Tag Archives: Vox

Vox at bat: poetry swings for the fences

October 18, 2010 Bob Hicks Leave a comment

By Bob Hicks

Cy Young baseball card from 1911, the last of his 22 years pitching in the big leagues. He won 511 games, by far the most ever -- and lost 316, more than a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers won. Wikimedia Commons. Today we offer a quick link to Mr. Scatter’s review for The Oregonian, under his non de plume Bob Hicks, of Achilles’ Alibi, the latest evening of choral poetry from Eric Hull and his company Vox.

The program repeats this Thursday through Sunday, Oct. 22-24. Good stuff; catch it if you can. You can also read about Mr. and Mrs. Scatter’s previous visit to a Vox performance, in April.

As the review suggests, the poems of William Stafford are at the heart of this edition. But lots of other fine poets are along for the ride, and in honor of the baseball playoffs and impending World Series — like fresh apple cider and the ritual bringing-out of the sweaters, they’re part of what makes autumn special — we quote from one of them, May Swenson‘s bases-clearing double off the wall, Analysis of Baseball:

Sometimes
ball gets hit
(pow) when bat
meets it,
and sails
to a place
where mitt
has to quit
in disgrace.
That’s about
the bases
loaded,
about 40,000
fans exploded.

Cy Young baseball card from 1911, the last of his 22 years pitching in the big leagues. He won 511 games, by far the most ever — and lost 316, more than a lot of Hall of Fame pitchers won. Wikimedia Commons.

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

Scatter and yon: life in the old stories yet

October 12, 2010 Bob Hicks 1 Comment

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:

Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, has a guest column on Tobi Tobias’s Seeing Things dance blog at Arts Journal. In Doing Well in a Rainy Climate: Ballet in the Pacific Northwest, Martha notes that ballet is drawing an unusually big following in the Northwest, and gives a good rundown of what’s happening with the big three: Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, Portland’s Oregon Ballet Theatre, and Eugene Ballet. It’s especially good to see her sharp take on the Eugene company, which often gets lost in the shuffle.
Martha also reviewed the premiere of OBT’s scintillating new version of The Sleeping Beauty for The Oregonian. Here’s the Oregon Live link.
Mr. Scatter, sometimes known by the nom de plume Bob Hicks, has a review in The Oregonian of Third Rail Rep‘s sweet and slightly bawdy American premiere production of Brit writer Chris Chibnall’s life-and-death comedy Kiss Me Like You Mean It. As usual with Third Rail, the directing and acting are topnotch. Here’s the Oregon Live link.

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.

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, Books, General, Poetry

Miracle elixir, that’s wot did the trick, sir

April 20, 2010 Bob Hicks 6 Comments

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage against the dying of the light with a well-mixed martini in your hand.

W.H. Auden, Library of Congress/Wikimedia Commons In a recent post about a Vox spoken-poetry performance, Art Scatter mentioned in passing “the magician’s drone of listening to the likes of W.H. Auden reciting his own work.” That phrase caught the attention of playwright, novelist and filmmaker Charles Deemer, who passed along the following memory of the great gimlet-eyed poet. (And, yes, we know it was Dylan Thomas who advised against going gentle into that good night. Thomas was known to pack away a brew or two, himself.)

Since you mention Auden …” Deemer writes, “his magical readings were more magical than meets the eye.

In 1963 I had the honor of hosting Auden, who was giving a reading at a community college I attended at the time. There was a dinner and reception before the reading, during which he drank, by my own nervous count, a dozen martinis! And seemed drunk. We didn’t know what to do, and when approached he assured us all was fine, no, he didn’t want any coffee …. so off we went to the reading, nervous as hell. He still seemed drunk to me when he went to the podium. Then somehow he didn’t. He gave a brilliant, flawless reading. Then he stepped away, seemed drunk again, and wanted to know when he could have a drink.

Remembering Auden’s feat got Deemer going, and he passed along another couple of encounters.

Continue reading Miracle elixir, that’s wot did the trick, sir →

Bob Hicks, General, Language, Music, Poetry, Theater

Poetry off the page, or, the fat lady sings

April 19, 2010 Bob Hicks Leave a comment

On Saturday night Mr. and Mrs. Scatter went down to the industrial east Willamette waterfront, to Waterbrook Studio, the little theater-in-a-warehouse just north of the Broadway Bridge, to catch Poetry Off the Page.

voxpostcard It’s the latest in Eric Hull‘s Vox series of staged — I almost want to say composed — poetry readings. Composed, because it’s done by a chorus of actors in a chamber-musical fashion.

Brunnhilde, George Grantham Bain Collection/Library of Congress Waterbrook is basically a room with an entrance area and a door leading to what serves as a green room for the performers. Somewhere around the corner, down a broad-plank floor, is a restroom. On Saturday the performance space had a few rows of folding chairs for the spectators, a lineup of music stands up front for the six performers, and three chairs to the side for the performers who occasionally sat a poem out. In other words: all the tools you really need to create some first-rate performing art.

It helps, of course, if you have some first-rate performers, and for this show Hull has cast impeccably. His six actors are adept at making their diction precise without squeezing the life out of the words. They are masters of rhythm, as crisp and casual at passing the ball as a good basketball team on a fast break, and beautifully cast for pitch, color and range. Grant Byington is the tenor, Gary Brickner-Schulz the baritone, and Sam A. Mowry the bass. The women — Adrienne Flagg, Theresa Koon, Jamie Rae — are similarly cast for their complementary vocal qualities.

What they do is this. They take a poem (twenty-five of them, actually), break it down to its component parts from stanza to line to syllable to vowel and consonant, settle on a rhythm, and deliver it as a group, sometimes passing it around phrase by phrase, sometimes word by word, sometimes in unison, sometimes as a soloist and chorus.

Continue reading Poetry off the page, or, the fat lady sings →

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