Category Archives: Music

Bob Hicks, General, Journalism, Music

Mr. Scatter becomes a lobbyist (with a laptop)

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As the old joke goes, tonight’s the night!

This is not Mr. Scatter. Not by a long shot. It's Storm Large.
Art Scatter regulars might have noted that it’s been Philip Glass Week in Portland, and tonight at Keller Auditorium his 1993 opera Orphee opens in its West Coast premiere, performed by Portland Opera. Reports are promising: Glass liked the dress rehearsal so much that he whipped up a deal to have all four performances recorded and turned into a CD for Orange Mountain Music. It’ll be this opera’s first full recording.

And sitting in the lobby, along with his laptop and four other local members of the blogospheric chattering class, will be Mr. Scatter, there to file a continuing stream of instant analysis, much like a pontificating television face on a national election night:

“Orpheus has been caught on camera looking over his shoulder, and that could spell serious trouble for Eurydice’s chances in the tensely fought Afterlife race. At stake is control of a sprawling district that runs from the far shores of the River Styx to the lush meadows on the surface end of the cave opening. We’ll update you as we learn more. But this could be bye-bye to a once-promising career. Over to you, Storm.”

Here are my owlish teammates, and where you can follow their instamusings:

Storm Large. The rock diva and musical-theater star of Cabaret and Crazy Enough will post at www.stormlarge.com. You’ll recognize her. She’s the tall good-looking one, and her posts will probably be littered with Words Not Ordinarily Associated With Art Scatter.

Byron Beck. If Portland’s a town, Byron’s the man about it. He knows just about everybody, and just about everything, and dishes it out when and where the mood strikes. www.byronbeck.com

Jim Withington. The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art has been one of Glass Week’s sponsors (it has a long relationship with Glass) and Jim will be blogging on PICA’s Urban Honking.

Cynthia Fuhrman. Portland Center Stage’s resident marketing genius is very smart and very funny and no doubt will be a lot of fun to read. She’ll be posting on the PCS blog. Rumor has it that while the other bloggers will be sipping beer as they type feverishly away, la Fuhrman will be pampered with cocktails, no doubt with colorful little paper umbrellas to pretty them up. It’s rigged. Florida election here, folks.

Marc Acito. BONUS PICK. The witty Portland novelist (How I Paid for College; Attack of the Theatre People) and playwright (Holidazed) actually has a role in the opera. But when he’s backstage he’ll be blogging on the show at The Gospel According to Marc. Amazing exploit!

That’s all, folks. Until tonight. News at … oh, 6:30, 7, 7:15, 8, 8:30 ….

——————————————————————————

PHOTO: This is not Mr. Scatter. Not by a long shot. It’s Storm Large. Credit: Laura Domela

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music

Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment

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“I’ve never been very interested in film,” Philip Glass said one morning this week at a long table set up in a rehearsal hall in the Portland Opera studios. “I don’t go to movies a lot.”

Jean Cocteau in his 20s. Wikimedia Commons

An odd confession from Glass, the 72-year-old composer who was in town for several days in conjunction with Friday night’s opening of the West Coast premiere of his 1993 opera Orphee at Portland Opera.

Orphee is, after all, one of a trilogy of operas that Glass has written based on the transcendent movies of Jean Cocteau (the others are La Belle et la Bete and Les Enfants Terribles).

And in a time when classical performers (Yo Yo Ma, Luciano Pavarotti, Andrea Bocelli) achieve celebrity but composers ordinarily don’t, Glass has become famous partly because of his forays into film, beginning with the hallucinatory Koyaanisqatsi in 1982.

Original poster for "La Belle et la Bete." Wikimedia Commons

Still, what he said made sense, especially when you consider the ways that he’s interacted with film — he’s hardly Hollywood-mainstreamed it — and the sentence he added immediately after his confession: “And yet film is an important aspect of the collaborative arts.”

Collaboration, he said, is one of the great attractions of the film world: It’s filled with extremely talented artists working toward a goal. The technology is amazing. And of course, compared to any of the performing arts, movies are seen: “The reach of film is extraordinary.”

