Tag Archives: Oregon Arts Watch

Bits & pieces: Glass, Le Guin, and Austin

Richard Troxell as Older Galileo. ©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver.

By Bob Hicks

Breaking the Glass ceiling. Again.

This just in from Portland Opera: the Philip Glass connection strikes again. You probably already knew the opera company will open its production of Glass’s 2002 chamber opera Galileo Galilei on Friday night in the Newmark Theatre. And you probably recall that Portland Opera’s recording of Glass’s Orphee – the company’s first-ever commercial recording – made Opera News’s 10-best-of-the-year list in 2010.

Well, recording no. 2 will be this production of Galileo Galilei. And as with Orphee, it’ll be the first CD of the opera. It’ll come out, once again, on Orange Mountain Music, which specializes in recording Glass’s work, and the conductor will again be Anne Manson. Release is expected late this year. The libretto, by the way, is by the excellent playwright Mary Zimmerman (Metamorphoses and her new play The White Snake, the hit so far of the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival season).

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The book is dead. Long live the book.

Seems like everybody’s talking about the death of the book these days, and it’s true, the publishing industry is going through cataclysmic changes. But if the primary purpose of books is to feed the act of reading, maybe we’re being a little premature. Ursula K. Le Guin, Portland’s belle dame of letters, has been thinking it through and came up with some provocative conclusions on her blog post The Death of the Book. Here’s a brief taste tickler. Read the full post for much, much more:

“Is reading obsolete, is the reader dead?

“Dear reader: How are you doing? I am fairly obsolete, but by no means, at the moment, dead.

“Dear reader: Are you reading at this moment? I am, because I’m writing this, and it’s very hard to write without reading, as you know if you ever tried it in the dark.

“Dear reader: What are you reading on? I’m writing and reading on my computer, as I imagine you are. (At least, I hope you’re reading what I’m writing, and aren’t writing ‘What Tosh!’ in the margin. Though I’ve always wanted to write ‘What Tosh!’ in a margin ever since I read it years ago in the margin of a library book. It was such a good description of the book.)”

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Linda Austin and the space time continuum

In case you missed it, I posted this essay, Stop making sense: Linda Austin’s ‘A Head of Time’, yesterday on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about the Portland choreographer/dancer’s remarkable new group piece, which played over the weekend at Imago Theatre. Here’s a teaser:

“Chances are the narratives she puts on stage don’t make a lot of sense, at least in the old-fashioned linear way. … What you get in an Austin dance is a dream-story: fleeting images tied together by little, perhaps, but an empathetic feeling and the coincidence of being clustered together. Maybe it’s Freudian. Or maybe it’s only a cigar.”

Make sure to check Martha Ullman West’s comment at the end of the post. It adds some important information.

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PHOTO: Richard Troxell as Older Galileo. ©Portland Opera/Cory Weaver.

Link: Feves’ clay motion at craft museum

feves-sixfigures

By Bob Hicks

Betty Feves (1918-1985) was a pioneering American ceramic artist who lived most of her working life in the Oregon desert town of Pendleton but gained a national reputation as a thorough modernist in a tradition-bound medium, and not coincidentally shattered a few glass ceilings as she went about her work. Portland’s Museum of Contemporary Craft has just opened a fascinating retrospective of her work, Generations: Betty Feves, and I covered it for Oregon Arts Watch. The result is this story, Betty Feves: down and dirty with the clay.

An excerpt:

“In Feves’ case, (art and craft) seem inseparable. Her more mature work, the stuff where you see more of her and less of her influences, is pared down and elemental, more purely suggestive than representational of anything specific or immediate. But you also see, very clearly, the landscape in which she lived her life: the geologic curvatures and textures, the size and brawn, the brown-based desert colors that shift suddenly and sometimes burst into flame. Things crack and sag and curl, and sometimes their glazed surfaces look like wood or stone. But usually lurking somewhere is the spine of the land. Its impact is inescapable, as in the paintings of the late Oregon abstract artist Carl Morris and the works of Pendleton artist James Lavadour, whose celebrated international career got a kick-start from Feves’ prodding and encouragement.”

Illustration: “Six Figures,” date unknown. Raku on wooden base. Collection of Feves Family. Photo: Dan Kvitka

All new, all the time at NW Dance Project

By Bob Hicks

Ching Ching Wong and Patrick Kilbane in Patrick Delcroix's "Chameleon." Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.For Portland’s scrappy Northwest Dance Project, putting on a program of three world premieres is just another day at the office. It’s how they roll. I went to the company’s Spring Premieres a few nights ago and posted this piece, Spring awakening: NDP’s torrent of new dance, at Oregon Arts Watch. An excerpt:

“In its Spring Premieres program on Friday and Saturday nights in the Newmark Theatre, NDP rolled out three new dances – Wen Wei Wang‘s Conjugations, Sarah Slipper‘s Airys, and Patrick Delcroix‘s Chameleon. And unlike the weather, which was whipping every which way but loose, these three new dances seemed to be blowing from a similar place. An angsty sort of place; a place that made me think more than once of cartoonist Jules Feiffer’s earnest modern interpretive dancer.”

