Category Archives: General

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism

To the lighthouse, Mrs. Woolf (and pay as you go)

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This afternoon, while shuffling idly through the File of Unfinished and Rejected Posts — it’s true, not everything we write ends up in virtual print — we found this piece from last August, initially rejected on the grounds that maybe it was a little off-topic and too much of a downer. But in light of our continuing national baring of the teeth and difficulties in coming up with a simple, rational health-care plan, let alone any apparent impulse to talk civilly and sanely with one another across the artificial divide of our go-for-the-jugular political discourse, we’re publishing it now. After all, arts and culture can’t exist without an honest sense of shared responsibility and experience, and that is what this seaside idyll is about. Read on, and argue with it if you wish.

Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Newport, Oregon. Photo: Rebecca Kennison, 2005, Wikimedia Commons

Newport, Oregon, has two lighthouses. The original, on the south side of town and decommissioned for most of its 138 years, has been turned into an agreeably nostalgic tourist lure complete with resident ghost story. The larger and younger lighthouse (by two years) has been working continuously since the day it was completed. This light, its beacon visible for miles out to sea, stands 93 feet tall on a narrow peninsula at the city’s northern edge.

While it’s not precisely true that once you’ve seen one lovelorn ghost you’ve see ’em all — the tales of tragic circumstance and details of costume have their specificities — it IS true that once you’ve toured a particular location of purported ectoplasmic activity you can go a good long time before repeating the experience. (I make an exception for re-readings of James Thurber‘s story The Night the Ghost Got In, which should be frequent and preferably aloud, to an intimate audience.)

So while I enjoy outside glimpses of the southside Yaquina Bay Lighthouse (active from 1871 to 1874, brought to light again in 1996, haunted since the city’s promoters realized the commercial possibilities) I haven’t taken the tour in several years.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the north side lighthouse, too (although I can see it as I’m writing this from the sands of Nye Beach), but for different reasons.

I’ve always liked this lighthouse — it’s called simply the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, for the rock on which it stands — and for many years I made a point of calling on it whenever I was in the vicinity. A twisty, usually lonely drive west from U.S. 101, past the concave of an old rock quarry, to the spare grounds around the tower. Not too many tourists. Not much of anybody; the few besides me mostly people who had actual work to do. On almost any day the wind was stiff, and on stormy days it was enough to almost knock you down. I like standing against that kind of force, feeling the swift air push against my chest and ripple in unseen waves around me. It’s challenging yet also somehow calming. It re-sets my rhythm to the rhythm around me.

Somewhere along the line I stopped visiting.
Continue reading To the lighthouse, Mrs. Woolf (and pay as you go) →

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Random Dance, and other movements

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Random Dance, coming to White Bird and the Newmark.

Mr. Scatter is not a dancer. This may seem odd, considering the number of dance posts that have been on this site of late (or maybe, once you’ve read them, it seems painfully obvious), but that is partly a matter of coincidence. There’s been a lot of dance in town lately, and more is on the way.

We’re talking, of course, about presentational dance, art dance, dance as performance — not the social dance that Mr. Scatter did not learn in the 1950s and 1960s, when he suffered from a not uncommon affliction known as Two Left Feet, complicated by a textbook case of shyaroundgirlitis. Yes, he did go to his senior prom. He was in the band. The perfect end-run.

Mr. Scatter's unfortunate childhood affliction.Watching dance, on the other hand, is a longtime pleasure, one that slides from tap to tango, classic to contemporary, Broadway to ballet. And it strikes Mr. Scatter that, while a lot of people weren’t looking, Portland’s become a heck of a dance town.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is somewhere near the middle of it all, continuing its lovely performances of Christopher Stowell‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and George Balanchine‘s The Four Temperaments through Saturday at Keller Auditorium.

And surely much of this renaissance can be laid at the feet of White Bird, which has routinely brought the un-routine to Portland audiences, exposing the city to worldwide dance ideas. Fresh from Hubbard Street, which has barely had a chance to skip back to Chicago, here White Bird comes again, this time presenting England’s Random Dance (that’s them in the photo above) Thursday through Saturday in the Newmark Theatre. The piece, Entity, by company leader Wayne McGregor, runs an hour and is reputed to be fast and furious. It also marks the end of White Bird’s two-year Uncaged series, which has spotted dance in adventurous spaces around town while it’s waited for its regular second-season home, Lincoln Performance Hall, to be refurbished. That’ll be done by the start of next season.

