Tag Archives: Oregon Arts Watch

Bob Hicks, General, Music, Theater

Links: From Bard to Beethoven

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David Finckel of the Emerson String Quartet at Chamber Music Northwest. Photo: Jim Leisy
David Finckel of the Emerson String Quartet at CMNW. Photo: Jim Leisy

By Bob Hicks

A couple of recent pieces, both at Oregon ArtsWatch.

– Here a Bard, there a Bard, everywhere a Bard Bard takes a look at Portland’s summer of Shakespeare, including Original Practice Shakespeare‘s energetic Much Adoe About Nothing (that’s original practice spelling) and Portland Shakespeare Project‘s world premier of C.J. Whitcomb’s Lear’s Follies.

Quick quote: “Amid all of this action it’s tough to shake the idea that Shakespeare’s becoming almost more source material than sacred text. Like Greek mythology for visual artists and playwrights, or like the Great American Songbook for jazz innovators, Shakespeare’s plays are serving more and more as springboards for reimaginings – stories so well-known, at least in certain circles, that they become raw material for new creations.”

– Chamber Music NW: Relax, it’s only a masterpiece looks at the effects of formality and informality in serious music, what “contemporary” means in the face of great works from the past, and whether it’s OK to wear jeans to hear Beethoven.

Quick quote: “It didn’t matter that the Emerson can seem aloof, or that Shifrin can be charming, or whether the performers and audience were wearing white tails and top hats or Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps. In the presence of greatness, only the greatness matters.”

 

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Generation Nexus: How CAN we fund the skills our future leaders will need?

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By Trisha Pancio Mead

Self-confidence. Poise. Complex pattern recognition. Spatial relationships. Symmetry and paradox. Good design. Leadership. Collaborative, deadline-driven, results-oriented cooperative achievement. Proportion. Scale. Balance. Discipline. Persuasiveness. Empathy. And yes, innovation.

Are these values and skill sets that we want instilled in the next generation? The generation, let’s remember, that will ultimately be responsible for running the organizations, government entities and private businesses that are the backbone of Portland’s economy?

Science meets art: Woman teaching Euclidean geometry in 14th century painting. 1309 - 1316, France;The British LibraryOr, let’s get even more pragmatic here: What percentage of our future workforce would we like to see have a high school diploma? And is it worth $35 a year to ensure that, not only do more of Portland’s students graduate, they also graduate with self-confidence, discipline, empathy and the capacity for innovation?

Because, in its simplest terms, the funding mechanism proposed by the Creative Advocacy Network is designed to do exactly that: restore arts and music instruction and increase access to arts related experiences throughout Portland. On Saturday The Oregonian’s editorial board dismissed the proposal, arguing that art and music “are low priorities.” Oregon Arts Watch founder and editor Barry Johnson quickly filed this rebuttal, and Niel DePonte –  Oregon Symphony percussionist, music director of Oregon Ballet Theatre, Grammy nominee, founder/president of Metro Arts, Inc. – followed with this rebuttal printed in The Oregonian’s opinion section.

Why, in spite of The Oregonian’s objections, is this initiative crucial?

Continue reading Generation Nexus: How CAN we fund the skills our future leaders will need? →

Bob Hicks, Theater

Links: Solo shows and Arthur Kopit’s sin

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Portland’s 33rd annual Drammy theater awards are tonight at the Crystal Ballroom, and to get you into the mood I’ve posted a couple of recent theater pieces on Oregon Arts Watch.

akopitThe most recent is How Arthur Kopit led me to wrack and ruin, a headline that grievously overstates the distinguished playwright’s culpability. An excerpt:

And then I signed up for a speech class, which was being offered through the theater department instead of the English department, and I met a girl who was, as she declared a little breathlessly, an actress, and as one thing led to another I found myself hanging out with the cast and crew of the show she was working on: yes, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. And the people were frankly kind of nuts but also smart and a lot of fun.

The other is A crowd of singular sensations, a look at Portland’s sudden scramble of one-person shows, including The Centering and How Small a Thought. An excerpt:

For people who believe, as I do, that the heart of theater beats in the spaces between the performers, solo shows present a conundrum: with only one performer, where’s the vital mystery in the middle? A good solo show – and both The Centering and Hull’s piece are good ones – neatly bypasses the problem by taking the magic space directly to the audience, which becomes the “other” performer in the play. It’s really not much different from a soliloquy in a Shakespeare play, in which the character isolates himself from the “reality” of the stage and takes his case directly to the audience.

Photo: Arthur Kopit, dangerous man.

