Portland music writer Brett Campbell was kind enough to develop a lengthy response in the comment section of our last (or latest) Halprin post, and we decided to give it a post of its own, accompanied by a photograph taken by his wife, CaroleZoom.

Very sneaky, Barry, trying to embarrass me into writing up an essay on City Dance by calling me out publicly. Well, it ain’t gonna work! As a full time non blockhead freelancer, I make it a point never to write except for money. Except this. Sadly, I couldn’t interest my primary national market in a story about City Dance (or another Portland phenomenon I consider equally newsworthy, Linda Johnson’s amazing South Waterfront Artists in Residence program), so I guess I won’t be writing that City Dance piece after all. But I do consider it an important and perhaps historic event in the city’s art history. The comment I overheard over and over was “I’ve lived in Portland xx years, and I’ve never been to Lovejoy Fountain / Pettygrove Park / Keller Fountain.” So in that respect, the event accomplished what Ron and Third Angle wanted: drawing Portlanders to these wonderful yet neglected public spaces. (Confession: I’ve lived a few blocks from Lovejoy Fountain for more than two years and had never been there.)

But I think it went beyond just re-energizing these spaces. Randy Gragg’s associated events (talks and lectures) used art to connect people to their city’s history. The proximity and connection to Sojourn Theater’s Built, Linda Wysong’s Backyard Conversations and the AIR project forged fascinating connections between Portland urban renewal of the 1960s and Portland urban renewal of the 2000s. I wasn’t able to attend the panel discussions, dammit — I asked Randy to consider posting a podcast or audio file — but certainly plenty of people learned a lot about the connections between architecture, dance and music as embodied in the Halprins’ relationship. Portlanders were also exposed to a vital element of our West Coast heritage: the pioneering music that emerged from the Bay Area in the 1960s. I bet plenty of listeners — 40 years ago and maybe even now — would have considered the music played at the fountains to be intolerably avant garde, but performed in that context (and brilliantly by Third Angle), it all seemed to fit. In particular, seeing Susan Smith wade into the fountain and strike the repeated chords to to Terry Riley’s landmark work In C (a piece as important to this century’s music, in its way, as the Rite of Spring or West End Blues or the Sun Sessions) while the dancers emerged and high school students played this once avant garde work and thousands looked on just brought tears to my eyes. (It still does, just remembering it, a sure sign of great art.)

It felt like such a perfect climax of beautiful movement and adventurous music and a magical environment, and followed by the ideal denouement at the Source Fountain, which could have been a massive anticlimax (for practical reasons, the program worked “upstream” from the Keller)… well, it just made me very, very proud of my city and its artists.

I’m going to resist your call for help with the music; it either works for you or it doesn’t. For me, the music of Riley and Steve Reich and the other American minimalists is very meaningful both personally and culturally and I’ve found that it transcends genre boundaries. I also like Oliveros and to a lesser extent Subotnick, but the composers were chosen less for musical than historical reasons (they were essentially the house composers for Anna Halprin’s studio), and I thought Third Angle made astute choices for what music was played where. All of the music (and much of the dance, too) had that quality of accessible strangeness to it that made me feel like I was temporarily in another world, a world I really wanted to explore. So in that sense, it all worked for me.

I’m no dance critic, but all the dances struck me as superbly appropriate to their venues and to the music, and exuded a feeling of generosity and welcoming, rather than the snooty, condescending attitude you get from some avant gardistes. I attribute a lot of this to the engaging personality of the artists involved — Linda Johnson, Third Angle, the other choreographers (whose work I’ve seen often) all have that good humored yet serious commitment to art and audiences, and it showed. I also credit Randy Gragg’s longstanding commitment to the city and its urban spaces. He obviously poured enormous effort into making this a much bigger deal than just another pretty art event. I admit I’m sort of in love with Portland as a community and particularly its modest yet developing urban spaces, and it was really gratifying to see the city and its artists showcased so beautifully.

I’d like to say it’s a very Portland thing, except that so much Portland art is plagued by the undeserved arrogance that often accompanies mediocrity, and neither quality tarnished this amazing performance.

Sometimes it feels like we progressive arts lovers and artists are laboring in an irrelevant little corner of a much bigger world that doesn’t know or care much about what we love so much. For me, City Dance took this wonderfully moving music and dance and architecture and brought it out of the shadows and into the big world. I saw thousands of people who would otherwise never have heard Terry Riley or Pauline Oliveros or seen Sydney Wilkes’s and Linda Austin’s work, or even experienced the serene beauty of Halprin’s urban spaces, all of them smiling, most of them genuinely moved or at least happily diverted for a couple of hours, and maybe some of them learned something about their city’s history and its present and future, particularly these terrific artists who’ve created so much beauty here for so many years. Reaching beyond the concert halls and dance studios and ivory towers to engage the city as a community — that’s what ambitious art at its best should do, and I think City Dance succeeded.

Too bad I won’t get to write about it.