But as important as they are, the scene is far from just OBT and White Bird. Keep an eye out for these upcoming events, too. (The dance action’s so hot and heavy that we’re sure we’re missing something; we apologize in advance.):
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Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

39 steps to a new and better Mr. Scatter

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Leif Norby on the lam in "Alfred Hitchcock's 'The 39 Steps'" at Portland Center Stage. Photo: OWEN CAREY

It’s been a busy few days around Scattertown.

First, on Thursday night, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter took a break from the gala festivities of Science Night at Irvington Elementary School to scoot up the hill to Talisman Gallery on Alberta, where their friend Cibyl Shinju Kavan was having an opening of new assemblages. Scrolls, bamboo, feathers and rocks figure into the work, which is quite pleasing.

Cibyl Shinju Kavan at Talisman GalleryThen, at midday Friday, the Scatter duo showed up at the Gerding Theater in the Armory to see dancer Linda Austin and her cohort J.P. Jenkins tear up the joint with a fascinating visual, musical and movement response to Mark Applebaum‘s elegant series of notational panels, The Metaphysics of Notation, which has been ringing the mezzanine railings above the Gerding lobby for the past month. Every Friday at noon someone has been interpreting this extremely open-ended score, and this was the final exploration. California composer Applebaum will be one of the featured artists this Friday at the Hollywood Theatre in the latest concert by Third Angle New Music Ensemble, the band of contemporary-music upstarts for whom Mrs. Scatter toils ceaselessly.

Austin and Jenkins began by racing around the mezzanine and literally playing the hollow-steel guard rail, which was quite fun. They moved from pre-plotted base to pre-plotted base, always coming up with surprises, as the small crowd followed like Hamelin rats mesmerized by a piper’s tune. Mr. Scatter enjoyed the red fuzzy bargain-store microphone and the Sneezing Chorus and especially the shower of discarded clothing items floating down from the mezzanine into the path of the startled flower-delivery guy in the lobby below. Mr. Scatter took no photos, partly because the little camera doohickey on his cellular telephone is pretty much useless for anything more complicated than an extreme closeup snapshot of an extremely still object, and partly because he was just having too much fun to bother. But Lisa Radon of ultra was more disciplined and took some fine shots which you can ogle on her site.

On Friday evening it was back to the Gerding for opening night of Portland Center Stage‘s comedy Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps,’ which takes the 1935 movie thriller and blows it to preposterous proportions.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Mr. Scatter’s Sunday: Dance, chat, wine

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The magnolia tree in Mr. and Mrs. Scatter’s front yard is budding. The handsome old plum trees a couple of doors down are in deep pink. And like an old tired bear stretching and yawning after a long winter’s nap, Mr. Scatter is cautiously poking his nose out of the cave and making a few public appearances.

You might recall his recent pre-game patter at White Bird‘s presentation of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, or his stint of instant analysis from the broadcasting booth of Portland Opera‘s Orphee.

Choreographer Maurice CauseyFor the next two Sunday afternoons he’ll be ambling over to the Northwest Dance Project studio just off North Mississippi Street (not all that far, as it happens, from the Scatter cave) to moderate talks with a couple of very interesting guest choreographers who are setting new work on the company for its spring performances.

The afternoons are called Dance Flights, and they’ll be casual, intimate affairs, a nice place to duck into and out of the rain. This Sunday’s chat will be with Maurice Causey (inset photo above), an independent choreographer identified closely with Nederlands Dans Theater (he’s been ballet master there, and also at the Royal Swedish Ballet) and with Ballet Frankfurt, where he was a principal dancer for William Forsythe for several years. On Tuesday I watched a couple of hours of Causey’s early rehearsal with the NDP dancers, and I’m eager to see what’s happened in the ensuing days.

