Arts & Books As the minutes ticked away past midnight on January 1, 2000, a sense of calm and joy sunk in over the world. The superstructures of the world avoided any Y2K insanity, and the symbolic turning of the page on a new millennium became something to simply celebrate. The world has never been as confident since. Disasters both man-made and natural have befallen the planet with alarming regularity. And ...   More

Arts & Books So much at the Time Based Art festival is in your face. Big Art Group screams about Greek tragedy and squirts ketchup all over the place. Miguel Gutierrez unleashes a mile-a-minute monologue about a thousand topics. This can be exhausting, and it can also trick you into thinking that performance is supposed to assault you in some way. That’s why I was so glad to catch (glowing), a clean and beautiful ...   More

Arts & Books “The city is a human creation reflecting its actors,” Gabino Rodríguez says, midway through Asalto al Agua Transparente (in English, The Assault on Clear Waters). It’s not a particularly earth-shattering statement, but it rings true for both the content and the form of this satisfying production, which was the second TBA offering from young Mexican theater collective Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol. ...   More

Arts & Books The conversations of Japanese theater troupe Chelfitsch are repetitive, mundane and awkward. They are also spellbinding.In three related vignettes (presented in Japanese with easy-to-follow supertitles), the cast captures the everyday annoyances and absurdities of modern office life. Employing the stylized choreography for which Chelfitsch is known—movements simultaneously balletic and robotic—the ...   More

Arts & Books Still sitting in the library after Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells’ The Quiet Volume, I’m almost too overwhelmed to write. I previewed this piece before the Time-Based Art Festival began, so I knew what to expect going in: Two participants are seated at a table at the Multnomah County Central Library, and they proceed to follow instructions piped through headphones. I’d even watched a YouTube video ...   More

Arts & Books Claire Evans is onstage at the Crystal Ballroom, clutching her signature all-white mic and contortedly dancing her way through a diametric dyad of songs off Shangri-La, the latest record from her and Jona Bechtolt's band YACHT.On “Dystopia (The Earth Is On Fire),” Evans (half-joking that the song is about her and Bechtolt's adopted home, Los Angeles) takes a dark view of humankind's direction—particularly ...   More

Arts & Books Perhaps it’s just TBA fatigue, but I struggled to get into Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good). The pieces seemed to be there: technical mastery, crack improvisational skills, some genuine belly laughs, audience participation that is neither obnoxious nor jarring. Yet I still found myself weary after the performance.Kitchen is not the easiest show to describe. Using live video feeds ...   More

Arts & Books Congelese dancer Faustin Linyekula made a plainspoken and indelible impression in his solo autobiographical work Le Cargo, which premiered last night at TBA before heading to New York’s Florence Gould Hall. Le Cargo tells of Linyekula’s 2011 return to Obilo, the Congolese village where he spent part of his childhood. It offers a snapshot of Congolese village life, but it also tackles some pretty ...   More

Arts & Books For his “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, filmmaker Sam Green—best known for his Academy Award-nominated documentary about some other, very different, utopians, The Weather Underground—has chosen a worthy, fascinating subject. Fuller—for those who aren't already among his cultish following—was a designer, philosopher and public intellectual now most famous for inventing ...   More

Arts & Books I was first introduced to Buckminster Fuller by a college professor in a history of architecture course. This professor, an endearing and excitable German we all revered, bounced about the lecture hall as he spoke, oh-so-sonorously, about Fuller’s geodesic dome, his avant-garde designs and his utopian principles.No matter how much enthusiasm that professor had for Fuller, experimental filmmaker Sam ...   More