How extraordinary? Glass recalled a story about the day Godfrey Reggio, the director of Koyaanisqatsi, called to tell him their movie was going to be shown on PBS:

Philip Glass in Florence, 1993. Pasquale Salerno/Wikimedia Commons

“I said, ‘What’s that mean?’

“He said, ‘It means 6 million people will see it that night.’

“I practically fainted. That is not a number that comes into my work very often.”

As it turns out, Reggio’s guess of 6 million viewers was off the mark. Twenty million tuned in.

And that’s how a composer becomes famous, minimalism or maximalism or any other ism aside. Who outside of the pop world is even better-known than Glass as a composer? John Williams, composer for the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Superman and first three Harry Potter movies.

So. The movies, yes. Glass noted that he did a little work on film crews to pick up extra money when he was a young man living in Paris, and even acted — pretty badly, he said wryly — in a few bit parts.

But he noticed something about film: “It was not an interpretive art form, it was a definitive art form.”

By that he meant, once a film is finished it’s frozen. That’s its form forever and ever, world without end, amen, amen. You can remake with new stars, but then it’s a new work. You can even do virtual scene-for-scene homages like Werner Herzog’s ravishing remake of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu or Gus Van Sant’s frame-for-frame re-do of Psycho, which had all of Hollywood scratching its collective head. But those, too, become their own discrete objects.

A play or a symphony or an opera, on the other hand, is an elusive, transformational thing, taking on new shapes and layers of meaning with each successive performance: The idea of Carmen today, after thousands of performances, is somehow different from anything Bizet imagined, Glass suggested.

“And then,” he said, “it occurred to me that maybe I could look at film in a different way.”

Continue reading Movies into operas: the great Cocteau/Glass experiment →

Bob Hicks, Film, General, Music, Theater

Mr. Scatter steps out from behind his wall of Glass

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"Orpheus and Eurydice," Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51

ABOVE: “Orpheus and Eurydice,” Nicolas Poussin, 1650-51. Musee de Louvre, Paris. INSET: Philip Glass, composer of “Orphee.” Wikimedia Commons.

DON’T LOOK BACK. Bob Dylan gave that sage advice, possibly after considering the experiences of Lot’s wife, who turned into a pillar of salt after peeking back at the lost pleasures of Sodom, and of Orpheus, who doomed his wife to the Underworld by glancing over his shoulder as he was leading her back from the far side of the River Styx.

Well, Mr. Scatter’s made a couple of rash decisions lately, and he’s determined not to look back: Mrs. Scatter would be seriously ticked off if she turned into a salt lick in Hell. Onward and forward, eyes on the prize.

*************

RASH DECISION #1: I’ve agreed to be one of Portland Opera’s speed-bloggers on Friday night at the opening performance of Philip Glass‘s Orphee, a 1991 opera (premiered in 1993) based on the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice and on Jean Cocteau‘s mysteriously poetic 1949 film adaptation, also called Orphee. Portland Opera‘s production will be the opera’s West Coast premiere.

Philip Glass/Wikimedia CommonsWhat this means is that, while you’re filing into Keller Auditorium before the show, I’ll be in the lobby seated at a table with several other bloggers, dashing out immediate impressions and committing them to cyberspace before I have time to repent and delete. I’ll have a backstage tour beforehand, and yes, I do get to see the show, after which I’ll dash back to my laptop and blog some more. This will be either the rough draft of history or outtakes of an unsifted mind, but I will Not. Look. Back.

To prepare, I’ll be on hand for Creativity and Collaboration: An Evening with Philip Glass, a Tuesday night gathering with the composer at the Portland Art Museum’s Kridell Auditorium, where Glass will talk about his music and career. The evening’s sponsored by the opera, the Northwest Film Center (which screened Cocteau’s Orphee last night) and the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, which has a long history with Glass. I’ll also get a chance to talk with Glass in a group interview Tuesday morning with a quartet of musically savvy Portland writers: Marty Hughley, Bob Kingston, James Bash and Brett Campbell. Glass’s trip to Portland will be pretty brief: By opening night of Orphee he’ll already be in Mexico City, performing some of his chamber music.

