TBA festival: Nature Theater of Oklahoma treats 'Romeo and Juliet'

Robert M. Johanson & Anne Gridley in "Romeo and Juliet"

By Barry Johnson

I don't remember the details of Poetics: a ballet brut, the first time I saw the Nature Theater of Oklahoma (the name comes via Kafka's Amerika not Tulsa or something), at the Time-Based Art festival in 2006.  I just remember some rather energetic galumphing about the stage by untrained dancers to 1970s American dance music (aka disco and its offshoots).  It was played for laughs, as I recall, and some of it might have been funny. Or at least silly.

But NTOO has a wide reputation in the avant-garde, especially in Europe, and I didn't allow Poetics deter me from seeing their Romeo & Juliet, especially after the rave reviews that I'd heard from fellow TBA voyagers.  Which was a good idea, if I do say so myself.

The NTOO Romeo & Juliet has one thing in common with that deformed description of Poetics above, and it's the word "untrained."  The spine of the script for the show came from interviews with members of the company and company friends. They were asked to recount the plot of the real Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet, and their responses were assembled into a series of short monologues delivered by Anne Gridley and Robert M. Johanson (with a couple of appearances by a sexy chicken, enacted by Elisabeth Connor).

Gridley and Johanson did this recounting in mock Shakespearean theatrical speech, with flourishes and strange accents, such as bal-CONY.  And then at the end they get together onstage for an exchange about love, lust, vulnerability, neediness and acting isn't quite as serious as that list makes it sound.

Dancing with Anna Halprin + John Jasperse

Portland Monthly's Culturephile, with the tag-team of Anne Adams and NY Times critic Claudia La Rocco, has had a great TBA festival.  La Rocco's familiarity with many of the performers and even specific shows has added a level of depth to the "coverage ecology" this year that has been welcome, and that's in addition to her keen eye and careful way with a sentence. And I'm always interested in Adams' take on things, speaking of keen eyes and active minds.

I wish the next line was: "But I come to bury Culturephile, not to praise it." Because the set-up is perfect. But no, I simply wanted to introduce la Rocco (and point you in her direction) so that I'd feel better about repeating one of her observations about the little Anna Halprin "Event" at Lovejoy Fountain last evening. Here's a video (rather long, 16 minutes) that features Halprin talking about her long career in dance:



The happening wasn't widely advertised, and it's entirely possible that the number of dancers (20? 30?) exceeded the number of spectators.  Mostly it was a guided investigation of the fountain, designed by Anna's late husband Lawrence -- the dancers walked and shuffled and waded in and around the water and the falls, singly then in pairs and small groups. The dancers (too many to name, of course, but including Linda Austin, Cydney Wilkes, Tere Mathern and Mike Barber) were rather sedate to begin with, but gradually became more and more expressive and idiosyncratic as time passed.

TBA festival: Why it matters

A couple of days away from the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival started me thinking.  Why is TBA important -- to me and to the city, and by "city" I mean, as usual, the entire cultural watershed? Why do I attend and why should we care about a little,  curated festival of fringe-y performance art, with a little multi-media and visual arts thrown in?

Maybe this is it: TBA presents the greatest concentration of artists struggling openly with the problem of freedom that we have in Portland during the calendar year. And freedom is difficult to handle, for artists and for everyone else, for that matter. We are confused by it, turn our backs on it, resent it, trumpet its virtues without accepting its responsibilities, assume it for ourselves and deny it to others. It is thoroughly perplexing. So TBA provides us with a little living laboratory, a tiny sliver of tissue, that we can slide under the microscope for a good, long look.

Artists are born and start making art in prison.