Tag Archives: Susan Banyas

Bob Hicks, Dance, General, Martha Ullman West, Poetry, Theater

Scatter and yon: life in the old stories yet

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Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell'sd "The Sleeping Beauty" at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

By Bob Hicks

Scatterers have been sowing their wild oats elsewhere lately, and old topics are coming up new again. A quick update:

Meanwhile, some old friends are knocking on the door again.

  • Susan Banyas‘s fascinating memory play The Hillsboro Story, about a little-known but extremely telling small-town skirmish in the 1950s vanguard of the war for civil rights, returns for a two-week run at Artists Rep beginning Wednesday. The play has been getting lots of attention since we first wrote about it in January of this year, when it debuted in Portland’s Fertile Ground new-works festival, and it looks to have a long life ahead of it — as well it should — in school tours.
  • VOX, Eric Hull’s fascinating “spoken-word chorus” of poetry rearranged as a sort of spoken music, with the language conceived as if it were written as four-part sheet music, returns to Waterbrook Studio for shows October 15-24. Mr. and Mrs. Scatter plan to be there one of those nights. This version is called Achilles’ Alibi, and includes works by, among others, William Butler Yeats, Robert Burns, William Stafford, Ursula K. Le Guin, Michele Glazer, and Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen. We wrote about a night with the VOXites back in April, in the post Poetry off the page, or, the fat lady sings.

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Gavin Larsen is the wicked Carabosse and Javier Ubell her chief toady in the premiere of Christopher Stowell’s “The Sleeping Beauty” at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Bob Hicks, General, Theater

Fertile Ground for a fresh look at civil rights

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_LaVern Green, Paige Jones and Susan Banyas in "The Hillsboro Story." Photo: Julie Keefe

Most of you know at least a little bit about Fertile Ground, Portland’s festival of new performance works, which has been playing on stages big and small around the city and continues to do so through Feb. 2. Marty Hughley and friends have covered a lot of the action, including Marty’s middle-of-the-action roundup, for The Oregonian. In its second year, the festival has expanded from its theater roots to include other sorts of performance, too, especially dance.

I’ve seen a bit of it, including White Bird’s premiere of dances by Tere Mathern and Minh Tran, and Polaris Dance Theatre’s iChange. Third Angle New Music Ensemble’s Hearing Voices wasn’t officially part of the festival but dovetailed nicely with it: Two of its four compositions were premieres, another had a fresh arrangement, and all four were story-pieces with narration — musical dramas.

On Sunday I saw The Hillsboro Story, Susan Banyas’s memory piece about a little-known but fascinating piece of American civil rights history that was not so long ago and not so far away, although life has barreled ahead so much in the past 55 years that for an astonishing number of Americans the civil rights years might as well be hung forgotten in the cloakroom alongside the colonial era’s three-corner hats.

For that reason alone — the short communal memory of a culture that consistently shortchanges its own past and often misinterprets it even when it does pay attention — The Hillsboro Story is worth telling, and seeing. I hope the play has a healthy future in schools and youth theaters — not that it isn’t a good piece of theater for adults (it is), but because still-developing hearts and minds in particular need to understand this vital part of their heritage.

Structurally, The Hillsboro Story is a little like The Laramie Project, the story of the Wyoming torture/murder of gay student Matthew Shepard and its aftermath. The difference is that Banyas, the teller of this tale, was there: She was a third-grader in the southern Ohio town of Hillsboro when, on the night of July 5, 1954, someone scattered gasoline around the ramshackle public elementary school in the black part of town and lit a match to it.

As it turns out, the firebug was Philip Partridge, the county engineer, who was fed up with fighting the town’s white power structure over school segregation and the rundown quality of the school for black kids. He figured, if the school burned down, the town would have to integrate its schools: After all, the Supreme Court had just ruled against school segregation in its landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

There are heroes aplenty in this story besides Partridge, whose act of civil disobedience might well be branded terrorism today (the play doesn’t delve deeply into the ethical issues of this sort of protest; but then, Partridge acted at a time when black men were still being lynched in America and nobody much did anything about it).

