Arts & Books Stories No one is dancing when I arrive at Jones. I’m here to meet Oregon Ballet Theatre dancers Olga Krochik and Lucas Threefoot and their friends, ostensibly for a night on the town. But it’s early ... More

Arts & Books Stories I have read Harry Potter erotica. Sometimes, life is like that. One moment, you’re getting ready to read what you think will be a fun short story about a magic girl and boy, and in the next, Gin ... More

Arts & Books Stories The Willamette River divides Portland’s art scene. Tony galleries in the Pearl District and Northwest exude First Thursday hauteur, while street artists turn Northeast Alberta Street into a fr ... More

Arts & Books Stories It’s just after noon on a gorgeous late summer Friday at Pioneer Courthouse Square, and one of the best and most versatile violinists on the West Coast is getting ready to do some busking. Dre ... More

Arts & Books Stories Debut poetry and fiction doesn’t have much visibility in the publishing world these days. Enter Paul Martone and Erin Hoover, a fiction writer and a poet who paired up to create Late Night Libra ... More

Arts & Books Stories Mike Daisey, All the Hours in the DayMike Daisey is, at various times, an improvisational storyteller, a big-hearted observer, a lonely expositor of self or a sweat-drenched haranguer from the stage ... More

Arts & Books Stories This Thursday marks the beginning of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s ninth Time-Based Art Festival, a 10-day rush of dance, theater, comedy, music, film, visual art and other assorted w ... More

Arts & Books Stories If Halloween weekend wasn’t enough and you’ve still got a thirst for costumes and theatrics, local writers Megan Clark, Monica Drake, Delilah Marvelle and Jessica Morrell appear as Dangero ... More

Arts & Books Stories Spending a sweaty Saturday in an airless room silently touching strangers might not sound like a good time. But Information Studio—a combination of Twister, sociology experiment and art happenin ... More

Arts & Books Stories Here's a promising recipe for a riveting biography: Pick a scientific genius who made the remarkable jump to world icon from his otherwise-impenetrable field. Choose a subject whose life was a bubbli ... More

Books In August 2010, a project called PDX 2 Gulf Coast took a group of 22 Oregonians to the Gulf of Mexico to get a firsthand look at the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill that had devastated the e ... More

Books One of the signal pleasures of a nostalgic soap opera like AMC’s Mad Men-—or, more recently, ABC’s Pan Am—is the consistent appeal of discovering that our predecessors’ morality is roundly ... More

Books Sara Wheeler’s The Magnetic North: Notes From the Arctic Circle (FSG, 315 pages, $26) quite literally describes a circle: Wheeler—a London-based journalist—travels counterclockwise, in pie-sha ... More

Books Until relatively recently—within the past 50 years, say—no one had to be told not to waste their food, and certainly not as an ecological or even public issue. It was simple common sense: Who th ... More

Books Cover songs are, of course, more than familiar—usually it’s the first step to becoming a musician at all. Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha (Publication Studio, 296 pages, $20) ... More

Books When one thinks of things associated with the politically unstable Balkans region, modern poetry isn’t exactly at the top of the list, although the ... More

Books “The first time I put on a dress, I was 37.” That’s a surprising statement coming from female impersonator Walter Cole, better known as Darcelle XV, doyenne of the West Coast’s longest-runn ... More

Books If you run in certain circles, you hear it every day: The publishing houses are dying, and books are therefore dying. Writers, we presume, are all also dying. The ... More

Books In Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a young man named Ishmael leaves his home in New York for several years of adventures aboard a whaling ship. After sailing the seas collecting sperm oil, when it c ... More

Books You are not going to believe this, but not everything you see in Gypsy (the musical or the movie) is strictly true. Thank the goddess of burlesque we have no less a luminary than Karen Abbott (she o the best-selling Sin ... More

Dance Little about ballet is American. Poised, practiced and, to many, pretentious, it’s antithetical to the unbridled passion of a country built on freedom, manifest destiny and tea parties.  ... More

Dance Drink enough on St. Patrick’s Day, and you may think you’re seeing leprechauns dance for you. But those aren’t leprechauns: They’re kids from local dance studios, whose parents are happy ... More

Dance The essential building blocks of dance—shapes—are deftly deconstructed in a new contemporary dance program from the Skinner/Kirk Dance Ensemble. Co-founders Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk (als ... More

Dance A towering wall of used cardboard boxes stretches diagonally across the stage, clear packing tape glinting in the light. Robert Tyree enters, tall and long-limbed and dressed head to toe in sequ ... More

Dance Gather, a new dance-music piece, professes its mission with buzzwords like interdependence, isolation, connection, division, collaboration and community. Such a jargon-y catalog is unsurprising ... More

