Tag Archives: Christopher Stowell

Sweet civility in the new ballet season (if nowhere else)

Art Scatter’s chief dance and decorum correspondent, Martha Ullman West, takes a look at Oregon Ballet Theatre’s upcoming season and discovers hope for artistic manners in the midst of a meltdown of civil rudeness.

Yuka Iino and Ronnie Underwood, center, in 2007 OBT performance of "The Sleeping Beauty" Act III. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

The ballet just might be the last bastion of civility in what used to be a civil society.

Consider the evidence:

  • A certain Supreme Court Justice, in attendance at Wednesday night’s State of the Union address, mouthing a contradiction of the President on camera.
  • So-called Tea Party activists shouting loudly enough to shatter a bone china cup.
  • Drivers, discourteously at best, cutting in ahead of other drivers in traffic.
  • Bicyclists — righteously, oh, how righteously — taunting drivers in the same way.

All of this occurred to me last night as I was watching Yuka Iino, a principal dancer at Oregon Ballet Theatre, balancing her way through the Rose Adagio from The Sleeping Beauty. The scene of this very tasty preview of the company’s first full-length production of the Tchaikovsky classic was OBT’s studio on the east side of the Willamette River in Portland. The occasion, complete with nibbles and name tags, was the ballet company’s announcement for press and supporters of its 2010-11 season. The Sleeping Beauty will open the season on October 9, accompanied by — oh, joy! — the live orchestra that has been mostly missing since the company’s financial disaster last spring.

Artur Sultanov and Daniela DeLoe in a 2009 OBT performance of Nicolo Fonte's "Left Unsaid." Photo: Blaine Truitt CovertThe Rose Adagio, for those who have never seen Beauty, takes place at Princess Aurora’s birthday ball in the ballet’s first act, when she dances, briefly, with four suitors, portrayed Thursday night by Lucas Threefoot, Brian Simcoe, Christian Squires and Brennan Boyer, who were dressed in ordinary practice clothes, as was Iino.

She, however, was so thoroughly steeped in the character of the young girl going through this aristocratic rite of passage — infusing her performance with the same shy charm and radiant smile that Margot Fonteyn had in 1949 — that she transported me to a place where decorum counted and manners mattered.

And of course the plot of this ballet is driven by an act of discourtesy by Aurora’s father’s Major Domo, who fails to invite one of the fairies, Carabosse, to the celebration. Carabosse then crashes the party and gives Aurora a spindle to play with, which punctures her finger so that she dies. Only it’s a fairy tale, and the Lilac Fairy mitigates this rudeness by having everyone fall asleep for 100 years instead. Y’all know the rest, I’m sure.

The rest of OBT’s 2010-11 season is more reflective of today’s society, with Trey McIntyre’s Speak, to rap music, on one program. Stowell’s and Anne Mueller’s Rite of Spring will be reprised on an all-Stravinsky program that also includes collaborative works by Ashley Roland and Jamey Hampton of BodyVox, Mueller, and Rumpus Room’s Rachel Tess. There’s decorum on that program too, with a revival of Yuri Possokhov’s staging of Firebird.

Stowell’s programming also includes an alternative to The Nutcracker in the form of a holiday revue that will run concurrently with it at the Keller Auditorium. And the season closer reprises Nicolo Fonte’s terrific Left Unsaid and Stowell’s own Eyes on You (like the Rose Adagio, it’s all about balance) — works that are fun, or thoughtful, or serious, that take us out of the present or into the future, or remind us of our better selves.

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Photos, both by Blaine Truitt Covert:

Top: Yuka Iino and Ronnie Underwood, center, in OBT’s 2007 performance of Act 3 from “The Sleeping Beauty.”

Inset: Artur Sultanov and Daniela DeLoe in a 2009 OBT performance of Nicolo Fonte’s “Left Unsaid.”

