arts dispatch

'Lips Together,' circa 1993

2011-10-03T06:40:00.000-07:00

[Editor's Note: This story was published in The Oregonian in 1993, while I was serving as the paper's theater critic.]

As the cast and crew of "Lips Together, Teeth Apart'' file into their first meeting before rehearsals begin, they are chortling. Someone, it seems, has just called the Oregon Shakespeare Festival box office seeking tickets to the Terrence McNally play.

"I want four tickets to 'Lips Together, Legs Apart,' '' the guy says.

The startled ticket-seller quickly corrects him, but too late: Visions of the X-rated parody already are sprinting through everyone's head.

In a way, the joke is a stroke of luck, helping to break down the reserve among this disparate collection of friends, acquaintances and strangers. And the tone is right. McNally's play is no "Debbie Does Dallas'' or even "Oh, Calcutta!'' but it has its ribald moments. Think of it as a darkly comic exercise in the existential and the absurd, with some naughty words thrown in.

More than 20 actors, costumers, administrators, techies and other assorted theater folk gather in the rehearsal hall of the Portland Center for the Performing Arts as director Penny Metropulos takes the lectern. It's late January, five weeks before the Feb. 24 opening night, and Metropulos is clearly ready to roll.

Short, curly haired, with a green knit sweater and an animated face that dances and smiles as she talks, Metropulos packs considerable voltage. It's easy to see why, after giving up a successful career as an actress, she's become such a hot directorial property. She's also open, even to the possibility of allowing a journalist into the normally closed world of the rehearsal process.

Will the production suddenly come alive one moment in the rehearsal hall — a pretty worm, wriggling toward the light? Or will it be a gigantic exercise in legerdemain, an elaborate sleight-of-hand, an illusion carefully wound and sprung on the audience? The journalist will be allowed to drop in from time to time over the next five weeks to find the answers. Make that, to learn that the reality is a lot less glittery and magical than one imagines.

Metropulos zips through the opening meeting. She describes the script ("I think the play is about fear and courage''), talks about the set, supplies some key words and images from the text, and discusses acquired immune deficiency syndrome and how it figures in the play. ("The AIDS epidemic makes us think about destiny.'') Then she predicts what the play's painful, personal nature will mean for her and the actors: "Although we'll be getting into some nasty places, we'll have some laughs, too.''

Metropulos extends an invitation to the extended group to come in and watch rehearsals, but asks that they clear it with her first. "It's a small cast,'' she explains, "so you feel pretty exposed out there.''

Tony DeBruno, one of the actors, picks up the cue and returns the discussion to its ribald beginnings. "Especially when I take my shower.''

"Oh,'' Metropulos retorts, "everybody is invited that day.''

Act One: Details, details, details

"Lips Together, Teeth Apart'' has only four characters. That made Metropulos' auditions in Ashland last August crucial. With only four actors, a casting error would be disastrous.

What was she looking for? The right physical types, perhaps, to fit the play?

"I was looking for an inner rhythm,'' Metropulos answers.

At first that seems like so much mumbo-jumbo — the theater-world equivalent of "whatever feels right.'' But then it starts to make sense.

"We all have rhythms that are our natural rhythms,'' Metropulos continues. "Fast, slow, smooth, jerky. That inner rhythm is where you live. It's not that we can't shift from there — good actors can — but it's where you live. For ' Lips' you don't want a lot of slow Southern rhythms. This is set in the Northeast. You need drive and speed.''

The group she has assembled sports three Ashland regulars — Linda Alper (who worked with Metropulos on "Restoration,'' last season's critical hit, among other starring roles on Ashland stages), DeBruno (another "Restoration'' vet who has acted all over the country, often in comic roles) and Bill Geisslinger (whose list of Ashland credits is far too long to fit here).

The fourth, Amanda Carlin, has major New York and Los Angeles experience and appeared in the festival's Portland version of "Season's Greetings.'' Trying to find a fourth for her trio, Metropulos remembered that performance in the dark Alan Ayckbourn comedy and invited her to join the show.

Despite the actors' differences in experience and approach, they are a warm and funny group. And they do have a similar rhythm: quick, to the point, alert.

DeBruno has a long face, expressive eyes and a flair for comedy. A veteran actor who has spent the last four years at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, DeBruno's Everyman sort of appearance fits well with Sam, the middle-class character he plays in " Lips Together, Teeth Apart.'' Sam has some homophobic feelings and he's irritated by people who can identify Schubert, but he's not an Archie Bunker. He's much more sensitive than that.

Carlin brings zest, insouciance, sensuality and a flair for the theatrical to Chloe, Sam's sister and the wife of John. Chloe seems to be the least complex character, primarily because she always says what's on her mind. She is overt, vulnerable, always taking care of everyone's culinary cravings. "You get a clearer take on Chloe instantly,'' Metropulos says. "Then you start looking more deeply into it.''

As John, Geisslinger plays the role of a cynic. John is ailing, physically and emotionally. He can be prickly and nasty. He doesn't try to get along. "John makes me sad,'' Metropulos says. Geisslinger must be closed and flinty one moment, closed and blissful the next, then closed and aggravating. It's a serious role, though Geisslinger is determined to find some leavening in it.

Alper, who has spent seven of the last 13 years working in Ashland after training at Julliard and working for 10 years out of New York, gets the complexities of Sally. Sally is dealing with the death of her brother and his gayness, and with a lot of other things: her affair with John, her pregnancy or lack of same, her general feelings of separateness and alienation. Things affect Sally deeply, and they show up in Alper's expressive face, her shoulders, her posture.

Besides choosing the cast, the Ashland-based Metropulos had hundreds of other choices to make before the operation moved to Portland. Theater people are always talking about choices. They think of the finished production as the culmination of a series of choices, managed by the director.

"You try to be as specific as you possibly can about what you show out there,'' Metropulos says. "There isn't time for just ' kinda, sorta.' On the stage for 2 1/2 hours it all has to be specific work that opens the point of the play. It's about specific choices.''

Many of the essential choices have been made before rehearsals start. The play has been chosen (by Henry Woronicz, artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival) and assigned to a director (Metropulos). The director has cast the play, worked with the designer (Robert Brill) on the set, talked about costumes (Sarah Nash Gates), lights (Derek Duarte) and sound (David Maltby).

The play's the thing

The play itself is where everything begins, of course, and Metropulos is a big fan of McNally's work. She remembers reading "Lips'' for the first time:

"I read it the way I would watch it. I read it to see if it did anything for me. I laughed out loud. It moved me. It talks about things that are very real and very important. It's extraordinary that he's done a play about AIDS without it being a play about AIDS. He focuses on what the disease has done to confront us as a culture; our fears and bigotries. You don't want to believe that you would wash your hands after being with someone you love. But we're here; we're scared.''

Even talking about it, Metropulos gets misty. It's something she obviously feels deeply about.

"Lips Together, Teeth Apart'' takes place at a beach house on Fire Island, a resort getaway near New York City. Sally and Sam have inherited the place from Sally's brother, David, who has died of AIDS. It's the Fourth of July, and they've invited Sam's sister, Chloe, and her husband, John, to spend their first weekend with them in their new vacation spot. Very quickly we learn that Sally and John have had an affair, that Sally and Sam have been having problems connected to her inability to have a child, that John has cancer, and that Chloe is beginning to crumble under the strain of life with John.

A quick summary misses McNally's humor: "Lips'' is a very funny play. It also presents very complicated technical problems. Music swells onto the set from the offstage houses on either side of Sam and Sally's new place. Very specific music: Mozart, Gluck, Schubert, Ellington, music from Broadway musicals, even some pop stuff. The house must have a working kitchen. The set must also have more than a suggestion of a swimming pool.

All of these problems involve choices. But by the time rehearsals begin with a first read-through on Jan. 22, many of the decisions have been made. There's just this little matter of figuring out what the actors are supposed to do with their lines onstage, and then waiting for the magic to happen.

Right?

Act Two: Say it again, Sam

Rehearsal is not glamorous.

Repeat after me, rehearsal is not glamorous.

To the visitor, it resembles death by a thousand cuts: a sophisticated and cruel torture that lacerates text, actors, director, stage manager.

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival rehearsals take place in a large, high-ceilinged room above the Intermediate and Winningstad theaters of the Performing Arts Center. It's full of banners and sports some large windows, but it hasn't been finished. Several of the walls are bare concrete. Still, it doesn't look like a torture chamber.

The rehearsal setup for "Lips'' is pretty simple: deck chairs and a table, a line marking where the house starts, a makeshift kitchen and two bedrooms. The actors wander around this space, trying to figure out where they are and what comes next.

In front of them is a long table crowded with stuff for the play: two cassette players, Big Red gum, Calistoga water, pencils and pencil-sharpeners, coffee cups, blueprints of the set, masking tape, a phone, variously marked scripts, watches, diagrams, a model of the set, Post-Its. Behind the desk sits stage manager Joanne Fantozzi, who coolly figures out all the cues for the play as she keeps up with Metropulos' instructions to the cast and makes sure everyone keeps to the schedule.

Jerry Montoya, production assistant, supplies props as they are required and prompts the actors when they draw a blank on their lines. He and Fantozzi are quiet and efficient, amazingly attentive and emotionally balanced.

Metropulos sits and watches — and takes notes. Lots of notes. When she sees something she really likes, she expresses approval enthusiastically. When something is going wrong, really wrong, she jumps up and intervenes. She tells the actors what she's seeing, asks them questions ("What are you thinking there?'' or "Why do you think Chloe wants to talk to Sally woman to woman?'') If it seems warranted, she lightly bounces through the physical gestures, demonstrating for the actor.

A Sisyphean task

Late one Friday afternoon, a couple of weeks into the rehearsal period, the actors are going over the end of Act Two. And suddenly it all comes clear: THESE GUYS ARE WORKING ON THIS ALL THE TIME!

It can be snowing, the Blazers can be fooling around in Salt Lake City, the Legislature can be fumbling away our future in Salem, and these seven people will still be up here going over "Lips Together, Teeth Apart'' — again and again, eight hours a day, six, count 'em, six days a week. They finish the final act, and then they start over at the beginning.

During the rehearsal period they will work on a particular scene dozens of times — learning the lines, working out the physical action, then trying to apply what they are learning about their characters to both the lines and the action. The changes seem minute. Gestures are cleaned up. Inflections change. The tempo is increased. An emotion — in this play, anger or sadness — is allowed to dissipate or increase.

Even Metropulos, who is cracking the whip, uses the word obsessive to describe the process.

"It seems to me as a director that you try to answer as many questions as you can,'' she observes. "But you never seem to have enough information. That's why it's such an obsessive kind of thing. You will spend eight hours rehearsing a play, four hours reading it and then go out to coffee and talk about it. You start relating everything to it — even the war in Yugoslavia. As (director) Peter Brooks says, with this one word, ' interest,' we could go very far.''

Later on, in a different context, she adds: "Ever since rehearsals started I've been dreaming about death.''

A tireless director

Throughout the rehearsal period, Metropulos is tireless. She keeps worrying a scene, answering questions (should Chloe put the cover on the grill if she's going to cook hamburgers, how should Sam hand a packet of pictures to Sally, how bleak is John at any particular time).

Instead of groaning under this assault, the actors actually seem to appreciate it. "She's intelligent and she has a lot of energy,'' DeBruno explains. "Actors often take on the mood and energy of the director. She gives you a lot of room. If you try something new, she sees that. You aren't acting in a vacuum up there.''

Alper, who has had to grapple with the ambiguities of Sally for weeks, is just as enthusiastic about Metropulos. "She's my favorite director ever to work with. She's very specific, and she's just dogged at keeping at the work. She has a good eye and she just keeps working. Penny doesn't get tired at draft 30: She goes on to draft 50, if that's what it takes.''

Gradually, the play takes shape. The actors give birth (Metropulos' term) to their characters. The connections between scenes begin to make sense. The "prop hell'' in which Chloe finds herself begins to work itself out. It doesn't happen all at once, and the changes are rarely radical. Slowly, after much effort, the production begins to breathe. No magic. No wriggling worm. One step at a time.

Then it's ripped out of the rehearsal room and plopped onto the stage of the Intermediate Theatre.

Act Three: The real thing

At the tech rehearsals, which start a week before opening night, the actors attempt to translate onto the stage the things they've been doing in the rehearsal hall. At the same time, Metropulos and Fantozzi work with the lighting and sound crew to make sure all the cues are right — that the Gluck comes wafting in at exactly the right moment to shade the action of the play, or the right actor is illuminated during a monologue.

Metropulos is running a marathon. She dashes constantly from stage to production table and back. Talking over a scene quickly, putting her imprimature on a lighting decision, pointing out a propping problem, she seems to be everywhere at once. Fantozzi sticks to the table, earphones connecting her to diverse sound and lighting centers.

Two issues become paramount. Can Chloe deal with all the serving, cooking, cleaning and household chores with the way the house is set up on stage? After a while, it's apparent that she can.

The second issue is starker, and involves the pool. The pool is a rectangle, five inches deep, filled with a ton and a half of water. The question is, how will Geisslinger manage to plunge his head into the water, exhale enough bubbles so that the audience in the balcony can see them, inhale some water, be pulled from the pool and placed on Chloe's lap, and then spit the water in her face? How will he do it tonight? How will he do it night after night?

Cold reality

Geisslinger is visibly nervous about it. When he dangles his feet in the water for the first time, he stops the action abruptly. It's cold. Really cold. Not only is he going to be drenched, he's going to be cold and drenched. The first time he dunks his head, the rest of the actors proceed through their lines at a normal pace. Suddenly, he emerges spluttering from the water, dripping and gasping for air.

"We're going to have to speed this up,'' Metropulos says. She's concerned. Geisslinger had only wanted to have to stick his head under once, because of the chill. Now, it looks like more chlorinated water is in his future.

Into the water again. This time Sam and Sally get him into Chloe's lap, but he hasn't been able to inhale any water. Again. But not enough bubbles. Again.

And finally it works.

Far from wanting to do it only once, Geisslinger is now eager to try new methods to get the right effect. In fact you can't keep him out of the water. He submerges himself continually. He becomes the master of this watery domain.

The next night is dress rehearsal. And Metropulos is still fussing with the sound, the lights, finding the cleanest, most natural way for the actors to find their places onstage. But really, things are looking quite beautiful. Brill's set is a shining thing. Duarte's lighting effects range widely over what is possible, including a reflected fireworks display. Maltby, Metropulos and Fantozzi have figured out the tangled complications of the music and the sound of the ocean. Geisslinger is a porpoise in the pool, and all the actors seem fresher and more polished than they have before. In a moment of exhaustion, Metropulos even manages a confident smile.

Opening night

But it's still a leap from dress rehearsal to last Wednesday's opening night — and the leap is illuminating. In between, the actors have had three previews to tighten things further. For the journalist who has missed the previews, one thing on opening night is shocking: gales of laughter.

The audience finds this grim existential play howlingly funny. It has seemed funny at times throughout rehearsals, especially Carlin's Chloe. But now Sam is getting laughs, big guffaws. Even Sally and John are getting laughs.

During the serious moments — the monologues, when each character muses over his or her circumstances — the audience quiets. After a particularly nasty exchange during which Chloe has been banished for six hours by John, Chloe tells the other three: "I think we are all pathetic.''

And there is applause.

Up to this point the characters haven't been noble, and we recognize that. Then Chloe says, "Sally, will you clean up? We'll have bugs galore. Pussy Galore! Remember her?'' And there's laughter again. The deftly rehearsed bantering onstage is reminiscent of that off-the-cuff ribaldry of five weeks ago, when the cast and crew of "Lips'' first met.

At Wednesday's opening night, the whole evening is a triumph: A funny, complicated contemporary play shines on stage, and has the audience bubbling at intermissions. It's an adult play with adult themes, intelligently written and produced. At the first intermission a woman in the audience says, "This is good,'' and heads for the lobby. At the second intermission, she's revised her opinion. "This is really good,'' she says, and waits for the third act.

The journalist, able to recall when the actors were bumping into things up in the concrete rehearsal room because they had to hold the script in their hands, is frankly amazed.

Nuts and bolts have turned to gold, after all.

This story first appeared in The Oregonian. Publication Date: February 28, 1993 Page: C01 Section: LIVELY ARTS

Weekend Wrap: Elizabeth Leach at 30, Terry Toedtemeier, etc.

2011-08-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

Helen Frankenthaler's Sun Rain

By Barry Johnson

The very first thing I wanted to do this weekend was drop in on the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, which opened 30 full years ago, when, as Elizabeth Leach herself reminded me, we were still young, she and I.

Thirty years in the commercial art gallery business is quite a feat, and Leach celebrated by packing her gallery full of art by some of the bigger name artists she’s represented in Portland over the years. So, for example, Louise Bourgeois, from whose multi-panel piece Leach borrowed the name of the whole celebration, “The Shape of the Problem.”

Many of those big national names come from Bourgeois’ generation. Robert Rauschenberg is represented, along with Mark di Suvero, Sol LeWitt and Helen Frankenthaler, among others. As a group, they all play with the idea of how art communicates, what its essentials really are. I was beguiled by the soft gestures of the Frankenthaler in the show, lines and curves and color in a sea of white space. Certain simple elements, a particular comma of a line or shade of blue, can stop us in our tracks for reasons we can’t fathom, and the Frankenthaler piece did that for me. (A little later, I revisited the effect in a Frankenthaler print at the Augen Gallery.)

Leach has also nurtured local artists, of course, and helped project them into national careers of their own. In the show at her gallery, a set of Melody Owen collages on glass based on “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” may transport your thinking on Lewis Carroll’s great story. And Malia Jensen has created a very realistic bronze fork of a tree, with a white cast cotton paper “pillow” hung between the limbs, another of the surreal, poetic juxtapositions she seems to relish.

“The Shape of the Problem” spills over to the Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art, which is primarily devoted to more regional artists. If you follow the local scene (and I’m not-so-subtly arguing here that you should, if you don’t), the artists are immediately recognizable: Christine Bourdette, Robert Hanson, MK Guth, Chris Rauschenberg, Matt McCormick and many others, some of whose work is more legible in this sort of survey format than others.

Terry Toedtemeier's Rock Cairn

Just down the street from the Elizabeth Leach Gallery, a gallery full of Terry Toedtemeier photographs waited at PDX Contemporary Art. Toedtemeier was the greatest historian of the photography of the Columbia River Gorge (you can see for yourself in “Wild Beauty,” the book he and John Laursen worked on together, right before his death), and also one of its greatest photographers himself. But these photos aren’t from the Gorge. They fit into a wider geography of the American West with a side trip to Maine.

I liked the wit of some of these photographs, especially the one of a little business at the edge of the vast Arizona desert, one with a sign that says “Dinosaur Tracks.” Was the proprietor selling peeks at the tracks? Casts of the tracks? Water to those drawn to this parched place by a savvy ad campaign? I have no idea. And the set of shots from Native American ruins in Chacon Canyon have the same melancholy majesty, to me at least, as Greek or Roman ruins. Most of these images weren’t developed by Toedtemeier (his longtime friend, Phil Bard printed them), though one corner holds four that he printed himself, meticulous but no more so than the ones by Bard. One of those is called “Rock Cairn (shot-up bucket),” with its carefully, even artfully stack of rocks and embedded bucket, riddled with bullet holes. And again, I was asking questions, though the big one was, “Huh?” Toedtemeier liked questions and riddles, and he didn’t mind leaving them unanswered and unexplained.

After leaving PDX Gallery, I walked over to Blue Sky Gallery (celebrating its 35th anniversary as a non-profit photography gallery, and which Toedtemeier helped to start, though Chris Rauschenberg has been its driving force.) Paul D’Amato (another early figure in the history of Blue Sky) was showing portraits of the residents of the Chicago projects, Pilsen and Little Village, big and beautiful images that I found affecting. The empty project grounds behind the subjects are almost as desolate as Toedtemeier’s desert scenes, but the people themselves burn with life and their own private stories.

I jumped next door to Charles A. Hartman Fine Art and landed in a mini-exhibit of modern photography masters. Brett Weston’s desert, I realized, is altogether softer than Toedtemeier’s, practically watery and gestural (like that Frankenthaler!). I’m a fan of Frantisek Drtikol, and he’s represented by a small beautiful portrait of a young woman from early in the 20th century. Garry Winogrand? Andre Kertesz? Photographic gold.

By this time I was almost running through the galleries: I wanted to see more, but I already had seen too much. At the Augen Gallery, the front room was full of a survey of prints by more great 20th century artists — Calder, Picasso, Hockney, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Lawrence, Bearden. And then I paused for a bit longer to take in a new set of Rick Bartow’s transformations at the Froelick Gallery. Bartow’s figures are caught between the human and the animal — coyote, bear, buffalo — smeary, in a state of flux or transition, moving forward and back at the same time.

That was my course on one afternoon. It could have been entirely different: The city has so many galleries now. Friday night I visited some Eastside galleries, and I have several more shows on my list this month. Maybe I’ll see you out there.

NOTE:

This post appeared originally on the Arts and Life page of the Oregon Public Broadcasting site.

Weekend Wrap: The jazz edition with Devin Phillips, Dave Friesen, Ken Ollis

2011-08-01T10:40:00.000-07:00

Devin Phillips

Listen to KMHD for a bit and it becomes apparent that Portland has a thriving jazz scene with lots of clubs, musicians and fans. I make a point of tuning into Lynn Darroch’s Bright Moments show on Friday afternoons, specifically to catch up with what the locals are doing, though several of the DJs make a point of touching home base during their programs.

For some psychic reason, this weekend I decided to catch some live jazz, and I had a ton of choices. I ended up going to hear Devin Phillips’ “Impressions of John Coltrane” show at the Mission Theater, Dave Friesen at the Camellia Lounge and a boundary-pushing trio led by Ken Ollis at the Blue Monk, but I could have gone several completely different routes through the weekend.

Thursday night, Devin Phillips

When Phillips arrived in Portland several years ago, displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, I liked his energy, his spirit and his ability to fit into various sorts of music ensembles, from soul to straight-ahead jazz. Almost from the start, he was something of a star here — a young, talented, good-looking sax player.

Time has changed him for the better, and he now seems to be making that difficult transition from “sax player” to jazz artist. After the show at the Mission Theater, I exchanged emails with Darroch, who had served as emcee, and he said that to his ear, Phillips had developed a “magnificent sound” while he’s been here, and then explained how this is the holy grail for jazz players. (I once asked Pharoah Sanders when he knew he’d discovered his sound; Pharoah said, “I haven’t found it yet.”)

In Phillips case that sound is warm and buttery, and “finding” it, I think, has changed his approach. Instead of the rapid sound assault he unleashed before, now he’s more apt to let those round tones take center stage. And that has simplified his playing, made it more thoughtful, not that he isn’t still capable of a mad cascade of scales.

Applying himself and his quartet to Coltrane songs was a challenge. It’s possible for a musician today to have “Impressions” of Coltrane, but it’s impossible to get much closer, to get inside the volcano, one of the metaphors of choice when it comes to Coltrane. If you can’t reproduce his subterranean creative processes, you really can’t reproduce the rough, elemental quality of Coltrane and his various bands.

Phillips’ take on the famous Coltrane songs — “My Favorite Things,” “Naima,” “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes,” “Impressions” and “A Love Supreme” medley, among others — was slightly introverted, studied, earnest, tuneful and balanced. He took his time establishing the melodies before rushing into his improvisations, and he frequently deferred to his bandmates, especially pianist Ramsey Embick and drummer Alan Jones. Embick’s light, quicksilver solos set the tone: The band wasn’t reproducing Coltrane; it was sketching its own music around him. Jones supplied the explosions and Eric Gruber supplied the grounding on bass.