My fellow bloggers (sounds like the beginning of a political speech) on opening night will be actress/rock star Storm Large, man-about-town Byron Beck, arts marketer extraordinaire Cynthia Fuhrman, and someone (not sure who) from PICA. Our compensation, I’m told, will be “plenty of beer, nuts and cookies during intermission.”

I don’t have a Facebook account and I do not Twit, so here’s how it’ll work: I’ll start a Glass/Orphee post on Friday evening and write everything on it, hitting “publish” at regular intervals so the post gets longer as the night goes on. I’ll mark each new entry by its time, so you can get a sense of the “running” part of the running commentary.

And I will not look over my shoulder. Someone might be gaining on me.

*************

RASH DECISION #2: My friend Susan Jonsson sits on the board of Well Arts Institute, a group of theater and other artists who use writing and theater to, as they put it, “generate well-being, hope, and meaning for people in life-altering health situations.” Some very talented people are involved in this project, and the transformational possibilities of storytelling are near the core of what they do.

Well Arts Institute: hand to handSo when Susan asked whether I’d be a guest performer in Well Arts’ fall show, Voices of Our Elders, I said yes. The process is fascinating. Well Arts people do a 10-week workshop on memoir and creative writing with older people in care centers, listening to their stories, transcribing them, helping them shape them. The result is a show of monologues and a few dialogues from people looking back on their lives, on what was important, and contemplating what’s to come. It’s a fundamental form of personal history and an emotionally involving form of documentary theater.

Well Arts director Lorraine Bahr has assembled a good cast to present these stories: John Morrison, Ritah Parrish, Deirdre Atkinson, Steve Boss, Andrea White, Wendy Westerwelle and writer-performer Vince Falco. Each performance will also include a revolving lineup of guest readers: singer Shirley Nanette; actors Delight Lorenz, Luisa Sermol, Tom Gough and Susan Jonsson; onetime Broadway hoofer and legendary Portland director/teacher Jack Featheringill; Oregon Arts Commissioner and longtime theater supporter Julie Vigeland; and me.

I went to a rehearsal on Halloween afternoon at the Olympic Mills Commerce Center, a rehab development housing arts, food and design businesses at 107 S.E. Washington St., near the riverfront in the close-in East Side light-industrial district. This is where the show will be, and it’s an interesting new creative hub, worth visiting: We rehearsed in front of the Zimbabwe Artists Project, a space covered with gorgeous appliques and fabric paintings created by women of the Weya region of Zimbabwe.

Voices of Our Elders runs at 3 and 7 p.m. Saturdays, Nov. 7 and 14; and at 3 p.m. Sundays, Nov. 8 and 15.  I’ll do my reading — a piece I like quite a bit, called The Day I Went to Enlist — at the Nov. 14 matinee. Ticket and other info here.

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater, Visual Art

Scatter’s Halloween/Day of the Dead rotogravure edition

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Mr. Scatter anticipates an evening of answering doorbells and dispensing mass quantities of solidified high fructose corn syrup when the lights go down tonight. But there are other, possibly better, ways to celebrate Fright Night. A visual selection, not one of which has to do with overturning outhouses:

"Canta y no Llores" at Miracle Theatre. Photo: Russell Young

Miracle Theatre Group’s original Day of the Dead play “Canta y no Llores” continues through Nov. 15 at Teatro Milagro. Performed in Spanish and English, it looks back on the trials of the Great Depression. Ticket information here. Photo: Russell Young

Halloween at Disjecta: a night of the living dead

Disjecta, the big barn of an art and performance center just a swing of the ax from the Paul Bunyan statue in Kenton, has a Halloween two-fer. Kid-and-family-friendly stuff rules from noon to 4 on Saturday, with proceeds going to benefit Chief Joseph Elementary School. Then, starting at 9 in the evening and continuing ’til the graveyards empty, all inhibitions are off for a dance party of ghoulish proportions. Details here.