An ‘Emerald’ out of the rough: second thoughts on OBT

Balanchine's Emeralds at OBT. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Once again Art Scatter is pleased to have the considerations of dance critic Martha Ullman West appear in our august corner of virtual space. Martha, who also reviews ballet for The Oregonian, is working on a biography of dancer and choreographer Todd Bolender. Plus, she’s a charter member of Friends of Art Scatter and the League of Tough-Guy Arts Observers. Her thoughts after seeing the first two performances of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s Emerald Retrospective:

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The critic was wrong, and she admits it. After filing my review of Saturday night’s opening performance for The Oregonian, I went to the Sunday matinee performance of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s Terpsichorean relay race known as the Emerald Retrospective and was moved to tears by Artur Sultanov’s and Alison Roper’s rendering of the pas de deux from James Kudelka’s Almost Mozart.

I still think it’s gimmicky –the dancers never let go of each other as they wend their way through Kudelka’s sinuous and steely choreography; and the costumes, as a friend said, look like an ad for bodybuilder Charles Atlas. However, these dancers’ commitment to Mozart’s mournful music and the anguish expressed by their bodies made me relive some profound personal losses.

Is that good? Yes. Great performances heal; the Greeks called it catharsis.

One of those losses (to the art form I love, and tend to take personally,) was Dennis Spaight, who died of AIDS in 1993, not yet forty. Once a tribute program had been performed in 1994, his work got buried with him, at least as far as OBT was concerned. I hope the bits from Gloria on this program are a trailer if you will for mounting the whole, and soon.

Or perhaps Frauenlieben leben, or Theatre Dances, or Rhapsody in Blue — or, if the money can be raised for live orchestral accompaniment, Scheherazade, that luscious, lavish deeply moving re-telling of the Arabian Nights story that has sets designed by Henk Pander, elegantly louche costumes designed by the late Ric Young, and lighting designed by Peter West, whose lighting for Gloria was handsomely reproduced by Michael Mazzola.

The Eugene Ballet and Nashville Ballet have performed Scheherazade in recent years. Crayola, parts of Gloria, and Irish Suite have been done by schools around the country. It’s a shame not to have Spaight’s work where some of it was made, and where some of it was polished and changed by the choreographer for specific dancers.

Continue reading An ‘Emerald’ out of the rough: second thoughts on OBT

Lithe Talented Dancers wow Large Smelly Boy

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

Oregon Ballet Theatre: Can this marriage be saved?

UPDATE: Barry Johnson of The Oregonian has posted this new, vigorous counter-argument on his Portland Arts Watch blog to Nigel Jaquiss’s Willamette Week story about OBT’s shaky financial history (link to WW story is below). The gist of Barry’s new take: Bad weather during “The Nutcracker” WAS a major setback; nothing nefarious was going on; the company has radically revamped the way it does business and has a drastically reduced budget for the coming season. So where’s the scandal?

Ballet shoes, in fifth position

Ballet shoes, in fifth position. Photo: Lambtron, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

The internal dissension at Oregon Ballet Theatre just keeps spilling over. Willamette Week broke the story of staff and dancer dissatisfaction with executive director Jon Ulsh, and now WW’s Nigel Jaquiss follows up with this report,which suggests a longstanding financial shambles. The Oregonian’s Barry Johnson followed up on the original story with a couple of good reports in his Portland Arts Watch column. Art Scatter posted its own take a week ago, and that commentary stirred up some impassioned responses in the comments section.

I hate this kind of story. People’s livelihoods and reputations go on the line. But you can’t sweep this sort of thing under the carpet. The newspapers need to keep hitting the stories; the organizations need to respond openly; the rest of us need to sort it all out and decide not just where the truth lies but also what it means.

The ballet world is an especially complex and partisan one that all too often seems to thrive, and sometimes impale itself, on divisiveness. Like classical music it gets caught up in the great-man or great-woman syndrome, for better and for worse. And when trouble hits — as it has in spades at OBT, where 41 of 56 employees signed a letter to the board questioning the executive director’s ability to carry out his job — the result can be a public relations disaster at the least and a crippling, even life-threatening blow at the most.