Dave Friesen, Camellia Lounge

Friday night, I dropped in to the Camellia Lounge behind The TeaZone in the Pearl District to hear the extraordinary bassist Dave Friesen, who has had a long and illustrious career playing alongside the likes of Marian McPartland, Joe Henderson, Chick Corea, Dexter Gordon and Dizzy Gillespie, among others. Personally, I’m partial to his work with guitarist John Stowell.

The Camellia is a small club, and at the start it was barely one-third full, though as time went on it started to fill rapidly as keen-eared young musicians began to fill the seats. Which is just to say that the first set, at least, was pretty informal and experimental. Kansas City guitarist Jerry Hahn sat in with Friesen and sax player Rob Davis (speaking of sound), and between songs Friesen would tip him off on how they intended to approach “My Funny Valentine” or “Black Orpheus” or one of Friesen’s new compositions. And then they were off.

They traded off a lot, especially as Hahn began to warm to the music at hand. That meant we heard a lot of Davis’ forays, complicated figures that still seemed to explain themselves as they moved along and entirely enjoyable. And at the center Friesen’s own solos were intense, full of clever moments, propulsive, muscular, deeply creative.

You could just wander in off the street, pay six bucks and hear this? Amazing.

Ken Ollis, The Blue Monk

On Sunday nights, The Blue Monk on Belmont Street does jazz. (I’ve never been there for the belly-dancing, but now that I know it’s there...) And this particular Sunday Ken Ollis, Dan Gaynor and John Savage were there -- a long way from Coltrane and “Black Orpheus” and into the farther reaches of new composition, where at least some of the exploration concerns what exactly you need to hold a musical expression together. In short, I don’t think I heard a chorus during the set I caught.

That’s not bad necessarily. Sometimes I happen to need something that doesn’t fit into my templates, something fundamentally unpredictable, and Ollis/Gaynor/Savage brought that to the Blue Monk’s basement. Sometimes the action was on Gaynor’s keyboard where first his right hand might construct a figure and then turn it over to the left hand. Savage’s flute runs were happily improbably, often running dissonantly against the grain of the piano. And Ollis, who composed most, if not all, the songs I heard (there was not much commentary from the bandstand and what little there was, was inaudible to those of us in the back), has a protean drumming approach that draws on jazz and rock, though here was in service to something I’d almost label alt-classical, not that labeling is all that important.

This turned out to be exactly what I needed — new ears, a brain re-set, oh, and an Arnold Palmer. It started to get warm down there.

Next Up:

PDX Jazz @ The Mission: Tomasz Stanko (Sept. 22)

Camellia Lounge: 9 p.m. Tuesday, Aug. 2, Jazz Jam with Noah Bernstein & Blake Lyman with Akila Fields, Jim Prescott, Sam Foulger, 9 pm

Blue Monk: 8-11 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 7, Ocular Concern (Andrew Oliver, piano/keyboards; Dan Duval, guitar; Steve Pancerev, drums); first set, all ages; sliding scale, $3-$7

NOTE:

This post appeared originally on the Arts&Life page of Oregon Public Broadcasting.

JAW's second weekend PLUS Todd Haynes on 'Mildred Pierce'

2011-07-25T08:19:00.000-07:00

Todd Haynes on Kate Winslet? Determined!

By Barry Johnson

As promised, here's my OPB-based post on the weekend -- which this weekend meant JAW and Todd Haynes.

Before a staged reading during the second half of the JAW festival of new plays this weekend, Portland Center Stage artistic director Chris Coleman suggested that theater lovers are really story junkies. We crave its ability to relate the tales of human experience so vividly.

I’m not sure that’s true, at least not for me. I found myself anticipating this weekend’s plays not so much for stories as the insights into our human predicament as we wander through the front end of the 21st century. And, maybe more than anything, I liked the buzz so many actors, directors, playwrights and committed theater fans create.

I didn’t get a clear signal from the four playwrights this weekend, no underlying themes or warnings about catastrophes to come. On the other hand I did get two excellent heroines, one autobiographical collision of a playwright and a war zone journalist and one doo-wop serial killer play. In brief:

“Anna Karenina” adapted by Kevin McKeon: Heroine number one was the tragic Anna. When I saw the running time of the play was under three hours, I thought this must be a comic version, like the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s version of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” But no, McKeon, an accomplished novel adaptor, has preserved the essential passion and plot of the play and saved us many days of Tolstoy reading. Perfect!
“Tales From Red Vienna” by David Grimm: Heroine number two is Helena, a widow whose husband has died heroically in World War I. Material resources vanishing, she is reduced to prostitution to survive. This sounds tragic (and it is), but the play is also hilarious, thanks mostly to a wisecracking servant and Grimm’s gift for one-liners and aphorisms, and Helena refuses to become a tragic heroine.
“The Body of an American” by Dan O’Brien: O’Brien exchanged emails with and finally met Pulitzer-winning photographer Paul Watson, and that forms the basis for this play. Watson is most famous for an image of the body of an American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, but that photograph has haunted him since 1993. O’Brien idolizes Watson and his own psychological issues entwine with Watson’s. The pace at which this happens? Breakneck.
“The Huntsmen” by Quincy Long: Long drops some fabulous doo-wop numbers into the middle of his dark comedy, and when Cory Michael Smith as the seriously unhinged teenager Devon breaks into “Some people call me Speedoo, but my real name is Mister Earl,” the audience practically cried out “Wow!” in unison. Think of it as a coming-of-age tale with machetes involved.

All these playwrights have considerable credentials, and these plays are all likely to find their way to the stage of a major regional theater. Portland Center Stage will produce “Anna Karenina” next spring, for example. And all of them seem very close to production-worthy -- sharp, smart, with most of their internal issues resolved.

In addition to Smith as Devon, I should point out Katy Selverstone as Anna, Melinda Paige Hamilton as Helena and Tommy Schrider and Ward Duffy as Dan and Paul for the way they dealt with the demands of their roles. Staged readings are not walks in the park -- in fact, I’d argue that they put more strain on an actor because of the short rehearsal period and the absence of sets, costumes and props. (For more on the second weekend of JAW, you can link to my posts at Oregon Arts Watch.)

Portland film director Todd Haynes and producer Christine Vachon arrived at the Northwest Film Center on Sunday, ready to take questions from fans of Haynes’ HBO series, “Mildred Pierce,” which Vachon produced. And for around 90 minutes they were peppered with them, questions technical (Q: How could you afford so many reflected shots through glass?; A: By working in miniature we saved money on set construction), celebrity oriented (Q: Kate Winslet! A: I liked the physicality, determination and focus she brought to Mildred) and film geeky (Haynes discussed Fassbinder and the great genre films of the 1970s).

I’m already on record with my admiration for Haynes’ “Mildred Pierce.” It’s not a film noir, like Michael Curtiz’s adaptation of the James M. Cain novel, and the textures that result, both in the richness of its depiction of 1930s L.A., and the psychology of the characters seem amazing in contrast. So, it was enlightening to hear him talk about it in person with Vachon.

Arts Dispatch family business: Welcome to the family, Oregon Arts Watch!

2011-07-24T09:41:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Wow! I know I've been gone a LONG time, and I should have explained myself LONG before now.

Mostly, I've been working on a new arts and culture journalism site, Oregon Arts Watch. A lot of other people have been working on it, too. And a couple of weeks ago, we launched a "starter kit" website, while our ace web designer builds a more functional and distinctive site for us. I hope you'll make your way over there. So far, the primary contributors are Brett Campbell, Lisa Radon and I, but more writers are working on stories as we speak.

For starters, we're going to focus on theater, dance, classical music and jazz, and visual arts, though we've already lurched into film and TV. If things work out, we'll deal with almost anything cultural.

The prime driver of Oregon Arts Watch is the observation that journalism (broadly speaking) as a profession is starting to disappear, especially journalism aimed at the cultural life we share together. The struggles of American newspapers and the news departments of radio and television stations is well know. At the same time, we observed that the practices of journalism needed to change, too, that the inquiry at the heart of all good journalism needed to be more open-minded, transparent and rigorous than what it had become. Oregon Arts Watch is a non-profit, and we couldn't in good conscience ask for public support without reforming the way we did business.

What about Arts Dispatch? I'm going to try to keep it going. For starters, I'm going to post the little columns I'm writing for Oregon Public Broadcasting's Arts & Life page here each Monday. Those are little wrap-ups of what I ran into over the weekend. After that, we'll just have to see. Right now, I can imagine a lot of things that I'd want to put into a personal blog that I would NOT want to post on a more general journalism site. The question is time: Getting Oregon Arts Watch started has consumed a lot of that, and I just know that keeping it going will, too. As I said, we'll see.

For those of you who have visited, my deepest thanks. And if I think I can't do a better job of keeping this site operational, I'll let you know, and we'll give it a little vacation!

Symphonies by the numbers

2011-06-23T09:53:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Comparing the financial numbers of symphony orchestras is tedious business. You have to go to GuideStar and look up each symphony's IRS 990 form, scroll through the form and find the right row. Those 990s have lots of good information, but they don't have base musician salaries. For those you need to go to the American Federation of Musicians and the International Guild of Symphony, Opera and Ballet Musicians. It's a pain, especially if you want to be comprehensive. And the 990s are always a couple of years behind -- the 2008/2009 numbers are now available for just about everyone.

I'm happy to report that Drew McManus at his Adaptistration blog has done all that work for you! You can compare and contrast to your heart's content. Want to know how much Michael Tilson-Thomas makes conducting the San Francisco Symphony? It's there ($1,588,816). How much does a fulltime percussionist without tenure or title make at the Boston Symphony? That's there, too ($128,180).

Of course, McManus can't speak to the actual numbers -- just the ones the symphonies reported to the IRS. And remember, this is a slice of data from two years ago. We know that a lot has changed in the symphony world since then. Nonetheless, the numbers are fascinating, if you're trying to make sense of how symphonies operate, though many of them beg for more explanation (for example, severance packages swelled the compensation numbers of some of the music directors).

Below, I've collected a few of McManus's numbers into my own chart. I'm in Portland, so the Oregon Symphony is in my first line. I've compared it to some geographically pertinent orchestras and others that have a similar overall budget.

Symphony Orchestra Salary Comparison/2008/2009

Total
expenditure Music
director Executive
director Base
musician
Oregon
Symphony $14,930,007 $424,000 $240,330 $45,924
Seattle $23,760,741 $785,113 $304,253 $82,250
San Francisco $63,732,771 $1,588,816 $480,989 $124,800
New Jersey $15,171,040 $375,000 $204,427 $39,712
Utah $17,788,364 $323,731 $212,176 $61,828
Indianapolis $35,619,798 $455,856 $281,933 $79,040
Houston $23,550,981 $359,323 $226,732 $75,735

Source: Drew McManus, Adaptistration

It's easy to start drawing conclusions from just the bare numbers. And the numbers are all over the place. For example, both Houston and Indianapolis paid their musicians about the same base salary in 2008-2009, even though the budget at Indianapolis was far larger. Seattle paid its music director more than double what Houston paid, even though their budgets are roughly equal. These are local decisions, even personal decisions, and they are made from different financial circumstances -- total expenditure isn't necessarily a good barometer of the economic condition of an orchestra. Without knowing the specific background and history of those decisions, it's unfair to comment. On the other hand, the numbers do suggest questions and in some cases should require some explanations from the symphony orchestras themselves. By the way, I suspect that Michael Tilson-Thomas is worth every penny.

A negative review: The Voice makes life impossible for its dance critic, Deborah Jowitt

2011-06-11T14:30:00.000-07:00

Deborah Jowitt out at The Village Voice

By Barry Johnson

When I was young and restless and living on the East Coast, I was an avid reader of The Village Voice. I read the political columns closely, because the mainstream press failed to appreciate either the depth of the disaster and folly in Vietnam or the old-boy corruption at home, and the Voice did. And I read the arts writers, Andrew Sarris for film and Robert Christgau for rock, because they understood that the arts of the times weren't a decorative sideshow -- they were at the center of things, reflecting the tumult of the '60s and containing the most savage and telling critiques of American society. I understood that from reading those critics.

I also read the Voice's dance critics. Jill Johnston's columns barely qualified as criticism really. They were bright bursts of a cultural and personal consciousness summoned by dance, more than careful considerations. The shocking and wonderful dance experiments of the time, which questioned and redeployed all of the elements of movement into completely new approaches and concepts, were perfect for Johnston's enthusiasm. Deborah Jowitt was aware of the cultural upheaval around her, but she focused her considerable powers of observation on the dance itself and the artists who made it, finding in their radical experiments a way for us all to engage the world creatively.

This is a column about Jowitt, because she recently resigned from the Voice rather than change her approach to writing about dance. Her editor wanted to her to write more "negative" reviews, and that's not the kind of critic that Jowitt is. She rightly refused to comply, and as a result, the Voice continues its mad dash toward irrelevance. Actually, I suppose it's more of a marathon, this slow unwinding of a once-great newspaper. On the other hand, I'm confident that Jowitt will find interesting projects and places to write in the future. She is a national institution greater than the newspaper she is leaving.

Mostly, I want to talk about this idea of negative versus positive reviews, because it's such a limited way of looking at the arts and ultimately so damaging to everyone who cares about them. Here is how Jowitt's editor, Brian Parks, himself a playwright, explained it in his clumsily written reply to her resignation:

There were virtually no negative reviews. But of course all of us in arts journalism know that every arts field has all sorts of bad or mediocre work going on, many times by established figures and in prominent venues. This work needs to be addressed and challenged by a paper’s critics, just as the good work needs to be saluted. That’s part of a newspaper’s vigorous critical practice, and what The Village Voice does in all the rest of its arts coverage, from the sections I handle, through our film and music sections. The dance reviews have not been doing this.

This is the traditional view of criticism, arch-conservative, formalist criticism. I would say "mainstream criticism," but the New York Times is considerably more progressive. In Parks' view, all art divides into three categories -- good, bad and indifferent. And the Voice arts critic signifies this (and demonstrates a "vigorous critical practice") by sorting the art of New York into these three categories and then writing a "negative" review of the bad work.

But it's a terrible way to think about art. Art doesn't divide neatly into those categories (critics disagree all the time about art and artists), and far worse, the critic who focuses on those distinctions misses just about everything that is at stake in the arts -- what insights it gives us into the world we live and the art form itself, how it fits into the cultural moment and cultural history, what direction it suggests for the future, what it means and how it achieves that meaning. Critical engagement means more than a grim argument "for" or "against" an artwork (of whatever sort). It should be a more creative and speculative inquiry than that.

I prefer a critic who doesn't come to art with a measuring stick in hand, one who arrives with an open, curious and informed mind, one who struggles with the problems the art poses -- technical, philosophical, political -- not to mention the inherent problems of interpretation. The best criticism is only very tangentially positive or negative, and really, the best is always positive, because it takes me somewhere I haven't been, even if it's just a convincing affirmation of opinions I already hold. That's positive in my book.

I hate arrogant criticism, and what Parks proposes is arrogant criticism, Voice of God criticism: This art work goes to Heaven, this art work goes to Hell. Ridiculous. How many times have I changed my mind about an artist or a work of art? Too many times to count. And I don't trust critics who haven't done the same thing, because it means 1) they've stopped thinking, or 2) their brains are addled by terminal confirmation bias. Why do I care where Karol Armitage fits in your personal scheme of Heaven and Hell? I don't care at all.

Ultimately, the critic (and any writer, really) writes something that is useful to me or not -- gives me some information, suggests a connection, takes me on a little trip, makes something abstract come alive, translates some important bit of reality into something another human can understand. And, you know, as I read a publication, I don't divide the arts columns into negative and positive reviews or wonder why Deborah Jowitt isn't more scathing in her assessments of the artists she encounters. Either, she's useful to my purposes or not.

I read one of Jowitt's most recent reviews, just to check in with her. It was about Karol Armitage, the edgy New York choreographer, now a sort of avant-garde icon in dance. It begins with a little reminder about Armitage, who she is and what she's done, through a careful description of a recent concert at the Joyce Theater in New York. Armitage is a major artist, and Jowitt's column treats her that way. But Jowitt does have a problem with Armitage, and it has to do with her use of non-Western dance forms. Here's Jowitt:

What began as commendable artistic adventurousness emerged as a vivid, but disconcertingly superficial appropriation of non-Western traditions.

And then she enters the dance in question, describing and questioning and admitting befuddlement at the same time she admires certain moments in the dance. Is it a "negative" review? No, not really. Nor a "positive" one. And it certainly isn't "indifferent." It's something else -- Jowitt trying to understand something that isn't easy to understand, that troubles her even as it captivates her. It's not exhaustive, this review, but we leave it feeling satisfied. Would we go to see this Armitage concert having read the review? That's a little beside the point. Maybe. Jowitt gave it a fair shake, though, and if we find something in her account that intrigues us, maybe we would.

The fair shake. I don't think Parks understands the fair shake and how important it is. I don't think he (or his overlords) understands how much further than thumbs-up/thumbs-down a review can go. I don't think he gets that his categories are shallow and ultimately useless. He doesn't get that Jowitt's conversation with the New York dance audience goes back several decades, that it's "rigorous" and valuable, that it transcends his small-minded idea of what criticism does.

I hate the high-handedness of Parks' response to Jowitt's resignation. I think he has made himself and his publication small and mean, and he has tainted the entire enterprise of arts journalism in the process, an enterprise I take seriously. That's not how I feel about the Village Voice these days: I don't take it seriously at all.

NOTES

The Voice has been discontented with Jowitt's work for a while. She was nearly fired in 2008.

Alex Ross, the Oregon Symphony and the argument for coherence -- not to mention drama

2011-06-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

Carlos Kalmar, ebullient/Photo: Leah Nash

By Barry Johnson

The triumph of the Oregon Symphony at Carnegie Hall was duly noted by the New York Times (and still somehow created a kerfuffle of sorts), and the New York Times is a very good recommendation indeed. But I was waiting for the full review from Alex Ross at the New Yorker. He'd given a vigorous, positive nod toward Carlos Kalmar and company on his blog, and for me, the author of The Rest Is Noise, is at the top of the classical music reviewing heap.

Just to remove all suspense, Ross called the Oregon Symphony's performance of its "Music for a Time of War" program "one of the most gripping events of the current season." He then proceeded to describe the music and its playing in the poetic phrases that are central to Ross's gift as a reviewer. You know, like "the brutal timpani strokes that open Britten's symphony fell like cannonballs on the hospital ward." And then: "A sense of fragile resolution at the end of the Britten was torn asunder by the scouring dissonances of the Vaughan Williams...." Great stuff.

The primary point Ross made had to do with the thoughtfulness of Kalmar's programming, the way it created drama and a sense of coherence, the power of its concept. He compared this to the usual programming at American symphonies: "The mechanical reshuffling of canonical repertory creates the impression that classical music is all-purpose fabric that can be cut by the yard." (And may I just say that I love the professionally employed metaphor here?) This programming -- one old warhorse, one bright piece for the soloist, one newer but mostly harmless piece -- may serve some of the symphony's constituencies, but maybe isn't the most satisfying for any of them at the end of the day.

Can we connect a symphony's programming and "quality" to attendance (and financial health)? Does a symphony that plays more conceptually exciting programs very well have a better chance at success than one that plugs away at the old format in the old way? I'd love to see some attempt to measure this.

The problem is that you can't conduct a good experiment. We'll never know how much better the San Francisco Symphony does, financially, with master conceptualist Michael Tilson-Thomas at the helm than it would with someone less daring.

Ross doesn't mention the precarious financial state of the American symphony orchestra, so he isn't prescribing deeper connections between the elements of a program, a deeper purpose, as an elixer to cure their money problems. Still, an audience in a heightened state at the symphony has to be a good thing for all concerned. "Such programming forces you to lean in rather than sit back: it demands alertness," Ross writes at the end of the review.

American critics, in my experience, push for more adventurous programming, almost invariably. A critic is a peculiar audience member, though. How many concerts does Ross see in a year? Enough to know that the Oregon Symphony's performance was a highlight of the season in New York City, which is a lot of concerts. For that reason, possibly, music directors ignore the pleas of critics. Plus, they don't want to offend the strict constructionists in the audience, who might take offense if Firebird (the safest possible Stravinsky) appears in the program rather than... I don't know, Strauss? What do the strict constructionists want? Brahms? Well, Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Symphony showed that it's possible to make Brahms part of a convincing new music program (even though the death of Gorecki took the edge off their last program, by denying the symphony they commissioned from him).

But Ross wasn't asking for new music necessarily -- just some coherence, a reason for existing, maybe a little musical drama or enlightenment thrown in to boot. Why? Maybe because anything else amounts to an insult to the audience. It assumes the audience doesn't know better. Maybe it doesn't, but then whose fault is that? To a certain extent, don't symphony orchestras make their own audience? And if that audience doesn't know better, why are symphony orchestras in so much trouble, economically? But our argument is getting circular here.

Commitment: Carlos Kalmar and the Oregon Symphony committed themselves to "Music for a Time of War." They raised the stakes for themselves and for the audience. They demanded attention, the kind of attention that Ross gave them. And here, I think, I'm starting to make a case for fewer, more intense programs, which is a case I've made before. I don't know how it pencils out in the ledger book (speaking metaphorically). But I think it does work for the artists on the stage and the audience. Will that lead to larger audiences, ultimately? Well, lots of other factors come to bear on that problem. Don't we know by this time that pushing one button won't create a healthy future for classical music?

Yeah, I think we know that.

NOTES

Not everyone agreed with my position on fewer, more intense programs. James Bash, for instance, at his Northwest Reverb site. I wish we could have debated the proposition.

You can listen to a recording of the Oregon Symphony's "Music for a Time of War" concert on NPR.

Documentary review: 'How to Die in Oregon' opens the conversation

2011-05-27T10:23:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Last night I watched Portland filmmaker Peter Richardson's How to Die in Oregon on HBO, and that wasn't easy. In the past months, both of my wife's parents have died, her father quite recently, so the anxiety and sadness are very close to the surface. No matter how it goes, you have doubts -- could we have made it easier for them? Which is another way of saying, could we have made it easier on ourselves?

"Easier" here is the tricky word, because honestly we don't know. We don't get to experiment with different ways of dying to find out the one we want. We assume the less pain the better, but when we are attending a loved one who is approaching death, we can't be sure what that means. Not even the doctors can -- how many milligrams of this, how many milligrams of that.

We also assume that the more control we have over the death experience, the better. That's the rationale behind Oregon's 1994 Death With Dignity Act: If you are consciousness and dying, you should be able to choose when you die, have the means prescribed to accomplish your death and do it legally.

Richardson's How to Die in Oregon tells several stories that explore real experiences connected to the Death With Dignity Act, all of which give human depth to the provisions of the law. The central story, though, is that of Cody Curtis, who has terminal cancer. And here, the use of the word easier become ridiculous, because her experience is not easy. It's painful physically (sometimes more than others) and in every other way you can imagine, because she lives with it, with her impending death, consciously all the time.

Cody Curtis, center, with her doctor and husband.

In my favorite part of the movie, Curtis talks about how she is feeling so much better physically than she thought she would -- or had any right to expect, given her cancer -- while she planted flowers near her house. I like to think that the physical activity, the sensation of earth and water and green things in her hand, occupied her attention, deflected her from this persistent awareness of her condition. As this implies, Curtis collaborates deeply with Richardson on this documentary, allowing him access to visits to her doctor, talks with her friends and family, her reflections as she passes through her day. She has friends and family, and she hates to give them up -- and they hate to give her up, too. Her life becomes one long goodbye, bitter and sweet, too.

When her health deteriorates again, she sets a time and date to take her leave. We can hardly believe it. One day, she is teaching her son the recipe for her famous Christmas cookies, and two days later she is gone. So, yes, easier isn't the word, though this choice, her choice, is better to her than letting the cancer play out in her body in front of her family and friends. It's hard to argue, one way or another, which is another rationale of the law: Why should anyone argue with you (or attempt to stop you) when you've decided this is the course you want to take?