None are more heroic than the group of African American mothers who pressed their case unceasingly against the town fathers who patted them on the back and assured them that something would be done “later.” Nor is any image in the show quite so startling as black performer LaVerne Green’s fervid delivery of Mississippi Senator James Eastland’s fervid, vile speech asserting the right of white Southerners to kill their black neighbors.

What makes The Hillsboro Story more than just another formulaic tale of triumph over adversity is that we see it consistently through the eyes of Banyas as a third-grader, only dimly aware of the titanic social struggle playing out around her. Banyas’s memory pieces have always been personal, and they’ve always been fractured: not straight narratives but interweavings of thought and reminiscence, small intimate moments insisting on their place alongside the big things.

That helps emphasize that this isn’t strictly a story of good guys versus bad guys, a tale that makes it easy to point a finger and say, “Weren’t they awful.” By inserting herself as an unformed observer, trying to figure out why her world is changing, Banyas puts us all in the center of the thing, and reminds us that things that seem crystal clear now could seem cloudy then. This is a story of a time when things were different, when people thought in different ways, when an entire culture was just beginning to take a deep look at itself and think about what words like “freedom” and “equality” truly mean.

The Hillsboro school battle was the first case in the North to test the teeth in Brown v. Board of Education. The Hillsboro school board thought it could slide through despite the court ruling and just do what it wanted. It was wrong. And if this story has been largely forgotten, it’s because Hillsboro pretty much preferred to keep it buried. Banyas’s determination to disinter the tale does the town an honor: She tells the story with grace, and humility, and understanding, and love.

With Banyas’s fine interwoven script, choreography and direction by Gregg Bielemeier, music by David Ornette Cherry and good performances by Green, Banyas, Paige Jones and Jennifer Lanier in multiple roles, The Hillsboro Story shows why Fertile Ground is such an exciting development for Portland. Good stories are out there, just waiting for a chance to be told.

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Pictured: LaVern Green, Paige Jones and Susan Banyas in “The Hillsboro Story.” Photo: Julie Keefe

Bob Hicks, General

Missing blogger found in woods near Obscurity, Oregon

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St. Serafim of Sarov and a bear in a fragment from the 1903 lithograph "Way to Sarov." Wikimedia Commons

Yes, it’s true. Mr. Scatter has been missing from action for some time now. Perhaps you’ve noticed. He doesn’t go out, he never calls his friends, he ignores his children, he lets the dirty dishes sit in the sink, he NEVER WRITES. Yada yada yada.

Truth is, he did not go to meditate in the woods, and the bears didn’t eat him. It’s just that he’s been carrying this thing on his back — let’s call it the Modestly Big Project, or MBP — that’s been screaming for his attention and keeping him from his normal rounds. Or at least, keeping him from writing about his normal rounds.

So let’s catch up.

Yesterday Mr. Scatter tucked the MBP’s head on a pillow for a much-needed rest and took a whirl in his modest white automobile to the grocery emporium. On the way he realized he wouldn’t mind a cup of coffee — a nice cafe au lait crossed his mind — and maybe a little pastry-ish thingie to go with it. He spotted a likely-looking spot in a Neighborhood of Aspiring Hipness and swung in.

Almost immediately Mr. Scatter realized he did not meet the establishment’s cool-factor code. Despite his flannel-lined jeans and disintegrating shoes, he was insufficiently slack. His head was conspicuously neat from a two-day-old haircut, and not only was the shirt he happened to be wearing tucked in, it also had a collar with little brown buttons at the tips. They were actually buttoned.

“You gonna have that for here?” the whelp at the counter inquired, in a tone that conveyed his sincere hope otherwise. Mr. Scatter stood his ground, and found a table, and picked up a copy of a small local publication called Willamette Week. Soon he found himself chuckling.