I don’t envy the ballet’s board, which has the difficult task of sorting the truth from the innuendo and anger, and then following the truth wherever it may lead. But it has to be done.

A couple of points:

The artistic/business alliance

Any arts group, and a nonprofit one especially, has to do a creative dance between artistic ambition and financial reality. The theoretical division is this: The artistic director pushes for the moon, the executive director or general manager says, “Let me grab my ladder and my butterfly net.” In reality, the partnership has to be vastly more collaborative. The general manager has to be committed to the artistic director’s vision, and the artistic director has to be willing, if reluctantly, to work within the financial realities that the general manager and her development staff can realistically provide.

It has to be a mutual give-and-take. What do we want, what do we need, what can we afford? If we can’t afford it now, what steps do we take so we can afford it later?

The general manager who nods and says “I’ll get you the moon” when in fact he lacks a ladder does the group no favors. The artistic director who refuses to believe the ladder doesn’t exist and keeps demanding green cheese also can do severe harm to his organization.

A question to the board: Have artistic director Christopher Stowell and executive director Ulsh been playing in the same ballgame? Have they been in agreement, or at cross-purposes? Have their expectations been unrealistic, or did they truly just have the bad luck to be steamrollered by an economy run amok? Sometimes good leaders make big mistakes. Sometimes they get caught by circumstances out of their control and their enemies shout, “Aha! Told you so!” Sometimes they’re just not up to the task. Parsing the differences, which OBT’s board must do, is perilous and essential.

Stowell is a special kind of artist — the kind of smart, aesthetically astute, nationally connected person a city the size of Portland doesn’t see every day — and the impulse inside the company, I’m sure, is to want to give him everything he needs to push the company as far and as fast forward as he can. He’s done a remarkable job of that. But has the ballet bought a house when it could only afford the down payment? I don’t know. The board needs to figure that out.

Is the partnership irreparable?

If leadership has made mistakes — and that includes the board as well as Stowell and Ulsh — does that necessarily mean it can’t learn and improve? Or is it truly too late in the game? The astonishing vote of no confidence in Ulsh by three-quarters of the staff will make any attempt at reconciliation daunting.

Did the staff and dancers make a mistake in going public with their concerns? Did they realize the letter would be leaked to the press? Did they leak it on purpose, figuring that was the best way to force Ulsh out — and if that’s the case, is it all over but the shouting? This is the sort of genie that’s impossible to put back in the bottle.

Again, I don’t know the answers. I’m not inside the company, and although I hear a lot of things, it’s difficult to gauge what’s accurate and what’s the understandable result of deep frustration.

If part of the problem is the way that Ulsh and Stowell work together, can that working relationship be improved? I don’t mean, do they get along personally? I mean, is each able to understand his own role in the business relationship, and are they able to separate reality from illusion? Is the partnership between equals? Do they trust each other — and themselves — enough to tell each other the truth, and to understand it themselves? Can they talk clear-headedly about limitations?

It’s a tricky balance. You can’t spend yourself into oblivion, but if you accept the status quo, you can shrivel artistically. Still, growth has to be real growth, without artificial stimulants. And if the bucks aren’t being hauled in, why is that?

I won’t presume to tell OBT’s board that it should hire, fire, or retain anyone. (Well, I will say it needs to hold on to Stowell as long as it can, even if that means getting him some training on collaborating with the executive side. This is, after all, his first artistic directorship, and even if you’re a natural at it, which I think he probably is, there are things to learn.) But the board can’t just hope the trouble will go away. It has to deal with it, and it has to act swiftly — but with careful, hard-nosed consideration.

Can this marriage be saved?

Should this marriage be saved?

We’re all waiting nervously to find out.


Oregon Ballet Theatre: Showdown at the No-K Corral

UPDATE: Barry Johnson takes the story further on his Oregonian blog, Portland Arts Watch, with this post on Friday. This appears to be very much a hot issue. Keep watching Portland Arts Watch.