The only false note in How to Die in Oregon is the title itself. Very few Oregonians go through the process of the Death With Dignity Act to the end -- 65 in 2010 and 525 total since 1998, according to numbers released by the state's department of health. How do we die in Oregon? That's a very a good question. I started to type, "a lot like everywhere else," but I don't know for sure. It's possible that hospice care is better or more widely available in Oregon because of the Act or for some other cultural reasons. It's possible that Oregon hospitals are more concerned with pain management than most. I'm not sure how Oregon's specific culture deals with issues around the end of life compared to other states or other countries.

Curtis did not want to end her life in pain or unconscious in an intensive care unit as cancer overcame her. She didn't want her death to be financially or emotionally ruinous to her family. These fears, entirely understandable, suggest that the culture still hasn't adapted to changes in medical science and the hyper-capitalism that has come with it. We still haven't figured out, as a culture, what we value at the end of life, though as individuals we may know what we fear. Until we start talking to each other about those values, whatever they may be, the default will be to pass loved ones -- and ourselves -- over to the experts. As much as I appreciate experts, this may be a matter we keep for ourselves.

Death is personal, of course. Personal decisions about it are critically important. It's also social -- we affect the dying, the dying affect us. And anything social becomes legal. In some ways, though, I'm discouraged that the Curtis experience was framed from the outset by the law. In a better world, the culture has figured out ways to make the end of life softer and more affirming for everyone involved, without invoking a specific law.

From what I've read and heard, maybe we are heading in that direction with hospice care, but maybe we have to talk about death a little more to make this passage feel right somehow. I'm pretty sure that I do, anyway. And Richardson's contribution to us, to our culture, is to make this conversation a little easier to have, to help us understand what's at stake, to give us some common experience to discuss. For that, we must thank him.

Classical music links: Detroit reaches out and Philadelphia risks $50 million

2011-05-25T10:23:00.000-07:00

Has Philly risked $50m by filing for bankruptcy? Appears so.

By Barry Johnson

We have made our bed, and now we must sleep in it. I'm cliche-ing about the ongoing situations of two major American symphony orchestra, the Detroit Symphony and the Philadelphia Orchestra, about which we've written at length in the past. Their situations are different -- Detroit is coming back to life after a toxic strike and Philadelphia recently filed for bankruptcy, an action that is still open to interpretation and one that may have repercussions the board hasn't considered.

The Detroit Symphony goes suburban: Although the story doesn't say so, Detroit's striking musicians played a few concerts outside Detroit's city limits -- where the vast majority of Detroit metro population can be found. Continuing to connect to the existing classical music fan base in the suburbs and proselytizing among the uncommitted extends that idea. Another story talks about music director Leonard Slatkin's programming for the 2011-2012 season, which may or may not have an impact on attendance and fundraising (the story assumes it does, I have my doubts), and a few other changes the symphony has in store, lowering some ticket prices 50 percent, for example.

Was the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy a $50 million mistake?: That's the provocative question that Peter Dobrin, the Philadelphia Inquirer's fine music critic asks. It has to do with a $50 million endowment gift in 2003 to the orchestra by the Annenberg Foundation. That gift had a little stipulation: If the orchestra went into bankruptcy, then the foundation could ask for the money back. Complicating matters: Since the death of Leonore Annenberg, The Annenberg Foundation now rarely funds Philadelphia non-profits -- most of its giving occurs in California. In another story, Dobrin suggests that the orchestra's current financial situation is worse than it seems.

A few more related links: One of the key questions -- and maybe it's not even a question -- is whether the Philadelphia Orchestra board is using bankruptcy as a negotiating tactic to get out from under its contracts with its musicians, the pops orchestra and the concert hall in which it plays. The symphony in Louisville attempted to do something similar but the bankruptcy judge ruled it. Drew McManus's Adaptistration blog gets into the issue via a post from conductor Bill Eddins on the blog he keeps, Sticks and Drones.

The Detroit Symphony has lost several musicians during the strike and its aftermath, most recently its concertmaster, Emmanuelle Boisvert, who has played with the orchestra since 1988.

NOTE: ‘How to Die in Oregon’ premieres Thursday on HBO

2011-05-24T12:11:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Portland filmmaker Peter Richardson’s award-winning documentary, How to Die in Oregon, will have its HBO premiere at 8 p.m. Thursday. The film explores Oregon’s 1994 Death With Dignity Act through the stories of several patients with terminal diseases, including Cody Curtis, right center, a liver cancer patient, whose intimate and conflicted feelings about ending her own life are explored in depth. The film won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Here's a clip of Richardson talking about the project.

Dance review: McGinn's 'Gust' felt new and familiar at the same time

2011-05-24T11:29:00.000-07:00

Amanda Morse, Dana Detweiler and Jessica Hightower

By Barry Johnson

Saturday night was BIG in downtown Portland -- traffic was slopping over from the Timbers game, the symphony was in concert, some sort of do was animating the Portland Art Museum, the restaurants looked busy. I was headed for quieter climes, or so I thought, to watch Gust, the debut dance concert of TopShakeDance. But when I got there, the old Pythian Building was hopping, with a prom party on the fifth floor and a wedding on the second -- people were looking GOOD.

Conduit dance studio is on the 4th floor, and dancer/choreographer/TopShakeDance founder Jim McGinn has climbed those steps many times to rehearse with Mary Oslund and Tere Mathern, among others, over the years. He's danced with Oslund's company for 12 years and Mathern's for seven, and that by itself gave a hint of what to expect from McGinn's Gust.

Not that choreographic history is necessarily choreographic destiny, I suppose, but Gust was physically demanding (check), an hour with no intermission (check), abstract (check again), engaged with an equally abstract soundscape (check with an asterisk), ranged from the still to the frenetic (yo), found its expressiveness both in the overall form and structure of the dance and its small gestures (double yo). A description of Mathern or Oslund's work would contain many of the same elements. Which isn't to say McGinn's Gust is derivative of their dances, just in the same family.

Remember the asterisk on the soundscape? Remember the prom party and wedding? Remember "old" Pythian Building? Yeah, the sound of American pop music was bleeding into and throbbing under and above the studio throughout the concert. That's too bad, because the soundscape, composed from field recordings of wind that Loren Chasse has gathered all over the globe, was a key signifier in the dance, which I was able to gather from the few moments that I could hear it clearly.

Gust, yes, as in wind. In the program McGinn talked about growing up in windswept New Mexico: "While riding my bicycle at high speed from hilltops and through valleys I learned to ride the wind by conforming to its changing forces, turn by turn." The dance started with the dancers (McGinn, Dana Detweiler, Chase Hamilton, Jessica Hightower, Pamela James and Amanda Morse) lying in the semi-dark, very still but occasionally shuffling a little or raising an arm, adapting, I thought, to the wind in the soundscape. The floor work in this opening section gradually became more complex and soon the dancers were upright and ripping through some strenuous movement, led by McGinn -- strong, fast and aggressive.

McGinn kept the tempo changing, though, and soon we were in a slo-mo section, the dancers stretching on one leg, before things started speeding up again, spinning with broken arabesques, solo and in unison bits, gradually becoming fast and even convulsive.

This is hard to picture, I know: six dancers in motion, movement often led by the shoulders (like Oslund) and accelerated by deep bends at the knees, ready to tumble into -- almost anything. Occasionally, it all looked a little Tai Chi-like, but a series of stiff postures and spasms of motion displaced that comparison quickly. And I think it was all heading to a solo by McGinn, about two-thirds through the dance, acrobatic, smooth and tumbling, then still and erect and falling, covering big space, ending on his knees arms cracked at the elbow and raised, maybe in supplication, head lifted to the sky.

The great thing about watching the choreography of someone you know mostly as a dancer is that you think you are seeing how his (or her) body really wants to move, after bending itself to someone else's demands for so long. That's what I thought as I watched McGinn's solo: This is what his body has wanted to do all those years! Which is probably completely wrong, but somehow seemed right at the moment, right and satisfying.

Soon after, the dancers assumed positions very similar to how they began the dance -- lying on the floor, changing minutely as the wind blew. I thought things were over, but a few more episodes remained, an unintentional postscript for me. Hey, it happens. It gives me time to mention one of the recurring motifs I liked in Gust -- the way the dancers would casually walk over to an area of the stage where a solo or duet was occurring and watch the duet unfold. I don't know why, but it just seemed right, and then they'd be there on hand to take the choreography in a different direction when the duet was over.

One of the satisfactions of watching an art form in the same place over a number of years is that you get to see a dancer or an actor or a painter or a musician develop before your very eyes. That has happened for me with McGinn, a transformation, the creation of an artist, and all I can really do is applaud in the audience and tip my hat here. Which is what I'm doing... right now.

NOTES

Gust continues at 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, May 26-28, at Conduit, 918 S.W. Yamhill St., fourth floor. Tickets: $12-$25; topshakedance.eventbrite.com or 503-221-5857

Here is Bob Hicks' sensitive review for The Oregonian: "'Gust' is a quick, fluid, intensely musical dance, focused on a single idea yet varied enough in its movements to hold the audience's interest for an hour. In fact, one of its greatest charms is that it's aware of its audience's needs: Without ever pandering, it entertains."

Jim McGinn figured prominently in my review of Oslund's Bete Perdue in 2008.

I didn't say much specific about McGinn's dancers in TopShakeDance, though I could have said many nice things. The hard thing with the choreography is making each second really count, really say something, and I thought the company worked hard at that. They also mirrored McGinn's muscular approach to movement.

Theater review: 'Splat' says it all at Imago

2011-05-23T11:29:00.000-07:00

Danielle Vermette in Splat at Imago/Photo: Sumi Wu

By Barry Johnson

"Splat" is a perfect Carol Triffle word, a cartoon word, what happens when Wily Coyote runs seven invisible steps past the cliff edge, tumbles like a shot into the abyss and flattens himself on the canyon floor. Splat!!! It's visceral and funny, but also matter-of-fact, maybe even a little macabre.

Triffle's new show at Imago is called "Splat," which is why I bring it up, and the play fits the word. It's one-part horror movie, one-part demented musical and one-part situation comedy with a little burlesque slapstick thrown in for good measure. It has a body in the basement (though sometimes you can't keep a good man down), a heist, Dumb and Dumber, a femme fatale, a double-cross or two and a professional Cleaner who allegedly knows how to dispose of a body (like the one in the basement). All that in something around an hour without an intermission!

As the improbable events of "Splat" unfolded (they are so improbable that characters breaking suddenly into song and dance don't seem unreasonable at all), I wondered how "accessible" it would all be to an audience unacquainted with Triffle's work in this vein. Would Danielle Vermette's come hither looks and awkward tumbles on the couch seem as funny to them as they do for me, a veteran of such past Triffle/Vermette episodes as Simple People and The Dinner and Backs Like That? Or would it seem about half-past silly?

Which, by the way, it is -- they wouldn't be wrong. But something else is going on, too, in the little parallel universe that Triffle has imagined, something about vulnerability and the fear of being tricked, the fear of missing out, the fear of being alone. Also the fear of a hand coming off, but that's something else again.

You never know what's coming next in Triffle's world, except maybe that none of the characters is going to be "improved" by his or her experience. That's one of the pleasures -- forget the stories and psychology you know; they won't come in handy. The other pleasure is the acting company, which animates these characters, especially Vermette, whose moment-by-moment "fluctuations" are delicious. And, of course, Jerry Mouawad, as the Cleaner, who manages to manifest both "bombast" and "defeat" without losing his elasticity as a character.

Elasticity -- that's another lesson we might derive from Triffle, our capacity, like Wily Coyote, to go splat and still go on, emotionally and physically. Splat isn't something to fear, it's just something that happens.

NOTES

1. Carol Triffle's take on my take of The Dinner explains a lot.

2. So does her interview with Jerry Mouawad on the Imago blog, where she says, "This show is like watching old movies and TV shows. It has a little of sit-com, Jerry Lewis, the Honeymooners, Film Noir and Westerns." Jerry Lewis would be a great Imago actor -- and most of the great comedians from the Silent Era.

3. Katie Griesar's music is integral to the effects of Splat. I've also written about her and her music.

4. Here's Marty Hughley's review of the play for The Oregonian.

5. If you want to see for yourself, the show continues at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, through June 4 at Imago, 17 SE 8th Ave. Tickets are $8.

Designspeaks: The Felt Hat argues for design as a liberal art

2011-05-22T14:27:00.000-07:00

A Felt Hat design studio project

By Barry Johnson

Sometimes we know exactly what we want, and if we're lucky, we know exactly what process we should follow to get it. The more closely we follow the recipe, the more likely we are to pull perfect muffins out of the oven.

But when we are trying to generate creative outcomes, we have to start messing around with the process. A creative process often generates a creative outcome, we know, but we're less certain about how useful that outcome will be to our purpose (though presumably we know that an outcome that we're sure of won't work, either).

This line of thinking occurred to me during the Designspeaks presentation Thursday night by The Felt Hat design studio, specifically Don Rood and Nicole Misiti (Paul Mort was the silent partner in the front row). Several years ago The Felt Hat was in a funk, Rood told us. The studio was doing fine financially, no small feat, but that success was built on its work on corporate reports. Increasingly, that felt like a creative dead end to Rood and his partners Misiti and Mort.

When in doubt, do some traveling! Off they went, at Misiti's suggestion, to The Netherlands, a designers utopia of sorts, and after a month touring around and talking, they came back to Portland determined to do it differently. Step one: Take a deep breath and drop the corporate report design business. And replace it with what? With a process. As Rood said at the end of the evening, and I paraphrase, If all we are doing is making brands cool, we are underachieving.

At the start of the talk, Rood (the designated explainer, most of the evening) established The Felt Hat's primary guiding principles.

Design is a liberal art not an applied art. That was number one, and The Felt Hat takes it seriously, employing anthropological techniques (interviewing, observation) and doing lots of historical research as a key ingredient in its process.
Creativity is a natural resource. I took that to mean that the creativity of other people outside the project is important, but unlike a forest, say, it is renewable and even multiplies itself as it's tapped.
We never work with someone we don't want to have a meal with. That one came with several corollaries: "clients are never the enemy"; never do a project for the money; the client should be a committed collaborator; work with senior management because they likely will get the larger visionary consequences of the project.

Rood and Misiti then went through three key projects for The Felt Hat. One involved designing a new bill for PacificiCorp, a seemingly mundane assignment that ultimately helped the company achieve a new transparency with its customers and established The Felt Hat as a temporary hub for information from the company's various departments. Maybe that adds a new principle: There are no small jobs.

The next was a project for Star of India tea, which really tapped into principle one and two -- the firm used Indian designers, craftspeople, artists and producers for a wide range of packaging and display products, work that instantly and authentically read "Indian," which was the whole point. The firm learned that "tea is about time and relationships," and they deployed that bit wisdom in a multitude of ways.

Finally, the firm worked with client Sarah Miller Meigs on the Lumber Room, the home of a series of artist residencies and occasional public exhibitions. Misiti talked about research into timber practices of the past and how she used that research to design furniture, lighting and fabrics for the space, and how important Meigs was as a collaborator on the project.

A few more thoughts from Rood:

The work is more conceptual and stylistic, meaning that The Felt Hat's work isn't immediately identifiable as The Felt Hat work. Great craft is a baseline, but the concept lifts it into something special.
A joke: Q: How many designers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Does it have to be a light bulb?
"Design thinking is about one thing: The integrity of the idea." Which often puts it in conflict with political thinking, which involves compromise whether it damages the idea or not.

Design thinking, design process -- it's a matter of how far afield you are willing to go, how far you are willing to push the process, how willing you are to throw a lot of balls in the air and ... hope. "We re-invent ourselves all the time," Rood said, and that gives you some idea of where Felt Hat stands on the matter.

Of course, outcomes are important. (The ones The Felt Hat showed were beautiful -- by which I simply mean appropriate, ingenious and elegant.) And maybe that's why process and product aren't necessarily polar; they mingle. We want a creative solution to be a "correct" solution, too, after all. But I think I understand what The Felt Hat is driving at -- the more open-ended and open-minded your process is, the better chance you have of locating a correct solution in the research, especially if the problem is complex.

And those smooth general words conceal a complicated tangle of ideas pursued, discarded and embraced.

NOTES

1. Designspeaks provides a forum for designers and design issues. Once a program of AIGA/Portland, it is now an independent non-profit, directed by Eric Hillerns, though still connected to AIGA. I have been helping out Mr. Hillerns by serving on a Designspeaks organizing committee, which also includes Don Rood.

2. For more on the Lumber Room, here's Jeff Jahn's take for PORT on a recent exhibit curated by Storm Tharp. Here's a Randy Gragg preview of the same show for CulturePhile.

3. Ruud said that the name of the studio honors German artist Joseph Beuys, for whom the material had autobiographical significance.

Maintaining the Oregon Symphony: Is that such a bad thing?

2011-05-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Sometimes the brain creates a little lull for itself before it pushes "publish" on a series of thoughts it has doubts about. During that lull, it can weigh the consequences and measure the doubts. My lull on a little matter that involves the response of the New York Times critic to the Oregon Symphony's Carnegie Hall concert is about over. Here goes.

Followers of the symphony already know what I'm going to talk about -- the word "maintained." But really, I want to speculate about musical memory and the power of narrative, and maybe let Kozinn off the hook a little bit.

For those catching up, the Times critic Allan Kozinn wrote a very favorable account of the Oregon Symphony's recent visit to New York. In that account he wrote the following sentences:

"The orchestra was formed in 1896, and its international reputation has grown since 1987, when it began recording big, opulent works and sonic (sic) spectacular CDs for the Delos label. Many of these discs, conducted by James DePreist, the orchestra’s music director at the time (and now emeritus), remain in print and show the ensemble to be a highly polished precision instrument. Since 2003 it has been directed by Carlos Kalmar, a Uruguayan conductor who has maintained it admirably."

And the symphony's principal violist, Charles Noble, who writes a very useful blog, responded this way:

"However, to say that the orchestra was simply “maintained” at a certain level by Carlos Kalmar for eight years until our concert two nights ago is not only naive, it is laughable."

Noble then goes on to explain how much better the symphony has gotten since he arrived in 1995 as Kalmar pushed them toward his particular musical vision. Kozinn responded to Noble's criticism of his criticism, by saying that 1) "maintained" wasn't an insult, 2) that those Delos recordings are "very impressive," and 3) they are the only way a New York-based critic would have to judge the Oregon Symphony during DePreist's years.

In short, Kozinn was reasonable. I remember listening to the 1992 Delos recording of the Oregon Symphony playing Sibelius (Symphony No. 7), and it was quite beautiful and precise to my ear. Or that's what I remember, anyway, because just now when I looked for the CD, I couldn't find it. All I had were the words I'd used to label it then and smudges of that symphony, "polluted" by other encounters with the music. Back then, I remember "us" thinking (and here, "us" meant my colleague at The Oregonian, music critic David Stabler) that DePreist and the orchestra were great on music from the Romantic era, the more sweeping, the better. But we're talking about the 1980s and early '90s, and without consulting recordings, I just have those dry husks, those words, left from that time.

I suspect that trained musicians have better memories for the way things sounded. On the other hand, though, they listen to and play far more music than I do. So, I have some skepticism about anyone's recall of how something specific sounded that long ago. We know he or she is in a subjective position anyway, right? In the middle of the orchestra or sitting in the first balcony? That their meal before the concert might have disagreed with them or that they suddenly had a panic about whether they'd turned off the stove? And maybe their musical ideas and values have changed subsequently? I certainly hope so.

How did the "old" Oregon Symphony sound? My suspicion is that during the last few years of James DePreist's tenure, things started to deteriorate some -- rehearsals weren't so rigorous, maybe, and tough personnel decisions were tabled for the new music director to make. That makes sense to me as an explanation, but my sonic memory of music made in the late 1990s and early 2000s simply doesn't exist to verify it. How about before that?

I have a memory of "us" (this time Stabler's predecessor as music critic, Robert Lindstrom) thinking how much better the symphony sounded under DePreist than it had under his predecessor, even after the jump from Civic Auditorium (now Keller Auditorium) to the acoustically challenged Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. And we had a plausible account for it -- DePreist's musical charisma and the fact that he was working with a full-time orchestra, instead of part-timers. Again, the account remains with me, but not the music.

So, I understand the importance of establishing the Kalmar Narrative for Noble (and Stabler) not to mention the symphony itself. We want to think that things are getting better, that hard work is paying off. I find Noble's account of things, especially the practice of the string section in which he sits, quite persuasive in this way. And I'm even willing to defer to his musical "memory" when he says the orchestra sounds better now than it did when he arrived in 1995, though implicit in my deference would be, "to him." But that's difficult to demonstrate, isn't it? We need to capture the experience with words, because the experience itself, which is very unruly for the rational mind to begin with, starts to leak away almost immediately.

Maybe the problem is simply "better." How can we possible evaluate the performance of each of the members of an orchestra during a performance in such a way that we could compare it to the performances of a different set of musicians? "The principal violist was 3 percent better" -- it just doesn't make sense. Even with recordings, unless one of the versions is truly awful, usually we are choosing between accounts according to our own subjective preferences. We like the "saturated" sound of Philadelphia better than the precision of London, or then again, maybe Philadelphia sounds mushy to us.

Ultimately, we are counting on our symphony orchestra to give us an account that conveys much of what makes a particular composition important -- to the conductor, the musicians, the audience, musical history. And frankly, in that, there's quite a bit of latitude. What I like about Kalmar is his seriousness of purpose and his enthusiasm for the music he conducts. He helps to pull me along, even when I'm not so very interested in a particular piece of music myself. And you know what? I'd say exactly the same thing about James DePreist.

Maybe that drops me into Kozinn's camp, at least this far: Kalmar has restored the sense of excitement of DePreist's best years at the symphony, which were the years of most of the Delos recordings that Kozinn remembers (and maybe listened to before he took in the symphony at Carnegie Hall).

Personally, Kalmar's tastes are closer to my own than DePreist's were, at least what I took to be their preferences. I like the Classical period and I like 20th (and 21st) century work, and Kalmar seems to lean in that direction. On the other hand, I loved to listen to DePreist talk, loved his presence, loved how he persevered here during some of our toughest times, economically and culturally. Both have made the Oregon Symphony a credible musical force, capable of delivering musical value over a range of compositions. So, "maintained" isn't such a bad word.

Like any word, though, it smooths and erases actual experience. Noble's narrative is an important one for us to consider when we listen to the symphony now -- we can compare its sound to his words profitably, I think. But his words smooth and erase experience, too, even though he's writing from the inside. Maybe even more because he's writing from the inside, because his view is going to be shaped by all the things that limit and color our accounts of our own workplaces.

And now that I've expressed my sympathy for Kozinn, Noble's description of his use of "maintain" as "naive and laughable," often fighting words for journalists and critics, can be applied to me, I suppose. They aren't fighting words for me, though, just business as usual in this particular game.

Today, the New York Times ran an account by Peter G. Davis about Gustav Mahler's time in New York. Mahler died in Vienna 100 years ago today, after spending most of his last three years in New York, where he first conducted the Metropolitan Opera (only to be replaced by Toscanini) and then the New York Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Davis makes sense of Mahler, his painstaking approach to rehearsals (15 for Mozart's Don Giovanni, for example) leading to the rapturous response of critics and audiences to his concerts and operas.

And I'm wondering about "better," again, not so much as an objective "fact" and more like "something that fills my cup of needs to the brim and then runneth over." Art at its better and its best is more a matter of this plenitude than an account of practice schedules and wind sections, a plenitude that we register individually and in the company of each other.

