Fertile Ground: Biespiel to Larsen to Pearl: completing a rare triple play

By Barry Johnson

Back in the days of beatniks, maybe coffeehouse collisions involving a poet, a dancer and  a bongo player occurred. I'm thinking of Village Voice cartoonist Jules Feiffer's famous cavorting dancer and imagining an intense poet growling incomprehensibly behind her as she improvises in space.

But the poetry/dance/music combo is a rare one, which is what attracted me to the performance of A Ghost in the Room with Us by Incorporamento, the collaboration of poet David Biespiel, dancer/choreographer Gavin Larsen and pianist/composer Joshua Pearl, in the 2011 Fertile Ground Festival. The previous work of the participants was a draw, too: Biespiel is a fine poet who writes an illuminating poetry column in The Oregonian; Larsen just retired as a principal dancer for Oregon Ballet Theatre: and Pearl has worked with Levon Helm (The Band), Peter Schickele (PDQ Bach) and Kate Pierson (B52s), among others. I figured they had a chance of making this peculiar arrangement work. (I didn't see last year's collaboration, which is excerpted in the short video below.)


Incorporamento's "A Ghost In The Room With Us" Teaser from Salamander & Co on Vimeo.

They didn't disappoint: I've never seen anything quite like A Ghost in the Room with Us, and after seeing it, I wanted to see more of what these three artists can create together -- deep, complex and satisfying.