Oregon Ballet Theatre's version of George Balanchine's The Nutcracker

Ever since last spring’s remarkable bailout from its equally remarkable tumble down the financial rabbit hole, Oregon Ballet Theatre has been trying to assure everyone that things are really OK now — and rumors have been rumbling that they most decidedly are not.

Bet on the latter. Willamette Week’s Kelly Clarke reported online Thursday that 41 members of the company — including many of the dancers, highly respected school chief Damara Bennett, ballet master Lisa Kipp and artistic director Christopher Stowell’s executive assistant, Rebecca Roberts — have signed a letter to the board asking for reviews of the leadership of both Stowell and executive director Jon Ulsh. Our good friend Barry Johnson joined in with this report on his Portland Arts Watch blog for The Oregonian. Do read them both to understand the background.

Although Stowell’s name is mentioned, it seems clear that Ulsh is the focus of what amounts to an anguished cry from the ballet’s rank and file — a mutiny, almost, in a business that takes its traditional hierarchy as a matter of fact.

“Either (Ulsh) does not have the skill set” to deal with the multiple challenges of his job, the letter stated, “or he does not have the capacity to handle all of them at once. It seems to me that if he did, we would not be in such deep difficulty after three years under his leadership.” The letter, composed by company historian Linda Besant, continues: “… I do not feel that the organization can afford to be a training ground for its executive director in this very crucial year.”

OBT dancers Gavin Larsen and Artur SultanovHarsh words. And it seems odd that they were written by someone as relatively on the sidelines as the company historian. You could dismiss it as internal grumbling except that so many major players took the extraordinary step of signing it, potentially putting their own jobs on the line.

I want to make it very clear that I haven’t talked with Ulsh, Stowell, or any member of the board about OBT’s administrative troubles since the letter was sent. My thoughts are based on the news reports I’ve read, past observations, and second-hand reports from people close to the scene. I’m hoping to start a conversation here, not end one, and I hope people inside the company will feel free to respond openly.

It seems telling that while the actual artists in the ballet company are underpaid and thus prone to unrest, so are the musicians in the Oregon Symphony — and from what I can tell, most of the symphony musicians, who have accepted stiff pay cuts and reductions in benefits to help cope with the orchestra’s own fiscal troubles, are solidly behind their leaders, music director Carlos Kalmar and and president Elaine Calder.

So what’s the difference?

Hard to say, except it appears that while the symphony musicians have faith in Calder’s efforts to rethink how the orchestra presents itself to the community, a significant and perhaps majority percentage of the ballet dancers and staff have no such faith in Ulsh’s abilities. The letter, in fact, amounted to a vote of no confidence in Ulsh’s ability to carry out his duties.

Is there an element of scapegoating here? I don’t know. Maybe. I do recall that after the ballet’s emergency call last spring to raise $750,000 to keep it from folding (an astonishing outpouring of generosity brought in more than $900,000) one person extremely close to the company told me, “There’s going to be a scapegoat for this, and it’s going to be Jon Ulsh.”

And here we are. I’ve heard other theories, as dark and murky as a Dan Brown book plot, circling: Ulsh has stacked the board with his own supporters, and Stowell will take the fall. I see no evidence of that. I’ve known Ulsh casually for several years, and he seems both an honorable and an earnest man — and as even Besant notes in her letter, a man committed to the company’s success. Stowell has gained deserved recognition nationally for transforming this small company into a rising force in the American ballet world, and if the board doesn’t understand that, it ought to just give up the ghost and disband. Boards aren’t social clubs. They have strict duties, and the first is to understand the nature of the organization they oversee. The nature of this organization is this: Stowell has reshaped it into one of the most exciting small ballet companies in the nation. Period.

So what’s the trouble? M-O-N-E-Y.

No surprise there. Nonprofit organizations across the country, from museums to major universities, are in deep trouble, and sometimes because they got caught up in the go-go Wall Street frenzy themselves, as Stephanie Strom reported in the New York Times today. That’s surely no problem in Portland, where no nonprofit I know of has enough money in reserve to play the market. Arts groups here are in trouble (partly) because of the market, not because they play the market.