I think when Kozinn calls the symphony's performance "fantastic" (as he did in the comment section of Noble's blog) he means that it supplied that plenitude. And when he uses the word "maintains," he suggests that Oregon Symphony created a similar effect in the past. I do remember that -- the feeling of abundance -- with both eras of the orchestra. And I suppose at the end of the day I'm happy with that.

Monday links: Oregon Symphony, Hollywood in decline, National Jukebox

2011-05-16T10:08:00.000-07:00

Oregon Symphony plays Carnegie/Photo:NPR Melanie Burford

By Barry Johnson

Playing some catch-up on arts news with occasional local implications.

Oregon Symphony Triumphant!: The great New Yorker critic Alex Ross gave us a quick take on how our symphony performed at Carnegie Hall last week -- and he was pretty darn happy. I'm listening to it online as I type, and I'm pretty darn happy, too!

The Great 2011 Hollywood Box-Office Crash: I saw Thor yesterday, convinced by some "interesting" movie reviews and Kenneth Branagh's participation as director that it might be worth seeing. I even saw it in 3-D. And having seen it, this headline came as absolutely no surprise. (By the way, I prefer the old View-Master 3-D technology to modern film 3-D...)

The National Jukebox Gets 1 Million Pageviews in Week 1: Not to mention 250k downloads: Hey, free music! Kudos to Sony for allowing the Library of Congress to use its pre-1925 Victor catalog this way. That's the Paul Whiteman Orchestra above, playing Doo wacka do.

Theater review: Deep in the words with CoHo's 'reasons to be pretty'

2011-05-15T14:31:00.000-07:00

Nikki Weaver and Casey McFeron/Photo: Gretchen Corbett

By Barry Johnson

Neil LaBute's reasons to be pretty starts with one of those ominous arguments that couples sometimes have, an angry chainsaw of f-bombs and accusations that you just know is going to leave a stump where a relationship once stood.

In the CoHo production, which opened Friday, Nikki Weaver as Stephanie is doing most of the sawing, most of it offstage, ripping into her boyfriend Greg, played by Casey McFeron, who has said something, um, indiscreet, though we never know exactly what. We do know that it has to do with Stephanie's looks, at least that's what her best friend Carli says she overheard, and from what we're able to piece together from the fight, we suspect that Greg may well be guilty as charged.

Yes, Greg has said something about Stephanie and her looks. Maybe that she's not as pretty as a new woman at work. Or maybe that she's plain looking in comparison. Surely, he didn't say she was ugly, did he? I don't think so. He was talking to Carli's husband and his best friend Kent about that fetching new employee at the warehouse where Carli, Kent and Greg work, a young woman Kent has begun to obsess about, and maybe something untoward slipped out of Greg's mouth in the general enthusiasm for her delicate features. Well, something did slip out or Carli wouldn't have called Stephanie to tell her about it.

Two things occurred to me. The first was to consider what we can say about another person, someone close to us, that is truly unforgivable, words that defy abject apologies, flowers and promises of better behavior in the future. The second was to wonder how responsible we really are for the words that escape our lips, because we all say things we don't really mean. Our brains just spit out stuff sometimes, and surely we deserve a pass on some of it. Right?

Except this isn't a court of law or a formal debate, and Stephanie will never forget what Greg said, no matter how deeply he loves her, though actually, that's a question, the real question of the play: How deeply can someone as feckless and unformed and directionless as Greg really love someone?

Not that Greg is a bad guy. McFeron (and director Gretchen Corbett and playwright LaBute) makes him likable enough -- funny, self-deprecating, accommodating, even well read. You know a playwright likes a character when he has him reading Poe, Hawthorne, Swift and Washington Irving all play long. And Kent is so much worse. As the play evolves we start to understand that he isn't just a silly harmless "guy" and so does Greg, who has plenty of time to think now that his relationship with Stephanie has been clearcut.

Pretty soon we arrive at the play's next little dilemma. In addition to saying things that we don't mean (which most of us, I think, would consider unfortunate though understandable), we also lie. Would we lie to protect a friend even though the friend is doing something we think is wrong? Would we lie to the person who ratted us out to our girlfriend? In short, at what point are we responsible for the truth of what we say? And on this question, Greg begins to "dig in" -- a phrase of my grandfather's, advice that simply meant to stop the drifting, advice that we've all heard from various quarters at various times.

A few words about the production, which I found balanced and probing, under Corbett's direction.

I really liked McFeron's silences, his deliberation, the way he wavered and then became resolved. His scenes with Weaver start out so angry and then move to sadness and acceptance, not to sound too Kubler-Ross about it. Weaver is headed in the same direction, and we feel a certain twinge as we watch this passage they make, together yet apart. At first, I thought Weaver was entirely too "pretty" to play Stephanie, but then this whole matter of prettiness dissolved in the deeper currents of the play as prettiness so often does, and Weaver understands those deeper currents, contradictory and melancholy though they may be.

The scenes between Tallent's Carli and McFeron's Greg track their development even more clearly than those between Stephanie and Greg. Carli's course is even bumpier than Stephanie and Greg's, when it comes down to it, and like them she becomes more likable as the play goes on. The same can't be said of Kent, whose case of arrested development seems terminal. San Nicolas's sketch of him plays up his boyish enthusiasms, his dude-ness, as long as possible, and then suffers as the self-centeredness of that approach describes a target for his comeuppance(s).

At that first brutal argument, I recoiled a bit, thinking I was in store for another grim LaBute foray into human ugliness, like In the Company of Men, Your Friends and Neighbors and The Shape of Things. LaBute has undermined the cliches of relationships (as trees for example!) by making them awful and violent. But reasons to be pretty is a suggestion that lives, however badly begun, can be righted, forests can be spared. Does this take us into back into the land of the cliche? Maybe it depends on the acting...

NOTES:

Ben Brantley's 2008 review of the play in the New York Times is glowing, and so is the 2010 Peter Marks review in the Washington Post.

This play is the final installment of LaBute's "body" trilogy (The Shape of Things, Fat Pig), though the issue of physical beauty didn't register with me so strongly as other matters. A New York Times preview article goes into the issue a bit more.

Marty Hughley previewed this production for The Oregonian. Here's director Corbett on Nikki Weaver and the physical beauty issue: "How Nikki looks is irrelevant to me," she says. "I don't think it's about objective reality. It's about what kind of people we are. Don't we find our partners beautiful? And if we don't, what the hell is wrong with us?" Good question!

Democracy, Osama bin Laden and the power of stories

2011-05-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

Revenge Narratives need good heroes.

By Barry Johnson

A post here last week suggested that the events surrounding the death of Osama bin Laden conformed to those of a Hollywood Revenge Narrative -- the villain does something unspeakably evil, the hero doggedly tracks the villain to his lair where the villain plots even more unspeakably evil acts, and in a final battle, the hero defeats the villain and saves mankind (or his daughter). Mostly, the post meditated on how such a reduction, such a simple moralistic tale, blinds us to reality, not to mention more effective courses of action.

I was thinking of this reduction as the sort of thing that governments do as part of their PR campaigns and that news agencies employ because of how easily the stories connect to their audiences. I didn't imagine that the Bush Administration actually believed the narrative they spun. Surely, they understood that the real story of bin Laden was more complex than they let on and had a more pragmatic eye on the geo-political consequences of their actions than a Hollywood hero obsessively seeking out his prey, regardless of the bullets whizzing by his ear.

Kurt Andersen in New York magazine was thinking about the narrative of Osama bin Laden along similar lines:

But still, as a narrative, it was an over-the-top one-day conclusion to what had started as a whacked-out, over-the-top potboiler and had then turned into a different fictional genre, modern and artier, like the TV series and movies that riveted us during the decade Osama went missing, fictions that seemed realistic and great because they were dark and unsettling, without the bad guys necessarily getting their just deserts: The Sopranos, The Wire, The Dark Knight, No Country for Old Men. Finally, shockingly, the bin Laden story snapped back into familiar, tidy, old-fashioned storytelling mode à la James Bond and 24.

Andersen goes one step farther, though. He thinks the Revenge Narrative took over the thinking of the Bush Administration, and not just its selling of its policies and actions. "And I don’t think it’s crazy to think that those pop-cultural archetypes not only frame the public understanding of the events but actually shaped the events themselves." He notes that President Obama understands the power of stories and perhaps even considered becoming a novelist himself.

"The stories we tell and retell—fictional, nonfictional, hybrids of the two—really do inform important choices we make," Andersen writes. "They matter."

Now, Andersen is speculating here. He doesn't have any particular evidence to support the idea that President Bush and then President Obama unconsciously slipped into the Revenge Narrative (my term, not Andersen's) because it's such an archetype. But no one connected to the business of communication, the Persuasive Arts, would argue against his proposition.

Somehow, we seem hard-wired to make narratives out of our experience AND to project ourselves into the narratives of others, especially if they are skillfully told -- by a storyteller at the campfire or by a Hollywood blockbuster. And why not? A good story gives us psychological insight, a sense of the lay of the physical land, a larger social context, an underlying moral ground and maybe a practical lesson or two.

I think we distrust stories, too, maybe because we know how susceptible we are to them. We look for evidence to verify or disprove them because we know a good story can be a lie. But studies have shown that sometimes a story is so powerful for us that we ignore clear evidence against it. The Birther Phenomenon is like that. We don't want to go poking around some stories because so much of our view of the world is tied up in them.

Democracy is problematic because of the power of false stories. They lead us astray -- to a war in Iraq, for example. But no other system allows the systematic testing of stories, either. A proper democracy is a testing ground of information and stories -- at least as far as public policy is concerned. That's why democracy needs to be protected from private interests with the massive amounts of money it takes to to construct and repeat a particular story until more than 50 percent of us believe it's true.
That isn't democracy; it's something else.

Are all stories "false"? All stories leave out information, some of it pertinent. In a proper democracy we are always re-telling stories to make them better, to make them more accurate, to give us a better idea about what to do next. We tell stories to figure out what to do next. A "true" story is simply the best one we can tell given the evidence before us. Unfortunately, sometimes the most effective story isn't true at all ("Osama bin Laden is living in a cave") and the voices of those who say otherwise (Iraq has nothing to do with Bin Laden) are drowned out, even considered seditious. Which is why dissent is protected in a democracy -- sometimes it contains the seeds of a better, truer story.

When we went into Revenge Narrative mode, we started backing away from our commitment to a free, open, democratic society. My hope is that the death of the Villain will allow us to recommit to our principles. My fear is that another Villain will take his place.

How can we interpret the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy filing?

2011-05-11T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Kimmel Center, home of the Philadelphia Orchestra

By Barry Johnson

Just as the Detroit Symphony strike did last fall, the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy filing last month presents thorny problems for its interpreters. (Unless they come fully equipped with a simplistic ideological response to such problems -- I'm thinking of the anti-labor reflex of the Wall Street Journal's Terry Teachout here.)

In an earlier post, I complained about the lack of transparency by the board of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Without much better financial information, the argument for bankruptcy was almost impossible to judge.

We don't have tables of year-to-year attendance, revenue and expense figures, a reliable narrative of major initiatives (administrative and artistic), demographic data for the orchestra and the city, survey results from subscribers and donors, a good picture of the overall classical music "ecology" in Philadelphia and how the Philadelphia Orchestra participates within it, or a solid general sense of how Philadelphia Metro feels about its world-class orchestra and its appetite for funding it. All of these are important to know, both to understand the immediate situation and how the orchestra landed there.

At this point, following Peter Dobrin's analysis this Sunday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, I'm convinced that the bankruptcy is a screen behind which the board and orchestra management hope to re-make the orchestra and its current financial structure. Orchestra consultant Drew McManus agrees in his own probing analysis of Dobrin's article.

From my many posts on the Detroit Symphony, you know that I oppose this top-down approach because it alienates so many individuals and segments in the orchestra's community. The popular word today for those individuals and segments is "stakeholders," but I like the word community, because it points us in the right direction for possible solutions -- community organizing and community building -- to the underlying problems that orchestras face nationwide.

Before we go further, one important point must be made: The Great Recession of 2008 lingers with us still. I'm starting to think it may be the new reality, but if a real broad-based recovery ever occurs, then that will improve some of the immediate conditions -- depressed revenues -- that orchestras face. On the other hand, lots of orchestras, especially smaller ones but also Top 10 symphonies, faced chronic declines in attendance and revenue even before the Recession.

So, what are some of the explanations for this general decline?

1. Classical music is a dying form and nothing will save it. Antidote: Save your breath.

2. The classical music establishment has fiddled while the culture veered in new directions that don't value "old timey" classical music anymore, especially among the younger elements of the culture. Antidote: more emphasis on new music in new venues. (Greg Sandow)

3. Orchestra management hasn't been transparent or accountable enough. Antidote: Most symphonies are working on their biggest problems, with varying degrees of success, and applying best practices as they emerge will solve those problems -- as long as the stakeholders are accountable to and supportive of each other. (Drew McManus)

4. It's all the fault of greedy unions, who refuse to adapt to the times. Antidote: bust the unions. (Terry Teachout)

I'm not sympathetic to #1, though it suggests a point I myself have made: It's possible that classical music (and other art forms that require lots of trained artists) can't survive in the marketplace of the present. It's too hard to commodify and to tame for use for other commodities. That marketplace has driven it to the periphery of the culture (or rather, "ignored it to the periphery of the culture"). If it's going to survive, ultimately, classical music will need the support of the community as a whole -- from democratic governments -- in the form of much larger financial subsidies. Though unthinkable in the U.S. at this moment, other democracies have followed that course.

Sandow's ongoing discussion of how to make classical music part of the lives of younger people is an important one -- it addresses the "bad" demographics that symphonies face. And he champions the "natural" outreach efforts of small clubs around the country that mingle new classical-based music with other forms of music, such as jazz and indie rock, and performance. My reading of Sandow is that he believes that orchestras need to figure out how to get involved in this process, too, though the financial effects may be small at the beginning.

I am always a little suspicious of "technocratic" solutions to big problems, because they so often are imposed solutions. Imposed solutions generate opposition even when they work. McManus, though, has such a wide view of orchestra management that he avoids this. I recommend taking a look at his TED presentation on labor/management problems at symphonies and his analysis of Dobrin's article, for starters, and then adding his Adaptistration blog to your list of favorites.

McManus has the advantage of looking at the specifics of individual cases. So, following and adding to Dobrin, he recounts a series of management decisions by the orchestra that failed in one way or another. Management has never "owned" these decisions -- meaning simply that they haven't discussed them, explained them to their stakeholders, drawn public conclusions from them or been chastened by them. That list of decisions includes leaving their Philadelphia Academy of Music home for the new Kimmel Center, merging with the Philadelphia Pops and taking on new pension obligations for the musicians, all mentioned in orchestra's bankruptcy filing. He also points out "the underwhelming performance from the Ondine recording label," a financial partner of the orchestra. These decisions added to the current problems that Dobrin cites (failure to staff crucial fund-raising and marketing positions, for example) created the situation of today. Dobrin argues (and McManus concurs) that the situation is perilous:

The Philadelphia Orchestra is among the best ensembles anywhere, and if it becomes a lesser version of itself - in terms of its uniquely saturated sound, the quality of individual players, or its artistic drive - it's probably not coming back. A great orchestra is a rare and perishable thing. It takes decades to make, just months to ruin.

Teachout's argument -- that out-of-touch musicians and their unions are preventing enlightened orchestra management from a successful transformation into symphonies for a brave new world -- has no grounding in fact -- at least none that he cites:

"High-culture unions that fight to hang on to an untenable status quo are shooting themselves in the head. Labor leaders invariably respond to managerial cries of disaster-around-the-corner by arguing that their members should not be made to suffer today for the managerial mistakes of the past."

Invariably? Does Teachout have an editor at the Wall St. Journal? Apparently not. How many American orchestra unions have accepted pay freezes, pay cuts and benefit trimming in the past few years? A ton, including the Oregon Symphony, Arts Dispatch's hometown symphony. Many of them understand that traditional orchestra practices need to be adapted to this cultural moment. So, this is a straw dog that Teachout has erected, and McManus has dealt conclusively with Teachout's ignorance in the matter. I'm also struck by Teachout's own contradiction -- management made past mistakes but management now knows best. How does that work exactly? The musicians should follow the lead of managers and boards that exacerbated the problems? McManus would ask, where's the transparency and accountability. He'd be right.

The Philadelphia Orchestra does have a problem. Apparently, its deficit this year is going to be around $15 million on a budget of around $40 million. Much of its endowment -- around $140 million -- can't go to general operating expenses, it says. But both Dobrin and McManus argue that until management and board reform themselves, raising a lot of money to get themselves out of their current hole will be very difficult.

What strategy, beyond the bankruptcy filing and the $160 million fundraising campaign the orchestra has announced, is the board pursuing as it moves ahead? What sort of orchestra is it interested in supporting? What practices does it want to change? What values does it support? How does it plan to rally its community of supporters (musicians, audience members, donors, volunteers) and classical music fans in general to its cause? How will it reach out to Philadelphia to make its case -- especially if its own community isn't united?

I don't know the answers to any of these questions right now. Maybe they will become clear as time passes. I do believe that if the board tried its level best to answer them, they'd be doing their orchestra a favor, and they would be helping every other orchestra in the country in the process.

Contemporary art centers, YU, PCVA and I

2011-05-10T12:21:00.000-07:00

YU: Let the imagining begin!

By Barry Johnson

A blank page. A guitar standing in the corner. A rehearsal room. A vast empty gallery space.

Some things take us right to the lip of creation and then give us a little push forward. We can't help it. We start to fill them, use them, in our imaginations at the very least. A great question to ask someone you think you know pretty well: How would you fill that blank page, that empty gallery?

On Friday, I dropped by the old Yale Union Laundry Building where YU, a new contemporary arts organization, makes its home. YU was offering a trip to the past in the form of an exhibition of artifacts from one of its predecessors, the late great Portland Center for the Visual Arts, but I think that was really an indirect way of leading us to the lip of creation of something entirely new.

We entered on the first floor, which was nice and open and commodious, but we were directed upstairs for the display. When I landed in Portland in 1979, PCVA was the center of the city's small contemporary art scene. Portland had a few commercial art galleries (soon to be joined by a bunch of new ones), an artists organization or two, Blue Sky gallery for our photographers, an art school and a craft school and a craft non-profit gallery, but PCVA was the only place in the city that you could see the work of the American artists (and performers) who had changed the art world during the 1960s and 1970s, redefining art values and practices in the process.

The only place. Robert Rauchenberg, Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, Trisha Brown, Vito Acconci, Ed Ruscha, Chuck Close, Robert Irwin -- we could go on and on.

Portland arts writer Lisa Radon has been working on a book about PCVA, and from the Crumpacker Family Library at the Portland Art Museum, where most of the PCVA archives went, she assembled this quick trip down memory lane with Sandra Percival and Hope Svenson. I stooped over the vitrines that contained old letters, photographs and newspaper clippings documenting some of those shows, and then I would run into old friends from that time, including Donna Milrany and David Cohen, who tried to keep PCVA going as Oregon's economy suffered its deepest Recession since the Great Depression (deeper even than our current one). Eventually, in 1987, it couldn't go on and merged with the Portland Art Museum.

At the time, I didn't realize how big a loss this was. But as various other attempts to create a contemporary arts center with PCVA's ambition foundered in the years since, I've come to regret it more and more. Our contemporary art scene now is far larger and better developed than it was in PCVA's time. Our college galleries are more active; so is the Portland Art Museum's interest in contemporary art. Our commercial gallery scene is more various and far bigger. The performance art/dance programming that PCVA offered has been picked up by PICA and White Bird.

But the energy and focus that various museums of contemporary art provide in other cities around the country, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, is missing here. Not that they have the exuberance and chutzpah that PCVA had -- PCVA always felt so subversive, in a creative way. You felt like you were in a guerrilla camp in the mountains, and the government of "acceptable art" below was teetering and about to fall.

As I wandered from vitrine to vitrine, pausing to read Paul Sutinen's long accounts of the shows for Willamette Week and Fresh Weekly (I edited a few of them myself), thoughts like these flashed through my head, and then I had them again as I read Radon's historical sketch of PCVA, which is available at YU and will catch you up on many of these matters.

But then I left the exhibition room (and I haven't even mentioned Richard Serra's films, which are showing through May 21) and entered that vast open gallery space I mentioned in the first paragraph. On that rainy early evening it was bathed in soft light -- the banks of windows were so large that they captured all the available light waves into the room. And then I started imagining some of the events and shows I'd seen at PCVA in this room, followed by events and shows I'd like to see there. I'm sorry. You see it, and you'll do the same thing, I bet, imagine it full of installations, sculpture, paintings, performances that you need it to be filled with.

I haven't talked to YU's organizers, yet (we'll get to that soon, I hope). I don't know what its prospects really are, going forward. I know that these arts centers are hard to pull off. I wish we had a way of nurturing them and funding them to help them make the leap into reality -- YU is still in its "pre" phase, raising money to drive the programming it hopes to bring to town. I have no idea what sort of yearly budget YU will need, but it's hard to do these things on the cheap. Most of the successful American contemporary arts centers are in cities larger and richer than Portland.

But I already "owe" them for that rush at the lip of creation, for that big empty space. When I close my eyes now, I can't picture exactly what's on display there, but I do see that we're having fun.

Kids and horses at risk: Willy Vlautin's 'Lean on Pete'

2011-05-06T16:11:00.000-07:00

Count Fleet

By Barry Johnson

My grandfather kept a portrait of the great Count Fleet in his house in Clay, Kentucky. Other family portraits had their space, too, but I remember that horse better than I remember my ancestors. My grandfather and grandmother took me to the races every Friday afternoon in August at the track in Henderson, Kentucky, Ellis Park, or as they called it, Dandy Dade, which had been its name before James C. Ellis bought it in 1925. Yeah, we're going back a ways.

Since the late 1950s, I have followed the Kentucky Derby, some years with more interest than others. The first Derby winner I can remember was Tim Tam, who would have won the Triple Crown in 1958 if he hadn't fractured a sesamoid bone during the Belmont. He still finished second. Just as my interest started to wane, after I'd moved from Kentucky and gone to college, Secretariat scooped me back into the fold in 1973. And tomorrow, the first Saturday in May, I'll be watching when this year's top 3-year-olds, minus several of the early favorites already brought down by injury or gastro-intenstinal distress (Uncle Mo), test the Churchill Downs oval and that long home stretch.

All of this is just to say that horse racing is somewhat more important to me than to most people these days, though not so central as it once was to the culture at large, when the Man o' Wars, War Admirals, Sea Biscuits and Citations drew vast crowds and radio audiences.

In honor of this year's Derby and good old Dandy Dade, I decided to read Willy Vlautin's novel Lean on Pete, which starts at Portland Meadows race track before setting off on a little odyssey across the American West.

My original intention was to compare it to another recent horse racing novel, Jaimy Gordon's Lord of Misrule, which won the National Book Award. Gordon's novel is set at a small track in West Virginia, but it swings into mythic territory pretty quickly. Gordon knows her racetrack, and the descriptive passages in Lord of Misrule sound absolutely authentic to me -- and if you're new to the horse racing game, it even serves as a good primer to how the business end of it works. But magic is afoot in Lord of Misrule, poetry even, multiple voices and points of view, characters cracking and re-assembling themselves, and the horses take on the characteristics of "winged steeds," creatures that are only partly biological.

Vlautin's novel is another sort altogether, told from a single viewpoint, that of its 15-year-old protagonist Charley Thompson, and resolutely naturalistic. Magical and Romantic? Not a bit, unless you consider the attraction of a broken down racehorse to a lost teenager either one (or both). And maybe it is, and maybe that's the point?

Willy Vlautin

Charley narrates Lean on Pete. Among other things, that means he recounts the contents of just about every meal he has during the time period the novel covers. Partly, that's because the teen brain is focused on the next feeding with an almost shocking single-mindedness, I've come to learn. But mostly, it's because Charley often doesn't know exactly how he's going to get himself fed from breakfast to supper. Through Charley, Lean on Pete shows us just how precarious the lives of children can be in an America with a very moth-eaten safety net and fragile families.

