Tag Archives: Sarah Slipper

A Japan benefit; theater & dance tips

UPDATE: On OregonLive, Ryan White has just posted this announcement of a big-name benefit for Japanese disaster relief at the Aladdin Theatre on March 27. So far, the list of performers includes pianist/bandleader Thomas Lauderdale of Pink Martini, singers Holcombe Waller and Storm Large, dancers from Oregon Ballet Theatre, new-music adventurers fEARnoMUSIC, the Pacific Youth Choir, PHAME Academy, the Shanghai Woolies, and singers Ida Rae Cahana and Carl Halvorson. Check Ryan’s post for details.

© Rich Iwasaki 2008© Rich Iwasaki 2008

By Bob Hicks

You’ll be hearing about a lot of benefit performances and emergency fund-raising drives to help the victims of Japan’s triple whammy of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis. Perhaps you’ve already dug deep.

picture-1One performance coming up is particularly close to me, because I serve on the board of Portland Taiko, the outstanding Asian drumming and movement ensemble. At 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, PT and the Portland State University Department of Music will host a performance at PSU’s Lincoln Hall Room 175. A lot of people in Portland Taiko have family in Japan. As artistic director Michelle Fujii puts it, “Seeing the tragedy in Japan unfold was difficult for many of us in Portland Taiko on a personal and visceral level.”

Among others, the performance will include Portland Taiko, Takohachi (Japanese taiko and dance), Mexica Tiahui (Aztec drum and dance), Mike Barber (Ten Tiny Dances), Natya Leela Academy (traditional South Indian classical dance), Carla Mann and Jim McGinn (leading Portland contemporary dancers), and Hanzaburo Araki (shakuhachi, the traditional Japanese end-blown flute).

The performance is free, but volunteers from Mercy Corps and other organizations will be on hand to take donations. Hope to see you there.

Continue reading A Japan benefit; theater & dance tips

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.

*

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.

Continue reading Pardon the interruption, s’il vous plait

Coming up: Dance Flight with Delcroix

By Bob Hicks

Snow? What snow? It’ll be gone by Sunday (that’s not a promise, only an extreme probability) and you’ll be wanting to get out of the house. Maybe over to Mississippi and Shaver in North Portland, where Northwest Dance Project has its studio.

Choreographer Patrick DelcroixThat’s where I’ll be, starting at 3 p.m., for NDP’s latest Dance Flight — an afternoon of sipping wine, watching rehearsal and then settling in for an informal dance talk with the choreographer. The wine will be French, and so is the choreographer, Patrick Delcroix, whom I’ll interview onstage. The chat should be nice and easy, and I’ll make sure anyone in the audience who wants to ask a question gets the chance. Dance Flight details are here.

Delcroix spent 17 years as a leading dancer with Nederlands Dans Theater, then became assistant to choreographer Jiri Kylian, whose pieces he sets on companies around the world.

Continue reading Coming up: Dance Flight with Delcroix

Reminder: Dance Flight this afternoon

I’ll be at Northwest Dance Project‘s studio in North Portland this afternoon for an onstage chat with Luca Veggetti, the Paris-based Italian choreographer who’s in town to update his dance Ensemble for Somnambulists, which he created on the company dancers in 2006.

Choreographer Luca VeggettiThis should be interesting. I sat in on a rehearsal a few days ago and afterwards talked with Veggetti for about 20 minutes. He’s smart and eloquent (he speaks five languages, fortunately including English), with a lot to say about his own background and the state of dance in general. He also has strong background in experimental theater and opera (“I was raised at La Scala,” he says) so his outlook is broad.

The format is the same as last Sunday, when I had a good talk with Maurice Causey, a freelance choreographer associated closely with Nederlands Dans Theater. Show up at 3 p.m., have some wine and cheese, watch a brisk rehearsal, then get ready for the interview. Last week a lot of people in the crowd asked questions, and I expect the same today. Address: 833 N. Shaver Street, just off of Mississippi Avenue. Suggested donation is $20 ($10 students), which helps pay for the event.

Veggetti and Causey will each have a piece in Northwest Dance Project’s spring performances, which will also include two dances by artistic director Sarah Slipper, March 12-13 at the Newmark Theatre.

Random Dance, and other movements

Random Dance, coming to White Bird and the Newmark.

Mr. Scatter is not a dancer. This may seem odd, considering the number of dance posts that have been on this site of late (or maybe, once you’ve read them, it seems painfully obvious), but that is partly a matter of coincidence. There’s been a lot of dance in town lately, and more is on the way.

We’re talking, of course, about presentational dance, art dance, dance as performance — not the social dance that Mr. Scatter did not learn in the 1950s and 1960s, when he suffered from a not uncommon affliction known as Two Left Feet, complicated by a textbook case of shyaroundgirlitis. Yes, he did go to his senior prom. He was in the band. The perfect end-run.

Mr. Scatter's unfortunate childhood affliction.Watching dance, on the other hand, is a longtime pleasure, one that slides from tap to tango, classic to contemporary, Broadway to ballet. And it strikes Mr. Scatter that, while a lot of people weren’t looking, Portland’s become a heck of a dance town.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is somewhere near the middle of it all, continuing its lovely performances of Christopher Stowell‘s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and George Balanchine‘s The Four Temperaments through Saturday at Keller Auditorium.

