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The first week of the Time-Based Art Festival brought
mind-boggling sonic manipulation, walrus imitations, doughnut-themed
drag queens, aggressive confrontation of gender expectations and lots
and lots of naked bodies, confetti and glitter. As the Portland
Institute for Contemporary Art heads into the second and final weekend
of the fest, here's what to expect. Read our ongoing TBA coverage here.
Mammalian Diving Reflex, All the Sex I've Ever Had
The last time Mammalian Diving Reflex visited TBA, the Toronto-based performance group enlisted local children to cut people's hair. For several days, scissors-wielding kids gave Portlanders fresh 'dos. That work—called, quite simply, Haircuts by Children—was an exercise in risk, trust and power. It was a festival hit.
Seven years later, Mammalian Diving Reflex returns to TBA with another one of its social experiments. For All the Sex I've Ever Had, the group assembled five Portlanders over the age of 65 and conducted exhaustive interviews about their sex lives: everything from first times to ecstatic orgies to unwanted pregnancies to masturbation to what (or whom) they did last night. Those interviews have been molded into a script—essentially a chronological unfurling of coital history, with dance breaks and occasional audience interaction—that will be performed by the Portlanders themselves. Mammalian has built the show in seven other cities, where it's been hailed as heartbreaking, raw and frequently hilarious.
The participants—three men, two women—range in age from 66 to 76. Most have children, some of whom plan to attend the TBA performance. All are currently single. One is polyamorous. ("I had to go home and look that up!" said another, at rehearsal last week.) They heard about the project on Facebook, at senior centers, from friends in the theater community. Two were recruited on OkCupid—Portland project manager Erica Thomas created a profile on the dating site and sent messages to users she thought might be a good fit. Then the interviews began.
"I started realizing at age 60 that I could talk about anything," says performer Jackie Anderson, a 67-year-old with well-coiffed blond hair and stylish glasses. "Nothing matters. Now that I'm almost 68, it doesn't matter. Ask me, I'll tell. I felt a lot of freedom in it."
Beyond the interviews—which yielded details about Montana whorehouses, paying for a jailhouse blowjob with a pack of cigarettes and suffering through a spouse's extramarital affairs—the group played a few games. They sat at Pioneer Courthouse Square, for example, and assessed whether they would have sex with passersby. Fred Sly, a 67-year-old with an impish smile, had a tendency to note whether he would bang somebody twice.
Another exercise involved confronting strangers with a pointed question. "You pick someone you think is out of your league," Sly explains. "You walk up to them and say, 'My perception is that you're out of my league. Would you agree with that?'" (A 35-year-old told Sly he was probably a bit old for her.)
In part, All the Sex is a reaction against ageism and our collective reluctance to talk about older people as sexual beings. But Mammalian artistic director Darren O'Donnell—who notes that Portland, the project's first West Coast city, has had "more tantras, more chakras" than other locations—says the carnal details are almost incidental.
"Sex is an excuse for bringing everybody together and demonstrating that older people, because they've lived through so many things, aren't scared to be transparent about their lives," O'Donnell says. "The show is actually about the generosity in the room that's created by people who've lived long enough to know that life is filled with horrible things and fantastic things. There's not as much sweating around the small stuff."
But, Sly adds, they do have plenty to tell. "The perception is that we've been put out to pasture," he says. "But there's a lot that happens in the pasture." REBECCA JACOBSON. Portland State University, Shattuck Hall Annex, 1914 SW Park Ave. 7 pm Wednesday-Saturday, Sept. 17-20. $20-$25.
Liz Harris and Paul Clipson, Hypnosis Display
Like a lot of meditations on America, Hypnosis Display was funded by the British. English production company Leeds Opera North asked Astoria-based electronic musician Liz Harris (better known as Grouper) to perform a live score to a silent film as part of a series about England's former colonies. Harris figured she'd rather score an original film by Paul Clipson instead. It premiered in London in June.
The collaboration operated on a principle of free association. Harris composed the music mostly in Astoria, while Clipson is a filmmaker in San Francisco. Before beginning work they sent each other influences and touch points—ideas and books and films they admired. The two knew each other already; they'd collaborated at a festival in San Francisco and at Valentines bar in Old Town.
"It is important to us both to give each other room on literal detail and structure, aesthetic choices," Harris says. "There is a kind of magic conversation that occurs between independent structures that have the same intention, same foundation."
Clipson's film moves from natural images to grainy black-and-white clips that trip through the country's odd industrial corners, the strip clubs and highway overpasses and train stations made claustrophobic by the camera's frame. Though influenced by the stark iconography of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point and the more explicit mythologies of Bruce Baillie's Quixote, Clipson's approach became "very much about surface, about the exterior and creating a tension from visual perspectives that would hint at things underneath or within," he says.
Harris used a number of field recordings from trains and roads, creating a sound that allows static to occasionally overwhelm signal, melded with the often haunting slipstream melodies familiar from her work as Grouper. She was likewise inspired by Zabriskie Point and the film La Jetee, which Clipson sent her, to create an unreal vision of America "outside of time, an illogical reflection of the landscape." Together, the sound and image hint at a sort of menace just outside understanding—a document of a place open to so much meaning it inspires not just wonder but a touch of fear. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. Portland State University, Lincoln, Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave. 8:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 20. $12-$15.
Also showing at TBA
Jack Ferver, Mon, Ma, Mes
Since 2007, New York City dancer, choreographer and writer Jack Ferver has made a name for himself with highly reflective works that explore depression, bullying and art. He's a storyteller, to be sure, but one who incorporates exaggerated and repetitive motions, classical dance moves and witty asides to the audience. Bullied throughout his younger years, Ferver might enter an emotional scene about his lonely childhood before launching into what The New Yorker described as an imagined scene from The Wizard of Oz involving electroshock therapy and a chicken-coop escape vehicle. His solo piece Mon, Ma, Mes, making its West Coast premiere at TBA, promises to blur similar lines between reality and imagination, with Ferver performing scenes from earlier works that periodically give way to sharp self-analysis of his life as an artist. It's part lecture, part performance art. The New York Times praised its balance of childlike playfulness and vulnerability, as well as Ferver's ability to mine his material for both humor and horror. KAITIE TODD. Ecotrust, 721 NW 9th Ave. 6:30 pm Thursday-Friday, noon Saturday, Sept. 18-20. $16-$20.
Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort, Germinal
Chelfitsch, Ground and Floor
TBA last hosted Chelfitsch in 2012, when the Japanese theater troupe brought a triptych of plays—Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech—to the festival. Those linked vignettes had the characteristics for which Toshiki Okada's company has become known: colloquial and repetitive language, stylized movements simultaneously graceful and robotic, senses of anxiety and ennui. Ground and Floor abandons the more mundane foundations of Okada's previous plays to explore the impact of the massive earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Influenced by Noh, the Japanese theater form that often incorporates spirits, Ground and Floor centers on the ghost of a woman who must confront the memories of her two sons, and it's accompanied by a quaking soundscape from experimental band Sangatsu. This is the work's U.S. premiere, and PICA artistic director Angela Mattox says it's unlikely to travel elsewhere in the country. In Japanese with English surtitles. REBECCA JACOBSON. Imago Theatre, 17 SE 8th Ave. 8:30 pm Friday-Saturday, 4:30 pm Sunday, Sept. 19-21. $20-$25.
SEE IT: Tickets may be purchased at PICA's box office at 415 SW 10th Ave., by phone at 224-7422 or online at pica.org. Festival passes $48-$500.
WWeek 2015