At first, Charley's story, which Vlautin tells in the simplest possible language, seemed too flat to me, a minute tracking of all his movements (and menus!) without the refreshment of reflection. Charley isn't looking for meaning -- he's trying to get through the day. His descriptions aren't idle, either. They are intimately connected to his survival. And once that came clear, I started parsing his observations for signs of potential resources for Charley or signs of possible danger.

The specifics of the plot matter desperately to the novel, therefore. Charley finds himself living on his own. He's exploited by a trainer/owner at Portland Meadows, who introduces him to life and the characters at the track. He "falls" for a horse, who is called Lean on Pete, a quarter horse who at the age of five has already outlived his usefulness. And when Pete's ultimate fate comes clear to him, Charley horsenaps him and heads for Wyoming, where maybe Charley's aunt still lives. A series of calamities befalls him, some caused by bad luck and some by rotten people he meets along the way, people living as close to the margins of American life as Charley is, people who often can't be trusted.

This collection of thieves, cutpurses and addicts is positively Dickensian. The road of a broke kid on the lam -- from the bad dreams of his former life, from the authorities -- isn't easy. When he meets someone who offers him a hand, we get a few pages of relief, though we're pretty certain that further calamities await.

Somehow, these simple declarative sentences become eloquent. They track the contours of the West, of the urban edges that Charley inhabits, of Charley's own desires, without flights of fancy, data point by data point as Charley enacts his impulses -- to run away with Pete, to skip out on his halfway house, to seek revenge in Denver. Sometimes, Vlautin doesn't even note a thought process -- Charley can be pure action, pure reflex.

Kids teetering on the brink -- it's a class of humans, sure, but each has arrived at the edge by a different route, with a different set of memories, values, skills and hopes. Vlautin takes us deep into the life of one of them, and we instantly start rooting for him, trying to come up with a reasonable course of action for him as he ricochets from Portland to Denver to Wyoming. And maybe in the process Vlautin teaches us something about how valuable one note of grace can be in a life, especially a young life.

So, no, not a race horse novel, and nothing I'll see at the Derby tomorrow -- the obligatory Great Hats and Mint Juleps, the crew of colts breaking from the starting gate, each beautifully conformed -- will remind me that somewhere near me, a kid is trouble. Except this intersection with Lean on Pete.

NOTES:

Vlautin's novel was a winner at this year's Oregon Book Awards. His first novel, The Motel Life, is being made into a movie starring Emile Hirsch.

The Revenge Narrative and Osama bin Laden

2011-05-05T18:45:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Somehow Arts Dispatch found itself caught in the Osama bin Laden whirlpool, unable to get clear of it enough to rub two thoughts together, either about the raid and the aftermath or much of anything else.

To free this fragile blog from the circularity of its thoughts on the matter, we're counting on a series of short observations and reflections, because a fully integrated essay just seems impossible. Just to be clear about one thing from the beginning: You'll find no sympathy for Osama bin Laden here and no sympathy for his terrorism -- his slaughter of innocents. His demise should have come far earlier.

Hollywood is the primary generator of Revenge Narratives in the popular media. In the summer of 2009, I followed the first couple of months of blockbusters and noticed how many had revenge as a driver -- The X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator Salvation and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Revenge is something that every market understands.

Revenge is so simple and so liberating: If our goal is to eliminate evil (dishing out as much mayhem as possible in the process), then anything is allowable. Once we get into the revenge game, the "logic" of normal human life is replaced by the logic of war, and that particular logic leads to some twisted acts that Hollywood can make very cinematic.

In Michiko Kakutani's New York Times round-up of books about Bin Laden, I learned that Al Qaeda trainees watched Hollywood thrillers at night, looking for tips. Arnold Schwarzenegger movies were "particular favorites."

The Revenge Narrative is a black hole. It swallows all attempts at further illumination. Once we decided that killing Osama bin Laden was the only course, we absolved ourselves of having coherent thought about anything but following the logic of that decision. Nothing else mattered, not even revolutions brewing in a host of Arab countries that had nothing to do with him or Al-Qaeda. We stopped our efforts to understand (illuminate) ObL or the contentious Arab communities that created, supported and sometimes opposed him. We pursued the twisted logic to Iraq and Afghanistan.

It works the other way, too. Once bin Laden decided that revenge -- and its inevitable consequence, terror -- was the only course, he became blind to the world outside that revenge. In the process he made himself peripheral to the upheaval in Arab countries. And his own twisted logic led to the events of 9/11, which galvanized the world against him, regardless of their sympathy for his issues (the corrupt oligarchies running so many Arab states, using oil money to keep their people pacified).

So we were locked together in a Dance of Revenge and failed to notice that the music had stopped.

The cheering students on college campuses were simply embracing the inevitable outcome of the Revenge Narrative, namely, the death of the villain. And I agree with those cultural analysts who argue that they were also cheering their own possibilities of success in a world that seems more and more immune to American power.

I hate that Bin Laden's code name was "Geronimo."

Because of the timing, we swiftly transitioned from the Royal Wedding to the Execution of Bin Laden, which on cable TV meant that those Royal Watchers with the plummy Brit accents and speculations about the inner thoughts of the Royal Family were replaced by former generals and intelligence officials with Southwest American accents and speculations about the inner thoughts of Osama Bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the JSOC team that brought Bin Laden down. Our minds, accustomed to this sort of "channel changing," had no trouble shifting from one to the other.

Was Osama Bin Laden a celebrity, in our contemporary understanding of the word? Not just a famous villain (Billy the Kid, Jack the Ripper, Vlad the Impaler, Caligula), but a celebrity sharing the same media dynamic as Donald Trump, Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan? We would have a hard time coming up with the names of the President of Prime Minister of Pakistan, but we know a lot about Bin Laden -- he's an instant reference point.

We did not have to follow the revenge narrative -- wanted dead or alive -- to seek justice for the crimes of Bin Laden. The Revenge Narrative is essentially rhetorical. It signals that we are resorting to "extreme measures" in this particular case. We will not be going by the usual rules.

Paradoxically, the Revenge Narrative is employed to preserve the usual rules. The usual rules protect humans from torture, from becoming innocent victims and from a variety of other abuses, which are part and parcel of the logic of extreme measures.

In the Revenge Narrative, the details of the villain's demise are infinitely important. I suspect the original account of bin Laden's death -- using a wife as a shield while he emptied his AK-47 on the Navy Seals -- defaulted to the Hollywood position. Now, we spend our time debating how close he was to his weapons, the release of photographs of his body and his burial at sea. None of these is important outside the logic of the revenge narrative.

Is the single-mindedness of revenge a biological adaptation? A form of self-sacrifice for the group? Does that make us susceptible to using it when another approach would be better and to manipulators who employ it for their own purposes?

Although the Osama bin Laden killing followed the lines of the Revenge Narrative, did it also follow the logic of the bureaucracy? After all, a bureaucracy hunted him down, with the implacability that bureaucracies routinely muster.

If ObL had been captured, the Narrative of the Show Trial would likely have been no more illuminating than the Revenge Narrative.

Just to be clear again, I am not arguing "for" Osama bin Laden. He helped murder many innocent people and would have tried to murder more. Stopping him was important.

We made sense of 9/11 in a way that led us into expensive and bloody conflicts, following the logic of revenge. I think our cultural reflex (if not a biological reflex) supported this course. By now, I hope we see that the course we chose was not optimal and that we need to question this reflex in the future. We spent 10 years closely engaged with the Islamic world, and it seems apparent now -- after Cairo and Tunis and Benghazi -- that we know less about it now than when we started tracking bin Laden. We are blind to the cultural currents that bin Laden reflected and exploited and so blind to the way they are expressing themselves right now. This price for bin Laden's execution is too high, and it impeded our hunt for him. And unfortunately, it doesn't leave us better positioned to affect the Middle East in a positive way.

I have admired the way President Obama has handled his part of the narrative. In that, I find some hope for a more pragmatic approach to foreign policy, one tied to our democracy, which has always been to my mind a great experiment in pragmatism. But only some hope -- our foreign policy in the Middle East is almost never about our democracy, the pragmatism of people working together, and almost always about the power of special interests and their ability to subvert that democracy. One president cannot change that anymore than he or she can change our weakness for the Revenge Narrative.

Movie review: 'Meek's Cutoff' happily wanders in the desert

2011-04-27T15:27:00.000-07:00

Michelle Williams in Meek's Cutoff

By Barry Johnson

More than anything else in Meek's Cutoff, what sticks in my mind's eye is the scene that repeats itself over and over. Director Kelly Reichardt's camera captures a team of oxen pulling a wagon and a solitary figure trudging along behind it. That figure is wearing a long dress and a bonnet, and her shoulders are a little slumped. The walk isn't efficient, exactly -- it's too weary for that -- but it stays in perfect time with the wagon, keeps the same distance behind, travels at the same rate of speed.

Those scenes establish the terrain of Meek's Cutoff. This eastern Oregon sage desert is rough and difficult to traverse, full of "minor" features, little hills, valleys and ground both rocky and sandy. The bonnet, its visage turned toward the ground, suggests the other terrain of the film -- the psychological. And maybe it's a flight of my own, but I imagine that it tracks that of the landscape -- dry, sparse, rocky, persistent, trance-like at times maybe, but awakening to dull throbs and gashing anxiety.

Meek's Cutoff is the new film by director Kelly Reichardt, writer Jon Raymond and actor Michelle Williams, and it's very loosely based on a real episode in the history of the early immigration to Oregon -- the attempt to pioneer an easier and safer route to the Willamette Valley than the main stem route through the Blue Mountains and along the Columbia in eastern Oregon. The movie's primary contribution to our understanding of that time, though, is its visceral sympathy for the ongoing fear, drudgery and physical challenge that those settlers endured.

We thirst, we trudge behind our wagon, we are surrounded by empty, barren land that we might consider beautiful if we knew where we were going and had ample provisions. Film can do that in ways that the literature can't. Ultimately, it becomes a movie about trust -- and blind decisions.

I was a big fan of Wendy and Lucy, the last collaboration of Reichardt, Raymond and Williams. I liked its bare narrative economy, its purposefulness, the way it avoided typical Hollywood contrivances and conventions. And Meek's Cutoff shares those qualities. The historical Stephen Meek led a party of more than a 1,000 humans in more than 200 wagons with 4,000 livestock in tow -- a Western epic. Reichardt and Raymond have pared that to three wagons, seven settlers and Meek, plus a member of the Cayuse tribe that they capture along the way. The reduction produces an epic of a different sort, one with deep psychological interiors and wide open exteriors.

We join up with this little party as they cross a shallow river, an arduous task (though nothing like the two weeks it took the historical wagon train, hungry and disease-ravaged, to ferry everyone across the Deschutes River). And then they set off, led by Meek, here an old-fashioned macho mountain man with plenty of tall tales and an irritating swagger. The settlers know that Meek really doesn't know this territory as intimately as they've been led to believe -- one of them scratches "lost" on a log (which is historical).

Meek knows where he's going -- in a vague way. But he doesn't know where water is along the way and that quickly becomes the central existential issue of the film, water for the people, the horses and the oxen pulling the wagons. Early on the men start grumbling and consider hanging Meek from a wagon-tongue (this too is historical) because of his bad directions. But their fates are joined -- everyone needs water. And the mantra of Solomon Tetherow (Will Patton) is "one more day." Let's see what the next day brings.

Shirley Henderson, Zoe Kazan, Michelle Williams

Gradually, the characters start to become more distinct. A young couple (played by Zoe Kazan and Paul Dano) starts to crack up. A small family (Shirley Henderson, Neil Huff and Tommy Nelson) tries to keep itself organized and moving forward, guided by the Bible reading of the father. And the Tetherows (Patton and Michelle Williams) gradually start to lead the little band, as everyone loses faith in Meek.

The real wagon train was helped and guided by Native Americans. Reichardt and Raymond change the complexion of their band's encounter with a middle-aged Cayuse man (Rod Rondeaux) by making him a captive. The Tetherows decide their prisoner is trustworthy -- he needs water, too, though Meek is all for killing him. And this tension -- whether the captive is trustworthy, whether Meek is trustworthy -- twists tighter as the days go on and the thirst of animals and humans grows.

The ensemble is terrific as a whole, mostly because they don't overplay. Small gestures, tics and shreds of conversation become explosions of meaning in this context -- the silence of the Great Basin. How do we make decisions when we don't have good information? We fret. We pray. We try to assemble the little data we have into a convincing argument. We guess. And maybe we come to trust someone who doesn't speak our language. But we don't do it without a lot of emotion, no matter how fatalistic we start to become.

Although it's an ensemble success, Williams is particularly adept at the demands that Reichardt places on her -- the restraint and the conviction, the physical acting and its demands, the ability to play small responses to events and the other characters. And here, I'm really describing her work in Wendy and Lucy, too.

Eastern Oregon is a perfect place to play out the dramas of the West, most of which have been filmed in the Southwest. It's not Monument Valley with those dramatic land forms. It's more prosaic than that. I liked Williams' description of it in Movieline:

I think it was something about the landscape where everything looks the same — one patch of desert is completely unrecognizable next to another patch of desert. It’s just not my natural environment. So from the moment I got there, it unsettled me. But I’ve come to love it. If you look hard enough, you can see variation in the landscape where you think it’s actually completely barren and nothing lives out there. You spend a little time, you look a little closer, and you see what’s actually inherent to the land. But at first it felt like we’d been sent to Mars.

We know what happened to the real Meek wagon train. We don't know how this one ends -- Reichardt leaves us in the desert, following the Cayuse captive into the wilderness. Toward water maybe. The company has chosen a path, made a decision, bet everything on it, taken a leap of faith. The lights go up suddenly, in the middle. Which is where we in the audience also find ourselves in our own stories.

NOTES:

Here's another interview with Williams, a partial one in Interview magazine with an interesting take on the bonnets and the dresses.

Theater review: ART finds some farce in 'The Cherry Orchard'

2011-04-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

Linda Alper, Michael Mendelson and Tim Blough in The Cherry Orchard

By Barry Johnson

I laughed more than I thought I would at Artists Repertory Theatre's The Cherry Orchard, adapted by Richard Kramer and directed by Jon Kretzu. It was funny, both because of some broadly played characterizations and the original wit in Chekhov's script. Not that all is jolly on the formerly great Russian estate that is headed for the auction block -- and the subdivider. No, it's a sad production, too, which makes perfect sense.

The problem that theater folk face when dealing with The Cherry Orchard is an exchange of telegrams between the playwright Anton Chekhov and its first director, Konstantine Stanislavsky. Here's how Chekhov biographer V.S. Pritchett describes them:

There was only one jarring note: Stanislavsky had called the play "a truly great tragedy." Tartly, and fearing Stanislavsky's possessiveness, Chekhov replied that it was not even a drama -- "It is a farce."

Pritchett eventually agrees with Chekhov: "It is a farce because the people are a disordered chorus who have lost their gods and invent themselves." As Pritchett says earlier, no one in The Cherry Orchard really listens to anyone else.

Still, when we think of farces written around the same time as The Cherry Orchard, we think of something like Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest or Georges Feydeau's A Flea in Her Ear -- both of which seem far more absurd and funny to us today. And I've never seen a production of The Cherry Orchard played that way, like an episode of Seinfeld. Our thinking about Chekhov is more in line with Maxim Gorky's comments arising from a Chekhov short story:

"Chekhov has been reproached with having no philosophy. The reproach is absurd... Ever more often our ears can catch in his stories the melancholy but severe and deserved reproach that men do not know how to live, but at the same time, his sympathy with all men glows even brighter."

Kramer and Kretzu give us that Chekhov, but they give the farce element a nod, too, and it makes for a livelier evening as a result. The image that sticks with me is Vana O'Brien as the strange governess Charlotta doing magic tricks, stalking about with a rifle, and asking, "Who am I?"

The plot is swiftly recounted. The lady of the house Ruby Ranevsky (Linda Alper) come back home after five year in Paris, where she has apparently attempted to forget the death of her young son and fallen in love with a scoundrel. The estate is in deep trouble, despite the best efforts of her adopted daughter and estate manager Varya (Val Landrum). The businessman Lopakhin (Tim Blough), who grew up a serf on the estate, hovers nearby with a plan to save the estate at the expense of its famous cherry orchard, but he can't get anyone to listen -- or if they hear, they aren't acting on his advice.

Time goes by. The hangers-on at the estate grow restless with their own problems and obsessions. The auction of the estate grows nearer and is finally completed; the surprise buyer is... Lopakhin himself. And the household goes its separate ways, leaving Lopakhin with his head in his hands and the sound of the axes attacking the orchard in his ears.

The three keys to the play, from where I sat, were Linda Alper as Ruby, Michael Mendelson as her wearier-than-thou brother Leo and Blough's Lopakhin. Ruby acts on her emotions and she is a very emotional person. Alper gives her the necessary quicksilver changes of emotional state (think spring weather in Portland) but modulates that with authentic warmth of character. We get a hint of the cost of this all on her, but we don't bog down in it. Alper's pitch-perfect reading allows Mendelson to explore the broader aspects of Leo's snobbery -- he always has Alper as a home base. Blough occasionally gets a little too vocal for my taste -- he's shouting to be heard amid the chaos of the household, I understand, but maybe he could make his impatience physical rather than vocal? I don't know. But that said, he makes Lopakhin's contradictory impulses clear, and he emerges far more sympathetically than is often the case.

Vana O'Brien, Amy Newman and Linda Alper in The Cherry Orchard

With these three characters in good hands, we can watch the amusing or melancholy (sometimes both at the same time) antics of the "minor" characters, who are confused, in love with the wrong people, stuck in their routines or just generally addled. We feel sorry for Varya, who's not going to win Lopakhin's heart and who has to manage the few remaining kopeks on the estate. On the other hand, we think maybe she's going to get to go on that tour of convents after all! Will the tutor Trofimov (Blake Lowell), who believes in work but does very little of it, get to act on his philosophy? We hope so. We suspect the pretty daughter Anya (Amy Newman) will land on her feet, yes? And the penurious and narcoleptic Pischik (Todd Van Voris) already has, thanks to a discovery of mineral wealth on his estate.

But we're far less certain about the estate's staff -- the aged Firs (Tobias Andersen, whose ear for Leo is exactly right), the maid Dunyasha (Victoria Blake) with a crush on the valet Yasha (Colton Ruscheinsky) that isn't returned, the wild Charlotta and the bumbling Yepidikoff (Andy Lee-Hillstrom) with his squeaky boot. We fear his love for Dunyasha will never be returned, though we suspect a cobbler might help.

These are "types" in a way -- though maybe Chekhov himself confirmed them as types -- and Kramer and Kretzu give the actors the freedom to play them as types. The melancholy? Well, Kramer supplies it with two ghosts -- the lost son and the Woman in White wander through from time to time, reminding us lives past. Are they necessary? I'm not sure. And I'm not really clear why exactly a character playing Chekhov pops up from time to time, often to feed Firs a line. In a way, he's a ghost, too -- the real Chekhov died a couple of months after the play was produced.

Daniel Meeker's set manages to give us a fully developed cherry orchard, an "outside" playing area, a pool and the inside of an estate with a few deft moves and props -- and looked beautiful, too.

But we are getting carried away with the parts of the production. I exchanged messages about the production with Cate Garrison, who loves her Chekhov. Here's part of what she wrote:

This was "cherry essence," as I think I said on my Facebook page, in that it was concentrated, rich, tangy and sharp (in both the senses of "intelligent" and of extremely witty -- it's so frequent nowadays for directors to forget that Chekhov was very very funny, and, instead, get bogged down in words, words words and a misbegotten -- in my opinion -- heaviness and misplaced reverence -- as so often happens, too, with Shakespeare).

I think that's about right!

Personally, I don't feel so sad about the collapse of the estate -- at the end, everyone's liberated from this place, from the past, free to prosper or suffer in new ways. Even Lopakhin, who is left empty-handed, though he owns the land. Will Uncle Leo make a success of his new bank job? That would be a great comic sequel. And maybe that's why Chekhov thought the play was funny: He wasn't nostalgic the way Stanislavsky was and sending these oddballs out into the world amused him.

NOTES:

The play is almost two hours -- without intermission. It move quickly, but some preparations may be in order.

Cate Garrison was the theater critic for Willamette Week for many years.

Photo by Owen Carey for Artists Repertory Theatre.

The Oregonian's Marty Hughley reviews the play at length, detecting an underlying emotional realism in the text and the production.

Dance review: OBT does a little 'Song and Dance'

2011-04-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

Olga Krochik and Julia Rowe do NOT do-si-do/Blaine Truitt Covert

By Barry Johnson

When I was in college, someone (I forget just who) suggested that the closest equivalent to Elizabethan speech, the language of Shakespeare, existing in the world was spoken in the hollers of Appalachia. I was skeptical. One branch of my family had abandoned the tough living available in western Kentucky for the coal country of eastern Kentucky, and though I seldom visited, my memory of their accent didn't immediately bring to mind any Shakespeare I'd ever heard.

But the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand the comparison -- it's not their accent, it's the structure of their sentences, strangely old-fashioned at times, and certain anachronisms (I heard my mother say, "Donchee know," just yesterday, for "Don't you know" -- and in that ee, I think Elizabethan English endures).

When I saw Balanchine's Square Dance on Oregon Ballet Theatre's program, Song and Dance, this weekend, I had a similar response to the one I had in my college days. What does Balanchine have to do with square dance? But this time it only took me a few minutes to get it.

It's possible that the dance form closest to the old court dancing from which ballet developed is the modern square dance, which arrived in Appalachia via Scots and English folk dance. At least that's the line my speculations took. Again, it's structure more than vocabulary -- the couples promenading, taking their turns in center, dancing in unison, showing off the "ladies," executing some complex partnering maneuvers and developing everything from a set of basic instructions.

Once I made that leap, I happily watched OBT's dancers take on the demanding positions of Balanchine's Square Dance, which contains no cornpone, no comic mimicry and nary a do-si-do. In fact, the only bow to real square dancing is the caller, you know, the guy in the cowboy hat who tells the dancers what to do with clever patter. Yes, Balanchine included a caller in his original design of the dance, and OBT enlisted Tylor Neist to play the role of a caller in its version.

Anne Mueller, we'll miss you!

Of course, the caller isn't the choreographer -- he's more of a describer, and Balanchine's only instruction to the caller, according to the program notes, was that they couldn't use ballet terms. So, no "arabesque left" or "releve right." Neist's call was fun and took some of the edge off of the sharp angles of Square Dance, which otherwise would be pretty severe. "Here comes Chauncey, dancing fauncy..., he says, when principal Chauncey Parsons volleys fort, and his rhymes with "Julia" were truly groan-worthy, though that was part of the shtick. At least he didn't reduce Julia Rowe's first name to "Jules" and rhyme her with "mules."

Balanchine choreographed to music by Vivaldi and Corelli (played by a live chamber group for OBT), not the Soggy Bottom Boys, and the positions and movement are strictly neo-classical. The presence of a Balanchine dance on Oregon Ballet Theatre's program is always an invitation to talk about the idea of "perfection," and Square Dance could lead us in the direction, though we won't indulge. Let's just say that the dance's rewards are in those delicately arranged hands and arms and the precise movement, whether skipped or deliberate, each amplified individually by the dancers and by the group dancing in unison. Before I started to type this morning, I took a quick tour through Suki Schorer on Balanchine Technique, just to remind myself of those Balanchine angles and his careful placements of feet and fingers. And yes, the idea of perfection is afoot.

