Skip to main contentPortland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), which for seven years has made this city more culturally alive by injecting us with a much needed dose of the avant-garde, is at a crossroads. Against the odds, what began as an upstart arts organization, powered by founder and executive director Kristy Edmunds, has survived as a viable player on the scene when, across the nation, similar groups have bloomed and then perished.
Now, in this period of uncertainty for all arts organizations, PICA is taking a gamble by canceling its subscription performance program in favor of a new, risky--but exciting--format that condenses its normal performance series into a festival. It's quite a jump, but like someone perched on the edge of a burning building, there's no other option. "Audience behavior has changed," PICA's public-relations director Victoria Frey told WW. "We were finding that it was more difficult to have subscribers make firm commitments throughout the season." So, with the strength she gathered to bear PICA, Edmunds has come up with a solution for survival.
The new performance festival will launch September 2003 and will be a weeklong event of diverse work taking place in multiple venues. It has the potential of turning Portland into an American Edinburgh: a cultural backwater that recreates itself into an international arts capital.
"We have to constantly reevaluate our relevancy," says Frey. "Kristy's idea is really liberating aesthetically, and it will solve problems we've had with getting venues and press coverage." More importantly, says Frey, "this big blast of events will forge a new relationship between artists and audiences."
Such innovative ideas have made Edmunds a leader in the national arts scene, so much so that there's tremendous interest in this plan for of a Portland performance festival. "It's a great idea," New York's PS 122's executive director Mark Russell told WW. "Edmunds is developing an excellent way to focus her institution's programming." "I'm excited by Edmunds' plans for the festival," says Ruby Lerner of the Creative Capital Foundation in New York. "I think that a festival, happening in a concentrated time frame, creates a context that you can't get from a series that stretches out over months."
Perhaps the most exciting element of the festival is that it will give artists a chance to meet. "It allows for a critical mass of artists to be assembled in the same place and time, something that happens very rarely," says Lerner, "and this creates conversations that allow important fieldwide issues to surface and be addressed.... I hope to be there." Russell adds, "Unfortunately in America, artists don't often get a chance to see peers' work. Edmunds' plan will bring a confluence of energies together, and it should be very powerful."
So what will this festival look like? A typical day might go something like this: At 11 am you can either attend a coffee klatch lecture on the life and art of John Cage at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's gallery or go see a new Miranda July film in a Pearl District loft. At noon you can walk down to the new Jamison Square Park in the Pearl to watch some Czech street theater while having a glass of wine and a salad. At 1:30 pm you can catch the streetcar to Portland State University to see the Chicago-based performance group Goat Island's new piece, It's an Earthquake in My Heart, at Lincoln Hall, or head downtown to the Newmark to see a production of John Cage's piece Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Erik Satie: An Alphabet. After dinner you have the choice of seeing Spalding Gray's new monologue at the Tiffany Center, Carl Hancock Rux's Talk at the Winningstad Theatre, or going to the Portland Art Museum to see the premiere of Philip Glass' new cinemopera of Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. Afterwards, there's plenty of music, a Polish cabaret at Ohm or dancer Wendy Houston's latest piece underneath the Burnside Bridge to savor.
Will it work in Portland? The city has never been able to support an arts festival--be it the Portland International Performance Festival at PSU, which closed in 2002 after running for 10 years, or the decidedly middle-brow Artquake, which went under in the mid-'90s. But the very existence of PICA and its successes testify to Edmunds' formidable strength as an organizer and innovator.
Taking Edinburgh and its Australian sister Adelaide as examples, Edmunds envisions PICA's performance festival as a catalyst to spur Portland's development as an arts center. "Edmunds is open to collaboration within the community," White Bird dance producer Paul King told WW. "It's an insightful idea, and it could really give Portland an international reputation." It also solves some of the venue problems in the city, where White Bird and PICA were often unwittingly pitted against each other to secure spaces. Wisely, Edmunds has slated the festival for September, after all the European festivals are finished, making scheduling for a diversity of work easier.
In 1947, the city of Edinburgh, Scotland, decided to create the Edinburgh International Festival as a venue for national and international opera, ballet and theater. But some small theater companies objected to being excluded from the festival and opened a rival Fringe Festival to coincide. Soon a film festival sprang up around the stage events; then came a jazz festival; a festival of books and even a television festival was born. In what is now a monthlong series, the population of Edinburgh doubles each August with artists and tourists who have a choice of over 1,350 events in nearly 200 venues.
Imagine the Portland Film Festival, a mini White Bird season, WW's Musicfest NW and the resuscitated Jazz Festival joining PICA in September. Also imagine Imago, Conduit, Liminal, Third Angle and other local arts groups and artists taking to the streets, stages and lofts with their own contributions.
This isn't just a sink-or-swim situation for PICA--it's one for the city itself. Portland talks a good art line, but seldom shows any seriousness for the work that needs doing. Edmunds may have just done most of the work for us.
Premieres September 2003
PICA will announce further plans for the festival at its seventh-anniversary bash this Friday, May 31, at 7 pm. Call 242-1419 for information.
www.pica.org
Read more about Edinburgh's arts festival and fringe series at the sites www.eif.co.uk and www.edfringe.com , respectively, and about Australia's Adelaide Festival at www.adelaidefestival.org.au .
WWeek 2015