At Onda Gallery, a photograph by Paulina Hermosillo

In the Alberta Art District, Allan Oliver’s Onda Gallery specializes in the art and craft of Latin America. His Day of the Dead exhibit, continuing through Nov. 22, gathers work from nine Hispanic artists from Portland and the Willamette Valley, plus several others exploring similar ideas. The photo above is by Paulina Hermosillo. More information here.

General, Laura Grimes, Music

Schlepping high culture in the Large Smelly Boymobile

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Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso

Haiqiong Deng, zheng (but not Dungeons & Dragons) virtuoso.

While my brain has been on sizzle in other realms of the arts world, apparently a blog has been going on in my own house. The entire world can check in on what my current first husband has been up to, but I’m afraid to say I’ve been rather ignorant about it.

I feel a little sheepish about writing, actually. Recently, Mr. Scatter wisely and broadly covered America’s current fascination with Chinese culture, Martha Ullman West (otherwise known as Art Scatter’s highest paid correspondent) boldly encompassed the week’s vast dance scene and … me? Well, let me tell you about Cheez-Its.

***

A week ago Monday, Haiqiong Deng took a break from her concert tour to fly in from Boston and perform in Third Angle‘s China Music Now concerts.

United Airlines Boieng 767-300/Wikimedia CommonsHaiqiong (hiCHONG) is a virtuoso on the zheng (chung), an ancient Chinese instrument similar to a zither. Hers has 21 strings, each with a bridge that can be moved. For weeks it had been the big mystery instrument to me. I knew it was big, but I didn’t know how big. I couldn’t wait to hear what it sounded like.

When the Third Angle staff (I’m the managing director) were figuring who could pick her up from the airport, we had two questions to consider: Who wasn’t playing in the symphony that night, and who has a vehicle long enough to fit a zheng in it.

Guess what? I won.

A prime example of low cultureI was thrilled. And then panic set in. Did I have enough time to clean up the Cheez-Its?

Once a week, Mr. Scatter picks up six Large Smelly Sixth-Graders and schleps them to Dungeons and Dragons. You’ve heard of Soccer Moms? He’s a D&D Dad.

The boys pile in and then immediately grab for snacks and juice boxes. They’re usually pretty good about stuffing the trash into the garbage sack, but it’s six boisterous boys and crumbs fly.

A few hours before I was to meet Haiqiong at the airport, I realized I wouldn’t have time to get the van cleaned, but I had a few minutes to give it a once-over and open up the cargo hold. It was dusk and getting hard to see, but as soon as I plunked the back seat down one brilliant-orange square Cheez-It practically glowed.

I picked it up, noticed the van’s bulging trash sack and then threw it all in a garbage can. I took note that I didn’t have a replacement bag, but I told myself I’d worry about it later.

***

The baggage claim area at Portland International Airport has a sign: “Many bags look alike, please check tags.”

Haiqiong and I were chatty nonstop. People were everywhere, lots of luggage was going around the conveyer belt and we were chatty chatty chatty. She stopped at one point and grabbed a big suitcase off the belt and then we went on chatting. I occasionally eyed the conveyer belt for what I knew must be a hard-to-miss large something. I was curious. This was an important piece of Third Angle’s program. We flew her in specially to play it. What did it look like?

The crowd got thinner and thinner. The luggage disappeared bit by bit. And we continued to chat.

Dungeons & Dragons miniatures: NOT high culture/Wikimedia CommonsAnd then after a while, I got this eerie feeling. I looked around. Nobody was there and not a single piece of luggage was going around the belt. Where was it?

As I tried to quell this horribly unsettled feeling, I looked everywhere and then looked some more. I finally noticed a corral of luggage in a restricted area in a far corner. I got closer. No weird overlarge bag. I got closer. Nothing but rising panic. I got closer. And finally … it came into view: Behind a mound of luggage one really long green bag sat by itself. Relief washed over me.

When I told a uniformed worker the green bag was ours, she pointed to a green suitcase and said, “You mean that one?”