Bob Hicks, Dance

Link: Dancing down the mountain

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By Bob Hicks

A long time ago Portland dancer and choreographer Jim McGinn worked deep inside the mine shafts running into the mountain near Leadville, Colorado. It was hard and dangerous work, claustrophobic and stultifying. He never forgot.

jamb-photo-3-top-to-bottom-chase-hamilton-dana-detweiler-credit-lauriel-schumanSo he made a dance about it. His contemporary troupe TopShakeDance has been performing it at Conduit, and has two shows left: Friday and Saturday, May 24-25, 8 o’clock each night. I saw the show on Thursday night and posted this story, Jambin’ underground: TopShakeDance digs deep, on Oregon ArtsWatch.

An excerpt:

I spent the evening, for the most part, simply feeling the interplay between performers and sound, concentrating on the essential musicality of dance, which often comes with stories attached but at its deepest level doesn’t really need them, because, like music, dance is essentially unexplainable. Only afterwards did I read the program notes and discover the story that inspired McGinn. In a way that was a good way to go, because it gave me two experiences: the first, essentially emotional and existential; the second, reflective and intellectual. Put ’em together and you get a sense of how the human animal works.

Chase Hamilton and Dana Detweiler in “Jamb.” Photo: Lauriel Schuman

Bob Hicks, opera, Theater

Link: A theatrical theory on theories

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By Bob Hicks

Today I posted Theater: Hard Times for big theories on Oregon ArtsWatch _ a little theorizing on the failure of theories, as expressed by Voltaire in Candide (as adapted in the Leonard Bernstein musical at Portland Opera) and Charles Dickens in Hard Times (as adapted by playwright Stephen Jeffreys and performed at CoHo Theatre).

Camille Cettina in "Hard Times." Photo: Gary NormanThe grand theorizers tried by their creators and found wanting are the libertine Dr. Pangloss in Candide and the earnest schoolmaster Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times. You might find their viewpoints familiar.

A couple of excerpts:

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“You can’t walk around the art world, let alone the culture at large, without bumping into a theory or twelve. Essential to science, where they’re part of a continuing process of discovery, they tend to harden into dogma in the cultural, political and religious realms. In art circles people sometimes forget that theories work best when they explain what’s happening in art, not when they try to drive how it’s being made. And when applied rigorously to something as unpredictable and emotional as human beings, theories can create havoc. Ask B.F. Skinner’s kids. Ask Dickens and Voltaire.”

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“Gradgrind may be something of a fool, but he’s no Pangloss, adopting a handy theory as an excuse for libertinism. Gradgrind’s public-spirited and wants to be generous: he just gets it wrong. He begins with the Utilitarian tenet that society’s main goal is “the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest amount of people,“ a not unreasonable response to the industrial revolution that created a few big winners and a multitude of losers (sound familiar?) as it wrenched Europe away from its agrarian roots, and extends it to a belief that reason, and reason alone, will improve the average person’s lot.”

Inset: Camille Cettina in “Hard Times.” Photo: Gary Norman.

Bob Hicks, Dance, Film, General

Link: movies and dance, BFF

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Jonathan Krebs (top) and Jamey Hampton. Photo courtesy BodyVox.

By Bob Hicks

The other day I posted this essay, BodyVox cuts to the Hollywood chase, on Oregon ArtsWatch. It’s about BodyVox dance’s cannily amusing ode to the movies, The Cutting Room, which continues through May 19. In the piece, I dive into the pool where film, dance and music swim around in existential, essentially nonverbal waters, and I try not to sink. An excerpt:

What The Cutting Room achieves is to distill the essence of movie storytelling without weighting it down with any actual story. And it has fun doing it. Its a situational comedy, a comedy of mood and ritual trappings. “Stella!” a voice cries; or, “I’ll have what she’s having”; or “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen”; and we all know what the scene is and where, in Hollywood dreamland, we are. It’s as comfortable and comforting as reciting The Lord’s Prayer.

Photo courtesy BodyVox: Jonathan Krebs (top) and Jamey Hampton.

Bob Hicks, Cities, General, Theater

Link: Peter Pan town, all grown up?

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By Bob Hicks

Portland, a city at last? It’s just possible that Peter Pan is growing up.

storm_505t25xscLast weekend I saw three plays – the premiere of The Storm in the Barn at Oregon Children’s Theatre; Next to Normal at Artists Rep; and The Bridge, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, at Cerimon House. The experience led to this post, What if we woke up and found we’re a city?, on Oregon Arts Watch.

In the post, I discover myself wandering amid “an unruly flowering of culture, often in surprising places.” An excerpt:

“It’s easy to poke fun at it, Portlandia-style. And in the not-so-grand Portland tradition it’s still being done on a broken shoestring. To be clear: Portland isn’t New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, despite a lot of hopeful hype. For one thing, those cities actually put their money where their mouths are. Plus, they’re simply bigger, and size does make a difference. Yet there’s little denying: In spite of ourselves, we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution. And the seeds are blowing all over the place.