Dance Recent financial upheaval and the roller-coaster ride of the ongoing culture wars feed Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence. Hennessy and his contemporary dance-theater outfit, Circo Zero, mine Wall Stre ... More

Dance  What’s the appeal of flash mobs? Canadian choreographer Matjash Mrozewski thinks it might be the endorphin-boosting power of moving in unison with a large group, ... More

Dance Yuka Iino has been feeling a little, well, emotional lately: “I tear up for small little things, not necessarily things that are making me sad,” she confesses via email. “I cry for somethi ... More

Dance We’re expressing ourselves through more channels than ever before, but what are we saying? That might well be the question driving this riveting new contemporary dance work by Portland performan ... More

Dance It’s been a banner year for Portland’s Northwest Dance Project, which specializes in dancing work by international contemporary choreographers. The company won two European dance competition ... More

Performance For the first 45 minutes of Profile Theatre’s My Children! My Africa!, you may think a latter-day Mr. Chips has single-handedly defeated the entire edifice of 1980s-era South African apartheid w ... More

Performance It would be easy to carp about Lauren Weedman’s mispronunciation and misnaming of this newspaper (on opening night, she referred to it as “Will-uh-met Weekly”). But that would be too simpl ... More

Performance When Portland author Ursula K. Le Guin wrote The Left Hand of Darkness in 1969, she imagined it as a thought experiment. What would a world be like, she asked, where humans spent most of their liv ... More

Performance Ten Chimneys premiered in 2011. But with its old-fashioned form and frothy narrative, it might as well have been produced in the 1930s. That’s not entirely a bad thing. Jeffrey Hatcher’s comed ... More

Performance In 1969, gender was a fixed concept. The world didn’t know Boy George, David Bowie or Annie Lennox. There were no how-to websites for pursuing ambiguous gender expression. Jeffrey Eugenides hadn ... More

Performance Bruce Norris’ Clybourne Park—the first work to win the triple crown of the Pulitzer, Tony and Britain’s Olivier—is one of the most produced plays among regional companies. I haven’t se ... More

Performance Since her first play stunned New York audiences four years ago, Annie Baker, 31, has gone from obscurity to acclaim. In that time, critics have scraped away at her plays, trying to unearth what ma ... More

Performance In the program notes for The Possessions of La Boîte, director Charmian Creagle says the show “is an homage to an art form—the letter—and the power it possesses.” It’s an assertion that ... More

Performance Before Arabian Nights begins, Post Five’s performers move about the theater. Clad in harem pants and embroidered vests, they squeeze into black vinyl pews, wrapping an arm around an audience m ... More

Performance Deep into Conor McPherson’s St. Nicholas, our devilish, graying narrator is engulfed by the irresistible spell of otherworldly figures, swept into their London mansion of dark wood paneling an ... More

Visual Arts Whether in his photography, curatorial endeavors or seminal gallery, Soundvision, TJ Norris has always been a reliable purveyor of conceptually and visually elegant projects with a minimalist be ... More

Visual Arts Of the many galleries participating in Photolucida, Portland’s monthlong photography showcase, PDX Contemporary Art’s three-person show is the most effective. Elegantly and understatedly, it ... More

Visual Arts If you grew up in suburbia, the hairs on the back of your neck are apt to stand up as you make your way through the creepy Proustian labyrinth that is Stephen Scott Smith’s Seeyouyousee. The i ... More

Visual Arts One of the basic questions artists face is whether to focus on social, political and spiritual concerns or the narrower purview of their own inner worlds. From antiquity to the Romantic period, ... More

Visual Arts On the face of it, Mariana Tres’ Celestial Clockwork isn’t much to look at. Upon further investigation, it also isn’t much to think about, despite a tedious trail of conceptual breadcrumbs t ... More

Visual Arts Sun and sand, lean bodies and fat checkbooks: This is the chichi art fair known as Art Basel Miami Beach. It’s where art-world cognoscenti descend each December, hungry for wheeling and dealin ... More

Visual Arts The Portland art scene lost some important venues in 2012. After mounting some of the strongest shows in recent memory, Victory Gallery closed its doors due to economic necessities. One of the P ... More

Visual Arts Some artists spend years developing a distinctive style, only to walk away from it once they’ve found it. Think of the late Philip Guston, who infamously abandoned abstract expressionism in fa ... More

Visual Arts It’s a rare artist who invigorates not one but two fusty tropes—landscapes and floral still lifes—with jolts of fresh spunk. Sherrie Wolf can, and in Looking Back: New Paintings, she proves ... More

Visual Arts German artist Marianne Wex’s challenging show, An Exhibition, is a time capsule of the 1970s, but it retains the power to make us question assumptions about gender circa 2012. From 1972 to 1977, ... More