Tag Archives: Martha Ullman West

Pardon the interruption, s’il vous plait

Confessionals, Church Gesu Nuovo, Naples. Photo: Heinz-Josef Lücking/Wikimedia Commons.

By Bob Hicks

Bless us, Father, for we have sinned. It’s been six days since we entered our last post here at Art Scatter, which is just … embarrassant. Pardon, if you please. It’s not that we haven’t been busy. In fact, that’s the point. We’ve been so busy we haven’t had time to keep the faith and commit good bloggery. We’ll try to do better.

pandercatalogSo let’s play catch-up.

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On Friday, having survived the Great February Blizzard of 2011, which dropped all of a third of an inch of snow on the Chez Scatter front lawn but managed to snarl the city and shut down its schools, Mr. Scatter took a tour down the valley to the Hallie Ford Museum of Art in Salem to catch Memory and Modern Life, an expansive retrospective of the oils, watercolors and drawings of Henk Pander, the Dutch-born Portland artist.

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Updates: Maryhill and ‘Black Swan’

By Bob Hicks

The Plaza by GBD Architects. Watercolor rendering by C.S. Holmes.Maryhill Museum of Art officially breaks ground at 3:30 p.m. next Friday, Feb. 18, on its $10 million expansion project, which will give the Columbia Gorge landmark some much-needed elbow room. Between an expansive plaza and expanded indoor spaces, the project will add 25,500 square feet.  The museum will be open during construction: Maryhill’s 2011 season opens March 15. Read the update here on Art Daily. And read our original reporting here and here.

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Meanwhile, Scatterers who remember chief correspondent Martha Ullman West’s take on the Oscar-nominated movie Black Swan — “In several places I got the giggles,” she wrote here about the ballet-bloodbath melodrama — might also be interested in Alastair MacAulay’s take here on the same movie, in which the New York Times dance critic considers Black Swan in Bette Davis terms. “Let’s also admit there have always been striking parallels between the ballet classics of the 19th century and the Hollywood women’s movies of the mid-20th century,” he writes. Let’s.

Thoroughly modern Rachel Clara Marie

Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, shares some modern and classical moments with dancer/choreographer Rachel Tess and rediscovers that the distance between old and new is often whisker-thin.

Dancer Rachel Tess. Photo: Christa Mariottini

By Martha Ullman West

I took thoroughly modern choreographer Rachel Tess to the opening matinee of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker with me on opening day last Saturday, the day after seeing her compelling tour de force of a solo show, Once a Fool…

Dressed in bright blue cotton trousers, running shoes, and a couple of layers of sweaters and tops, backed by an installation of glass canning jars, Tess in a half hour of a capella movement took us in Once a Fool through a soliloquy of rage and regret, gaiety and bemusement, sometimes using jagged angular movement, other times movement as rhythmic and insouciant as an old-time hoofer.

nutcracker_1Whatever and wherever Tess is performing, whether it is in her friend Paige Prendergast’s Breeze Block Gallery last Thursday and Friday, or at Disjecta during a heat wave the summer before last, she has the presence and confidence of modern/contemporary dancers and choreographers who are far more experienced than she.

Or are they? Tess is a Portland girl, who as a child danced Clara in James Canfield’s first Nutcracker for what was then Pacific Ballet Theatre. She danced other roles in his second version for Oregon Ballet Theatre (in which Clara becomes Marie, as she is in Balanchine’s version, and in Canfield’s later, beautiful take, in which she’s performed by a small-sized company member, such as Vanessa Thiessen).

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Keep on truckin’, Scatter: grinding gears with OBT, Polaris, Sophie and Do Jump!

By Bob Hicks

Shocking as it may seem, sometimes the denizens of Art Scatter World Headquarters don’t give it away for free.

Performers: Andrea Lawhead, Brittany Walsh, Nicolo Kehrwald, Wendy Cohen, Tia Zapp, and Molly Courtney in Do Jump!'s "Greatest Hits for the Holidays." Photo by Jim Lykins“If I can’t sell it gonna keep sittin’ on it, never gonna give it away,” the hard-bitten narrator of the bawdy blues tune Keep on Truckin’ declares. Her hardcore-capitalist sentiment is definitely not the motto at Art Scatter, where we tend to write what we write just because it sends little shivers up and down our spines. Still, we have an abiding fondness for those stalwarts of the heritage media who help us keep the spring in our mattress by paying cash on the barrel head for written contributions. O admirable concept! Here are a few recent pieces wherein we’ve made the noble trade of play for pay. We thank the editors of The Oregonian for assigning these exercises in fundamental free trade, and the publisher for his largesse:

  • A third of a century in, the prestidigious performance troupe Do Jump! just keeps getting better. Mr. Scatter reviews the company’s lighter-than-air holiday show. Catch it if you can.
  • Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent and maker of one mean seafood stew, reviews the old reliable Nutcracker and the new kid on the Oregon Ballet Theatre block, a witty grown-up revue with the dancers and singer Susannah Mars. As those TV guys say, thumbs up.
  • Mr. Scatter takes in Repo, the latest show from Polaris Dance Theatre, and reviews it.
  • More than a quarter-century after she first hit the stage in Soph, trouper Wendy Westerwelle once again embodies the amazing Sophie Tucker, last of the red-hot mamas — this time in a leaner, more intimate show. Mr. Scatter compares and reviews.