Choreographer Luca VeggettiNext Sunday, March 7, the guest will be the Paris-based Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti (photo at right), whose career has roamed from La Scala Milan to London, Pennsylvania, Chicago, New York City Ballet and beyond. In 2000 he was the first Italian choreographer in the 20th century to set a piece on the dancers of the legendary Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet in St. Petersburg.

The format is this: Drop in, have a little nibble and a glass of wine, watch the dancers perform the pieces, then settle in for the talks. I’ll mainly ask the choreographers to talk about their backgrounds and their approach to dance, and I’ll encourage people in the audience to toss in their own questions. Very informal.

Each Dance Flight begins at 3 p.m. at the Northwest Dance Project studio, a pleasant, big-windowed space at 833 N. Shaver Street, just off of Mississippi Avenue. Suggested donation is $20 ($10 students), which helps pay for the events.

Northwest Dance Project’s spring performances, which will include the new works by Causey and Veggetti plus two pieces by artistic director Sarah Slipper, will be March 12-13 at the Newmark Theatre.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Journalism

Bad day at the Big O: layoff blues

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You’ve probably heard the news already. On Wednesday The Oregonian laid off 37 workers, 27 in the newsroom. The cuts have long been expected. Like the rest of the daily newspaper industry, the (not so) Big (anymore) O is trapped in a nightmare downward spiral triggered by landmark technological shifts, declining readership and, OK, its own reluctance to change with the times.

The Oregonian: a race to thrive and surviveI’ve waited to write this because even now I don’t know all of the names of the people who’ve been laid off. Lips have been tight, although The Mercury’s Matt Davis has ferreted out most of the hit list here. Predictably, a lot of online smart-alecks have been snickering about this. Don’t know what to tell them except they’re insanely stupid, and callous to the extreme. These are good, talented people, most of them extraordinarily dedicated to the public good, who are now out of work.

The possibly mortal weakening of the mainstream American press is nothing but bad news for our fragile democracy (or republic). Without the newspapers’ checks and proddings, who will speak authoritatively to power? In October of 2008 I wrote about the problems facing the news industry, and although that post offers no solid solutions (I’m no wizard), I think it lays out the difficulties pretty well.

Up until now, The Oregonian has managed the illness of its industry with remarkable grace. Maybe it hasn’t come up with answers (and maybe I’ve been frustrated by what’s sometimes seemed like a paralysis of will), but it has treated its people well, offering several generous buyout packages to its workers instead of just dumping them by the wayside, as so many other papers have. I took a buyout two years ago. My wife took one last May.

Pretty much everyone who was going to leave voluntarily has left. Now, the O has no real choice but to make the tough cuts by layoff. They’ve begun, and there could be more. I don’t pretend to understand how the decisions were made on who went and who stayed. Faced with the extraordinary difficulties of having to make these decisions about people’s lives and livelihoods, my own list would have been different in several particulars. But there’s no good way to do this thing.

Continue reading Bad day at the Big O: layoff blues →

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Music

Dick Bogle, jazz fan deluxe, dies at 79

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UPDATE: Stuart Tomlinson and Kimberly A.C. Wilson have this good obituary on the Metro cover of this morning’s Oregonian. Good pictures at the link, too.

Dick Bogle's jazz blog home page

Dick Bogle was a Portland cop, and a television newscaster, and a newspaper reporter, and a city councilman, and he distinguished himself in all four fields, partly by being a pioneer African American locally in each.

But I like to think of him as one of Portland’s most devoted jazz aficionados, a man who loved the music, had strong opinions about it, and spread the good word about it whenever and however he could. He took wonderful black-and-white photographs of jazz greats and local luminaries in the clubs. He was Oregon correspondent for Downbeat. And he reviewed new releases on his own jazz blog.