Just for the record, I enjoyed seeing OBT's Square Dance. Artistic director Christopher Stowell is dedicated to including Balanchine in the company's repertoire, and this one will sharpen their technique. I liked the good cheer of Rowe and Parsons in the lead roles almost as much as I liked the way they moved together: They knew that Neist was having some fun with his calling, and they joined in. Perfect.

I'll talk more briefly about the other three dances on the program, each of which OBT has performed before. They also featured Anne Mueller, who is retiring from the company's list of active dancers and leaves with a stage personality that will be impossible to replace.

Speak: Mueller didn't invent the tough-minded female character in Trey McIntyre's duet from 1998 (that was Vanessa Thiessen), but she has the aggression (and the abs) down as though she had. McIntyre's play with hip-hop is ingenious and in the right spirit, and after Square Dance, it gave our muscle groups a chance to relax from those difficult Balanchine positions -- well, the muscle groups in our head, anyway. Lucas Threefoot was an excellent foil for Mueller. And no Vivaldi in earshot.

Left Unsaid: Three women, three men, three chairs and smart dancing.

Left Unsaid: OBT danced Nicolo Fonte's dance for six dancers and three chairs for the first time two years ago, and I liked it a lot then. Danced to selections from two Bach compositions, it manages to be both "classical" and expressive at the same time, working best through its duets. OBT's Alison Roper, Anne Mueller, Kathi Martuza, Artur Sultanov, Brian Simcoe and Steven Houser danced it with such assurance that I appreciated the choreography, which builds up classical positions and then tears them down, even more this time around.

Eyes on You: Speaking of Roper, when she gets swaying in Stowell's take on a medley Cole Porter songs, she leaves the earlier high-school hi-jinx of the piece in her dust. This is appropriate to the material, really. Porter was an "adult" song-writer, after all, sophisticated and sly, and Roper channels him perfectly. Mueller gets several of the solo spots, too, and yes, we'll miss her.

Alison Roper and Brett Bauer

NOTES:

The concert is at the Newmark Theatre, which is a de-lovely place to see the company perform. The program runs through May 1; check the website for ticket availability. Really, there are no bad seats in the Newmark -- I even like the second balcony.

Here's Bob Hicks' take on Art Scatter. I agree with him that Square Dance is one of those dances that will improve during this run as the dancers get more comfortable with its shapes. And I really liked his descriptions of Mueller.

And Grant Butler will miss Mueller, too, as he says in his review for The Oregonian. He was harder on the Cole Porter medley, and I understand his point of view.

I'm still skeptical that growing up in Appalachia would have given me a leg up in understanding Shakespeare. The origins of square dancing are generally considered to be the quadrille and English morris and folk dancing.

All photos courtesy of Oregon Ballet Theatre. Blaine Truitt Covert is the photographer.

Dennis Bigelow, boards of directors and the death experience of Portland Repertory Theatre

2011-04-21T14:30:00.000-07:00

Dennis Bigelow directed The Miser in Portland in 1988./Set+photo: Carey Wong

By Barry Johnson

Yesterday in discussing the Intiman Theatre situation, I mentioned the closing of Portland Repertory Theatre in 1998, the last time a professional Portland theater company closed its doors for good.

Portland Rep was the second largest theater company in the city when it closed, one of two fully professional, Equity houses, after Portland Center Stage. It had a long, strange history, beginning as the Mark Allen Players with a penchant for Neil Simon comedies and gradually evolving, after Allen left, into a sharp, urban company that produced excellent versions of recent New York hits.

When it closed, its artistic director was the late Dennis Bigelow, whose life in the theater is a cautionary tale: Mommas don't let your babies grow up to be theater people. Bigelow came to Portland Rep to pick up the financial pieces after its previous artistic director Geoffrey Sherman ran up big deficits in an attempt to force the board to match its rhetoric about wanting a national class company with a much more significant fundraising effort than it mustered. Sherman ~~escaped~~ left for Meadow Brook Theatre in Michigan, and Bigelow's careful stewardship began.

UPDATE: I received the following email from Geoffrey Sherman disputing this brief account of his tenure.

Alas, I did *not* run deficits at Portland Rep to challenge the board or anyone else. I was made producing artistic director and was able to get my head around the accounting methods used up to that time, I discovered that the theatre had been capitalizing props, sets, costumes, furniture etc., thus, I am sure inadvertently, overstating the positive side of the balance sheet by many thousands of dollars. I checked with several managing directors at other theatres to discover that none of them used this form of accounting.

This discovery meant that Portland Rep. was suddenly running a sizeable deficit, without any help from me! These *facts* were shared with the board of directors at that time.

It should also be noted that I was totally committed to the company, even building our experimental theatre with my own hands (and that of a willing staff) to try to encourage the board to move the entire operation to our warehouse in the NW to capitalize on what I thought would be major development of the area.

I therefore find the notion of ‘escaping’ to my next job insulting. Since you published your erroneous remarks without attempting to contact me, I would be grateful for an immediate retraction, before I am forced to seek legal redress.

I apologize for any insult perceived by Geoffrey Sherman, and I can see how he saw one in the word "escape," which I have "neutralized" above. I remember Sherman himself telling me that he wanted the board to step up to the financial responsibilities that being a national class theater entailed. Only the books from the time would help us understand what exactly happened with the company's deficit during Sherman's tenure, which the staff and board said was around $500,000 when Bigelow took over. I have no reason to believe that Sherman ever had anything but the best interests of the theater at heart.

Bigelow was on his way toward a successful turnaround (in my opinion), when the board decided to pull the plug on the company in the middle of a show. They said it was a prudent financial decision; most of us looking at the situation from the outside thought they'd just lost their nerve, because the problems the company was having had to do with cash flow not its underlying health, which though precarious, wasn't dire.

Bigelow asked to meet with me after the board decided to close the theater.

I was The Oregonian's theater critic at the time, and we'd talked back in October of 2007, when the company publicized its poor financial situation for the first time -- and raised a significant amount of money to keep the doors open. Bigelow had been the first artistic director of Portland Center Stage, when it was still affiliated with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. After Henry Woronicz became artistic director in Ashland, he decided to divest the company of its northern branch, and he fired Bigelow, who had been a favorite of his predecessor, Jerry Turner. Bigelow's achievements at the company were big ones -- smart seasons, affecting productions, enthusiastic crowds, and I think Woronicz was wrong to torpedo OSF's Portland experiment and to let go of Bigelow. Maybe we'll get into it all another time, if anyone's interested.

I was shocked by Bigelow's appearance the day we met. He was pale and haggard. He chain-smoked cigarettes down to the nub and drank black coffee in between drags. His hands shook, so the cup and saucer clinked with each sip, and he had a hard time lighting a new cigarette. In the story I wrote, I rarely quote him, because he wasn't speaking in sentences or even words sometimes. Fortunately, the staffers with him were articulate and could speak for him.

I bring this up simply to indicate that each "story" -- from the Detroit Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Intiman -- leaves a trail of unhappiness that word like "distraught" can't adequately capture. Yes, Bigelow was distraught. Also angry and hopeless and lots of other emotions. It's not just institutional history -- or the end of institutional history in Portland Rep's case. It's also personal history. My own anger at the time was fueled by seeing Bigelow, a gentle soul and a fine director, reduced to this condition.

I think I blamed the board at the time, and I still think that if they had been more experienced in working with arts groups, Portland Rep's board, most of whom were new members, if I remember correctly, would have made a different decision. But something that Bill Bulick, the executive director of the Regional Arts & Culture Council at the time, said still rings true. The public also bears some responsibility. We say that we want creative people among us, that we want to be surrounded by artists making and performing great art, but we aren't really willing to pay for it. In the broadest terms, maybe the board recognized that reality and acted on it.

In the aftermath, lots of good actors left town, because they couldn't find paying work. Both Artists Repertory Theatre and Portland Center Stage picked up some of the shows that Portland Rep would have produced. Other companies started up, and a new generation of theater people moved to town or came of age. The depression caused by the company's death lasted a couple of years, and people moved on. We can't say what would have happened if the company had continued. I think it would have thrived. I think that Dennis Bigelow would be alive today making fabulous theater. I think the city would have been better for it in lots of ways. But I don't know for sure.

I wrote a lengthy analysis of what happened at Portland Rep for The Oregonian. Its focus is narrow, narrower than I would attempt to do today. And I wish it had more numbers, the financial nitty-gritty. But I think it gives a decent idea of how intractable the argument between the board and the staff became at the end.

Maybe my biggest regret at the time? Bigelow was planning to do "A Winter's Tale" with Gretchen Corbett as Hermione and her daughter, Winslow, as Hermione's daughter, Perdita. Gretchen had been wonderful in Molly Sweeney earlier that season, and Winslow had burst onto the scene here brilliantly in Arcadia the year before. It just seemed perfect to me. And it never happened.

Looking for scapegoats at Intiman

2011-04-20T15:02:00.000-07:00

Last Intiman show? Chuck Cooper in "All My Sons"

By Barry Johnson

I did some hunting and pecking for news on Intiman Theatre this morning and found something useful by Jose Amador at the Seattest website.

Amador took his text from the comments section of a post on the Seattle Stranger's blog, specifically one by the former artistic director of Seattle Empty Space theater company, Allison Narver. That comment is provocative at the very least. It starts: "I am so fucking sick of Arts Boards that don't know what the hell they're doing."

She was talking about the decision by the board of Seattle Giant Magnet children's theater festival to make this year's festival its last, but then she tore into Intiman's board, too. "Shame on The Intiman Board as well. Blaming Brian C. [Colburn, Intiman's former managing director] for the theater's misfortunes shows what a chicken-shit, lame, ignorant bunch they are." And then: "I'm sick of seeing worthy arts organizations (ConWorks, The Empty Space, Giant Magnet to name a few) close because of weak, scared, arrogant and/or inexperienced Boards."

This attack resonated with Amador: "Narver once again bluntly echoes some of what skeptics have been saying since the news of Intiman's fiscal woes came to light. What makes the statement stick is the fact that the Board has not been, and likely will not ever be, forthcoming about exactly what happened at Intiman." He also accused Intiman's board of scapegoating Colburn and neglecting its own duties, and vowed to take up Narver's call for deeper discussions of "non-profit governance and the relevance of arts organizations."

I'm in no position to ascertain the overall performance of the Intiman (or Giant Magnet) board. Still, two of Narver and Amador's points make sense to me.

A couple of days ago, I suggested that both the Philadelphia Orchestra and Intiman needed to be much more forthcoming, both about their basic financial information and their explanation, descriptions and narratives of how they got to their present situations. Amador uses the word "forthcoming," which is akin to the word I used, "transparency."
The behavior of non-profit boards is hard to fathom sometimes. I still believe that Portland's greatest theater "failure," the collapse in 1997 of Portland Repertory Theatre, then the city's second largest company, was unnecessary, the response of a board that had lost its nerve. That's another reason they need to be transparent -- so the public and the immediate community of the arts organization in question can offer alternative explanations and courses of action. The public, even the concerned public, rarely has a good idea of how non-profit arts groups are governed.

Transparency is directly related to democracy, we know. Only organizations with democratic characteristics need to be transparent about their decisions, and transparency is what makes democracy possible. I think that what Amador wants, really, is for Seattle's arts organizations to be more democratic.

Our narrative default is usually something like the Great Man theory of history. We look for specific heroes and villains, and we neglect the conditions on the ground that enable them to succeed or make their failure more likely. I want to know what Amador and Narver and other Seattle observers make of the overall conditions -- the values of Seattle's culture, its resources, its ambitions -- and how Intiman's board reflected, or failed to reflect, them. Then we can start describing what happened far more usefully.

NOTES

The Empty Space, which was known for its experimental approach to theater, closed in 2006... Intiman blamed Colburn for masking the true financial condition of the company from the board in February, when it went public with its need for emergency funding... Colburn left the company in November of 2010... The late director Dennis Bigelow was artistic director of Portland Repertory Theatre when it closed... Intiman says it's regrouping and hopes to offer a season in 2012... Crosscut's David Brewster applies some Great Man narrative to explain Intiman, though he adds some useful detail and historical perspective in the process.

The Philadelphia Orchestra and the changing financial model for symphonies

2011-04-19T13:47:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

As I browsed the half-dozen or so classical music sites I frequent, I half-way expected to find lots of blog posts about the Philadelphia Orchestra bankruptcy situation. I didn't. Maybe it's too early. Maybe the bloggers think it's a "local" problem. And the issues involved are complicated -- most of us glaze over at phrases such as "pension fund obligations" -- and the data is scarce, as we pointed out yesterday.

Classical music provocateur Greg Sandow didn't do an extensive analysis of the Philadelphia crisis on his blog, but he did place it in a larger context, the one he's been describing for the past few years. Sandow believes in the Le Poisson Rouge approach to preserving classical music, meaning that musicians and the institutions they play for need to figure out ways to enter the worlds of the people they aren't reaching now.

Le Poisson Rouge is a New York City club that mixes modern classical music, jazz, indie rock, performance art and almost anything else as long as it has an avant edge. It has proven to be very popular and helped to develop a new generation of art music composers (think Nico Muhly, Missy Mazzoli, David Lang). Sandow thinks the future of classical music is in the hands of clubs of this sort, because how else will we breach the wall between Gen Y and classical music?

But Sandow acknowledges that this will be hard on the current financial model, however broken it is. If an institution organizes itself to reach out to younger audiences, it will have to cut its ticket prices. And even if it attracts them, those younger audience members probably won't donate to the organization at anything like the same rate of older audience members. And musicians hoping to go the entrepreneurial route will find that clubs don't pay a lot, certainly nothing like they might get from a symphony.

Most important, to reach kids these days, Sandow thinks the programming is going to have to change -- away from the past and toward the present. He calls this alt-classical, a squishy word for music that integrates contemporary pop vocabulary, among others, into something people call "art music" for want of a better term -- yes, the music of Muhly, Mazzoli, Lang and their sort. Of course, if the symphony changes its programming, it risks losing the audience that supports it now. This entire line of argument is fraught with Catch 22s, isn't it?

Sandow indicates that the Philadelphia problem is symptomatic of these larger shifts and trends, and the right course of action is not clear. I have two thoughts:

1) Classical music will continue to move further and further away from the center of the culture if that culture is driven only by the marketplace. In our hyper-capitalist condition, it just isn't easy to commodify; the billions spent in directing audiences in more profitable ways will drive us toward ever emptier spectacles, not classical music. If we want it, ultimately, we can't depend on the market to give it to us. I think maybe Sandow is thinking of classical music in marketplace terms only -- he isn't calling for a greater government investment, for example.

2) Classical music composers have always absorbed other kinds of music, so I embrace alt-classical/contemporary classical permutations. But still I believe in the power of Mozart to have his way with an audience of younger listeners, especially if they are comfortable and it's part of their social world. That's the idea behind Classical Revolution PDX, and I think it's right.

Has the economics of the financial model of symphonies (and other "classical" arts) deteriorated to such an extent that the model must change? That's what we're testing now. One of the ways we test is to try various experiments to reach various audiences (and the young aren't the only demographic group underrepresented at classical concerts). Another way is to make the case for the music -- to the public, to schools, to legislators -- in hopes of building a consensus that it's worth preserving (and extending), no matter what the market suggests. And these, of course, are linked.

Unlike medical experiments, there's no "cure" to be discovered in these experiments -- just a series of encounters, between musician and new audiences. But what more could we ask for?

Gus Van Sant and William S. Burroughs explain Doing Easy

2011-04-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

Via Open Culture, I watched this Gus Van Sant short film from 1982. It "illustrates" a short story/essay by William S. Burroughs, The Discipline of D.E. The D.E. stands for "Doing Easy," which is following an efficient, smooth path through the universe. This sounds cosmological, but the movie teaches us how to get through our day without bumping into things or spilling, so, yes, the cosmos in a drop of water.

“How fast can you take your time, kid?”

Intiman Theatre, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the issue of transparency

2011-04-18T11:20:00.000-07:00

The venerable Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy.

By Barry Johnson

The news over the weekend was grim, confusing and bi-coastal. The mighty Philadelphia Orchestra filed for bankruptcy, though it has an endowment of $116 million. And Intiman Theatre in Seattle closed its doors for the rest of its season, though it successfully reached it Phase One $500,000 emergency fund-raising goal a couple of weeks ago.

The Philadelphia Orchestra has threatened this course for a while, but Intiman's decision came as a surprise. Still, what was missing from both organizations, both the mighty and the small, was the degree of transparency about their operations that would give potential donors confidence to contribute to them yet again.

At the end of the day, didn't they owe the public better numbers and better explanations than they gave us?

By most important measures -- budget, musician salaries, critical judgment -- the Philadelphia Orchestra ranks toward the top of all American symphonies. Saturday, its board of directors filed for bankruptcy, hoping to get out from under a $3 million annual pension payment for its musicians among other things. One suspects that all of those board members have generous pension arrangements themselves or are so wealthy that they don't require a pension, and this imbalance is the source of much of the emotion around the decision, I suspect -- musicians leafleted the board meeting and refused to leave the building when guards asked them to leave, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer account.

The Detroit Symphony's musicians strike gave us a preview of the Philadelphia bankruptcy vote -- a community divided against itself. And though the Philadelphia Orchestra board also announced a $214 million fund-raising campaign to help shore up its finances, the tension between musicians and the board and its management team surely won't help this effort.

We've talked at length about the failure of community in Detroit, so I won't repeat those arguments here. Instead, the Philadelphia situation reminds us that symphonies, even those that say they are in perilous straits, aren't nearly transparent enough about their financial situation. They speak in generalities: Philadelphia board chairman Richard B. Worley said there was a "fantastic imbalance" between revenue and expenses, for example, but he didn't go into specifics. No one trots out the numbers from the past several years -- attendance, ticket revenue, donations, grants, board contributions, government support, ancillary income -- so we can see the trend lines easily on the revenue side, and the same goes for the expense side of the ledger.

Here's what the Philadelphia Orchestra revealed in its letter to patrons:

Our financial situation is serious and the simple facts are these: Our operating funds are rapidly dwindling and will be exhausted by June 2011. While the Orchestra does not have any debt, we are operating at a significant loss with a structural deficit of $14.5 million.

And that's it. If I were going to give even $100 to the symphony, I would want to know more than this.
We can go to Guidestar and find some more numbers, though they aren't recent. The orchestras 2009 returns (for 2008) show a precipitous drop from the previous year: total revenue went from $53.1 to $29.5 million, as investment income, contributions and grants plummeted. Philadelphia wasn't the only orchestra to experience this downward spiral that year, the year of the Great Recession. Salaries went up a little that year, but other management cut other expenses. The bottom line was a $17.45 million loss compared to a $6.2 million surplus the previous year.

We don't have numbers from 2009 or 2010, which are crucial to plotting the general direction of things. Has revenue begun to creep back up toward 2007 levels? If so, then it's entirely reasonable to use the orchestra's large endowment to keep the course steady. That's what endowments are for, among other things -- to cushion the blow of unusual economic circumstances in the country and to make sure management mistakes aren't catastrophic. On the 2009 return (for 2008) the endowment dropped from $121 million to $93.3 million, as investments cratered. Now, it's back up to $116 million, though as with many endowments, there are restrictions on its use.

The symphony board claims that pension obligations are the major problem its bankruptcy filing is addressing, though the musicians union disputes the board's numbers. But the point here isn't to do a financial analysis of the symphony, it's to point out that we don't have the full picture. And if we don't have the details, we don't have any way of telling whether the board's interpretation of events is accurate, not that the board has offered much in the way of an interpretation to begin with, judging from press reports and the letter to patrons.

Without the details to bolster a convincing narrative, the community of classical music supporters in Philadelphia can't make a rational decision about contributing more than $200 million to the orchestra. Pew Charitable Trusts, the city's largest foundation, decided against contributing to the effort, at least for now. If the Philadelphia Orchestra wants public support, it must have the public's trust. The first step in earning that is transparency -- we need to know what's really going on.

While we're on the subject of financial transparency and lack thereof, Intiman Theatre closed its doors for the rest of the season and dismissed its staff over the weekend. That wouldn't be so surprising, if the company hadn't recently announced that it had reached its first emergency fundraising goal. The chronology:

February: Intiman announces a financial emergency and declares it needs to raise $500,000 almost immediately and $1 million by the fall in order to stay afloat.
Late-March: Intiman announces it has reached the first $500,000 goal.
Mid-April: Intiman closes down for the rest of the year, though it hopes to open its doors again in 2012.

Now, Intiman faces financial problems of an entirely different order from the Philadelphia Orchestra -- it's far smaller and has almost no endowment at this point. But how exactly did that happen? Here's the explanation on the theater's website: "Our primary intent has and continues to be to preserve the future of Intiman — and our hope was to save the season, too. Simultaneous efforts to accomplish both are simply unattainable." But what about the $500,000 they raised? That seemed like such a firm number way back in February. The statement doesn't even have an apology, a "sorry, we miscalculated, and now we've decided to close." What's Intiman's community supposed to make of it all?

Just as a practical, public relations matter, both Intiman and the Philadelphia Orchestra need to be a lot more transparent about their operations and offer better, more complete explanations of how they arrived in their current situations. That's simply how you build public support for public institutions.

Weekend reviews: Men dancing at White Bird, drama in the quartet at Portland Center Stage

2011-04-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

Matthew Boston and Chris Coleman in Michael Hollinger's Opus/Photo:Owen Carey

By Barry Johnson

Just about every putative Portland "Spring," your correspondent falls prey to one germ or another. Nothing serious, mind you, just enough to be a nuisance in the various ways that colds/mild flues can be. I even pretend nothing is wrong some evenings and head out into the drizzle to see something. This week, for example, I saw Yossi Berg and Oded Graf's zesty dance concert at the Alberta Rose Theatre, the historic home opener of the Portland Timbers and opening night of Portland Center Stage's Opus, which included the company's artistic director Chris Coleman in the cast.

I didn't want to miss any of them, but on the other hand, writing about them the next day was impossible. My head would start to hurt and sentences vanished before I could get them typed. Then I'd have to cough for a bit. Or something.

Back to business. Writing about a concert or play a few days later isn't the best plan, at least not for me, but that's what I'm going to do. The benefit to you is that everything will be a little shorter! And because this isn't a sports blog, I won't be writing about the Timbers game, though I have a rocking analysis of the game, if you want to hear it when we meet...

For some reason when I sat down to write the first time about Berg and Graf's 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer, I started out with four thick paragraphs about the problems that writing about dance presents. See how lucky you are? You aren't going to have to read those now. (I'll recycle them later, though -- I'm conservative that way). Today, I understand why I went down that path. 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer is just so darn interpretable.

It may even suggest a geo-political interpretation, because Berg and Graf are Israeli choreographers, and everything involving Israel has a political dimension in some quarters. And because this dance is "about" various ways we men are men and men are intimately connected to sovereignty, the last moment in the dance, with one dancer sitting cross-legged on the stage in a pool of light, looking out at the audience, sad or wistful or at least contemplative, we might be tempted to translate it as a commentary on the Middle East somehow.

That would be tiresome, though, even if you could set up a one-to-one correspondence between the episodes of the dance and the complex recent history of Israel and its environs. Which I couldn't, even if it's there.

Yossi Berg and Oded Graf's 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer

So let's just talk a little about "various ways we men are men." First of all, we are silly -- we'll line dance to "Caravan" or "Tequila" in the lounge-iest possible way, for example. We'll take a pratfall for a laugh. We'll pantomime for comic effect as well. Other men bring this out in us, 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer suggests. Then we get to wrestling with each other, maybe in a playful, mixed martial arts way to start, but pretty soon that degenerates into something more dire or... erotic! And suddenly our bleak existential condition, trapped with each other in a hell of our creation (hey, this isn't political, I promise!), reveals itself, and we collapse. Though not for long. Soon we're back to our old monkey business. It's not apparent that we actually learn anything.