OBT spent some months last year without a development director — a crucial position in a company of the ballet’s size. I asked a board member over the summer how the company was approaching fund-raising. It wouldn’t have a development director, he told me: That was one of the positions cut in the ballet’s budget belt-tightening. Then how are you going to raise money? I asked. Ulsh and Stowell will do it themselves, he replied. Most big donors want to talk with the artistic director, anyway: It’s a big part of his job.

True enough. But the artistic-director shmooze is supposed to seal the deal, not start it. He’s the artistic director, after all, and while pragmatics dictate that he or she has a role in bringing in the bucks, other people (including the board) have to do the major hauling.

I noted with both optimism and pessimism that when the ballet raised more than $900,000 in its emergency drive last spring, no single donation was over $25,000. That meant a huge number of people were sending in their $10, $50, $250 checks. It also meant the big-bucks crowd was keeping its pockets buttoned — and no arts group can hope to thrive in the long term without some deep-pocket supporters. Where are OBT’s deep pockets? And if they don’t exist, why not? I don’t know.

This maybe-divorce proceeding is also significant because, in a sense, OBT has seemed reborn since its emergency bailout in the spring. The company seems to have rediscovered that it’s part of a local community, and that that’s a good thing. OBT dancers have been all over town, taking part in events by other companies, dancing and choreographing in fund-raising events for the beleaguered contemporary-dance center Conduit. Stowell’s been everywhere, shaking hands, giving talks, supporting other groups, being part of things. People have begun to feel that the ballet is connected, and they’ve appreciated it. Why risk that good will? Apparently, because so many members of the company feel it’s necessary.

On a personal level, I want to be very clear here. The rise of OBT to its current level of performance has been one of the most encouraging and thoroughly pleasing arts stories that I’ve covered in the past 15 years. I would be devastated if this gutsy, talented, polished, personality-laden company lost the momentum it’s worked so hard to achieve.

In July I was talking on other matters with Paul Nicholson, executive director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which has seen a steep decline in its own endowment but has maintained its institutional stability. The subject of OBT’s recent bailout came up.

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” Nicholson told me. “And it would be a shame if Oregon Ballet Theatre did not take this and use it as a springboard to build those stronger relationships with those donors. If they just said, ‘Thank you very much,’ and that was the end of it. … Think of the incredible data base they’ve now compiled. There’s not much more signal that those donors can send to the theater that they care.”

A whole lot of people care, deeply. Can we now please try to solve this thing?

BodyVox: Home again, home again, jiggity jig

BodyVox's Water Bodies, which helped inaugurate the new dance center and is going on the road. Photo: J. Dunham Carter, Polara Studios

BodyVox’s “Water Bodies,” which helped inaugurate the new dance center (minus the sand!) and is going on the road. Photo: J. Dunham Carter, Polara Studios

The downside of BodyVox’s ambitious move into its own new BodyVox Dance Center in Northwest Portland?

Jamey Hampton, co-artistic director with his wife, Ashley Roland, of the Portland-based touring dance and movement ensemble, paused to consider the question.

“We were closer to cold beer before,” he finally allowed.

The new BodyVox dance center from the mezzanine. Photo: Bob HicksSurely a heavy price to pay — and the pizza was good, too. For several years BodyVox kept house in sunny but cramped quarters on the top floor of the BridgePort Brewpub,  several blocks away from the company’s new digs at Northwest 17th Avenue and Northrup Street.

But as charming as the proximity was, it’s tough to think of many other drawbacks to the move, which gives BodyVox a much bigger and more sophisticated space that also has the potential to be a vital community resource. As general manager Una Loughran put it, “We want this space to be used.”

One evening late last week BodyVox threw a little open house-slash-open rehearsal to show off the new space, and everyone was pretty much in a celebratory mood. Beer (BridgePort, of course) and wine were flying out of the lobby. Bodies were flying just as rapidly around the new stage, which is 60 feet wide as opposed to 40 in the old space, a huge difference in terms of choreographic possibility.