“No,” I said, pointing, “THAT one.” She took one look at the bag — about one foot by two feet by six feet plus — and waved me around the barrier to get it myself.

The zheng was surprisingly light.

***

On Thursday morning I fired up the van, started to pull out of the driveway and then hit the brakes. I pulled back into the driveway, walked into the house and stood in front of Mr. Scatter. He looked up.

The Large Smelly Boymobile (or reasonable facsimile)“You need the van. It’s D&D day. And by the way, it doesn’t have any gas. Sorry. Gotta go.”

But early in the afternoon in the office it hit me. The van had a bunch of boxes in it that I needed, including one very important sign for the concert that night. Mr. Scatter probably wouldn’t be back from D&D in time for me to get it. And I had left the back seat folded down so that there weren’t enough seats for the Large Smelly D&D Boys.

I made a phone call. How to get the boxes? Mr. Scatter had just filled the van with gas, he had put the back seat up and would drop by the office. Gawd, I love this man.

***

This is not Haiqiong Deng's zheng. It's the one on Wikimedia Commons.“Can you schlep the zheng?” the Not-So-Mysterious Jane said after the concert late Friday night. “It needs to get back to the hotel.”

“Schlep the zheng? Sure.”

I walked to get the van, my heels clicking on the sidewalk. When I opened it and looked around I suddenly remembered I had never replaced the garbage sack and the whole D&D gang had been in the van the day before. The back seat was littered with empty Cheez-It bags and juice cartons. I quickly stuffed it all in the snack bag and stashed it under a console.

It would have to do. It was time to schlep the zheng and one world-class virtuoso.

— Laura Grimes

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Music, Visual Art

China rising: Shen Wei, Tan Dun, Third Angle, Isaac Stern, and the smashing of the Cultural Revolution

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Wanfujing Street, Beijing: 100,000 visitors a day. Nggsc/Wikimedia Commons

For every now, there is a then. China, of course, has many thens, but two are on my mind right now: the then of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, which might have outdone Stalin in its attempt to eradicate culture and replace it with ideology; and the then of the big melt, which began with Mao’s death in 1976 and gave birth to China’s rapid ascent to its current level of world power and influence.

Right now, the art of China seems everywhere. And it’s not just the ancient art of terra cotta soldiers and jade figurines. There’s a sense in the rest of the world that we have entered the Chinese Century, and if Beijing is the new Athens/Rome/London/New York, we’d better figure out what’s going on in the place.

Ji Ji, Hi Panda, 2006/Pole Design. Portland Art Museum's "China Design Now."The Portland Art Museum, in a show assembled by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, heralds the arrival of China Design Now. (“Now” is really then, but a recent then: The show was aimed to coincide with last year’s Beijing Olympics and to capture the wave of commercial and aesthetic design in the world’s most populous country, a wave that inevitably has since washed on.)

In New York, Carnegie Hall is hosting a Chinese cultural festival it calls Ancient Paths, Modern Voices. Chinese composers and musicians have become stars of the international scene, and several are part of the Carnegie’s extended party. Tan Dun conducts his Violin concerto The Love on Monday night at Alice Tully Hall, with soloist Cho-Liang Lin. On Nov. 4 at Carnegie, the St. Louis Symphony performs Bright Sheng‘s Colors of Crimson and Tan Dun’s Water Concerto. This weekend’s headliners are Shen Wei Dance Arts, who will be in Portland Nov. 11 as part of the White Bird season. New York’s 21-day festival concludes Nov. 10 with pianist Lang Lang and the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra.

This “now,” this flowering of Chinese cultural achievement, is an outgrowth of the restrictions of the Cultural Revolution and the intellectual relaxation of control that followed Mao’s death. A few months ago David Barboza recalled in the New York Times violinist Isaac Stern‘s 1979 visit to China, a celebrated journey that resulted in the documentary film From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China.

Beijing's ultramodern "Egg," the National Centre for the Performing Arts. Vera & Jean-Christophe/Wikimedia CommonsI remember that film well — the extreme, almost ecstatic enthusiasm of China’s musicians; Stern’s encouragement and good will; his sense that the older students and musicians he encountered — the ones who’d spent years being “reeducated” in peasant labor and cut off from contact with Western music — seemed technically correct but lacking passion in their playing.

