Out Of Time

[September 20th, 2006] As PICA's 11-day Time-Based Art bonanza wound down, WW sobered up, pored over our note-covered cocktail napkins and reported what the hell happened and who did it.

31 Knots

With white face-paint running down his face, 31 Knots leadman Joe Haege perched atop a folding chair at the Works, steadied himself on the shoulder of his girlfriend (noted singer-songwriter, and tonight audience member, Corrina Repp), and leaned out over the crowd, milky sweat dropping from his nose as he sang, "I am the City of Dust/ I am a cold dark place." That line, from the band's 2005 release Talk Like Blood, is one of Haege's greatest Jekyll moments, where the acerbic temperament of his Hyde-like stage persona gives way to impassioned performance. It was enough to make you forget that he mimed through the whole first song and changed outfits three times during the performance, moves that prompted one patron to say, "How very TBA." And it wasn't me. (MB) The Works at AudioCinema, Wednesday, Sept. 13.

Marina Abramovic, Balkan Erotic Epic

Abramovic's multichannel video piece exploring aspects of Serbian folklore and pagan sexuality—like village women raising their skirts to reveal their crotches and frighten rain gods—is an almost humorous departure from a long body of performance work that revels in an audience's Olympian powers of patience. Men copulating with an open pasture and women clasping their bare breasts may be provocative, but ultimately the work falls flat—failing to maintain Abramovic's singular sense of the fragile balance between comedy, terror and transcendence. I miss the discomfort and boredom that marked her earlier work. (TDR) Corberry Press, through Friday, Oct. 6.

Jollyship the Whiz-Bang

Cute puppets, but no plot to speak of. Is the puppet theater an excuse for the mediocre music, or vice versa? Either way, the Works crowd remained distinctly unrocked. (BW) Seafaring hand puppets—humans, too—on jollyship adventures, set to a hyper happy-pop soundtrack. Lanky singer Nick Jones is the charismatic captain, pitched somewhere between David Bowie and Rufus Wainwright. The lyrics were hard to capture in the din of the crowd, but Whiz-Bang was quirky and charming, a nice departure from the raucous knock-you-down "The Works" programming so many other nights. (SB) The Works at AudioCinema, Wednesday, Sept. 13.

Spalding Gray Project, Leftover Stories to Tell

Moments, perfect and imperfect: Local author Tom Spanbauer appears, the night's guest performer, and the Newmark is filled with cheering; Hazelle Goodman delivers Gray's sweat-lodge prayer—"Oh, creator, let me not appropriate this ceremony into another story that I will attempt to sell to the American public"; the woman to my left asks what big theater towns I've worked in, and I, found out at last, attempt to disappear into my seat. (BW) Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Wednesday, Sept. 13.

Edie Tsong, Telecommunity Portrait

You meet an artist via computer. You talk; she talks. Then you peer intently at each other's faces, one at a time, drawing a portrait—absorbed in the other's expression, the planes and shadows of her skin and bones, the degree of discomfort she shows from being observed so closely. This exchange of visual attention and verbal communication brings a delightful and considered quality to Tsong's piece; the fact that it's all being conducted via webcam and fax is surprisingly unobtrusive, emphasizing the everyday, personal quality of contemporary technology. (TB) TBA Central, Thursday, Sept. 14.

10 Tiny Dances

From Mike Barber's initial huzzah—"It's all about constraint, baby!"—the ever surprising 10 Tiny evening at the Works took on a Jollyship Whiz-Bang quality all its own. The 4-by-4-foot stage saw things from the curious and sublime to the vulgar to the chin-scratchingly awestruck. Highs: "Dim Sum Puppet Opera," featuring the tiniest dancer of them all, a porcelain Korean hand puppet; Juliet Waller Pruzan and Stephen Hando's desert island/cubicle bit brimming with a respect for both perimeter and tragicomic pathos; Nature Theater of Oklahoma's awkward burlesque featuring cowboys in skivvies and pirates in plaid; Emily Stone's trademark blend of the madcap and the experimental; Bebe Miller's understated mastery; and the unsettling and darkly poetic Marat/Sade-meets-Triplets of Belleville finale by Angelle Hebert/Phillip Kraft featuring Carla Mann. (TDR) The Works at Audio Cinema, Thursday, Sept. 14.

Deborah Hay, Mountain

Hay's Mountain is a testament to the power of individual artists' tenacity for growth and new experiences. Initiated as a commission by three of the Northwest's more compelling dancemakers (despite direct discouragement from PICA founder Kristy Edmunds), Hay's piece finds resonant spirits with this trio of movers. These performers have a rich capacity for patience and focus and are capable of taking small gestures, nonobjective vocalizing, and nonlinear narrative and movement and instilling in them breath and a disregard for tidy resolution. Their balancing act between stillness, tension and humor (and a "score" of kids' rhythm instruments, sing-song and stunning lighting) bookend the piece lovingly. The piece loses steam in the middle, though, when words and meaning come together—ultimately the success is in the ellipses and silence. (TDR) Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, Friday, Sept. 15.