Grab a seat and come along for the ride. We’ll be truckin’ ’til the break of day.

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Andrea Lawhead, Brittany Walsh, Nicolo Kehrwald, Wendy Cohen, Tia Zapp, and Molly Courtney in Do Jump!’s “Greatest Hits for the Holidays.” Photo: Jim Lykins.

‘Farewell Wake’: small world, big bang

By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter had so much fun doing his cameo for Charles Deemer’s new micro-movie The Farewell Wake that by the time he actually saw the movie he was surprised by how complex the whole thing was.

Rick Zimmer stars as a performance artist/provocateur in Charles Deemer's micro-movie "The Last Wake."He shouldn’t have been, of course. After all, Deemer knows this stuff. He teaches screenwriting at Portland State University, and is a terrific playwright, and a pioneer in the expanded-universe form of hyperdrama, and he’d already done another ultra-low-budget film, Deconstructing Sally, which we wrote about a little over a year ago here.

Still, when you’re having fun you forget about such things. And not a lot could have been easier than Mr. Scatter’s day on location, which consisted of meeting Deemer at a downtown coffee shop, sitting outside, doing two quick improvised takes for what turned out to be about a minute’s screen time in a 96-minute film, and then shooting the breeze for a few minutes until we both trundled off in our  separate directions. Plus, Deemer himself was the cameraman, and his camera, such as it was, wasn’t much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. Not much danger of stage fright under those circumstances.

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Here there be faeries: fantastic, isn’t it?

Lucas Threefoot as the Bluebird in Oregon Ballet Theatre's "The Sleeping Beauty." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By Bob Hicks

“People must love fairy tales,” the fellow said, and then he laughed, in something that sounded like happy, faintly embarrassed resignation. “Me, too, I guess,” his laughter seemed to say.

The man and his companion were standing behind Mr. Scatter’s shoulders, in a Keller Auditorium crowded with people on their feet, most clapping loudly and a few even whistling and stomping and shouting out, during Saturday night’s curtain call for the final performance of Oregon Ballet Theatre‘s The Sleeping Beauty. Next to Mr. Scatter, the Small Large Smelly Boy, who is rapidly developing into an enthusiastic and discriminating follower of the ballet, had also risen to his feet, although as always he declined to clap: that would be too demonstrative.

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Scatter and yon: life in the old stories yet

Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell'sd "The Sleeping Beauty" at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By Bob Hicks

Scatterers have been sowing their wild oats elsewhere lately, and old topics are coming up new again. A quick update:

Meanwhile, some old friends are knocking on the door again.

  • Susan Banyas‘s fascinating memory play The Hillsboro Story, about a little-known but extremely telling small-town skirmish in the 1950s vanguard of the war for civil rights, returns for a two-week run at Artists Rep beginning Wednesday. The play has been getting lots of attention since we first wrote about it in January of this year, when it debuted in Portland’s Fertile Ground new-works festival, and it looks to have a long life ahead of it — as well it should — in school tours.
  • VOX, Eric Hull’s fascinating “spoken-word chorus” of poetry rearranged as a sort of spoken music, with the language conceived as if it were written as four-part sheet music, returns to Waterbrook Studio for shows October 15-24. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter plan to be there one of those nights. This version is called Achilles’ Alibi, and includes works by, among others, William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, William Stafford, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michele Glazer, and Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen. We wrote about a night with the VOXites back in April, in the post Poetry off the page, or, the fat lady sings.

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Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell’s “The Sleeping Beauty” at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

So much dance we can’t keep up

It’s not just rock around the clock in Puddletown: It’s dance around the calendar. Autumn, winter, spring and even summer, you just can’t keep this town’s dancing feet down. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West has done her best to keep up with the action, and reports here on some of what’s been kickin’ in town lately.

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By Martha Ullman West

Portland is having a dance boom, even though those who swim in Terpsichore’s wake are having a hell of a time staying afloat.