He was reading a review by Aaron Mesh of the new Harrison Ford/Brendan Fraser movie Extraordinary Measures, which was apparently filmed in Portland, and Mr. Mesh had struck an exquisite balance between gentle appreciation and the art of poking fun. He noted with approval Mr. Ford’s tendency to shout in irritation at pretty much any and everything. Mr. Scatter had already witnessed Mr. Ford doing just that, in television commercials for the movie, and it was a pretty scary sight. Reading about it was probably more fun than actually sitting through the film. And a whole lot more fun than the little coffee shop Mr. Scatter will not be visiting again.

Mr. Mesh’s review made Mr. Scatter feel a little better about the fate of dead trees, a gloomy topic that had come to mind earlier in the morning when he picked up his Oregonian and discovered, for the second time in four days, a front-page wraparound (it’s called a spadea in the biz) trumpeting the newspaper’s editorial-page objections to state Measures 66 and 67. We’re getting used to this form of advertising. If it’s a Fred Meyer ad, Mr. Scatter checks to see if there are any sales on things he usually buys, then dutifully deposits the thing in the recycling bin.

But this ad, featuring headlines and copy from The Oregonian itself, looked at first and even second glance not like an advertisement at all but like a front-page editorial endorsement. Mr. Scatter was actually shocked, if far from awed.

Wednesday’s version put the words “Paid Advertisement” in bigger and bolder print at the top, but it didn’t amount to much more than a better grade of wallpaper over the gaping hole in the newspaper’s ethical wall. The publisher’s argument that the spadea space was just as available to proponents as to opponents of the measures was disingenuous. Newspapers make qualitative decisions every day about what is and is not acceptable in advertising copy. At least, they used to. Nothing is more important to a newspaper than its reputation for integrity, which must be guarded zealously.

Mr. Scatter understands that these are difficult times for newspapers, but what these wraparounds cost The Oregonian in reputation was not worth the quick paycheck.

The answer is simple. Keep the spadea, but for commercial advertisers. Make the front-page wraparound unavailable for any political advertising, of any stripe, on any issue, from any source, at any time. Just say no.

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Since we last talked at any length Mr. Scatter has spent a little time in a town some miles south of Portland known to locals as “San Francisco.”

A small corner of curliques at the Queen Anne HotelHe found it a pretty little place, with lots of hills and a pleasant small-town feel, and he particularly enjoyed a local delicacy of deep-fried crabmeat shaped into something like a drumstick and attached to a claw. Rumor has it that the dish has Chinese origins, although the crab itself was definitely Dungeness. In the evenings Mr. Scatter found himself shacked up in the shabby-chic splendor of the Queen Anne Hotel, near the crest of Sutter Street. The interior is like a giant overstuffed spangly cat toy that’s been knocked around a bit, and in its own way it’s really quite splendid. Mr. Scatter took a few shaky snapshots with his cell phone and sent them to Mrs. Scatter, who was amazed and envious.

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Several evenings ago Mr. Scatter escorted himself to the Newmark Theatre to see iChange, the latest show by the lively Polaris Dance Theatre. Polaris has been around quite a while but this was the first time Mr. Scatter had seen the company perform, and all in all it was a pleasant experience. Polaris has some good dancers who are dedicated to what they do, which is a highly accessible, very pop culture-oriented contemporary style of dancing, a little sexy but not raunchy, and just the sort of thing to attract enthusiastic initiates. Sort of like Fame a few years after graduation. Before and between performances the audience was invited to whip out its cell phones and send Tweets and other instant text messages, which were then posted on a large screen on the stage. Mr. Scatter refrained, but he didn’t mind the activity, which seemed quite popular in other seats.

Last night Mr. Scatter attended a meeting of the board of Portland Taiko, the excellent performing organization with which he is associated, and spoke with other august personages of Important Things.

This very evening, Thursday, he will motor to the World Forestry Center for White Bird‘s dance presentation by two of Portland’s finest, the cerebral Tere Mathern and the sinuous Minh Tran, who reveals to The Oregonian that these performances, through Sunday, will be his final as a dancer; he’ll move full-time into dancemaking instead.