Is all of that "in" 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer? Well, yes, I think so, expressed mostly in movement, though we do hear the story of Alice in the middle. The Oregonian's reviewer, Marty Hughley, detected a symbolic quality in Alice. "Alice -- spoken of with fascination but never shown -- is a representative of womanhood and pulchritude, of potential completion for the ideal man, but also of potential, or maybe inevitable, disruption to the male community." That doesn't really work for me, though, because Berg and Graf are so meta -- thinking about what they are thinking about what they are thinking. Do they really think that Alice (or any potential completion) will significantly alter our underlying existential condition? I seriously doubt it.

How quickly the men abandon Alice for their own cries of the heart comes clear in the most moving section of the dance, a duet that begins in macho chest bumping and evolves into something almost unbearably sad. As they bump, one of the dancers says "no" and the other says "yes," this evolves somehow surreally into "I love you" and "more money" and "more power" and "make it stop." Dear humans, you are tragically ridiculous.

The masks, the deer prop, the casual suits -- 4Men, Alice, Bach and the Deer is quite theatrical as bare as the stage is. The four dancers, the choreographers plus Hillel Kogan and Irad Masliah, are engaging, and they lead us through the dances rapid transformations and episodes without a hitch. And right there, I hesitated to call them "dancers" -- because in this piece, they are more like movement actors than dancers, in the formal sense. There's not a dancerly movement phrase the whole evening, at least not that I can remember now, except maybe for the line dance that begins the show and the occasional nod to social dancing (a little salsa-ish styling from time to time). And that's why my first attempt to come to grips with the show started so far afield itself. What the heck is "dance" anyway?

I'd also like to point out how well the White Bird team adapted the Alberta Rose Theatre for dance -- extending the stage and adding banks of lights. It's a terrific neighborhood theater to begin with, and White Bird made it an excellent place to see dance.

I would have wanted to see Opus even if Chris Coleman wasn't playing in it. It's about critical moment in the life of a string quartet -- with flashbacks to other critical moments -- and I've been interested in the dynamics of small groups for a long time. We spend much our lives in small groups, voluntary or otherwise, and yet we haven't developed that many useful approaches or insights into how they work. Not that I've seen anyway.

A string quartet is different from a lot of musical organizations, more democratic, usually, and more organic, sometimes. And we get to eavesdrop on their conversation -- at least the musical performance part of it. What goes on behind the scenes? Well, that's what playwright Michael Hollinger, himself a classically trained violist, tells us about in Opus.

The quartet in Opus (Coleman plays first violinist Elliott, Chris Hietikko is the cellist Carl, Greg Jackson plays second violinist Alan, Matthew Boston plays violist Dorian, who is replaced by Grace, played by Sarah Stevens) has some formal rules -- everyone has an equal vote about everything, anyone has veto power. As the play begins, Elliot, Carl and Alan are choosing a new violist. Dorian, who's always been a bit fragile (we learn some of the reasons later), has disappeared, and the quartet has a major gig in its immediate future -- a date at the White House. Which is where Grace comes in -- she's auditioning for the group.

The quartet is pretty informal, and like most successful groups, the special characteristics of each member are made into strengths. So, Carl is impatient with arguments and wants decisions made quickly. Elliott (in the absence of Dorian, anyway) takes a leadership role, though the others "adjust" the outcomes he's angling for. The absent Dorian, we learn via flashback, had the most particular musical ideas. And from the same flashbacks, we learn that he and Elliott have a romantic relationship that has gone sour and that he's the needy one. Everyone has a back story, of course, and they are all obligingly supplied by playwright Hollinger. The membrane between life at work and life at home is always permeable, but in small groups it can almost disappear altogether, as it does with Elliott and Dorian. Dorian is "more" equal in the quartet, and Elliott is more equal in the relationship, and you know that's going to be a problem, right?

So, to the first question: Yes, Chris Coleman can act! He has the boyish charm that Elliott requires to get his way in his relationships and the quartet, and the coldness necessary not to mind that his way might mean pain for others. Because, yeah, there's pain in the quartet, lots of it -- sickness, loneliness, relationships gone bad, musical dreams unrealized. And there's a sort of violence, too, as the quartet re-forms itself without a member. You can veto everything but the vote on your own membership in the quartet, apparently, because in extreme situations, in states of emergency, the rules are always set aside.

Opus is "musical" (the actors mime playing their instruments to the piped in music), and I liked its discussion of Beethoven's late quartet, Opus 131, which the group considers the greatest of chamber quartets (Schubert agreed, supposedly: "After this, what is left for us to write?"). But you don't have to be a chamber music buff to enjoy it. It's about small groups and relationships and important work, things we are always ready to consider, yes?

Beyond Coleman, the rest of the actors, under the guidance of director Brendon Fox, have enough nuance to deliver each of the characters as individuals while realizing they are part of a larger group. Hey, that's a lot like a string quartet! Funny! In this context, I especially enjoyed the blenders -- Jackson and Stevens -- who have less of the obvious drama to enact. And I liked the ingenious set by James Kronzer, with its interlocking, movable panels, almost the same light color of wood as Kaul Auditorium's acoustic backdrop at Reed College, where Chamber Music Northwest (among others) plays.

Final question: Does Opus finish off our thinking about the string quartet? Of course not. I know that with just a passing acquaintance with a few quartets in my life. But maybe it will get you thinking about your own small groups, how they work and don't work, what your place in them might be with a little more reflection. It did that for me, as you can see.

NOTES

Hollinger's play (2006) has already played in many American theaters. Director Fox directed it in North Carolina previously. Here, Christopher Isherwood reviews the New York version of the play, with Kronzer's set design, quite favorably.

Denver and Detroit: Link me, two-time

2011-04-12T11:59:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

We look to other cities both for good ideas and cautionary tales. These two links take us Detroit, where the Detroit Symphony strike is full of the latter, and Denver, which has shown a far more robust interesting in funding the arts than most other American cities.

The planned art center in Parker, Colorado.

Since it created a metro-wide Scientific and Cultural Facilities District 22 years ago, Denver has become the Shining City on the Hill for arts groups around the country. The district's taxing system sends about $40 million a year coursing through the veins of local arts organizations. Now, the city is seeing a sudden blossoming of smaller arts centers, specifically two in the southern reaches of the metro area, as reported in the Denver Post. These aren't specifically connected to the cultural facilities district -- they have their own funding mechanisms, public and private -- and it might be difficult to prove a strict cause-and-effect relationship, but the correlation is at least interesting.

In some ways, Denver is an urbanist's worst nightmare, with its rings of sprawl, emphasis on superhighways and dearth of urban amenities. Its streets certainly aren't made for walking. But its also at least interesting that one way its suburbs are attempting to define themselves, give themselves a distinct sense of place, is through arts centers. Not little ones, either. Both of the ones under construction cost north of $20 million. Undoubtedly, everyone will have to drive to them, but as Denver grows and the traffic there gets worse, the population of south metro will likely find it far easier and satisfying to attend events at these arts centers rather than dare the trip to the downtown cultural center -- better 15 minutes in the car than 45 minutes or an hour.

There's a lot to munch on in the Post account -- the importance of a local developer to one of the centers, for example, or the emphasis on arts education at the other. But just the fact of them, in this economy, is worth mulling: Some people think the arts are a pretty good investment.

Drew McManus's Adaptistration blog followed the Detroit Symphony strike closely, and McManus is also interested in the aftermath, which at this point couldn't look less promising. McManus analyzed the set of weekend stories from Detroit, and he found that the musicians are distrustful of a management team that steered the orchestra onto the financial rocks in the first place, and the managers are still moaning about the amount of money they have to raise. Management might have plunged into discussions with the musicians about how they could start doing the Memphis Style outreach that the new contract call for or announced a new financial plan, new funding initiative or a new set of donors who agreed to help once the strike was settled. But that's not what they did. So, I guess that makes me distrustful, too.

Todd Haynes' enthusiasm for 'Mildred Pierce' is catching

2011-04-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Kate Winslet sets her jaw for Mildred Pierce.

By Barry Johnson

Sometimes a friend you trust about such matters is so enthusiastic about a painter, a restaurant, a writer or a movie that you allow yourself to get swept up in the vortex, even though you may have some doubts about how tasty that food/painting/novel/film will be.

That's a little like where I was with Todd Haynes and his HBO adaptation of Mildred Pierce, not that Haynes and I are friends or anything. I'd recently watched the Michael Curtiz film version, with Joan Crawford in the starring role (for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1946), and I wasn't sure how Haynes could make that relatively stiff film noir into something with the depth of a good Masterpiece Theater. Not that I hated the movie -- it had its delights, Eve Arden as Mildred's wise-cracking sidekick, for example, Ann Blythe as the wicked Veda and Jack Carson as Wally, the conniving lawyer and sexual predator.

But after watching Haynes five-part series, I have to admit that he was onto something -- as our enthusiastic friends often are -- and the material, especially James M. Cain's original novel brought to life by Haynes and Jon Raymond's script, had resources I didn't imagine it had. And Haynes's visual style utterly upends Curtiz's dark, stark version. Given room to breathe, the story fills with music, sumptuous designs and costumes and gorgeous settings, and the LA of the '30s starts to speak to us.

What really makes Mildred Pierce problematic? That would be Mildred Pierce herself. Cain's novel is a psychological character study, but it comes with one giant "given" that neither film version can alter: Mildred is a total sap about her daughter Veda. We don't know why, because Veda, unlike her younger sister Ray, is totally impossible, monstrously self-centered and affected as a little girl and increasingly viperous as she grows older. Does Mildred identify with her for some reason? Was Mildred mistreated as a child and wants to make sure her own daughter is indulged? We have no idea. Like I said, it's just a given. It confined Joan Crawford's performance to a narrow emotional spectrum, and it works similarly on Kate Winslet's performance for Haynes, though I think Haynes and Winslet find a way out.

That escape paradoxically comes from emphasizing Mildred's other confining roles. By turns, she's a proud member of the middle class, then she's a casualty of the Great Depression looking for work, a manual worker, then an entrepreneur, a lover (this one's harder for her), a very successful empress of a restaurant mini-empire, a stage mother (briefly), a socialite (briefly) and a wife (briefly). Throughout, she's Veda's doting mother, but with the time a mini-series gives him, Haynes allows Winslet to develop these other parts.

In my favorite scene in the series, Winslet teaches herself to carry multiple plates of food at one time by overlapping them up her arm, practicing in her bedroom with rocks on plates. She'd determined to be competent at whatever she does, and that little scene screwed that little piece of her personality into place perfectly. But because of Veda, her success in the restaurant trade doesn't give her the satisfaction that it might. Veda doesn't believe in work herself, though she's diligent at the piano. She's one of those characters who believes the work world is beneath her, and even to be around it, to live in the same house with it, sullies her. In short, Veda's "evil" character is the second given of Mildred Pierce.

Veda is a tasty role to play, and Morgan Turner (as young Veda) and Evan Rachel Wood are both creepily, nauseatingly affected little princesses. Curtiz has his revenge on her at the end, but Haynes leaves her headed to New York with a whole city full of lives she can wreck. Brilliant!

Evan Rachel Wood: Is Mildred Pierce really her story?

Veda and Mildred. How you deal with their relationship, with them as characters, determines a lot of your reaction to the mini-series. Are they too exaggerated? Totally unbelievable? At first I thought so, but then Haynes's enthusiasm for them carried me past my first take, though Turner's mannerism's got a little old by the end of episode three. Wood's Veda is described by her music mentor as a snake, and that's exactly right -- she's a schemer, several steps ahead of Mildred and everyone else, crazy with ambition and the need to dominate, with the voice of an angel and the heart of a ... well, you know.
Will she betray Mildred? She'll delight in it.

Yes, Haynes's Mildred Pierce retains the melodrama. If Veda had a mustache, she'd twirl the end of it before coming up with her next evil deed. Haynes doesn't try to hide that aspect of the story; he lets it play out in all its gory glory. But it's just one plane in the more complex geometry he's describing.

Mildred also has man problems. Her husband at the beginning of the series, Bert, is apparently cheating on her as he tries to rebound from losing out on a sweet investment to his ex-partner Wally. He has his better qualities (he sees Veda for who she is, for example), and so does Wally, who helps Mildred get started in business. But Wally's really out to serve Number One, not Mildred, as it turns out. And then there's Monte, the penniless playboy, a sybarite and a parasite, whom Mildred falls for twice with alarming results. Curtiz made Wally into an amoral lech (played with relish by Jack Carson), always making a play for Mildred. Haynes's Wally is less tom cat than unscrupulous businessman (though we don't hear his side of it, of course!). He expands Monte's part for Guy Pearce, who can seem so weary from the pleasures of the flesh sometimes. And do you think he has Mildred's interests at heart? No, you're not that gullible.

Mildred is luckier with the women in her life, except for Veda. I miss the hilarious Eve Arden as Ida in Curtiz's film, here reduced to a bookkeeper worried about Mildred's growing extravagance. But Haynes adds another trusted confidant from the novel in Lucy (Melissa Leo) and surrounds Mildred with earnest waitresses, maids and other helpers. Haynes doesn't make it a battle of the sexes, though; he's more subtle than that.

The background for this Mildred Pierce is the Depression and LA before it became America's second city, which Curtiz ignores completely. Haynes is far more interested in both, and they give the mini-series a sense of realism to balance the psychological melodrama of the plot. You may start to exclaim at every street scene, because the cars and the houses are so beautifully "period." And the interiors take your breath away -- Haynes knows how to do color and design, as we learned in Far From Heaven. Subtle and intricate and glowing, these reach their apotheosis in the last episode when Mildred refurbishes Monte's mansion and Veda gives a vocal recital in an orchestra hall. The fabrics! The flowers! The furniture! And the costumes, though entirely appropriate, are wonderful -- I'm thinking of a deep blue hat that Mildred sports, so deep you can almost feel it in your fingertips.

See? Haynes's excitement about this project, reflected in the details and the movement, moment by moment, wins you over, even if you think that maybe Winslet has held her head in her hands one too many times by Episode Three -- and you know the real suffering's still to come.

I am not criticizing Winslet here, though. Like Crawford, she has that "given" and she can't escape it. She can't please Veda no matter what she does, no matter what she sacrifices or what she gives her. And that's her life's work, except maybe for her own small weakness for well-sculpted playboys. And that limits her range of possibilities, the spectrum she can play. No side-of-her-mouth slang for Mildred, no emotional growth, no new personality vistas. She may become a leading restaurateur, but she's stuck behind the rock, pushing it uphill, and when she reaches the top, it rolls back down right over her; Sisyphus is a hard role to play.

Veda: I can still see Wood's look of pure hatred for Winslet as the series reaches its climax. Not petulance -- Veda's way past that. So, Wood practically snarls at her: I've done the worst things I can do to you, betrayed you in the most profound ways, and but if I can hurt you more, I will. Maybe this is Veda's story, more than Mildred's. And as Mildred sobs at the end, we have a feeling that more pain is in store for her, not matter what she says.

NOTES:

New York Magazine interviewed Haynes after some negative reviews were published. I especially liked one of his lines: "I think it’s good for us, in our era of constant distraction and digital multitasking, bite-size information and endless texting, to have an experience where you actually move through someone’s life without leaping hysterically, flashing forward, and jumping around."

LA Weekly's review is positive and gives a good comparison of novel, film and HBO miniseries. J Hoberman in the Village Voice is also favorably disposed, though the review contains some backhanded compliments.

Island hopping for a Friday

2011-04-08T09:23:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

The Cleveland Orchestra's critic-in-residence program caught the attention of Arts Dispatch, but what about the overall effect of its annual 3-week residency in Miami? David Fleshler of the South Florida Classical Review gives a fair assessment of the positives and negatives. Positives: They play great, teach college students and play for schools. Negatives: They play conservative repertory and may drain philanthropic money out of Miami, money that might have gone into re-establishing a professional orchestra in Miami.

Let's be clear: Arts Dispatch doesn't claim to be hip. On the other hand: Arts Dispatch doesn't want to be square, either. And that's why we like articles like this "defense of hipsterism." Hey, we want something to aspire to!

Is this little essay-let/screed anti-hipster? I'm not sure: HTMLGiant puzzles me that way sometime. I get the whole irony v. authenticity thing confused -- like, can something be authentically ironic? Or is irony ever-receding from authenticity, an image in a mirror in an image in a mirror in an image in a mirror in an image in a mirror... you get the point.

Yes, we are in a sort of metaphysical frame of mind this morning: "There is no necessity for me to be me and for the other to be them, it just is." That's from another short essay by Peter Thompson on the Verso Books blog, which is always provocative, one way or another. Thompson argues that I am always "island hopping" from the self I am now to the self I want to be, from the self to the other, from the subjective to the objective, and that until we understand that, we misunderstand all human endeavor. OK. Got it. I'll try to carry that with me to the next island.

A few thoughts on Kristy Edmunds at UCLA Live

2011-04-06T09:50:00.000-07:00

Kristy Edmunds, back in the USA

By Barry Johnson

Kristy Edmunds has been named the new director of UCLA Live, among the most influential and, at times, forward-thinking performance series on West Coast, and yesterday, when the LA Times story was posted, I sent out a couple of emails to interested parties. Edmunds started her career as an arts administrator/curator in Portland, first getting traction with her efforts for the Portland Art Museum's Art on the Edge program of contemporary visual and performance art, then founding Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 1995.

The road at PICA was bumpy -- it started as a performance series and exhibition space, but when it ran into financial problems, it reinvented itself as a festival, specifically the Time Based Art festival. In some ways, that transition was Edmunds most important accomplishment, requiring every bit of her considerable enthusiasm, political skill and charm. I can't think of a more successful re-imagination by a Portland arts group during my time in the city, which stretches back to 1979.

My emails went to Victoria Frey, the executive director of PICA, and to Walter Jaffe, who founded and runs White Bird with Paul King.

King heard about Edmunds' move when he was in Melbourne recently for a dance festival. Edmunds first served as artistic director of the Melbourne International Arts Festival for four years after leaving Portland in 2004, and in 2008 became Head of Performing Arts for the Victorian College of the Arts at the University of Melbourne, which is the hometown of her partner, choreographer Ros Warby. Jaffe had kind words for David Sefton, whom Edmunds replaces.

Sefton resigned last May when UCLA decided to eliminate the international theater festival he had created. UCLA Live and the university itself have struggled during the Great Recession -- attendance and donations to the performance series declined precipitously -- and the university, which supplies around 15 percent of the $8 million series, said it didn't have the resources to make up the difference.

"UCLA has undergone major budget cuts and they let David Sefton go because he was spending too much on programming -- that’s what we understand," Jaffe said. "We liked David’s taste though -- he was a big fan of Stephen Petronio -- and we partnered with him on Hofesh Shechter last year. So it will be very interesting to see what Kristy brings to UCLA."

UCLA Live has been a major dance presenter during Sefton's 10 years of leadership, and given the difficulties of dance touring these days (the number of dance presenters has declined as expenses have risen, for example), partnerships with White Bird make sense.

Frey said she'd known about the possibility of Edmunds' move for a while, time she'd spent "trying to hide my excitement." "It does open up a lot of opportunities for increased collaboration for West Coast touring and development of work," she said. "Kristy remains invested in PICA's future as the Founder and will be looking for ways to leverage partnership that benefit both programs. She is also a significant leader in the field and will add much to the national conversation. We are very happy to have her back in the US and on the West Coast."

Edmunds faces a steep climb at UCLA Live, by all accounts, as the series figures out how to find a new sustainable financial level. How avant-garde a series will LA support? On the other hand, she lands in a city with a lot of extremely wealthy and arts-engaged patrons. It won't take very many wins among this group to get UCLA Live back on track, and I'm not betting against Edmunds. She's always been great at creating a buzz around "pushy" performance work, and the lessons she learned in Portland and refined in Melbourne should be applicable to LA. The "noise" level in LA is far greater, of course, but that's the challenge. It will be fun to watch her operate again, even from afar.

The Detroit Symphony: What we saw during the strike and what lies ahead

2011-04-05T12:04:00.000-07:00

Leonard Slatkin will return to the Detroit Symphony podium soon.

By Barry Johnson

The news yesterday that management and the striking Detroit Symphony musicians have reached a tentative contract agreement, with the musicians absorbing a 23 percent pay cut, somewhat less than management had proposed, wasn't exactly happy news. That's a big pay cut, but an accurate measurement of the orchestra's financial state, which is perilous.

The proposed work rule changes likely will change the lives of musicians at orchestras around the country, which is a good or bad thing depending on your viewpoint. We'll get to that in a moment.

Arts Dispatch has followed developments since September, when it became clear that a strike was inevitable. Here's what we think we saw, in the form of a series of bullet points:

Against a backdrop of gradually declining attendance and donations of various kinds, the Detroit Symphony was hit by the recession of 2008 and large debt payments on its new music hall.
That debt, around $54 million, is the symphony's Sword of Damocles -- it places the survival of the symphony in the hands of the lenders.
The symphony's endowment plunged from nearly $60 million in 2008 to $23 million today.
The symphony's "community" -- not the entire Detroit metropolitan area, but the people in that area "activated" to one degree or another by classical symphonic music -- was not organized well enough to play a role in the lead-up to the strike. No donor groups, audience groups, volunteer groups -- in short, Friends of the Symphony -- were called in to help solve the problem. This was like a labor dispute at GM or Ford, and it got just as nasty just as quickly.
Unfortunately, unlike GM or Ford, the symphony requires a certain amount of good will to survive, and how much of that remains will be tested in the coming months.
Early press reports (and later blog posts by the likes of Greg Sandow and Christopher O'Riley) focused on a few intemperate statements by symphony musicians, which seemed to indicate that the musicians thought they shouldn't have to do anything for their keep except play their symphony concerts well in their beautiful new hall. This was wrong.
We know it's wrong because the striking musicians immediately started playing concerts around the Metro area in various alternate venues, such as churches and school auditoriums. And they had cooperated with management on a long-range plan that involved activities of this sort in the year before the strike.
Many in the media outside of Detroit (Terry Teachout in the Wall St. Journal, for example) assumed that the problem was the Decline of Detroit, reflected in recent census data from the city proper, but Detroit metro still has a large, impressive economy and it's still a major American city, much larger than in population that the state of Oregon (among others). That city is rich enough to support a Top 10 symphony orchestra if it wants to do so.
We shouldn't underestimate the vitriol and dishonesty of the rhetoric, especially the arguments coming from the management side. (The musicians cataloged and responded to these on their website.)

For me, the only positive development in the past six months was the series of concerts the musicians produced on their own in various suburbs and nearby cities. These addressed directly the "outreach" problem (and I find that word utterly inadequate to its task) that just about everyone who thinks about large legacy arts organizations believes is central to their future. Within that catch-all term, we lump cultivation and encouragement of hard-core supporters, education efforts among children, planting the classical music flag in hard-to-reach communities, raising the profile of the music in the culture at large, establishment of key relationships with elected officials and finding new foundation and individual donors, and we might also lump in "electronic outreach" -- recordings, radio and television programs, various internet forms (blogs, podcasts, etc.).

Each one of these is a complicated bit of business, but all are built on the music of the symphony. And the value of easy-to-reach, affordable concerts in large metropolitan areas such as Detroit is hard to overestimate. (It also raises some skepticism about the huge investments by cities such as Dallas and Montreal in big, shiny arts districts, but that's another subject for another time.) Music director Leonard Slatkin agreed: ""If there's one thing we've learned, it's that we have to be more involved in the communities outside of Orchestra Hall. We won't abandon it, but direct connections with other populations are absolutely crucial."

So, three problems: 1) organizing the present community of music fans; 2) figuring out a way to develop new fans; 3) raising the general visibility, er, audibility, of classical music in the area.