Blinglab, The Untold Misadventures of Lewis and Clark

The idea was promising: a campy sendup of Lewis and Clark's excellent adventure, enacted by colorful puppets built from dolls and bits of salvaged fabric. The result was so bad it was embarrassing. When this dismal parade of twitching caricatures wasn't overtly obscene (an eagle raped a rabbit in the first scene), it was intolerably dull. Sometimes it was both. Poorly executed musical numbers ("whatever Lewis wants, Lewis gets, and, little Clark, Lewis wants you") only prolonged the agony. Blinglab should have stuck to visual arts. (BW) Someday Lounge, Saturday, Sept. 16.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Poetics: a ballet brut

Cross arms. Put hands in pockets. Put hands behind head. Bring arms to side. Repeat. This, at first, is the purposefully limited and seemingly mundane movement vocabulary of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma's memorable Portland debut. But over the course of 60 minutes, the movements develop and crescendo into an all-out disco dance-off, accompanied by campy 1970s tunes (ABBA, Donna Summer, Michael Jackson). Co-directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper are interested in intimacy, sexuality and community, and in how our bodies communicate (or don't). Through movement, dance and gesture alone (there's barely a spoken word in the show), the actors surprised, nudged and sometimes winked at the audience: Two performers go through a series of intimate touches, a kiss and then a handshake, then they turn to the audience as if to say, "You paying attention here?" Nature Theater generated a big buzz during TBA—rightfully so. The work's not radically groundbreaking or life-alteringly profound, but it is alive and joyful and playful and (thankfully) not brooding or too self-important. Company members—pouty-faced Anne Gridley, sexy bearded Robert M. Johanson, slimy Fletcher Liegerot and buff Zachary Oberzan—all do very well, augmented by a motley crowd of P-town audience members-cum-guest stars in the show's over-the-top final 15 minutes. (SB) Lincoln Hall, Portland State University, Friday, Sept. 15.

Crispin Spaeth Dance Group, Dark Room

A small group of onlookers are handed night-vision goggles and peep surreptitiously at a quintet of bodies flailing through the darkness in this Seattle-based company's work. It's a cool concept, especially as the goggles' spooky neon glow reveals dancers sliding, flipping and grasping for each other in the void, each occasionally turning a blind eye directly toward the audience. But the addition of a constant, droning soundtrack effectively crippled the performance. For one all too brief passage, the music cut out and a lone dancer rolled and dove at the carpeted floor, her breath heaving and catching with effort. I put down my goggles and stared out into the inky blackness—finally ensnared and engaged by simply not seeing her. (KC) Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Saturday, Sept. 16.

Harrell Fletcher, The American War

Though Fletcher seems genuinely motivated to engage audiences in much-needed dialogue about war and the potential viciousness of humanity, his installation of meta-photographs from a Vietnamese museum inspired deep questioning about exploitation and appropriation. The work wields blunt political power, churning up issues about what we call the Vietnam War and the Vietnamese call the American War, and drawing inevitable comparisons to present-day Iraq and atrocities such as those committed at Abu Ghraib. But in the hours and days since I pored (and cried) over this show at great length, questions have plagued me: What are the ethics of an artist taking snapshots at a museum and claiming them under his own name? Does it matter that the subjects are not merely clever images that might inspire some detached postmodern academic claptrap, but documents of real horrors guaranteed to produce shock and awe in the observer? How many of the show's decapitated, half-skinned and napalmed victims, its grinning American GIs and original photographers, agreed to become part of a chi-chi artfest? Is there not something terribly easy about putting up the most disturbing documentary photographs imaginable, cushily reframing them as one's own story and waiting for the accolades to roll in? Or is it sheer genius? To Fletcher's credit, his work once again raises more questions than it answers. (TB) Corberry Press, through Friday, Oct. 6.

Jennifer Monson/iLAND, Flight of the Mind

No piece better defined the notion of Time-Based Art than Monson's installation/performance at Disjecta. Concurrent action-events (dancers rolling through gravel, repetitively picking at plaster, exploring the expanse of a hallway) throughout the first floor of the raw space grew like ivy until Monson's piece "began" on the second floor, surrounded by marsh grass, cattails and the sounds of birds and related electro-acoustic textures. Damp curtains of sonic moisture permeated much of the work—with interlacing movements that at times seemed to echo the Vaux swifts' searching for a landing path. Nesting instincts; diagonal, Trisha Brown-esque flight lines; a "ballet" moment and Monson's trademark raw sensibility (including the best contact improv you've ever seen with a 4-by-8 piece of plywood) were just a few of the things that made this one of the best things of the festival. As with Faustin Linyekula last year, with Monson's work, the surprise of discovery and risk is the reward. (TDR) Disjecta, Sunday, Sept. 17.

Bebe Miller, Landing/Place

"This is our landing place," said TBA guest curator Mark Russell as he introduced the Bebe Miller Company. One of the very last groups to perform at TBA, Miller's company seemed to take flight as soon as it hit the Newmark stage. Maybe that had to do with the fact that Miller and her creative team had, just an hour earlier, won a prestigious Bessie award in her home base of New York City for Landing/Place, the piece they performed in Portland (in front of an audience that seemed to include every person ever connected to dance in this city). Exuding all the requisite Miller moves, a little bit of Merce Cunningham and a lot of African movements, as well as references to the uprooting that is taking place in a post-Katrina America, this well-grounded piece provided the perfect landing for what ended up being an amazing two-week fest. (BB) Newmark Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, Sunday, Sept. 17.

NOTE: This is an extended version of the story that ran in WW's print edition.