Tag Archives: Rachel Tess

Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Stravinsky the hipster

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By Martha Ullman West

So I put on my black leather jacket and my uncut corduroy black jeans, but balked at a nose ring, and attended the Dance Talks panel at the Pacific Northwest College of Art yesterday afternoon.  This outreach program for adults usually takes place at the Keller or the Newmark a week or so before Oregon Ballet Theatre opens a new concert series.

Stravinsky, by Picasso, 1920. Wikimedia Commons.This one, however,  was a panel discussion to introduce an audience that admittedly had more young people in it than usual to The Stravinsky Project, the middle piece on OBT’s all-Stravinsky evening opening at the Keller this coming Saturday night.

It’s a collaborative effort on the part of four choreographers with very different aesthetics and approaches to dance: Rachel Tess, Anne Mueller, and Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland of BodyVox.

Unfortunately, Hampton and Roland couldn’t be present (BodyVox is touring in Europe), but the two choreographers were joined by composer Heather Perkins, costume designer Morgan Walker, a painter who is on the faculty at PNCA; and OBT’s lighting designer Michael Mazzola.

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Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Thoroughly modern Rachel Clara Marie

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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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