“Simple fact: It’s impossible for any one person to keep up with all the theater happening in town. Can’t be done. That alone suggests the end of township and the beginning of city status: Cities are places that are too big to be known. In a real city, no matter how well you know it, you’re always also a stranger. And that can be exciting.”

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Photo by Owen Carey: Jack Clevenger in “The Storm in the Barn”

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Holy Ghosts: the serpent made ’em do it

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ghosts2-470x210Gary Norman

By Bob Hicks

Today I posted an essay, Serpents, true believers and ‘Holy Ghosts’, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Romulus Linney‘s remarkable 1970 old-time religion drama, which is still fresh and vivid in light of the rise of the fundamentalist right, and worth seeing not just because it’s rousingly good entertainment but also because it’s the farthest thing from a predictable diatribe: it’s funny and sympathetic and engaging, and then every now and again it reminds you that some pretty strange stuff’s going down. Beth Harper’s production for Portland Actors Conservatory is a … well, a revelation.

An excerpt:

“Music is at the soul of the revivalist spirit that haunts Holy Ghosts, and poisonous snakes, the successful handling of which signifies faith and glory to the true believers of the theatrical congregation, are in its grip. Linney’s play is Southern Gothic, and from a rationalist perspective its characters are as nutty as a Truman Capote fruitcake – who are these people, and why are they doing this insane stuff? – but they also follow a rigorous logic of the heart. The craziest thing about the play is how it gets inside fanaticism and allows you to understand and even sympathize with it, or at least with the people who turn to it for solace. …

“Blue state urban bubble-dwellers really ought to see this play, and not to poke fun at the red-state rubes, although the drama has some very funny scenes, but to get inside some pretty interesting skin and begin to understand the culture wars from a different perspective. Among these fervidly holy men and women ‘value politics’ isn’t a matter of partisan tactics but of everyday life. And don’t think you’ll always know what the values are …”

Bob Hicks, Dance, General

Link: Goteborg dances into PDX

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By Bob Hicks

Last night I went to White Bird‘s opening-night performance by Goteborg Ballet (the Swedish contemporary company performs again tonight and Saturday night in the Newmark Theatre) and discovered a sort of sister-city alternate universe.

"OreloB," by Kenneth KvarnstromThree dances, all contemporary and very European, all very different from what you see at Oregon Ballet Theatre but also intriguingly complementary, and reminiscent of OBT’s old James Canfield days. I wrote about it in this essay, Sister dance cities? Goteborg meets Portland, on Oregon Arts Watch. An excerpt:

“At the core of OreloB is Jukka Rintamaki’s electronic score, based on the sinuous repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero but scratching them up so they sound ragged and removing the overly familiar undulations while retaining the hypnotic effect. Helena Horstedt’s costumes, with little shoulder-and-back ruffles that seemed like sea-creature gills, lent the piece a slightly sinister science-fiction feel (the designs reminded me a little of the stuff the late lamented Portland theater artist Ric Young used to do). And the dancing was vigorous and unstoppable, inventive and relentless. The energy doesn’t let up: when the dancers walk, they walk with purpose. It’s rhythmic, sexy, trancelike – maybe something like Ravel’s music was when it was fresh, before it became commonplace.”

Photo: “OreloB,” by Kenneth Kvarnstrom

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Link: Gay marriage & surfboard Bard

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By Bob Hicks

What do nine short plays about gay marriage and a Gilligan’s Island take on Much Ado About Nothing have in common? What do either or both have to say about that old bugaboo, elitism and the arts?

Melissa Whitney and Peter Schuyler, on the beach in "Much Ado." Photo: Jon GottshallIn my essay Gay Marriage, beach-blanket Bard: elitism for the masses over at Oregon Arts Watch, I try to sew it all together in a discussion about Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays at Artists Rep and the beach-blanket Much Ado at Northwest Classical Theatre Company.

On Standing on Ceremony:

“Whatever happened to the old-fashioned curtain-raiser, the theatrical equivalent of the pre-show cartoon and newsreel at old Saturday movie matinees? How about 10 minutes of Labute’s Strange Fruit, just to play imaginary producer for a moment, paired with a production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage?”

On Much Ado About Nothing:

“The other thing I love about Much Ado is the way that Beatrice and Benedick spin a new reality out of their passion for language. By talking, by creating their stories on the fly, they travel from isolation to consummation. It’s the perfect evocation of the power of language, of art, to transform lives. Beatrice and Benedick don’t fall in love. They talk themselves into it.”

Plus, as they say, much much more if you click the link to the full story. Don’t delay!

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Melissa Whitney and Peter Schuyler, on the beach in “Much Ado.” Photo: Jon Gottshall