Tag Archives: Portland Theatre Works

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Theater

Friends of Scatter show their chops

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By Bob Hicks

The thing about so many Scatterers is that they don’t just observe, they also participate. Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would be so pleased.

Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham's Cave of the Heart. Photo: John DeaneTonight we head to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company trods a Portland stage for the first time since 2004. One way to think about modernism: The Great Graham was born in 1894, which would make this modernist avatar 116 years old if she were still alive and kicking, and very much of an antique. How do you keep modernism modern when it’s got so old?

One way is to keep the dancers themselves fresh and vigorous. Another, presumably, is to build on the legacy, and that’s where Friend of Scatter Josie Moseley comes in. We’ll be holding down the “observer” part of the bargain. Josie will handle the participating. Moseley, the Portland choreographer whose credits include work directly or indirectly with Jose Limon, Alwin Nikolais, Anna Sokolow and Mark Morris (among others), set a new solo on the Graham company’s Samuel Pott this fall, and it’ll be premiered tonight. Her piece is one of three new dances commissioned as responses to Graham’s seminal 1930 solo Lamentation. (The other two are by Larry Keigwin and Bulereyaung Pagarlave.) Moseley’s variation, Inherit, is set to music by jazz saxophonist and composer Joshua Redman.

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Wednesday night it’s to Northeast Portland’s Blackbird Wine Shop & Atomic Cheese to see Scatter friend Charles Deemer‘s debut screening of his latest online movie, The Farewell Wake. Deemer’s made two versions of the film — a shorter, more tightly edited director’s cut and a longer version, which includes some scenes and performers who’ll end up on the short version’s cutting room floor. The Blackbird screening is the long version, and it’s a special showing for all the people who took part.

That includes Mr. Scatter, in a very brief cameo as a guy named Art Scatter, and Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West in a meatier supporting role. Will Mr. Scatter survive the final cut? He’s on pings and noodles. Martha, he knows, is a survivor. Here’s what we wrote about Deemer’s last video film, Deconstructing Sally. (And here’s what we wrote about his Oregon-classic play Christmas at the Juniper Tavern.)

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Sidney Paget (1860-1908): "Sherlock Holmes," 1904. Wikimedia CommonsFinally, Scatter regular George Taylor has taken a break from his sauerkraut fermentation duties to spin out yet another play, and this one sounds like a corker. It combines England’s favorite miser and its favorite violin-sawing, cocaine-snorting gumshoe into a comic mystery called The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

You can see a free reading of it on Monday evening, November 29, at Theater! Theatre! under the auspices of the invaluable Portland Theatre Works (read what we had to say about them here). Among the promising-looking cast are Tobias Anderson, Dave Bodin and Maureen Porter.

What’s it about? PTW’s Andrew Golla passes this along:

It’s Christmas Eve 1882. A miserly businessman named Scrooge calls at 221B Baker Street with a problem. A series of ghost-filled dreams has made him terrified to go to sleep. He fears the last dream, which is to take place this night, may signal his last night on earth. Surely the “world’s greatest detective” can discover what, or who, is behind the dreams. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson have to use a controversial form of investigation to solve The Strange Case of the Miser at Christmas.

Your participation is humbly invited.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

  • Heidi Stoeckley Nogoy in Martha Graham’s “Cave of the Heart.” Photo: John Deane
  • Sidney Paget (1860-1908): “Sherlock Holmes,” 1904. Wikimedia Commons
Bob Hicks, Cities, Environment, General, Theater, Visual Art

Monday scatter: Rose Quarter blues, theatrical greens, soft-pallette Gauguin, fighting red ink

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thomas_paineOur partner-in-Scattering Barry Johnson (who does not look like the portrait here of Tom Paine, rabble-rousing author of the political tract Common Sense) advocates a little citywide common sense in the continuing flap over Portland’s Rose Quarter and Mayor Sam Adams’ push to tear down Memorial Coliseum to make room for a minor-league baseball park and a suburban-style “entertainment district” of aggressively anonymous chain outfits on the order of a Hard Rock Cafe.

Barry writes in his alternate-universe column in this morning’s Oregonian that we all need to think more clearly about common sense the way the thinkers of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment thought of it, as “an idea based on the best available evidence and therefore potentially persuasive to anyone.”