And surely much of this renaissance can be laid at the feet of White Bird, which has routinely brought the un-routine to Portland audiences, exposing the city to worldwide dance ideas. Fresh from Hubbard Street, which has barely had a chance to skip back to Chicago, here White Bird comes again, this time presenting England’s Random Dance (that’s them in the photo above) Thursday through Saturday in the Newmark Theatre. The piece, Entity, by company leader Wayne McGregor, runs an hour and is reputed to be fast and furious. It also marks the end of White Bird’s two-year Uncaged series, which has spotted dance in adventurous spaces around town while it’s waited for its regular second-season home, Lincoln Performance Hall, to be refurbished. That’ll be done by the start of next season.

But as important as they are, the scene is far from just OBT and White Bird. Keep an eye out for these upcoming events, too. (The dance action’s so hot and heavy that we’re sure we’re missing something; we apologize in advance.):
Continue reading Random Dance, and other movements

Northwest Dance Project joins the PDX renaissance

Wen Wei Wang / "Chi" / 2009. Photo: Blaine Covert

Above and below: “Chi,” by Wen Wei Wang, Northwest Dance Project, summer 2009. The Project dances downtown Friday and Saturday. Photos: Blaine Covert


It’s not all about Oregon Ballet Theatre.

Sure, the OBT story’s fascinating. Scrappy little company grows into rising national star. Stumbles into economic abyss. Gets saved by outpouring of bucks and extravaganza featuring top dancers from around the country. Dumps its executive director after noisy staff revolt. A day later, triumphs onstage. It’s like Pauline’s perils. Or the Comeback Kid. And there could be cliffhangers yet to come.

But while OBT’s sucked up most of the attention, Portland’s been enjoying a modest renaissance of dance. The two big pieces are OBT — a sterling company in spite of its backstage adventures — and White Bird, the presenting company that’s rejuvenated the city’s contemporary dance scene by bringing in a lot of the best the world has to offer.

And there’s much more.

The popular dance/movement troupe BodyVox, which tours the country, has opened its new dance center in Northwest Portland. Another contemporary troupe, Polaris, has its own new digs. The Portland Ballet, a well-regarded training company, is once again readying its charming holiday production of La Boutique Fantasque — this time with live accompaniment from the Portland State University Symphony performing Rossini’s playful score. Ghe downtown dance center Conduit, despite its own bump in the road, continues to serve the contemporary scene well. Veterans such as Mary Oslund, Josie Moseley, Gregg Bielemeier and Linda Austin are creating vital new work. Movement-inspired theater companies like Do Jump and Imago (which reopens its innovative teeter-totter version of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit on Friday, with a terrific-looking cast) cross disciplines audaciously. Mike Barber’s Ten Tiny Dances pop up all over town. The aerialists of Pendulum Dance Theatre keep on floating new ideas. Newcomers like POV Dance, which specializes in site-specific work, are turning out some dizzying stuff — in the case of POV’s August piece at the Conduit benefit, literally: The performers were poking over and out from the four-story open stairwell at the Pythian Building as the audience gazed over guardrails, stomachs flipping.

What we have here, folks, is a scene.

And there’s more. Like, for a pretty big instance, Northwest Dance Project, the brainchild of choreographer and teacher Sarah Slipper, which got its start in 2004. Slipper, a Canadian who did her training there and in London and danced with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, came to Portland as ballet mistress for OBT back in the James Canfield days. Although deeply rooted in classical ballet, her temperament, like Canfield’s, is more contemporary.

photo: BLAINE COVERTNorthwest Dance Project began as a summer training program for young and mostly professional dancers, ages 16-25, who came to town from across the country to work with leading national choreographers for a few weeks and then put on an end-of-workshop public performance.

That still happens. Dancemakers such as Canfield (now at Nevada Dance Theatre in Las Vegas), Nashville Ballet’s Paul Vasterling, Bebe Miller, Susan Gaudreau of BJM Dance Montreal, Lucas Crandall of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, and Washington Ballet’s Septime Webre have offered classes.

But things have expanded. Now the Project has an eight-member resident company that does some touring: It’s doing a residency next month at the Flying E Ranch, a 20,000-acre working dude ranch in Arizona’s Sonoran desert that also hosts arts groups, and follows that with a performance in Tucson. And it’ll perform Friday and Saturday nights at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland.

This summer the Project moved into its own new studio space in a handsome old ballroom just off North Mississippi Avenue at 833 North Shaver Street, right across from the popular Equinox Restaurant and Bar and barely a skip from the hot spots Gravy and Cup & Saucer Cafe. This part of town is hopping, and a lot of people peek in from the sidewalk to watch the dancers jump. The studio’s bathed with natural light from its big windows, and out back, behind the studio mirrors, the view opens to a sweet little pocket park. It’s a good place to call home.
Continue reading Northwest Dance Project joins the PDX renaissance