The rehearsal was mostly for Water Bodies, which the company is taking on tour to Philadelphia and New York state in mid-October (the home season, which will be performed entirely in the new space, opens Nov. 12), and with a crowd on hand it was loose. Christopher Stowell, artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, stood at the side of the stage with a microphone to talk about what was going on in the dances, and when Hampton and Roland weren’t out on the stage performing, they joined in on the chat, too.

I talked briefly with veteran dancer Eric Skinner, one of BodyVox’s artistic anchors. He and the company were getting ready for a quick trip to Minnesota for a performance tomorrow night (Sept. 24) at College of St. Benedict and St. John’s University near St. Cloud. I congratulated him on the company’s wisdom in scheduling a trip to the upper Midwest in September instead of January.

Eric grinned. “Coldest winter I ever spent was the year I danced with Milwaukee Ballet,” he said.

By the time everything’s finished BodyVox’s main performing space will hold 160 seats, up from 90 in the old space. “It really transforms the financial picture for us,” Loughran said.

A front studio with big inviting garage-door windows onto the street was in use during the reception and already is attracting dancers for lots of classes. “That’s nice, too. Gets us back to that revenue flow,” said Loughran, whose job it is to worry about such things.

Continue reading BodyVox: Home again, home again, jiggity jig

Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take

Like so many great art forms, dance is a series of interlinked relationships and memories, a tradition that continually redefines and reinvents itself. It lives in the past, and the present, and the future, and its story is written in the memories and associations of open-hearted observers as well as the muscles of dancers and the patterns in choreographers’ minds.

Dance writer Martha Ullman West, one of our best observers, took in last Friday’s Dance United, and for her it was like biting into a madeleine: The reminiscences and connections just began to flow. Somehow, no matter how far-flung, they all looped back to Oregon Ballet Theatre, its history and successes, and this extraordinary event to keep the company alive and vital.

Here is the link to Martha’s review in The Oregonian of the performance. And here, below, is her more personal report on what it all meant:

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Daniel Ulbright, New York City Ballet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTReally, it was a cross between a potlatch and an Obama rally, a gathering of the clans.

Dancers came from Texas, Utah, Massachusetts, Canada, Washington state, California, Chicago, Idaho, and that other geographical location, in New York called Downtown, here designated as Portland’s modern and contemporary dance community.

The gifts they brought were generous: their talent and their time. And they were welcomed to Keller Auditorium with the same enthusiasm as Obama’s supporters do and did, reaching into their wallets with many relatively small donations to keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive. On Tuesday, OBT had in hand $720,000 of the $750,000 it needs to make up THIS season’s deficit.

I’ve been watching dance in Portland and elsewhere for more decades that I wish to reveal, and professionally since 1979, when I wrote an essay on postmodern dance in New York for Dance Magazine. In so many ways, this gala triggered some Proustian moments, also making me think of all the ways that dance and dancers are connected to each other.

Linda Austin’s thoroughly postmodern “anybody-can-dance, any-movement-on-stage-is-valid” Boris & Natasha Dancers (on catnip) took me back to New York’s SoHo and a performance created by Karole Armitage consisting of a group of dancers on their hands and knees, painting stripes on the floor, in humorless silence. They were not skilled at either painting or dancing, but it was the same democratic approach to the art form as Austin’s new dance, which featured such pillars of the Portland community as two Bragdons (Peter and David), Scott Bricker, James Harrison and Peter Ames Carlin galumphing across the stage, one of them wearing red sneakers that I wondered if he’d borrowed from White Bird’s Paul King. (Armitage, you may remember, also made work on OBT’s dancers on James Canfield’s watch.)

Sarah Van Patten Damian Smith, SFBallet. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTThe Joffrey Ballet’s Aaron Rogers, performing Val Caniparoli’s Aria, recalled for me the profound pleasure of watching Val work with Portland dancers, first at OBT’s precursor Ballet Oregon, and then at OBT. Caniparoli’s kindness and courtesy in the studio turned out to be extremely productive when the company performed his Street Songs and other work. Rogers looked like he was enjoying himself, flirting with that mask, and certainly seduced the audience in the process.

