The
Portland International Performance Festival
July 6 - Aug. 14
725-3307
www.extended.pdx.
edu/PIPF/index.html
See Stage and Words
listings for this week's events.
Theatre Gargantua
performs Raging Dreams Thursday-Saturday, July 29-31,
at PSU's Lincoln Hall.
The eighth annual Portland International Performance Festival
opens this week, though you could be forgiven for not knowing
about it. For the past seven summers, PIP Fest has hazarded
to provide a feast of excellent theater for Portland. Yet
the festival still suffers from a quiet reputation. The
Oregonian has failed, up until this year, to treat the
festival with any serious attention. Compare this to the 2-year-old
Portland Arts Festival, the clot of cheap-jack stalls along
the South Park Blocks that was affiliated with the Rose Festival
and attended by more than 60,000. PIP Fest stands as the antidote
to this bitter aftertaste of the Rose Parade. If the festival's
popularity can grow to meet its quality, Portland may someday
be a city known for throwing a good arts festival.
From the first, PIP Fest has been the brainchild of Michael
Griggs, a scholarly theater director and former artistic
director of Portland's risk-taking New Rose Theater. Supported
by Portland State University's Summer Session program, Griggs
has been tireless in his pursuit of exciting and innovative
theater for the festival, which gathers together an astonishing
international group of artists from dance, music, drama
and spoken word. In past years, the inspired madness of
British actor Ken Campbell, the painterly movement of post-Butoh
dancer Setsuko Yamada and the lissome violence in Wendy
Houstoun's performance piece have all had an important impact
on Portland's best theaters.
Last year's production of The Dybbuk was a sublime
piece of theater. Using the simplest of props, Poland's
Wierszalin Teatr rebuilt an entire prewar Jewish village,
where the famous tale of possession and exorcism was intensely
realized with puppets made of wood blocks. This year, Canada's
multidisciplinary Theatre Gargantua may make a similar impression.
Fusing text, music and movement, the company strives to
turn each performance space into a dream chamber from which
the subconscious can be explored.
Wisely, Griggs has always included the best of Portland's
artists in PIP Fest, bringing a wider audience to Kristy
Edmunds (whose installations are not as well known as her
curatorial skills), dancer Minh Tran, the cabaret trio 3
Leg Torso and soundscape-fashioners Waltzing Mice. Last
year Puppetry on the Edge, an annual gathering of Northwest
puppetry artists, happened to coincide with PIP Fest, creating
an opportunity for cross-pollination. The group joined forces
with Wierszalin Teatr for a weekend of workshops and a production
of Wierszalin's riotous version of Faust.
Compared to Edinburgh's affair with its theater festivals
and Seattle's enthusiasm for Bumbershoot, Portland has remained
fairly oblivious to the riches PIP Fest offers. Partial
blame must lie with Griggs and the organizers for their
dull, colorless posters and promotional brochures. A contest
among student artists for a poster and campaign design would
bring visual art into the festival and give PIP Fest more
visibility. Still, it comes down to support. In an ideal
world, PIP Fest would be the type of arts festival any city
would be proud to promote. Let the Rose Festival have its
souk of tinseled trash and amateur theatrics; if Portland
were truly serious about art, it would immediately embrace
PIP Fest.
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 14, 1999
|