Ching Ching Wong and Patrick Kilbane in Patrick Delcroix’s “Chameleon.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert.

Link: OCT does the Locomotion

Tyler Andrew Jones and Andrea White in "Locomotion" at OTC. Photo: Owen Carey.

By Bob Hicks

Today I posted this essay, Doing the Locomotion with kids’ theater, at Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Oregon Children’s Theatre‘s terrific production of Locomotion, Jacqueline Woodson‘s stage adaptation of her National Book Award-finalist children’s book, which is something of a tree-grows-in-Brooklyn tale. In Bedford-Stuyvesant, to be exact, where a kid nicknamed Locomotion learns to deal with some tough stuff through the power of poetry. An excerpt:

… I like to drop in every now and again on a show for kids. No audience experiences the give-and-take between stage and seats more directly or honestly. If an audience of kids tunes out, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have a bad show: It might just not be right for kids. But if you’re an actor or director it’s a good idea to pay attention to where the kids zone out, because maybe you’ve got a problem on your hands. And if the kids are with you, they’re gonna let you know. Loudly.

Above: Tyler Andrew Jones and Andrea White in “Locomotion” at OTC. Photo: Owen Carey.

Link: Dancing the weekend away

By Bob Hicks

Mr. Scatter spent a good share of his weekend with the sons and daughters of Terpsichore, watching and thinking as they sliced through space.

Bob Eisen in performance.The performances he took in were 4 Men Only at Conduit and Troika Ranch’s Enter Comma Prepare at Reed College’s Kaul Auditorium. He then posted his thoughts on Oregon Arts Watch, in an essay titled Dance weekend: 4 men and a chancy machine.

An excerpt about Bob Eisen’s For Lulu, part of 4 Men Only:

His distinctive appearance helps him pull the thing off. Eisen is long and whooping-crane lean, with a prodigious wingspan, and he wears his 65 years with an easy economy of motion and head-banging intensity of effect. Dressed in pajama tops and multi-pleated harem pants, he looks like Ichabod Crane in a white shock of Art Garfunkel hair.

An excerpt about Enter Comma Prepare:

Finally audience and performers alike moved into the larger auditorium, where chairs were clustered cleverly in several small islands so the dancers could flow around them like electrons coursing through a mother board. And so they did, to a drone of computer-generated instructions intoned over loudspeakers in a metallic voice like Hal 9000’s in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Jonathan. Southwest,” it would say, or “Nancy. North,” and off the performer would go. At one point I had a fleeting image of Cary Grant ducking into a cornfield while a homicidal pilot chased after him from above, shouting “North by northwest!”

Photo: Bob Eisen, one of “4 Men Only.”

Link: a little theater, cradle to grave

By Bob Hicks

Luisa Sermol and Ted Schulz in "Boleros." Photo: Russell YoungI’ve posted Teen to twilight: a theater weekend for the ages at Oregon Arts Watch. It recounts my adventures at the theater over the weekend, when I caught the Jason Robert Brown teen musical 13 at Staged! Musical Theatre, the theater-games comedy Circle Mirror Transformation at Artists Rep, and Jose Rivera’s memory-play Boleros for the Disenchanted at Miracle Theatre.

Somehow, the matter of age kept popping up: eventually it’ll be the death of us. Sound cheerful? Surprisingly, it sort of was. An excerpt:

“13” may be a stock teen comedy, but it’s also very much about growing up: after all, a bar mitzvah marks a boy’s passage into manhood. Jose Rivera’s “Boleros for the Disenchanted,” at Miracle Theatre, picks up chronologically a little after “13″ ends and breaks the age barriers right down the spine. It hurtles its characters directly into the romance and perils of youth and then pushes them on to the regrets and consolations of old age, leaving all of the muddled middle areas implied. The kid in “13” might think his life’s over. For old Flora and Eusebio in “Boleros,” it almost is.

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Luisa Sermol and Ted Schulz in “Boleros.” Photo: Russell Young

Hal Holbrook meets the Twain again

By Bob Hicks

Hal Holbrook‘s back in town on Saturday, riding the horse of his magnificent one-man show Mark Twain Tonight!, and even as Holbrook noses up on 87 years old it’s bound to be a helluva show.

Mark Twain receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford University. Wikimedia CommonsA couple of weeks ago I chatted on the phone for about an hour with him (Holbrook, not Twain, although it’s sometimes hard to tell them apart), and today two resulting stories have seen the light of print.

This one – As Twain, Holbrook’s made his mark – is in Friday’s A&E section of The Oregonian, and is partly about Holbrook’s deepening attachment to Twain’s more politically acerbic side.