And I thought about Mark Goldweber, ballet master at OBT under Canfield, then for some years at the Joffrey, and now at Ballet West. (He gave the only authentic performance in Robert Altman’s dance film The Company, in my view.) I wondered what Mark thinks about the way Adam Sklute, now Ballet West’s artistic director, staged this version of the White Swan pas de deux.

When I encountered this ballet’s real-life Prince Siegfried, Christopher Ruud, at OBT’s studios earlier in the week, I spoke with him about his father, who had helped Todd Bolender at Kansas City Ballet (Bolender is the subject of a book I’m working on). Ruud told me he had staged one of his father’s pieces on the company several years ago.

Continue reading Martha Ullman West on Dance United: a personal take

Missing the ballet: Looks like it was a barn burner

danceunited_finalbows

I’ve been out of town but eagerly scanning for news on Dance United, Friday night’s gala benefit to help Oregon Ballet Theatre dig out of its financial hole. According to these front-line reports from Culture Jock at Culture Shock and Barry Johnson at Portland Arts Watch, it was boffo — an absolute night to remember.

And, they report, it was announced at the gala that OBT’s emergency fund drive had hit $690,000 of its $750,000 goal, which makes it highly likely that it will have hit the goal and, if all goes well, more by its June 30 deadline. That’s excellent news — and everyone needs to understand that this is just the beginning, the even-ing of the keel so the tough, unending work can begin of raising enough money on a consistent basis to provide the economic stability and means for growth that this excellent artistic organization needs and deserves. There’ll be lots more news out of OBT in the months to come.

I know that dance writer Martha Ullman West, a charter Friend of Art Scatter, will have extensive coverage of the Dance United gala in Monday’s editions of The Oregonian. Look for it then in print and online at Oregon Live.

In the meantime, Friday night was spectacular, as Blaine Truitt Covert’s photo above, from the grand finale curtain call (that’s OBT artistic director Christopher Stowell in the center with the dancers) attests. Those are some happy faces!

Congratulations to all. Thanks to all the big-time companies from across North America that sent dancers to perform. And many happier days to come.

OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts

Fund drive as of Wednesday, June 10THE LATEST NEWS FROM OREGON BALLET THEATRE, which is struggling with a life-threatening deficit that has it feverishly trying to raise $750,000 by June 30 to keep from going out of business: The campaign hit the $524,000 mark by Wednesday. That morning OBT’s Erik Jones said 900 tickets were still available for Friday night’s gala benefit performance Dance United, which will bring star performers from across North America to raise money for OBT. Buy your tickets here — this could be the event on the season!

At Portland Arts Watch, meanwhile, Barry Johnson reports on the challenges OBT faces AFTER June 30.

And prominent national dance critic Martha Ullman West, who plies part of her trade (the pro bono part) here at Art Scatter, has some things to say below about last weekend’s season-ending program and how it revealed the necessity of keeping this company alive. She even took time to give her Scatter editor a scolding for something he posted on the subject: When you’re pro bono, you get to do that!

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When I wrote on Monday in The Oregonian that the way Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s dancers performed The Concert last weekend clearly and painfully demonstrate how much we have to lose if the company folds, I didn’t mean the same assessment couldn’t be applied to the rest of what was a very difficult program.

Artur Sultanov in The Concert. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERTOBT’s season-finale program was designed to accomplish several goals, one of which was to challenge the dancers. And there is no getting around the fact that the work those dancers had performed most often — Rush, Afternoon of a Faun and The Concert — was polished to the accomplished shine you see only in major companies: New York City Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Houston Ballet and the like. These are troupes with far bigger budgets, many more dancers and far more opportunities to perform than OBT.

What Christopher Stowell, as artistic director, and Damara Bennett, as OBT School director, have accomplished in Portland in six years is truly remarkable. And it’s known throughout the country, which is why, when OBT announced its life-threatening financial emergency last month, so many artistic directors answered his call for help in the affirmative.