Bogle died this morning at age 79. Willamette Week’s Hank Stern has the story here, complete with excerpts from a short profile WW published in 2007. Bogle’s wife, the singer Nola Bogle, said the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Dick Bogle was one of those people of whom you can honestly say, this city is a better place because he lived here. I didn’t really know him, although I talked with him a few times. But I’ll miss knowing he’s around. I wish I knew where to find some of those jazz photos, so I could show you how he saw his city.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Visual Art

Talkin’ Hubbard Street: Mr. Scatter speaks

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On Tuesday evening Mr. Scatter stood before a friendly audience (including Scatter friends Jenny Wren and David Brown) in the lower-level lounge of the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall and talked for 20 minutes about Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, the admirable company that was about to perform upstairs. Mr. Scatter discovered that (a) microphones are our friends, and (b) speeches are better with simple sentence structures and a lack of ten-dollar words. Mr. Scatter thanks White Bird for the invitation. If there’s a next time, he promises to do better on the simplicity bit. Here is the manuscript of his talk, in black and white:

Hubbard Street Fance Chicago in Johan Inger's "Walking Mad." Photo: Tom Rosenberg

Some of you know I do a lot of my writing these days for a Web site called artscatter.com, so bear with me while I scatter a bit.

At Art Scatter we practice something I like to call the Scatter Method of Indirect Analysis, which basically tries to bring some order to the chaotic collision of free association, intuition and logic that keeps batting around inside most of our brains.

The process goes something like this.

You find a topic, and you stick it in the back of your mind, and you sort of forget about it, like it’s a slow-cooking soup.

Except not really, because from that point on, everything you see and hear becomes part of your back-burner thinking process on that particular topic. And eventually it hits the front burner.

You’ve opened your receptors. Even when you don’t actively realize it you’re looking for connections, for clues, for ways to relate your everyday world to this thing you’ve decided to concentrate on. It’s all extremely conjectural. But sometimes intriguing clues drop in from very surprising places.

I happen to think that’s a good way to approach experiencing any sort of art, from reading a book to watching a dance. You, as the audience or consumer, are the finishing point of the art. Without you, it’s incomplete.

And because each of us brings something different to the party, any work of art has a million possibilities for completion. Or I guess that’s 7 billion and counting. The artist creates, but the implications and the impact are really up to us. We want to make it the best experience we can, so we keep our tentacles attuned. See what we pick up.

So. The subject is Hubbard Street Dance Chicago.

Let’s dive in.

One of the first things that struck me when I started investigating the company’s history was that in the mid 1970s, when it began, it grew out of a studio devoted to teaching tap dance. As in Bojangles Robinson and Brenda Bufalino and Gregory Hines.

Tap has a lot of international relatives, from the hornpipe to flamenco to Irish clogging, but it’s an American art form, with roots in slavery and the West African rhythms that became transformed on our own soil. And here’s something Count Basie had to say: “If you play a tune and the person don’t tap their feet, don’t play the tune.”

Bing. That stuck on the Velcro at the end of my tentacles. Didn’t know why, quite, but there it was. Something American. Something that pays attention to the audience.

Continue reading Talkin’ Hubbard Street: Mr. Scatter speaks →

Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

A disquieting day at the art museum

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Jaume Plensa, "In the Midst of Dreams," 2009. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Lelong, New York

Size matters. When a traveler in an antique land stumbles upon, let’s say, a sphinx towering from the sands of a desert, a part of the astonishment is the sheer scale of the thing. What impact would Richard Serra‘s Tilted Arc have had if it had been three feet long and sitting serenely on a display table at the Museum of Modern Art?

We’ve gotten used to monumental works, and some of the — what’s the best word: terror? — of the things has leeched out of our reactions. A giant typewriter eraser by Claes Oldenburg inspires other admirations (and, for a rising generation, a bit of head-scratching: what the heck’s a typewriter?), and as the Burj Khalifa pricks the sky 160 stories above Dubai, we think of our own iconic steel giants, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, with warm, compact, nostalgic pleasure. Not the biggest of the big, we tell ourselves, but still the best of the big.

Daniel Richter, "royit on sunsetstrip," 2008, oil on canvas, 88 x 67 x 1 inches. The Eugene Sadavoy Collection.Bigness and pleasure struck me the other day as I entered the rotunda of the Portland Art Museum and came face to face with Jaume Plensa‘s massive 2009 sculpture In the Midst of Dreams. Make that face to face to face: Plensa’s lighted polyester piece, 35 feet long and 24 feet wide and more than 7 feet tall, consists of the large heads of three women “buried” on a bed of stones. It’s the first thing you see when you enter the museum’s new exhibit Disquieted, and I thought immediately, “This is the most fun this space has been in a long time.”