Barry’s pretty clear about the slapdash quality of the thinking on this rush-rush move. His summation of how we got into this municipal pickle has the blunt ring of truth:

The initial push to demolish Memorial Coliseum came from Mayor Sam Adams, who wanted 1) to make sure Portland got its Major League Soccer team, 2) which he could only do by building a new baseball stadium, 3) which would help him and the Blazers build their entertainment district if it landed in the Rose Quarter, 4) which, in turn, would serve his new convention hotel. Oh, and 5) he’d have to knock down Memorial Coliseum to do it.

Brian Libby, on his site Portland Architecture, also continues to hit hard and tellingly on why Adams’ plan is a bad idea (I’d argue that after Point 1 above none of it makes sense), and Libby’s helped rally the city’s architectural community to the cause. Keep checking him out, because he keeps adding new twists to the story.

I can only add, picking up on Barry’s theme of “common sense,” that we also think of the meaning of the commons — those areas that we hold in public trust, for the greater good of all of us. The division between what’s public and what’s private has long since been blurred: These days, big  projects increasingly come in the form of what’s called “public/private partnerships.” That’s why city and state governments pay hundreds of millions of dollars for big-league baseball and football stadiums, and it’s why, in Portland, the rehab of the old armory building into a home for Portland Center Stage came from a complex quiltwork of various governmental dollars. It’s not a bad thing: It gets things done. But it does muddy the sense of what’s public and what’s private and who benefits most. And it makes it that much more crucial for our political leaders to remember which side of the fence they’re on.

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Bob Hicks, Books, Dance, General, Theater

Tuesday scatter: On Nixon, women in power, tutus and veils, alternate histories and Charlie Brown

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Mia Leimkuhler in Kudelka's Hush. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

On Saturday morning I picked up my newspaper and saw on the front page a photo of President Obama, smiling easily and looking down at, but not down on, Hugo Chavez. The American president is shaking hands with the Venezuelan president, a man who ordinarily makes great political hay from being seen and heard as a bellicose opponent of the United States and its political leaders. Chavez, too, has the sort of smile that seems genuine and not faked for the cameras (although who can say for sure in either case — these are politicians), and a semicircle of unnamed onlookers at the Western Hemisphere summit meeting in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, seems equally charmed.

Bill Christ as Nixon in Nixon/Frost. Photo: OWEN CAREYYes, charmed. And I thought, this is policymaking outside the channels of policy. Here, in Obama, is a man utterly at ease inside his own skin. That’s why people respond to him. Because he’s comfortable with himself.

My eye lingered on this photograph because the night before I’d seen Peter Morgan’s play Frost/Nixon at Portland Center Stage, and if there ever was a leader who was uncomfortable inside his own skin, it was Richard Nixon. Actor Bill Christ, in Rose Riordan’s smooth and entertaining production, makes this as clear as can be. He offers a Nixon who is inordinately intelligent and funny in the driest possible way, but who’s so clumsy he gives even himself the heebie-jeebies. He’s not smooth, he’s not sexy, he can’t do small talk. If he were a language he’d be German, not French. Nixon was actually savvier even than JFK about the power of the television camera but he couldn’t take advantage of it because he didn’t have the goods: He could only mitigate the camera’s effect by understanding how it works. Nixon knew that in the charm game he would always be an outsider looking in, and he resented it deeply. It fed his combativeness, his sense of the Other, of us versus them, of his bitterness of the East Coast elite’s patronizing of him, of being the guy who knew all the strategies and did all the dirty work but was barely allowed in the game.

I was young when Nixon bulldozed back into power in 1968 with his “secret plan to end the war,” and I despised him with all the moral certainty that only the young can summon. It was an extension of my detestation for Lyndon Johnson: How could these men be such liars and murderers? Over the years I’ve come to think of both instead as tragic figures. Here were leaders who could have been great — indeed, who were great in certain ways — but who were destroyed by their own hubris. Over time I might change my mind about this, too, but I now think of Nixon and Johnson as tragic in a way that George W. Bush can never be, because Bush lacked the capacity for greatness: His limitations made him instead something on the order of an oversized and disastrously effective school bully.

Continue reading Tuesday scatter: On Nixon, women in power, tutus and veils, alternate histories and Charlie Brown →