The new work rules might help with each of these, but the efforts of the musicians will need to be targeted properly for maximum effect. The rules tie a certain portion of a musician's base pay to "outreach" efforts, which might include teaching, playing in a smaller chamber group outside the symphony or recording work. It will be an "opt-in" -- meaning a musician can decide to forgo the money if he or she doesn't want to participate.

This sounds reasonable, but it will involve a close relationship between individuals in the orchestra and management. It calls for a plan that taps into the inner "sound engineer" of a cellist, the repressed DJ in a percussionist, the small band leader in a trumpet player -- in short, drawing on the strengths of the individuals and helping them group themselves in new ways for important purposes. That takes knowledge and trust, and both were shown to be lacking during the strike. How much freedom to be creative and entrepreneurial will the orchestra management allow? How deeply involved will the orchestra be? Big organizations have a hard time making changes of this sort, right? Until they have to? And even then it's hard to replace one culture with another.

In some ways, the next few years will be much more interesting in Detroit than the past one, though without the "news" of a strike, it's unlikely that the symphony will be under anything like the scrutiny that it's had the past six months. We'll try to keep up with what's going on, though. Musicians, funders and audiences all over the country will want to know what's happening.

NOTES

I've written about this topic many times now, including this representative post about the "top-down" style employed by management, and this re-description. My thinking about the strike changed over time, and more and more I saw it as a community organizing problem and a "democracy" problem. I still think that.

Weekend reviews: We danced 'til we dropped

2011-04-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

How "local" is dance? Would an observer from a "neutral" place -- Switzerland, Omaha -- detect a specific, distinctive dance style in Portland, say, different from Chicago or Seoul? Or are the borders of dance so permeable that its useless to talk about geography at this point, and we're all Cunningham dancers now?

LDP in motion/Photo:Yong Hoon Han

At various times, I've thought of Portland as the Galapagos Islands of dance (and theater, for that matter), so isolated that entirely new species of movement arise here. In any new specimen, the careful field biologist might note a quirky Gregg Bielemeier tic here, a Bonnie Merrill pattern there, Mary Oslund's shoulder roll and a general looseness of expression balanced by an attitude of sureness, maybe combination of Jann Dryer and Judy Patton.

All of these choreographer/dancers, except for Oslund, danced with Portland Dance Theater in the 1970s and then after that company's demise, continued (for the most part) to live and work and teach in the city, at Portland State and Conduit dance studio. And small generations of their students have continued and extended their work, developing along their own paths.

But this is a simplistic way of thinking about modern dance here, because those dancers had influences, too, often by way of New York -- Cunningham, of course, and the Judson School, for example. And lest we think of New York as the center of the cultural universe, we should remember that Cunningham and Judson stalwart Trisha Brown grew up in the Northwest (Washington), and that Anna Halprin's improv experiments in the Bay Area had their effects here, too.

The visit to Portland this weekend by the Seoul-based Laboratory Dance Project brought all this to mind. How Korean was it?

Then on Sunday, the Art Gym opened an exhibition that is deeply dance related, featuring artifacts from the dance preparations of four local choreographers -- Linda K. Johnson (who now lives in the Bay Area), Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Susan Banyas. On Sunday, the first three of them performed, too, and in the Art Gym's smaller gallery, we could see videos from dance here in the 1980s, with dances by many of the Portland Dance Theater dancers mentioned above. How Portland was it?

Laboratory Dance Project/White Bird/Lincoln Hall

I had no idea what to expect from LDP, the Seoul-based contemporary dance company, which made its Portland debut this weekend at PSU's Lincoln Hall, part of the White Bird Uncaged dance series. Would it be folk-dance inspired? Resemble some form of Japanese performance art? Take on the coloration of Broadway musicals or advanced European ballet theater?

After the first dance on the program, Are You Happy to See Me?, I decided on the last of these -- without the ballet part. In some important ways it fulfilled nearly all of the requirements of international-style contemporary dance. I ticked off those characteristics in my head toward the end of the piece.

Is the general "subject" anxiety? Check.
Does the music involve bass-heavy, hip-hop beats, industrial techno and maybe something oddly off-kilter? Check. In this case the off-kilter part was martial band music.
Are the costumes a little strange? Check. Blue denim skirts for the all-male company with flimsy brown shirts.
Does the set have an inexplicable component? Check. A large silver translucent square suspended above the stage through with a stage light shines.
Do little snatches of narrative emerge occasionally from a mostly abstract movement environment? Check.
Does the tempo speed up to the spasmodic and throttle down to the glacial? Check.
Does the movement combine everyday movement, unison calisthenics and expressive gestures (somber or grief-stricken)? Check.
Is the ensemble more important than individual virtuosity? Check.
Are the dancers fit as fiddles and fully engaged throughout? Most definitely.

I speculated that the martial music bits and heavy anxiety might reference the state of Cold War between the two Koreas on the one peninsula, and if I were making art in Seoul, I suspect it would be impossible to think sometimes about the madcap but well-armed regime to the North, Freedonia with nukes. But I couldn't be sure. Other readings of it were possible.

After the concert ended, White Bird helpfully staged a little audience talk-back session with the company. And the choreographer, Mi Sook Jeon, said that was exactly what her piece was about -- the way the two countries would approach each other, a hand would be extended in friendship and the somehow things would fall apart again. And yes, then I remembered the offers to shake hands, especially in the very last section of the dance, a dancer reaching forward in a pool of light, and then plunged into darkness.

My point is simply this -- the general expectation that all art should communicate directly and immediately, without mediation of any kind, is just wrong. As in anything, the more information about the subject you have, the more direct experience, the better chance you have of interpreting and assessing it correctly -- and the more useful it likely will become for you.

The LDP concert wasn't chock-a-block with obscure references, though. The second dance, Modern Feeling, choreographed by dancer Insoo Lee and danced with his old friend Jinyook Ryo (more good info from the talk-back), is something of a comic masterpiece. It starts with Ryo sitting in a chair in deep contemplation. Lee sits next to him, but can't "communicate" with him. He reaches out and puts his hand on Ryo's leg, which immediately starts spasming in a bad case of Nervous Leg Syndrom. The hand is removed; the leg stops. Lee tests the effect again; yes, more violent shaking, so violent at one point that Lee's body picks up the vibration, too, and then they are off in a swirl of give-and-take action, inventive and funny, with traces of tae-kwon-do, hip-hop and gymnastics involved. Lee said he and Ryo have been dancing together for 15 years, since their days together as B-boys back in their home town, entertaining the locals with break dancing, and that familiarity and friendship is apparent in the dance.

Changho Shin's exuberant No Comment concluded the concert with energetic, up-tempo unison movement, a little like a dance club routine punched into overdrive, that spread out into the audience, allowed the dancers some gymnastic b-boy expression, and thoroughly delighted everyone. What was the point? To get us off our feet!

LDP was established a decade ago, and was Korea's first modern dance company, created, according to Jeon, to emphasize new work by Korean choreographers and move the dance community beyond Martha Graham technique into other worlds of expression. Most of the dancers seemed to come out of hip-hop, and they said they were heading to a club after the performance (they didn't say which one), the show after the show. How Korean is hip-hop? How Korean is contemporary dance? As Korean as it wants to be...

Dance: before, after during, The Art Gym, Marylhurst University, Terri Hopkins curator

I was glancingly involved in this exhibition -- I wrote the wall text for the Past Moves room, where the videos from the 1980s are looping -- so I'm not going to delve too deeply here into the exhibition or the performances on Sunday. The Art Gym was full of dancers and choreographers from many generations, and that by itself was bracing.

I'm not sure that Johnson, Holt and Austin are "representative" of dance here now, but that's the problem with the idea that there's a distinct Portland style. These days, things are obviously more heterodox than in the '80s when I first started following dance here, though even then, eddies and whirlpools of different influences and creations made it hard to define a Portland style. Dancers come and go and return with new ideas.

The pieces they did were installation oriented. So, when we walked into the space, stacks of cardboard boxes filled the back wall, the props for Holt's Sunshine, and carefully folded blankets of many colors and patterns filled a case on another wall, with videos of some of Austin's year-long movement diary project (which deserves a story all by itself). Dance is pretty ephemeral and exhibitions need objects, generally, and the choreographers complied. Johnson contributed a grid of small bags with objects related to her solo.

I enjoyed the three performances, though I was admittedly in a receptive mood -- so many people I knew were there, the occasion was so celebratory, I'd spent a little time watching the old videos and re-visiting the past. Reverie and analysis don't go together very well. So, just a few notes.

I don't think I'd ever seen Johnson quite this "personal" in her work -- a mosaic of various states and movements, some relating to the exhibition (she told me later) and others from childhood. And despite one screaming fit, it all seemed comfortable and familiar somehow, especially the part where she played the kids' game of trying to balance on a small rock. Everyone gasped when she pulled a large plastic bag over her head, especially the few with little children, and it made me realize how powerful that particular taboo is. She then stuffed the bag up her shirt, and though I thought she might throw herself into a bag-protected belly flop, she never did.

Austin had used those blankets recently in an improv at Disjecta, and the first part of this piece (which I took to be semi-improvised) involved the dancers spreading those blankets on the floor, lying on them, then getting another one from the case: repeat. Things went on from there -- quietly, without drama, small groups forming and dispersing -- and it produced an agreeable meditative state. Holt danced with Robert Tyree, and when I say "danced" this time, I really mean it, because Holt did something immediately recognizable as dance, swift and stretch, at least for a while once the box-rearrangement section was over. Boxes and blankets -- we could write an entire essay on that "subject" (and if you happen to do so, send it to me and I'll post it here!). I've already used the word "familiar" but that was part of it, common items that somehow engage the imagination, emotions, memories, old stories.

These small, intimate performances had little to do with LDP's show at Lincoln Hall, though again, this was a matter of choice. The Korean choreographers might leaned in a more personal direction; the Portland choreographers might have created a spectacle for Lincoln Hall. And the "choice" element is another thing that works against "local." Ultimately, maybe local in dance is simply who is dancing near you now.

NOTES

Bob Hicks reviewed LDP quite positively for The Oregonian... Susan Banyas will perform at The Art Gym at 2 p.m. on April 30 and May 14... the next White Bird show features work by Israeli choreographers Yossi Berg and Oded Graf, which will allow us to get into this issue yet again!

An argument against cutting the pittance the State of Washington spends on arts funding

2011-03-29T14:36:00.000-07:00

By Barry Johnson

The State of Washington is facing a $5 billion budget shortfall, and on Gov. Chris Gregoire's list of items to cut is the $3 million the state spends on its public art and state arts commission. If those two amounts of money seem wildly disproportionate, well, that's just the way public servants think about the arts, just about everywhere, not to sound bitter or anything.

I don't pretend to know anything about Washington's budget woes. (I do know the state wasted tens of egregious millions on bad plans for the Columbia River Crossing, just like the State of Oregon did.) But I want to make a brief case for that $3 million, in any case, specifically any state's rightful role and responsibility in arts funding. I'm not going to start at the beginning with a full-throated argument for the crucial effects the arts have on the rest of the culture. I'm assuming you're already with me on that.

It's a simple argument, really, and it's based on fairness: Without the state's involvement, we lose our standing to argue that all of us should have access to the arts.

The situation is desperate, even as it stands. Our "market driven" system of arts support means that large numbers of us are excluded simply because ticket prices are so high. At the same time, we have stopped providing systematic arts education in our schools, failing to understand its value, both intrinsically and its direct effects on student performance. Still, the state, through its grant programs, has influenced arts organizations, rewarding those with education programs, for example, and outreach efforts to those who can't afford tickets. State grants fund small programs in neighborhoods and far-flung towns that don't have a lot of access in the best of circumstances. My experience is that most arts organizations actually want to be more accessible and state funding helps provide a base for their efforts. And it's more than the meager dollars -- it's the sense of purpose, of commitment, an expression of values.

What happens if we allow this cultural Darwinism full expression? Easy. We say that accessibility to a 40,000-year record of what it means to be human will be determined by your economic strata, by your level of education, by your geography, by your age. We suggest that the arts aren't a common good, a legacy over which we have a temporary and shared stewardship, that the cave paintings and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the epic of Gilgamesh and Leaves of Grass, Medea and King Lear, medieval chants and American jazz, only belong to you if you are wealthy enough to access them.

And that, from where I sit, makes them useless. Because the whole point of the arts is what they tell all of us, the shared experiences they offer, the way they model human accomplishment at the highest levels, the things they affect us privately, one-to-one, and collectively, one-to-many. The arts are at the center of any culture, not the periphery, and whatever shared values and sense of community we have, they are in the middle of it.

In arguments such as these, inevitably we return to the importance of the arts, I suppose, or at least their potential importance. I happen to think that when we eliminate them we lose a good chunk of our ability to improve our circumstances, as individuals and as societies. And when we act as though they aren't a common good, we demean them by making them into silly commodities. I'm sorry. If you're thinking of Romeo and Juliet or Angels in America as commodities, as apps or wheat futures, you aren't thinking clearly. You are destroying the culture just as much as the Taliban did when it destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan.

I make a similar argument for state support of education: We as a community rightly assert that all of us should have access to education and should help shape its details. In Oregon, we have defunded higher education, and our universities are seeking to be independent of state oversight in return. That's a bad bargain, for the same reason -- we devalue education by reducing it to a market commodity; we lose our ability to assert certain values, such as accessibility, openness, rigor, when we shrug our shoulders and refuse to support our colleges financially. We allow them to float and adapt to a marketplace that values other things -- spas, luxurious living quarters and dining rooms, a many-splendored football team -- over accessibility and rational inquiry.

It's simple, really. When a common good is at stake, we agree to support it together. In Washington, a rich state by most measures, plenty of money is available to fund that $3 million, if the state has the political will to tax itself properly and to fight off the bad ideas of powerful interests. I'm not naive. No, Washington doesn't have that political will, any more than Oregon does. But maybe someone will figure out a way to block this particular bad idea. Good luck to them.

Weekend reviews: Hope, that's it, or something like it

2011-03-28T13:17:00.000-07:00

Charise Castro Smith's boomcracklefly at Miracle Theatre

By Barry Johnson

Anxiety, if not downright despair, had its way this weekend, but hope wasn't routed completely. No, hope is stubborn or at least stubbornly intermittent. And at the arts events I attended, it fought a guerrilla campaign against overwhelming forces, a campaign that expressed itself in an invitation to lunch at a Thai restaurant and in the survival of a band of characters on a raft, tiny expressions of hope's capacity to resist the seemingly irresistible.

Is that vague enough? A little specificity: This weekend's events included the Arnica String Quartet's "Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze" concert at the Community Music Center, a first look at Matt McCormick's first feature film Some Days Are Better Than Others and a Sunday matinee of Miracle Theatre's Boomcracklefly.

Arnica String Quartet, Community Music Center:

Each of the sections of Henryck Gorecki's Already It Is Dusk (1988) begins with a bow scraped lightly against a string, lightly enough to give it a fuzzy, quavery sound that might become "scratchy" if the musician dug into the string just a little more. It's not an an unpleasant sound, exactly, and it's a common enough device in modern music. Here, Gorecki follows it with a storm of sound that will give you night terrors, if we are to follow the cues of the title. Forget sweet dreams in this night. It's a jungle out there, full of predators who can see in the dark. Hope? Maybe it's in the quavery line

The Arnica -- violinists Shin-young Kwon and Fumino Ando, violist Charles Noble and cellist Heather Blackburn -- nodded a few times toward to Gorecki, a Polish composer who was a child during World War II, losing several relatives to the concentration camps. They play him well. Gorecki was part of concert organizer Bob Priest's "Forgive Me, Mister Zappa," one of four composers Priest "adapted" to a song by rock iconoclast Frank Zappa. And the Arnica began the concert with Gorecki's Allegro Molto for two violins from his Sonata, op.10 (1957), a screeching, dissonant knot that immediately let the full house at the music center know that they hadn't wandered in for a bit of Mozart. Where was the hope in Gorecki, who died in November? Maybe just in those quavery lines, plaintive though they be.

At first I thought the concert's title, "Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze," was a comment on the early Kronos Quartet adaptation of Jimi Hendrix's famous rock song, especially since Kronos commissioned Gorecki's Already It Is Dusk and has been a champion of Gorecki's music. No, that was the name of a piece by composer Michael Longton, whom Priest enlisted to contribute to a CD of new music inspired by Hendrix, and Longton was right: His piece has nothing in common with "Purple Haze," though I liked its slowly unfolding modulations.

The program included Lutoslawski's Bucolics (1962), a slightly gentler bit of business, lots of hope there, maybe, and concluded with Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, op 133 (1825-26), which is hardly restful itself. Stravinsky called it "an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever," and it's not a huge step from it to Gorecki; it's that jagged and dissonant.

So, hope? Gorecki himself found some in words inscribed by an inmate, an 18-year-old woman, in a Gestapo prison: "Oh Mamma do not cry—Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always." He included them in his Third Symphony, Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, his most famous work, and found some solace in the lamentation.

Matt McCormick, Some Days Are Better Than Others, Hollywood Theater

Awkwardness is fast becoming a dominant trope in American art and pop culture, not that it hasn't been with us since one of our savanah-roaming ancestors tripped in a pothole or was discovered making whoopie with the wrong, ahem, homo erectus, a joke that has already been made by a pop movie, that employs the trope.

McCormick's film, his first feature, isn't an awkwardness-based comedy, like "The Office" or "Curb Your Enthusiasm." No, it explores melancholy around the edges of Portland, Oregon, so quiet, soft and empty beyond McCormick's lens. That describes its three primary characters, too.

Carrie Brownstein (Portlandia, Sleater-Kinney) plays Katrina, who discovers her boyfriend's cheating on her via his email (she's cracked his password) and rapidly spirals from "getting by" into "despair." She works in an animal shelter and aspires to become a contestant on a reality television show. She knows here way around a camera and she likes to take old stuffed animals, tear them apart and make something different with them, a crazy animal hat, say. And she's pretty frank about her unhappiness. How long will it take for her pain to go away, she asks her roommate Eli, who is played by another important indie musician (McCormick has directed music videos for both), the Shins' James Mercer.

Eli says, maybe never. Eli's like that, clinging to his apartment and daily sustenance (he's figured out how to eat out three times a day for less than $7, though one of these involves lots of coffee refills at Stumptown) through a series of temp jobs, each worse than the last. He does have a friend, his step-grandfather, who spends his days making beautiful soap bubble films and traveling around town with Eli, whenever Eli needs to borrow his car. Even Eli has begun to understand how awful his life is, though he can't figure out how to escape its clutches. At one point he says, I'll never have a job that pays $20 an hour, and though that's just a financial measurement, it doubles as his assessment of the quality of his future overall.

On one of his temp jobs, filming the beach for a few minutes every thirty minutes from near dawn to dusk (an assignment that is ultimately trash-canned, by the way), Eli spots a woman with a funeral urn, spreading ashes on the beach as the tide rolls in. That's Camille (Renee Roman Nose), who discovered the urn and its contents in a box where she works, a non-profit thrift store. Camille lives by herself and seems completely isolated from human contact, except at work, where she utters a few words now and then. She becomes obsessed by the urn and by the little girl's ashes inside. Her boss registers it with the police, but when its owner doesn't claim it, she takes matters into her own hands.

McCormick lets these little stories spool out slowly and then entangles them. Although the characters resemble Wendy in Wendy and Lucy, the film by Kelly Reichardt and Jon Raymond, starring Michelle Williams, Some Days Are Better Than Others is lighter, more whimsical, though mostly that's because of Katrina's quirks and Eli's strange jobs (counting milk containers at grocery stores, for example). But its subject is similar -- transience, the idea that we are in flux and headed toward uncertain futures that are shadowed by death and destruction. Truly, I feel better about Wendy's prospects than Katrina or Eli's, even though she's scraping the very bottom and they aren't quite there yet.

Katrina and Eli (and to a lesser extent, Camille) are awkward in their lives, profoundly awkward. Their schemes and accomplishments are so minor and their blockages and hurdles are so large that we we wonder how they'll ever escape these little lives. But we know that a cure for awkwardness exists. It's called grace, and we suspect that all three characters have a karmic store of it somewhere, and that something good may await them. Maybe it starts with with Eli's suggestion to Katrina that they go to lunch together. On the other hand...

McCormick is getting drilled by some reviewers for this film. Simon Abrams in Slant magazine writes, "Its brand of Teflon-coated humanism is twee to the extreme and largely devoid of anything that might prove that it has more than just a surface interest in the way we live now." And closer to home Alison Hallett writes, "By the unavoidable metrics of character and plot, though, Some Days is a flop, with a predictable, overlapping-lives setup that's doused in hipster melancholy and uninspired quirk."

I understand their points of view, but I like McCormick's impressionism, his willingness to allow a sky or series of boarded up houses float into his movie, not to mention those soap bubble movies. And if we get very far into the question, are these characters "real," we slip into choppy metaphysical waters quickly.

Boomcracklefly, Miracle Theatre

Oh-oh. Did I mention choppy metaphysical waters? Because boomcracklefly spills us into an ocean of them.

A new play by Charise Castro Smith and directed by Olga Sanchez for Miracle Theatre, boomcracklefly began as an idea to do a play about global warming, according to Smith at an audience talk-back after Sunday's matinee. That's hard to do, of course. How do you get someone to play a collapsing ice shelf in Antarctica, pray tell? But without really mentioning greenhouse gases, Smith has managed the feat.

The play is actually an allegory: Can we use technology to repair the problems that technology created AND create a technological utopia at the same time? We'll just remind you of that band of characters floating on a raft at the end of boomcracklefly for the answer.

Although it has its slow spots for me, the play brims with energy, committed characterizations, odd flights of fancy, tumbling tricks and Ernest Hemingway. It links three stories -- the tale of the tumbling Lenin/Lennon sisters, the love of technology wizard Phoenix for the beautiful Fulana de Tal, and the battle of aspirations between an architect and his pregnant wife. These stories are not "realistic": Lennon has a brain tumor that allows her to fall in love with the ghost of Ernest Hemingway, for example; Fulana has an imaginary grandmother; and the Phoenix uses her body parts to create a Utopia explosion. The architects wife sprouts wings. But we won't go into these -- much of the fun of boomcracklefly comes from the ways the actors and technical crew manage to make this stuff happen onstage.

Utopia. I've always been sympathetic toward utopias, even though, right, I have my doubts about getting involved in one. Major doubts. Smith's point is that they imply stasis, meaning once things are perfect, why would you want to change anything. But knowing primates as we do, we know that we aren't about to stand still for anything, even perfection. We're going to tinker. And we're going to rub each other the wrong way or get the wrong idea. And pretty soon, things are going to be just as bad as ever, maybe worse.

So, where's the hope, the theme of the day? Smith said it was simply in the fact that the characters, most of them anyway, survived to cling to that raft. And then one audience member pointed out, that's going to be one long, hard raft ride. And I'd have to agree.

NOTES

Mead Hunter interviewed Charise Castro Smith to great effect (she had The Skin of Our Teeth in mind!)... and Richard Wattenberg reviewed the show for The Oregonian: "Director Olga Sanchez accepts the challenge with a spare production that may have rough edges but still captures the wonder at the heart of the play... A good selection of Matt McCormick's experimental shorts are available on Vimeo... Bob Priest organized March Music Moderne, a series of concerts featuring modern classical music, of which "Almost Nothing Like Purple Haze" was one -- thanks, Mr. Priest!

	Total expenditure	Music director	Executive director	Base musician
Oregon Symphony	$14,930,007	$424,000	$240,330	$45,924
Seattle	$23,760,741	$785,113	$304,253	$82,250
San Francisco	$63,732,771	$1,588,816	$480,989	$124,800
New Jersey	$15,171,040	$375,000	$204,427	$39,712
Utah	$17,788,364	$323,731	$212,176	$61,828
Indianapolis	$35,619,798	$455,856	$281,933	$79,040
Houston	$23,550,981	$359,323	$226,732	$75,735