Category Archives: General

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Wicked good, wicked bad with the LLSB

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By Bob Hicks

Breaking theater protocol, Mr. Scatter leaned toward the LLSB* as the show was running and whispered: “She’s like Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde.”

Mamie Parris as Elphaba. Photo: Joan MarcusThis nugget of cross-genre enlightenment was met with less than enthusiastic acknowledgement because (a) for the LLSB, who was born in 1994, the 2001 movie Legally Blonde almost counts as prehistory; and (b) the LLSB was deep in the pleasures of the megamusical Wicked and did not wish to be distracted by parental interference.

Yes, Wicked. For the second time in a month (after a surprise Valentine’s Day encounter with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) Mr. Scatter found himself in the unusual position of attending a touring version of one of those great big overblown kids’ shows of an expense-account mainstream Broadway musical. The LLSB has developed into an MFMT – a Major Fan of Musical Theater – and Mr. Scatter considers it his bounden duty to feed the appetite as generously and frequently as possible. After all, it may well do more for the lad than pre-calculus or physics in the long run of his life.

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Bob Hicks, General, Visual Art

Link: Feves’ clay motion at craft museum

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feves-sixfigures

By Bob Hicks

Betty Feves (1918-1985) was a pioneering American ceramic artist who lived most of her working life in the Oregon desert town of Pendleton but gained a national reputation as a thorough modernist in a tradition-bound medium, and not coincidentally shattered a few glass ceilings as she went about her work. Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft has just opened a fascinating retrospective of her work, Generations: Betty Feves, and I covered it for Oregon Arts Watch. The result is this story, Betty Feves: down and dirty with the clay.

An excerpt:

“In Feves’ case, (art and craft) seem inseparable. Her more mature work, the stuff where you see more of her and less of her influences, is pared down and elemental, more purely suggestive than representational of anything specific or immediate. But you also see, very clearly, the landscape in which she lived her life: the geologic curvatures and textures, the size and brawn, the brown-based desert colors that shift suddenly and sometimes burst into flame. Things crack and sag and curl, and sometimes their glazed surfaces look like wood or stone. But usually lurking somewhere is the spine of the land. Its impact is inescapable, as in the paintings of the late Oregon abstract artist Carl Morris and the works of Pendleton artist James Lavadour, whose celebrated international career got a kick-start from Feves’ prodding and encouragement.”

Illustration: “Six Figures,” date unknown. Raku on wooden base. Collection of Feves Family. Photo: Dan Kvitka

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

All new, all the time at NW Dance Project

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By Bob Hicks

Ching Ching Wong and Patrick Kilbane in Patrick Delcroix's "Chameleon." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.For Portland’s scrappy Northwest Dance Project, putting on a program of three world premieres is just another day at the office. It’s how they roll. I went to the company’s Spring Premieres a few nights ago and posted this piece, Spring awakening: NDP’s torrent of new dance, at Oregon Arts Watch. An excerpt:

“In its Spring Premieres program on Friday and Saturday nights in the Newmark Theatre, NDP rolled out three new dances – Wen Wei Wang‘s Conjugations, Sarah Slipper‘s Airys, and Patrick Delcroix‘s Chameleon. And unlike the weather, which was whipping every which way but loose, these three new dances seemed to be blowing from a similar place. An angsty sort of place; a place that made me think more than once of cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s earnest modern interpretive dancer.”

Ching Ching Wong and Patrick Kilbane in Patrick Delcroix’s “Chameleon.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

Bob Hicks, Books, Cities, Dance, General, Laura Grimes, Music, Theater

Link: OCT does the Locomotion

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Tyler Andrew Jones and Andrea White in "Locomotion" at OTC. Photo: Owen Carey.

By Bob Hicks

Today I posted this essay, Doing the Locomotion with kids’ theater, at Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Oregon Children’s Theatre‘s terrific production of Locomotion, Jacqueline Woodson‘s stage adaptation of her National Book Award-finalist children’s book, which is something of a tree-grows-in-Brooklyn tale. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, to be exact, where a kid nicknamed Locomotion learns to deal with some tough stuff through the power of poetry. An excerpt:

… I like to drop in every now and again on a show for kids. No audience experiences the give-and-take between stage and seats more directly or honestly. If an audience of kids tunes out, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a bad show: It might just not be right for kids. But if you’re an actor or director it’s a good idea to pay attention to where the kids zone out, because maybe you’ve got a problem on your hands. And if the kids are with you, they’re gonna let you know. Loudly.

