we write just because it sends little shivers up and down our spines. Still, we have an abiding fondness for those stalwarts of the heritage media who help us keep the spring in our mattress by paying cash on the barrel head for written contributions. O admirable concept! Here are a few recent pieces wherein we’ve made the noble trade of play for pay. We thank the editors of The Oregonian for assigning these exercises in fundamental free trade, and the publisher for his largesse:

  • A third of a century in, the prestidigious performance troupe Do Jump! just keeps getting better. Mr. Scatter reviews the company’s lighter-than-air holiday show. Catch it if you can.
  • Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent and maker of one mean seafood stew, reviews the old reliable Nutcracker and the new kid on the Oregon Ballet Theatre block, a witty grown-up revue with the dancers and singer Susannah Mars. As those TV guys say, thumbs up.
  • Mr. Scatter takes in Repo, the latest show from Polaris Dance Theatre, and reviews it.
  • More than a quarter-century after she first hit the stage in Soph, trouper Wendy Westerwelle once again embodies the amazing Sophie Tucker, last of the red-hot mamas — this time in a leaner, more intimate show. Mr. Scatter compares and reviews.

Grab a seat and come along for the ride. We’ll be truckin’ ’til the break of day.

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Andrea Lawhead, Brittany Walsh, Nicolo Kehrwald, Wendy Cohen, Tia Zapp, and Molly Courtney in Do Jump!’s “Greatest Hits for the Holidays.” Photo: Jim Lykins.

Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, Film, General, Music, Theater

Hot links: hard nut, black swan, bad ‘Y’

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Mark Morris and his Dance Group in the Duffy Performance Space at the Mark Morris Dance Center, 2008. Photo: Klaus Lucka/Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris‘s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.

Nikolai Dimitriyevich Kuznetsov, portrait of Tchaikovsky, oil on canvas, 1893. State Tretiakov Gallery, Moscow/Wikimedia Commons.You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday story ballet, but people who think that about it (a) aren’t paying a lot of attention to the dance itself, and (b) apparently haven’t read the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which both The Hard Nut and The Nutcracker are based. Morris took the narrative for his version, which premiered in 1991, directly from Hoffmann’s tale-within-the-tale, which is more sinister than your average sugar plum and which Hoffmann himself titled The Hard Nut. If you’ve never read the Hoffman story, it’s well worth it.

The Hard Nut returns to the Brooklyn Academy of Music next weekend, and this morning’s New York Times carries a freewheeling Q&A interview with Morris by Julie Bloom. It offers a great inside look at Morris’s thinking and his approach to art. He declares himself a classicist in many ways, which I think is true, especially in terms of musicality. And he reveals that it was his love for Tchaikovsky‘s score that prompted him to create The Hard Nut in the first place.

Absolutely. Tchaikovsky strikes me as one of our most misunderstood major composers, a guy whose work is often dismissed as sweet and antiquarian. Hardly. Yes, his music is melodically gorgeous. Structurally, it’s like steel: tough and springy, and fully anticipating modernism. As Morris puts it, it’s “astonishingly advanced.”

Read the interview here. And don’t forget that Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s production of the Balanchine Nutcracker opens December 11.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

In an evening of schoolhouse Martha Graham, Moseley’s lovely lament

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Josie Moseley teaching at the School of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Greg Bond/Oregon Art Beat/2010. Courtesy Oregon Public Broadcasting

The place to be in Portland Tuesday night was the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company was performing in town for the first time since 2004. As if that weren’t draw enough, the program provided the world premiere of Portland choreographer Josie Moseley‘s “Inherit,” a solo for Graham dancer Samuel Pott. Moseley’s piece was underwritten by White Bird, which presented the Graham company as part of its Portland dance season. Catherine Thomas’s review for The Oregonian is here. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent and resident dance critic, Martha Ullman West, was also on the spot and files this report.

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By Martha Ullman West

Ask a male modern dancer about Martha Graham technique and you’ll likely get a shake of the head, a roll of the eyes, and a lecture on how her pelvis-centered movement is difficult to impossible for a man’s body to do.

Portrait of Martha Graham and Bertram Ross, June 27, 1961. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Van Vechten Collection. Photo: Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964). Wikimedia Commons.This is definitely true of Lamentation, the gut-wrenching, writhing, keening solo Graham made on her own body in 1930, in which she absorbed and expressed all the griefs of a world as troubled as our own, at the same time providing the kind of catharsis the ancient Greeks found in the tragedies of Sophocles, Euripides and Aeschylus.  It’s no accident she later made dances based on Oedipus Rex (Night Journey) Medea (Cave of the Heart) and Agamemnon (the monumental evening-length Clytemnestra) all of them from the woman’s point of view.

Lamentation is the centerpiece of the Martha Graham Company’s current road show: We saw it twice at the Schnitz on Tuesday night, first performed with smooth elegance by Carrie Ellmore-Tallitsch, her costume — originally a tube of knitted fabric as much a part of the solo as the dancer’s body — perked up with a red leotard underneath it.

Then, post intermission, to introduce the Lamentation Variations we saw Martha herself, on film, gnarled feet rooted to the floor, her seated body arching in a seamless cry. Let it be said that this 80-year-old solo of Graham’s is so emblematic of that period of modern dance that the editors of the International Dictionary of Modern Dance chose it for the book’s cover.

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