Five choreographers’ questions. One set of creative thinking tools. FRONT invited five leading US-based choreographers to reformat a period of artistic creation past into a series of questions now. The result is a publication with the spirit of a toolbox, through the lens of contemporary dance.
Read more "FRONT: ED05"BUOY OPENING LETTER For FRONT’s fourth edition, we trespass outside artistic production, asking the dark rich waters of process: What resources do communities self-engender to underwrite artistic inquiry? How is dance developed in the realms of privacy or friendship? What shines skulls and pelvic bowls diagonal from project-driven logics? When distinct roles elide, authorship blossoms […]
Read more "FRONT: ED4"She just brought this today. Check this out: now it’s a bag! Obviously, I cannot hang this right now. And my musicians are not here. Allie Hankins who walks out resolutely told me Sunday. Idarubinstein-dancing-1913.jpg “Nijinsky’s Golden Slave” by Kevin Kopelson in Dancing Desires—-> Ida Rubinstein danced with Nijinsky in Michel Fokine’s Schéhérazade (1910)——> […]
Read more "Allie Hankins: Like a Sun That Pours Forth Light but Never Warmth"The first time Tahni talked with me about the project that would become Duet Love, she had me hang my head off a bleacher. We had just finished a final rehearsal for her 2012 piece SUN$HINE. Laying there, the studio upside down, she instructed: “Take in the room, its depth, its volume, the lights, the […]
Read more "Duet Love for Stance"The inaugural Festival TBD ran July 24-28th at Abrons Art Center/Henry Street Settlement. Fresh baked from a “city-wide heat emergency,” five summer nights on the Lower East Side unfolded Ben Pryor’s neatly creased Emergency Glitter, opening a “new amorphous framework…of loosely related curatorial endeavors, each with their own structure and context.” If you don’t know […]
Read more "Festival TDB: Emergency Glitter"I had always thought that I would be fantastic at voguing—I love to dance in clubs. That should be good training, right?— A couple years ago, I took a voguing workshop from master instructors Archie Burnett and Brahms “Bravo” LaFortune and thought: Finally, my moment has arrived. Each class culminated in the whole group striking […]
Read more "Camille A. Brown & Dancers – MR. TOL E. RAncE"I took my seat for White Bird’s first show of the 2012-2013 Uncaged Series feeling quite the cynic—reluctantly as I really didn’t want to feel jaded about the Trisha Brown Dance Company, but despite myself as I’ve lost faith in major dance production. The Newmark Theatre is an awkward dance venue for Portland. The seating […]
Read more "Trisha Brown Company"PERFORMANCE CLUB: TBA:12 has hit the road, but Portland’s still here. Wanna watch the dust settle? After 10 days waking up for the Time-Based Arts festival—bombing red lights on my bike to get less late for 10 a.m. workshops (or noon chats)—these past mornings have been sluggish. More heartbroken than hung-over, but admittedly a bit […]
Read more "Postscript (TBA:12)"PERFORMANCE CLUB: For 10 days each of the last 10 Septembers, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Arts Festival has run rampant in a city often peripheral to considerations of contemporary performance. TBA’s two nonstop 90-hour weeks draw a lot of committed people to get haggard and timely together; a break in Portland’s avowedly […]
Read more "Time in Portland (TBA:12)"Backstage at On the Boards, the other artists in the first weekend Studio Showcase of the Northwest New Works Festival were playing word games I could never figure out – something involving a lot of guesses and maybe a bus. What’s “crotch” in French? I think they settled on “entrecuisse”. I couldn’t join in, which […]
Read more "On the Boards:NWNW + H2M:Risk/Reward // 2012"Earlier in the day –before The Göteborg Ballet’s All-Nordic Program– my academic director told me I looked like a Russian sailor. Making great use of office flattery, he added, “It’s a good spring look.” That was nice of him. Honestly, I had thought about my sweater a lot that day. I often buy sweaters at […]
Read more "The Göteborg Ballet: All-Nordic Program"LOVE FIRE immediately declares how it intends to relate to its audience: brashly. There’s a man, a woman, a greatest hits collection of classical waltz music and a title I can’t read without a smirk. waltz – What does it make you think of? Probably something vaguely historic. There’s most likely traditional male and female […]
Read more "Yasmeen Godder: Love Fire"You’d have to be in a really bad mood not to have a good time at Dark Matters, Crystal Pite’s widely-toured work for her Kidd Pivot company. It’s entertaining, spectacular and deftly constructed. The first hour flies by and flings you into intermission, while the second act plays with aspects of performance distinct from the […]
Read more "KIDD PIVOT: DARK MATTERS"15-20% of the audience walked out of a dance performance I was at recently. We were in a theatre with no back exit and a stage that ran level with the front row – like Portland’s Imago Theatre. Each person that left had to walk past everyone else in the audience and cross a couple […]
Read more "!!!!!!!!!!!!!……….(TBA:11)"cloudy sunday just before seven is quiet. epically quiet Post-festival depression? During the festival, I’m consumed and don’t have time to properly be. I sleep too little, drink too much, nub excessive smokes and feel robbed of my direction. My aptitudes swept away by a world running beneath my feet. Sitting in a quiet room […]
Read more "My Hijacked Weeks (TBA:11)"When I heard Cathy Edwards got slack for “exhausting” us last year and read the Portland Mercury’s repeated, unintelligible flogging of Meg Stuart’s Maybe Forever (TBA:09), I was afraid that there might be no meat with our gravy in TBA:10. Fear assuaged. Maria Hassabi gives us something to chew on. SoloShow is challenging, expansive, and […]
Read more "Maria Hassabi: SoloShow"
Robert Tyree 