Above: Tyler Andrew Jones and Andrea White in “Locomotion” at OTC. Photo: Owen Carey.

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Link: Dancing the weekend away

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By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter spent a good share of his weekend with the sons and daughters of Terpsichore, watching and thinking as they sliced through space.

Bob Eisen in performance.The performances he took in were 4 Men Only at Conduit and Troika Ranch’s Enter Comma Prepare at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. He then posted his thoughts on Oregon Arts Watch, in an essay titled Dance weekend: 4 men and a chancy machine.

An excerpt about Bob Eisen’s For Lulu, part of 4 Men Only:

His distinctive appearance helps him pull the thing off. Eisen is long and whooping-crane lean, with a prodigious wingspan, and he wears his 65 years with an easy economy of motion and head-banging intensity of effect. Dressed in pajama tops and multi-pleated harem pants, he looks like Ichabod Crane in a white shock of Art Garfunkel hair.

An excerpt about Enter Comma Prepare:

Finally audience and performers alike moved into the larger auditorium, where chairs were clustered cleverly in several small islands so the dancers could flow around them like electrons coursing through a mother board. And so they did, to a drone of computer-generated instructions intoned over loudspeakers in a metallic voice like Hal 9000’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Jonathan. Southwest,” it would say, or “Nancy. North,” and off the performer would go. At one point I had a fleeting image of Cary Grant ducking into a cornfield while a homicidal pilot chased after him from above, shouting “North by northwest!”

Photo: Bob Eisen, one of “4 Men Only.”

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Timeless TBA: art & politics in ‘Giselle’

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“We could do with a regiment of Wilis to haunt the halls of Congress,” Martha Ullman West declares, and then she tells us why. Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, who reviewed Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s current production of “Giselle” here for The Oregonian, expands on her ideas for us, moving the conversation into the twilight territory between arts and politics.

Giselle (Haiyan Wu) and the peasants in "Giselle" at OBT. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

By Martha Ullman West

With no apologies whatsoever to PICA and its annual TBA festival, Giselle is a sterling example of time-based art.

The creators of this collaborative piece from 1841 – composer Adolphe Adam, choreographers Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot, and librettists Vernoy de Saint Georges and Theophile Gautier – were seasoned, rather than young, creatives.

Coralli and Perrot were making some distinct innovations in ballet technique, particularly pointe work, which gave new prominence and independence to ballerinas. You can see this particularly in Act II, where the women balance in unsupported arabesques. And the librettists were expressing, or reflecting, some political ideas just seven years before Karl Marx (who came from the Rhineland, in which the ballet is set) issued the Communist Manifesto.

So the ballet is at once time-based and timeless, a great work of art, providing a cathartic experience in the theater as well as much food for thought. Oregon Ballet Theatre’s new production (staged by Lola de Avila, and repeating this weekend) looks distinctly old, but because of the commitment and talents of the dancers, it speaks to our concerns as well as our hearts.

Think about the libretto. The class divide (or “war,” to use Republican hyperbole, and which our president isn’t causing) drives the plot.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General

At ‘Giselle,’ the view from on high

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Before the fall: a joyous Haiyan Wu and Chauncey Parsons as Giselle and Albrecht at OBT. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

By Bob Hicks

Seeking to rise above the weather under which he’s been submerged these past several days, Mr. Scatter elevated to the balcony of Keller Auditorium on Saturday evening so he could take in the grand sweep of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s new Giselle. The air was a little giddy up there – or maybe it was just the gyroscope wobbling inside Mr. Scatter’s overstuffed head – but the view was magnificent.

