Weekend reviews: We danced 'til we dropped

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?

The wisdom of experience: Linda Austin on dance improvisation

Dance improv at Disjecta on Saturday, via Linda Austin/photo: Jeff Forbes

Arts Dispatch received a very thoughtful reply to my consideration of Linda Austin's improvisation at Disjecta on Saturday. There, I attempted to provide a little guide to considering the topic -- dance improv -- in general, and Linda thankfully came to my assistance, gently correcting here and elaborating there.

In the short history of Arts Dispatch, this is only the second time dance improv has come up (the first was in regard to Anna Halprin's exploration of Lovejoy Fountain, which was designed by her late husband, Lawrence Halprin).  And it rarely comes up in either polite company or the city's other arts blogs, either, at least not that I know of (please correct me if I'm wrong).

So, I've decided to move Austin's response from the comments thread to a post of its own. Please feel entirely free to continue the discussion in the comments thread!

By Linda Austin

Thanks, Barry, for your thoughtful watching and comments and for your framing of Saturday’s performance at Disjecta in a larger context of "what is improvisation."

I am mulling over two aspects of improvisation and choreography that emerge from your writing: movement choices and purposefulness. I will point out that it is not the freedom to use seemingly "crazy" movement ---"tiny steps, crawling on the ground, one-legged poses, hopping and odd calisthenics”--- that makes a dance improvised. These "oddities" (not odd to me) might just as well make their way into a choreographed piece, while more conventionally "dancerly" movement might be the basis of an improvisation. So, your comments re: the challenge of dealing with movement that, to some, may seem purposeless and/or without easily-recognizable "dancerliness" can also apply to a completely set choreography as well as to improvisation.

It's very telling that our bodies and our eyes viewing bodies are so trained for utility (chop down a tree, make a cup of coffee) or obvious virtuosity (sports and many flavors of dance) or beat-oriented musicality (social dance or dance that makes a visual counterpart to already composed music) that the pleasures (and yes, virtuosity) of movement that fall outside these are hard to fathom. Yet, you say, "the rote way we respond to the world isn’t always satisfying." I also like the term "cognitive scramble" you used in your review/commentary.

The second theme -- purpose -- operates on many levels. First, there is the overall arc and motor: If you are not telling a story and you do not have an objective such as the concrete goal of moving the ball down the court and getting it into the basket (was talking about this last night with friend/colleague Robert Tyree), how is the piece moving forward through time? Lots of possible answers that I don’t have the clarity of mind and time to go into now. But I wanted to acknowledge that question and suggest, again, that it is not improvisation per se that makes this a challenge, and that an improvisation certainly may have a kind of progression (ours did) while a choreographed piece may mine the same material for an extended duration.

Another play of purpose occurs in the moment-to-moment actions of the performer. I propose that the improvisor’s real-time decision-making and responses to unforeseen situations may be less arbitrary and more filled with purpose than the re-enactment of already created movement. Like the consciousness that “right now I am going to break up this glacial timing with something quick and jerky.” Or "Oops, I was going over there to climb on her back but she moved! Must adapt!" At the same time it may all seem “useless”. But then uselessness, along with excess and play, is among the aspects of art-making and viewing that I love.

Weekend reviews: 'Jack Goes Boating,' Northwest Dance Project, Linda Austin at Disjecta

By Barry Johnson

This was one of those weeks when the events of the outside world -- the drama with nuclear reactors in Japan, the institution of a no-flight zone in Libya -- creep into our theaters, galleries and concert halls. Sometimes a play is so involving that it acts as a momentary escape from international news, and that's how Artists Repertory Theatre's production of Jack Goes Boating worked for me. Not that the relationship issues at stake in Bob Glaudinin's romantic comedy aren't important themselves: We know from experience that our personal lives go on regardless of the events in Japan or Libya, and that those events go hardest on the personal lives on people a lot like us. But still, this is an indirect connection.

Other times, we may be watching a dance performance, as I did Saturday night, and experience a sudden mental newsreel -- of file footage of Tomahawk missiles or fresh video from the one of the tsunami's many disaster areas. In this case, I think the dance itself, Sarah Slipper's Black Ink for Northwest Dance Project, inspired that jolt of memory.

Those were two of the shows I saw this weekend. The third was an improvisation by Linda Austin set on and around and even under an installation by Kurt Burkheimer at Disjecta, an art space in the Kenton neighborhood. It took me on an entirely different course altogether, as Austin's work often does.

Portland Dance: Linda Austin's video solos

By Barry Johnson

This morning's buzz about the internet was arrested by a Twitter from Linda Austin that linked me to Vimeo and a set of videos she's been stashing there. The ones I watched were silent, short bursts of movement, a couple of minutes each. "Bursts of movement" doesn't quite capture it. Sure, there's a bit of "bursting," but it's movement of all sorts, a choreographer working out, warming up, trying some phrases or stringing some phrases together.  If I hadn't been in such a hurry to tell you about it, I would have stayed longer. After my work here is done, I intend to go back. Here's a sample:


7-28-2010c from Linda Austin on Vimeo.


I read a story about how dance vanishes on the BBC 3 site the other day. Last year, both Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham died, and their work instantly started to evaporate.