This company is extremely well-schooled. That was abundantly clear in Rush and in the second performance of The Cage on Saturday afternoon, as it was in the spring performances of William Forsythe’s The Vertiginous Thrill of Exactitude, which OBT’s dancers will perform in Friday’s benefit gala. I was startled when I returned from Kansas City last spring, having seen Kansas City Ballet the night before, by the contrast. KCB celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, but it’s OBT that has a true company style.

That’s an achievement for which Stowell, Bennett and ballet mistress Lisa Kipp can take credit. Most of these dancers had quite different training. Sure, there’s a cadre that has been to the School of American Ballet that includes Gavin Larsen, Adrian Fry, Lucas Threefoot (summer program), Christian Squires and Javier Ubell. But a number were trained in OBT’s school, at PNB or SFB. And the excellent Ronnie Underwood trained in Tulsa, so is part of the Ballets Russes strand of American ballet style. Artur Sultanov’s schooling was Russian, at the Vaganova Academy, and Chauncey Parsons, who joined as a soloist last fall, trained at the Kirov Academy in Washington, D.C. Parsons will show us some bravura Kirov style dancing at the gala. Yuka Iino — hardly second string, Mr. Hicks, as the Novice in The Cage at the matinee (nor was Grace Shibley in Faun) — trained in her native Japan, as did Ansa Deguchi.

Continue reading OBT’s ‘Rush + Robbins’: Some further thoughts

An emergency plea: Save Oregon Ballet Theatre!

Mia Leimkuhler in Hush by James  Kudelkae. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.The bad doo-doo has just hit the fan. Art Scatter’s Barry Johnson, on his alternate-universe blog Portland Arts Watch, has just reported that Oregon Ballet Theatre has its back against the wall. It needs $750,000, and it needs it fast — by June 30 — or it could fold up shop and simply disappear.

Make no mistake: That would be a catastrophe. No doubt the sneerers will be out in full force, snickering about how the marketplace has spoken and it just doesn’t care about twinkle-toed terpsichores trouncing around in tutus. I’m sorry, but Just. Shut. Up. Even if ballet leaves you cold, if you care about Portland and believe it has both the right and responsibility to be a full-fledged city, this is important stuff.

The fact is, we are in the middle of an economic disaster — I just learned this afternoon of yet another friend who’s lost her job — and it is taking down both people and organizations with no respect for their talents or worth. “The marketplace” has failed the nation. Right now, it’s a lousy measuring stick for anything.

Why is it essential that Portlanders keep Oregon Ballet Theatre alive? For a lot of reasons, one of which is that this is the city’s most gifted performing ensemble — or at least right up at the top, along with the Oregon Symphony, Portland Baroque Orchestra and Third Angle New Music Ensemble — and a beacon, in every show, for the heights that any group, artistic or not, should strive to achieve. It is our target, our model, our proclamation that we can stand shoulder to shoulder with the best.

Under artistic director Christopher Stowell OBT has achieved a solid historical grounding, a mastery of technique and an exciting artistic personality. The best part is, it’s still growing, and promises to achieve much more if only given the chance. No financial crisis should put a stop to that.

It’s simply unthinkable that dancers with such zest and style as Alison Roper, Artur Sultanov, Anne Mueller, Gavin Larsen, Yuka Iino, Kathi Martuza and Ronnie Underwood should suddenly find themselves out on the street, unemployed and unappreciated. All of them, and their fellow dancers, have created something special, and it is Portland’s duty to help them when they need help the most.

As Barry points out, the ballet world has taken notice. People in the know, know that this is a company on the rise, and a company of increasing national importance. So on June 12 — shortly after OBT’s season-ending program of works by Jerome Robbins and Christopher Wheeldon — dancers from the New York City Ballet, Boston Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, the Trey McIntyre Project and elsewhere will be in town for a giant gala benefit performance that promises to be a true bell-ringer. Buy tickets to Robbins and Wheeldon. Buy tickets to the gala.

And if you’re able, write a check. OBT is too important to fail.