The Festival That Works

[September 17th, 2003] One of the greatest pleasures, in a week of pleasures, has been colliding with various friends and colleagues and crowing "I told you so" to those who had voiced doubt over my belief that the first Time Based Art Festival would succeed.

By artistic as well as financial indicators, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's first TBA Festival is a smashing success, and the fear that Portland cannot support an innovative event of this magnitude might now be safely tossed. Following is our breakdown of last week's events. The good news, of course, is that there are still another full five days of events to seek out. Go! (SS)

Eiko and Koma: Offering

Love, loss and longing rose and fell with the tide-table of the Jamison fountain Thursday night in this exquisite site-specific piece by the Japanese/American Eiko and Koma. Dressed in hides and pancaked white Kabuki-style, the pair's gentle, watery pas de deux, played out before 500 people packed into the square, was heartbreaking. The poignancy of passing beauty, distilled in the old Japanese word aware, was emphasized by the rising full moon in the distance. (SS)

Jamison Square, Thursday, Sept. 11.

Lawrence Goldhuber: The Life and Times of Barry Goldhubris

Goldhuber's piece seemed rather hubristic, with the famed performer smugly moving through a cobbled-together piece that was more self than analysis. A dance between a man and a mop has been performed before, and better, by Gene Kelly and Jackie Gleason. A self-empowering harangue could never quite shake itself free of clichés. (SS)

Winningstad Theatre, Friday, Sept. 12.

Shelley Hirsch: A Rupture in the Order of Reality

Hirsch destroyed my fine-tuned TBA itinerary. After catching her performance on Friday night, I canceled my Saturday plans so I could see her again. Like a mad cross between Nina Hagen, Billie Holiday and a frantic yodeler, Hirsch deconstructs old standards only to rebuild them with slices of memory, literary borrowings and birdcalls. "States," the piece that opened Rupture, was a comic/tragic trip through "Blue Moon" and "Blue Skies," ending somewhere, it seemed, near the Moon Lake Casino, where a delicate young man will blow his brains out, and a young woman, Blanche Du Bois, will see the sweet bird of her youth fly away. Saturday's performance added a special guest: the brilliant violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain (who performs Thursday through Saturday this week). Roumain and Hirsch, who had never worked together before, jammed together memorably. One of PICA's hopes was that artists would meet at the festival and form partnerships. Saturday night was proof that this goal is being realized. (SS)

Wieden & Kennedy Atrium, Friday-Saturday, Sept. 12-13.

Donna Uchizono: Butterflies from my Hand

Although some started TBA off with the bombast of 300-pound mover Goldhuber's naked ass backlit and surrounded by a cloud of silver confetti, it was a pair of gleaming silver shears snipping through a swath of red fabric that really unmoored this festival from everyday life. In the first seconds of her world premiere Butterflies, Donna Uchizono gave us a flame-haired beauty suspended in a web of cloth three feet above the stage. Snip went her scissors and thud, she smacked into the floorboards. The fall opened a frenzy of movement across the stage as the company's other three bodies writhed and twittered to a soundscape of fluttering moth wings. Uchizono is a dangerous lady. When her dancers embrace, they shiver and shake, as if that was their natural state of rest. Although the evening's exhaustively repetitious choreography could stand a bit of editing, this New Yorker's whiplash work on loss will reverberate in our heads long after TBA ends. (KC)

Newmark Theatre, Friday, Sept. 12.

David Greenberger and 3 Leg Torso: Legibly Speaking

David Greenberger collects the memories of old people. But as the writer's voice filled the hall with the stories of cat lovers, stroke victims and gamblers, it was 3 Leg Torso's Eastern folk and tango-tinged melodies that swept in to sketch out these elders' individual faces. Vibes added a smirk and a raised eyebrow; the rich rasp of the double bass traced furrowed brows. At one point Béla Balogh's violin and Courtney Von Drehle's accordion created a dirge that not only worked in concert with Greenberger's monologue, but also made his voice its missing instrument. Greenberger pushed his voice beyond its limit near the end of the concert, sputtering and rasping through the life lessons of a 100-year-old New York painter. But as he barreled through the last sentences, it was still arresting. Watching a man bent on illuminating an age of life many would prefer remain in darkness is rarely a lost cause. (KC)

Scottish Rite Center, Saturday, Sept. 13.