Mr. Scatter ordinarily sits on the orchestra level, closer to the stage, where the sounds of scraping slippers are more strenuous and the actorly expressions of the dancers are as revealing as they can get in a 3,000-seat hall. Upstairs, he missed some of the dramatic detail (how was the gifted Chauncey Parsons interpreting the two-timing rich dude Albrecht? – easy to tell choreographically, tough to tell psychologically) but had a better chance to appreciate the breadth and patterns of the dancing, which can unfold so much more fully from above. What he lost in intimacy he gained in scope: a sort of whole-picture Cinemascopic sweep of design; what the movie people call mise-en-scène.

And what a scène it was.

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Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Visual Art

Link: Pander in war, Wilis on the loose

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Henk Pander, "Resistance Asleep," oil, 1995.

By Bob Hicks

I just posted this story, Pander transported: memories of a time of war, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s a look at Dutch-born Portland artist Henk Pander’s remarkable series of paintings and drawings at the Oregon Jewish Museum based on his childhood memories of World War II in his hometown of Haarlem. An excerpt:

“Even more cadaverous, and ravenous, is the 1999 ink drawing ‘Soup Kitchen,’ in which thin skull-eyed children bend over bowls of thin liquid. This might be Pander’s memory of the winter of 1944-45, the hongerwinter, a time of famine caused by harsh weather and a German blockade, during which those who survived (18,000 did not) did so partly on a diet of tulip bulbs and sugar beets. War is an act of waiting, and people wait in these drawings and paintings. They endure, if that’s the right word, and they anticipate, and they simply – wait. For the next bad thing. For the end of the next bad things.”

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And in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, my preview interview with the charming Lola de Avila, stager of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s new version of Giselle, ran. Besides talking with de Avila, one of those great old-time dancers who wastes no time declaring that today’s dancers are better-trained (well, she’s one of the people doing the training), I spent a couple of hours in rehearsal watching her teach the corps de ballets how to act like perfectly ghastly Wilis. Which, of course, is what they’re supposed to be. You can read the story here.

ILLUSTRATION: Henk Pander, “Resistance Asleep,” oil, 1995. Courtesy Oregon Jewish Museum.

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Link: The Scatters, beautiful and beastly

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The Scatters celebrate Valentine's Day. (Actually, that's Dane Agostinis and Emily Behny.)

By Bob Hicks

Through a series of coincidences too complicated to describe, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter spent Valentine’s Day evening at the opening performance of the latest touring version of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Mr. Scatter then wrote his impressions of the production for The Oregonian; you can read them here.

It may come as no surprise to you that Mrs. Scatter assumed the role of Beauty while in attendance, and Mr. Scatter stayed in character as Beast. Among other things, it was pleasant to see all the little girls in the audience in their party dresses and hair-bows, paying rapt attention: It was like The Nutcracker with mirrors and fangs. The chocolates and Cognac after the show were lovely, too.

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Photo: The Scatters celebrate Valentine’s Day. (Actually, that’s Dane Agostinis and Emily Behny.)

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Link: a little theater, cradle to grave

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By Bob Hicks

Luisa Sermol and Ted Schulz in "Boleros." Photo: Russell YoungI’ve posted Teen to twilight: a theater weekend for the ages at Oregon Arts Watch. It recounts my adventures at the theater over the weekend, when I caught the Jason Robert Brown teen musical 13 at Staged! Musical Theatre, the theater-games comedy Circle Mirror Transformation at Artists Rep, and Jose Rivera’s memory-play Boleros for the Disenchanted at Miracle Theatre.

Somehow, the matter of age kept popping up: eventually it’ll be the death of us. Sound cheerful? Surprisingly, it sort of was. An excerpt:

“13” may be a stock teen comedy, but it’s also very much about growing up: after all, a bar mitzvah marks a boy’s passage into manhood. Jose Rivera’s “Boleros for the Disenchanted,” at Miracle Theatre, picks up chronologically a little after “13″ ends and breaks the age barriers right down the spine. It hurtles its characters directly into the romance and perils of youth and then pushes them on to the regrets and consolations of old age, leaving all of the muddled middle areas implied. The kid in “13” might think his life’s over. For old Flora and Eusebio in “Boleros,” it almost is.

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Luisa Sermol and Ted Schulz in “Boleros.” Photo: Russell Young