Fun? At an exhibition that is built around what its curator, Bruce Guenther, calls “the things that wake us up at nights. … the things that make us mutter in the streets”?
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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Mr. Scatter speaks. In front of a crowd.

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Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Johan Inger's "Walking Mad." Photo: Tom Rosenberg

Today Mr. Scatter is putting the finishing touches on a little talk he’ll be giving Tuesday evening before Hubbard Street Dance Chicago‘s performance at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.

His charge from White Bird, the dance presenting folks, is simple. Speak for 20 minutes, try to say something interesting about the performance coming up, don’t put the audience to sleep.

Mr. Scatter will do his best. Yes, scattering will be involved. Mr. Scatter suspects it might even be sort of fun. For the audience, too. On the program Tuesday night: Jorma Elo‘s Bitter Suite, Ohad Naharin‘s Tabula Rasa, Johan Inger‘s Walking Mad.

The talk, part of the White Bird Words series, will be downstairs at the Schnitz. It starts at 6:45, giving everyone ample time to settle into their seats upstairs before the 7:30 curtain. The talk is free, but you need a ticket to the performance to get in. After all, much as Mr. Scatter might suffer from occasional delusions of grandeur, the performance is the main attraction.

PICTURED: Johan Inger’s “Walking Mad.” Photo: Tom Rosenberg

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

BodyVox-2 does the bunny hop

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BodyVox-2, in "Usual Suspects." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Mr. and Mrs. Scatter headed for BodyVox, the Portland touring dance and performance company, the other night for the public debut of BodyVox-2, the next generation.

BodyVox is a veteran company, filled with performers who have long and deep experience in ballet companies and with such performance troupes as Pilobolus and Momix. They carry their performances with the sureness and muscle memory of artists who have been living with this material for a long time, and, in many cases, who have had pieces created specifically for them and their bodies.

NodyVox-2, "Hopper's Dinner." Photo: Blaine Truitt CovertSo it’s something of a revelation to see some of these works performed by other bodies. Thursday’s performance included 10 short dances, plus a couple of Mitchell Rose’s terrific short comic films — a smorgasbord of BodyVox hits. Seeing fresh bodies perform them wasn’t just about getting to know a new crop of good dancers in town. It was also about rethinking these works as pieces of choreography that both define the BodyVox style and stand on their own as discrete works of art that have entered the contemporary-dance repertoire.

These are good dancers, all of whom come to the company with significant training and who now get the opportunity to learn the BodyVox style and absorb some of the knowledge of Jamey Hampton, Ashley Roland, Daniel Kirk, Eric Skinner and other main-company stalwarts. BodyVox vet Zachary Carroll directs the second company, which already has done a little regional touring and several school shows, and he’s done a good job: If things aren’t always quite as crisp as with the main company, this is a highly promising, athletic, nimble young professional ensemble.

The troupe of Jeff George, Kara Girod, Melissa Kanavel, Jonathan Krebs and Josh Murry works well together, especially on such ensemble-oriented pieces as Usual Suspects (top photo), the rollicking Hopper’s Dinner, and the nose-wiggling frolic that is The Bunny (inset photo). Despite their loose-as-a-goose moods, these aren’t easy pieces to perform, and BodyVox-2 pulls them off with a nice combination of recklessness and polish.

The growth of BodyVox-2 means a couple of things. First, BodyVox has become an institution, known for a specific style that can be replicated and performed by multiple casts. That’s a big step in the arts-touring game. Second, it’s a bet on the future, a way to prepare for passing things along. BodyVox isn’t just a group of performers who work together any more. It’s a body of work. And BodyVox-2 makes it much more likely that, come that inevitable day when artistic leaders Hampton and Roland and other veterans retire as performers, BodyVox will continue to grow and thrive. You could call this a legacy moment.

BodyVox-2 has two final performances, at 2 and 7:30 p.m. today, at BodyVox Dance Center, 1201 N.W. 17th Ave., Portland.

PHOTOS: Blaine Truitt Covert