This one – Hal Holbrook on jackasses and Mark Twain’s wound – is on the online culture journal Oregon Arts Watch and ranges a little more broadly, dropping in on John Updike and Lewis Leary and the enduring controversies over The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Holbrook’s been at this game in one form or another since the late 1940s, and he’s really quite amazing at it. Just for fun I looked up a review of Mark Twain Tonight! that I wrote for The Oregonian in 1991. Here are excerpts:

Where does Hal Holbrook leave off and Mark Twain begin? After 36 years of Holbrook’s solo show Mark Twain Tonight! it gets harder and harder to tell. But one thing’s sure: No humorist alive who’s working in the American language is more deeply and dryly funny.

On Friday night, 2,700 people packed Portland’s Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall as tight as a sardine can. Holbrook (or was it Twain?) provided the salt.

Holbrook’s one-night stand was accompanied by the usual appurtenances: a lectern, a library table, a padded armchair, a pitcher of water, a clutter of books. He strode blithely through the usual fog of cigar smoke, wearing the usual Kentucky-colonel creamy white suit. And as usual, he lit a firecracker string of laughter under his audience.

“Civiliiizzay-shun,” Holbrook exclaims at one point, turning the word into an impossible contortion that is part wonderment, part delight and part sneer.

It was part of Twain’s genius as an entertainer that he could make the most cynically corrosive observations about human nature and phrase them in such a way that his readers and listeners would both recognize and delight in them. To a young country both innocent and destructive, prudish and bursting with desire, he became an avuncular and smilingly savage bearer of self-knowledge.

Sin and salvation — the twin excesses of America — are the twin pillars of Twain’s comedy.

“When I was a young man wavering between the pulpit and the penitentiary …” he might begin. Or again: “That old Presbyterian religion laid on me like an anvil sometimes …”

Holbrook … played Twain’s favorite themes lightly. Stiff-shouldered and shuffle-stepped, with that roiling rasp that is a cadenced, musically scraping sound, he reminisced about young Sam Clemens’ wandering days in Nevada and California and the Sandwich Islands.

His apparent rambling – always with a point somewhere around the bend and always delivered with devastating timing – covered the life-saving pleasures of habits (bad ones), the fate of young missionaries who are et by apologetic cannibals, the reason that Irishmen don’t fall on dogs and the impossibilities of the political beast.

“Teddy Roosevelt, the great hunter,” he says. Pause. “and conservationist.”

“Shot a bear!” Holbrook shakes his head in bafflement. “When he could have stayed home and shot a senator!”

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Photo: Mark Twain receiving an honorary doctorate degree from Oxford University. Wikimedia Commons

Link: Shackleton’s amazing voyage

Launch of the lifeboat James Caird from the shore of Elephant Island, April 24, 1916. Published in Shackleton's book, "South," William Heinemann, London 1919. Photo is probably by Frank Hurley, the expedition's photographer. Wikimedia Commons

By Bob Hicks

I’ve just put up this post at Oregon Arts Watch about two extraordinary feats of endurance: Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton‘s star-crossed quest in 1914-17 to trek 1,800 miles across the Antarctic continent, and Lawrence Howard’s captivating three-hour solo telling of the tale at Portland Story Theater. Give it a read, and the next time you think of grumbling about a little Portland rain, think of Shackleton and his men. Still a few tickets available, I’m told, for Howard’s Friday-night performance Jan. 27.

Photo: Lifeboat James Caird launches from Elephant Island, April 24, 1916. Probably by expedition photographer Frank Hurley. Wikimedia Commons

Link: Shooting stars on Portland stages

Jack Street, Vin Shamby and Chris Murray in "I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi." Photo: Owen Carey

By Bob Hicks

Over at Oregon Arts Watch I’ve posted Ready, aim, fire: on Portland stages, a shot in the dark. It’s an account of my weekend adventures viewing the premieres of Joseph Fisher’s (I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi at Artists Rep and Jason Wells’s The North Plan at Portland Center Stage, plus Allison Moore’s Collapse at Third Rail Rep. Guns were blazin’. Regimes were toppled. A sex addict helped save the day. I even managed to introduce the Victorian poet and critic John Addington Symonds into the mix. Well, why not?

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Jake Street, Vin Shambry and Chris Murray in “(I Am Still) the Duchess of Malfi.” Photo: Owen Carey

Link: On mad hatters and picture books

By Bob Hicks

melodyowen_alice3In Down the rabbit hole: Melody Owen makes a book, which is new on Oregon Arts Watch, I tell the tale of … well, of Melody Owen making a book. Actually, it’s more about the publication party for the Portland artist’s new book, Looking Glass Book, at Publication Studio, in a tuckaway corner downtown. The book consists of collages inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books, and the whole thing makes for an interesting tale.

Also well worth checking out at Oregon Arts Watch is ‘My Flashlight Was Attacked by Bats’: Farewell to poet Marty Christensen, in which Leanne Grabel, Doug Spangle and Mark Sargent offer heartfelt, eloquent and only mildly profane tributes to the late poet, who died January 5. Farewell to another cantankerous player from the old and gritty Portland.