Foreman Fest

[August 9th, 2006] [AVANT GARDE theater] Two nights. Twenty-six performers. Ten days of rehearsal. One script. For the fourth year running, Performance Works NorthWest's annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival presents some of the most intriguing and original performances Portland has to offer.

First conceived in 2002 by PWNW founder Linda Austin as a one-time fundraiser, the Foreman Fest challenges artists to create four- to eight-minute pieces using excerpts from the notebooks of Richard Foreman, the renowned writer, director and all-around madman whose bizarre "Theatre of Coincidence" performances with Ontological-Hysteric Theater made him a darling of the international theater scene in the '70s.

Since 2000, Foreman has made the contents of the notebooks—containing the raw ideas from which his plays were formed—freely available online (at ontological.com) for anyone to perform however they see fit. The texts may be edited, excerpted or rearranged in any way. Foreman asks only that anyone using his work inform him that they are doing so.

Each year, Austin chooses a text from Foreman's website (this year it's "Don't Know") for artists to use, with the sole condition that they must use a few selected lines. "Using the same lines in every piece gives a thread of continuity to the different performances," Austin told WW.

A new twist to this year's festival is a pile of "mystery suitcases" handed out at random to participants. Each suitcase contains a prop or props that must be used in the performance, adding an additional constraint to the process.

Interpretations in previous years have varied widely, from puppet shows to dance and solo drumming. Participants this year include the nondancing Boris and Natasha Dancers, one-man theater troupe Johnny Stallings, and WW's own jazz drumming dance critic, Tim DuRoche.

Oddly enough, Austin says Foreman has yet to show any interest in the P-town festival. "I email Ontological every year, and I usually don't even get a reply," she said. "But this year, after I was quoted in a New York Times article about the notebooks, a staffer asked us to send a video." Well, at least that's an encouraging sign.