Danielle Vermette, Darren McCarthy in "Backs Like That." Photo: Sumi WuUsed to be things were winding down by the time you reached the summer solstice, and there definitely was a time when addicts like me found it impossible to get any kind of movement fix once the Rose Festival was over. Not this year — I actually had to make choices, not having managed the art of being in two or three places at once. So to several emerging choreographers as well as some much more established ones, I apologize for not making it to their performances and herewith offer some thoughts on those I did see.

I’ll start with Carol Triffle’s new musical Backs Like That, which I saw on June 18th. It’s the latest in her series of quirky commentaries on what Balzac called the human comedy, with more than a little irony implied, and as usual with an Imago piece, it is greatly involved with movement.

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Delores Pander, 1938-2010

Henk Pander, portrait of Delores Rooney, December 2009. 54" x 64", oil on linen. Courtesy of the artist.

Graceful, intelligent and hard-working, Delores Pander generally stayed behind the scenes of Portland’s arts world, where she had a habit of making sure the scenes were working precisely the way they ought to. Born on Aug. 16, 1938, she died of cancer on Thursday, June 24, 2010. For many years she was the wife and partner of the Dutch-born Portland painter Henk Pander, one of our best and most important artists, whose work has fused the long tradition of Dutch art with the frontier edge of the Pacific Northwest and a keen outsider’s feeling for the American psyche. Art Scatter senior correspondent Martha Ullman West, a longtime friend of Delores, offers this personal tribute.

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By Martha Ullman West

Delores Pander died early Thursday morning after a long, hard, painful battle with cancer. Her accomplishments were many, her passion for knowledge profound, the reach of her love and loyalty and friendship broad and deep.

Henk Pander’s extraordinary portrait above of his beautiful wife, made in December of last year, says it all: she is surrounded by images representing the things that were most important to her — a ceramic made by her granddaughter Mary-Alice; the house she shared with Henk and Mary-Alice and several dogs for a number of years; a pile of books; and in her hand a book by Ursula Le Guin, another artist whom she helped with the practical details of work. Her favorite color was the deep, dark red that saturates the painting, and the lighter red shoes she’s wearing are emblematic of her love of pretty clothes.

Delores was years away from becoming an artist’s wife when I first met her in the fall of 1973 at David Nero and Associates, where I was an incompetent technical writer and she was the highly competent secretary for an educational research project to study Follow Through, a shortlived offshoot of Head Start. With her dark hair and sparkling eyes, her clear intelligence, her love of laughter, and the incredible speed, organization and efficiency with which she ran the office and kept our motley crew in line, she reminded me at once of my mother, who put all those attributes, including the dark-haired beauty, to work in the caring and feeding of my artist father.

Delores’s refusal to put up with any guff from those of us who were above her in the pecking order also reminded me of my mother. I’m ashamed to say I was a bit uppity with her at some point, and for Christmas she gave me an engagement calendar inscribed “to the writer from the typer-writer.”

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Belly-dancing on the Nile: Our far-flung correspondent hobnobs and returns

Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, has been trotting the globe. She’s endured an evening of wretched belly-dancing on the Nile, chatted with a centenarian ballet dancer in Philadelphia, revisited the works of Jerome Robbins in New York, and returned home to Portland, where she found irritation with Random Dance and happiness with Oregon Ballet Theatre. Here’s her report:

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Here are some scattered (no pun intended) thoughts about what I’ve been seeing in the world of performance, mostly dance, since I departed on February 1st for a glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art tour of Egypt with a postlude in Jordan, followed by 10 days in New York, where I ploughed through many clipping files in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center.

These endeavors were interrupted by snow and a day trip to Philadelphia to interview Yvonne Patterson. She is a former dancer in Balanchine’s first companies, now a whisker away from turning 100, still swimming every day and teaching the occasional master class in ballet, no kidding. There was also a fair amount of hobnobbing with my New York colleagues, during which the state of dance and dance writing was discussed with a certain amount of hand-wringing on both counts.

The River NileThe worst performance shall come first: an unspeakably godawful belly dance demonstration on board the Nile River boat on which I spent four otherwise glorious nights.

I’ve seen better at various restaurants in Portland, although the effects of her lackluster undulations, which bored even the men in the audience, were somewhat mitigated by the sufi dancer who followed, a very young man who was completely committed to spinning himself into a trance, and therefore pretty compelling.

In New York, I was taken to see a play called Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, oh so cleverly written by Douglas Carter Beane, at Second Stage Theatre, starring the suave John Lithgow as a gossip columnist running out of copy and Jennifer Ehle as his equally ambitious and rather more unethical wife. They invent a celebrity to write about, and despite such wonderful lines as “I swear on a stack of Susan Sontag‘s Against Interpretation” and the cast’s finely tuned delivery of the lines, the ethics practiced by the real-life press these days made it all rather less than funny for someone who still thinks journalism is an honorable profession, or at the very least that it should be.
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