On Friday night Mr. Scatter’s destination is Kaul Auditorium at Reed College for the latest show by Third Angle New Music Ensemble, the splendid troupe for whom Mrs. Scatter toils night and day. This will be an evening of mostly new works by several Northwest composers, and it has a literary theme: Narrators include the actors David Loftus and Michele Mariana, plus the distinguished Ursula K. LeGuin, reading her own story A Ride on the Red Mare’s Back to a score by Bryan Johanson. This is what’s known as the payoff.

Sunday afternoon, Mr. Scatter scampers to Artists Repertory Theatre to take in the premiere production of Susan Banyas‘s performance piece The Hillsboro Story, which hurtles us back to 1954 and a key moment — one that Ms. Banyas, as a third-grader in her Ohio home town, witnessed — in America’s civil rights movement.

If you happen to be at any of these events and spot Mr. Scatter wandering about, do say hello. He promises to leave the bear in the woods.

Up against the wall: Polaris prepares to scale the heights. Photo: Brian McDonnell/BMAC Photography

Photos, from top:

  • Not Mr. Scatter, who actually never was lost in the woods. Not in recent years, anyway. This is a fragment of a 1903 lithograph, “Way to Sarov,” that depicts St. Serafim of Sarov communing with a friendly bear. Mr. Scatter would not do this thing. Wikimedia Commons.
  • One curlicued corner from the spacious lobby of San Francisco’s Queen Anne Hotel, which is curly from its overstuffed stem to its overstuffed stern.
  • Up against the wall: Polaris prepares to scale the heights. Photo: Brian McDonnell/BMAC Photography
Dance, General, Martha Ullman West

Remembering Merce in his element: the vast Northwest

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Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Nearly Ninety. Photo: Anna Finke/2009

Dance critic and historian Martha Ullman West has spent a lot of time thinking about Merce Cunningham, the great 20th century dancer and choreographer who rethought what dance means by  introducing chance as a primary element in the mix. Cunningham, who was born and raised 90 miles from Portland in the small town of Centralia, Wash., died July 26 at age 90. Martha considers, among other things, the effect that the Pacific Northwest had on Cunningham’s art.

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Merce Cunningham. Photo: Mark Seliger/2009 Merce Cunningham died the other day, in his sleep it is said, which means he was still hard at work at the age of 90. Artists do, you know, work in their sleep, as well as their waking hours. There is no rest for the psyche.

He died in New York on Sunday, July 26, at his home in Greenwich Village. In his obituary for the New York Times, Alastair Macaulay, who is working on a book on Cunningham, called him “always a creature of New York.”

That’s not untrue, at least from 1939 on, when Cunningham joined Martha Graham‘s company. But it’s only part of the story.

Merce, in fact, was one of ours. So was Robert Joffrey. So are Trisha Brown and Mark Morris, who, thank God, are still around. All are natives of the Pacific Northwest, specifically Washington State.

I believe that Merce’s use of space, his sense of infinite possibility, his connection to nature, his conviction that you can do anything that pleases you on stage as long as it works aesthetically, came from the ethos of this part of the world. You see those elements in the poetry of Gary Snyder, who like Merce and composer John Cage, Merce’s long-term partner in life and art, was influenced by Zen thinking. You see them, certainly, in the work of Trisha Brown.

And, to bring it home to Portland, you see it in the choreography and technique of Mary Oslund, who studied with Cunningham and several members of his company, including the late Viola Farber. Oslund remembers being at dinner with Merce when White Bird presented the company (which, God love them, they did twice, in 2001 and 2004). Merce talked with her about Farber, Mary says, in his “diminutive and humble way.”

“He gave us a lot of permission,” Susan Banyas told dance maker Gregg Bielemeier when she heard the news of Merce’s death.

Continue reading Remembering Merce in his element: the vast Northwest →