Mao and his functionaries had virtually outlawed anything but traditional Chinese music, forcing musicians (and all sorts of other people) into what amounted to slave labor. Times were tough, and Barboza’s story in the Times quotes one older musician saying that the psychological brutalization during the Cultural Revolution was so harsh that 17 instructors at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music committed suicide.

So it was fascinating, at Friday night’s audience talkback following Third Angle New Music Ensemble‘s superb concert China Music Now at the art museum, to hear composer Ye Xiaogang‘s reply to a question about what effect the Cultural Revolution had had on him and other musicians who went through it. Continue reading China rising: Shen Wei, Tan Dun, Third Angle, Isaac Stern, and the smashing of the Cultural Revolution →

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

The Beggar’s Opera: Satire for Stumptown

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UPDATE: Also read David Stabler’s feature on Stephen Marc Beaudoin’s adaptation of “The Beggar’s Opera” in Tuesday’s Oregonian. David digs a little more deeply into the social politics of the adaptation. See his story here on Oregon Live, or with bigger versions of Brian Lee’s rehearsal photos in The O’s dead-tree edition.

William Hogarth, scene from The Beggar's Opera, 1728. Tate Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

ABOVE: William Hogarth, “The Beggar’s Opera,” 1728. Tate Gallery/Wikimedia Commons. INSET BELOW: Scot Crandal (Mack) and Emily Zahniser (Lucy) in Opera Theater Oregon’s “The Beggar’s Opera.” Photo: Katie Taylor, Opera Theater Oregon

“What think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?”

Jonathan Swift, casting about for a fresh entertainment for the London stage, made this modest proposal to his friend and fellow satirist Alexander Pope in 1716.

A dozen years later (people took their time in the 18th century) their friend John Gay picked up the idea, turning it from a pastoral into a satire on Italian opera and creating the succes de scandale of 1728, The Beggar’s Opera.

Thieves and whores there were aplenty, plus a clutch of unfortunate impregnations, a few double-crosses, a near-hanging, and a sardonically happy ending. The satire had targets a mile wide, perhaps the broadest being the notable Whig politician Robert Walpole, and the entertainment managed to stay just this side of the censors and the libel courts. It was witty enough in its savagery that many of its targets seemed to take it all as good sport, laughing with the rest of the audience as they were being lampooned.

Scot Crandal (Mack) and Emily Zahniser (Lucy). Opera Theater Oregon "The Beggar's Opera," coming in October 2009. Photo credit: Katie Taylor, Opera Theater OregonSwift and Pope seem good midwives, or perhaps godfathers, for The Beggar’s Opera, which echoes the incisive mockery and shocking entertainment value of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. In addition, Gay’s opera had songs — 69 familiar tunes given new lyrics that sometimes, to the delight of London crowds, seemed scooped fresh from the gutter.

And it was topical. The allusions flew as fast and thick as anything on The Daily Show, and often with a lot more bite.

Which is where Stephen Marc Beaudoin comes in.

Beaudoin, a young singer and writer who hit town from Boston a few years ago with a degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and a ton of ambition, promptly stirred up a storm with a string of sometimes scathing performance reviews in Willamette Week, Just Out and The Mercury. To some he was the devil. To others he was the voice of truth.

Either way, he hasn’t played it safe. He also performs in Portland frequently, giving his critics plenty of chances to take their own shots. (He performs well enough that those shots generally misfire.) And starting Thursday, the audaciously hellzapoppin Opera Theater Oregon presents his new, freewheeling version of The Beggar’s Opera, which he has adapted and directed, and which has a new score by Michael Herrman of the band Buoy LaRue. It opens at the Someday Lounge in Old Town and later transfers to The Woods, an old funeral parlor turned music hall in Sellwood.

Continue reading The Beggar’s Opera: Satire for Stumptown →

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, 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.

**********************************************

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, 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.