Arts & Books Groovin’ Greenhouse 1Fertile Ground is best known for its showcases of new theater works, but the festival also nurtures dance in development in its Groovin' Greenhouse series. This year, the innovative Polaris Dance Theater offered its Goose Hollow studio theater space to a dozen presenters over five different shows. Beat Bangerz led off the first on Jan. 21 with its mix of traditional tap rhyt...   More

Arts & Books There's a reason fairy tales have been plumbed for art's sake so deeply: they're bottomless. Murky with our fears, desires and other shadowy drives, the stories of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and the like consist of just the sort of muck in which artists love to play. Shaking the Tree's The Tripping Point, directed by Samantha Van Der Merwe as part of the Fertile Ground festival, l...   More

Arts & Books Although you may have thought the vampire craze had long since reached critical mass and collapsed under its own bulging excess, it appears the trend has not yet been staked in the heart Walking the line somewhere between the chaste, no-biting-till-marriage vampires of Twilight and the fuck-anything-that-moves vamps of True Blood is Bite Me a Little, a vampire musical by local playwright and compo...   More

Headout Murder, conspiracy and apocalypse! No, it’s not the latest Ron Paul slogan. As grim as the farcical presidential race has become, it has nothing on some of the bloody, unsettling and bizarre pla   More

Arts & Books As I sat in the chilly warehouse space last night and waited for …ballet? to begin, I eavesdropped on the conversation next to me. Two women and one man were heatedly–though cordially–discussing their picks and pans of the Fertile Ground festival, the 10-day spree of new works of local theater and dance. Merely listening in on their conversation was exhausting. Fertile Ground’s offerings a...   More

Arts & Books Imagine a person is trapped inside a cloth sack and stretching the surface trying to get out from the inside. That's what the sculptures adorning the stage of Oslund's newest work Childhood Star look like. The show was commissioned by local dance presenter White Bird and premiered last night as part of Portland's Fertile Ground festival (read WW's big preview on the festival here). In constantly t...   More

News The first day of the Fertile Ground Festival of new play has come and gone. Here's what we saw on day one of ten: Truth and Beauty It's been a long time since Many Hats Collaboration's last full show—Lava Alapai's Mutt in 2005—and I had very high expectations for the company's latest project. Truth and Beauty is an adaptation (by Elizabeth Klinger, who also directs the show) ...   More

News I only made it to one show on the second day of the Fertile Ground Festival (see our reviews from day one here): Hunt Holman's play Willow Jade, a social satire about a bunch of losers in a small Washington town that turns into something significantly stranger, which is getting a very short but very full production at Portland Playhouse. The play blends absurdity with despair in the best wa...   More

News My last show from the first weekend of the Fertile Ground Festival was Dirty Bomb: A thoroughly perplexing world premiere, written and directed by recent New York transplant Rob Newton, in which a pair of despicable middle-aged siblings drink, scream and complain about their mother, who is rapidly falling into dementia, and the depraved young hustler who seems determined to destroy all their liv...   More

News After a short break for press day, we're back with more of the Fertile Ground festival of new performance art. Pulp Diction Presents: The Rewrite Man Everyone has something to hide in this occasionally mystifying reading of a new spy thriller, written by Oregon Book Award winner Steve Patterson and delivered with a splash of neo-noir. "There's cloak and dagger, and then there's crazy," an...   More