Arts & Books Sitting through Yasmeen Godder’s dance piece Love Fire last night at PSU’s Lincoln Hall I felt a sensation welling up inside me: a profound sense of shrugging WTF. The Israeli-American choreographer’s duet with dancer Matan Zamir centers on an exploration of romance and our desire to be “transformed and taken by passion.” That translates to a cavalcade of sexual and bestial ...   More

Arts & Books Reality crowds illusion and chaos thwarts control in Dark Matters, a stunning new work by Kidd Pivot Frankfurt RM. The company, run by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite and known simply as Kidd Pivot when it made its Portland debut in 2008, has returned with a work that’s thought-provoking and moving, as well as funny and periodically heart-stopping. It’s ingeniously lit and packed with ...   More

Arts & Books Those new people in that big white house, the ones who keep coming and going and gathering out front—what are they doing, exactly? As it turns out, they are Vertigo Dance Company and they’re just visiting for the weekend. They’ve come all the way from Jerusalem to share a contemporary dance piece called Mana, Vessel of Light with us, and this is their first time on the West Coast, so we should ...   More

Arts & Books You heard it here first: White Bird’s 2011-2012 season will be mixing fresh faces with past favorites. It opens Oct. 5 with Pilobolous, a return engagement for the acrobatically minded troupe with just one degree of separation from Portland’s own dance scene (BodyBox founder Jamey Hampton is a former member). The return category also includes the winsome Trey McIntyre Project Oct. 13-15; Australia’s ...   More

Arts & Books Brazilian dance just had a heartbreaker of a week, due to the fires that torched some of Rio’s samba schools right before Carnival. But Brazilian dance also had a triumphant week, at least in Portland, which celebrated the Belo Horizonte-based company Grupo Corpo with a standing ovation Wednesday night at the Schnitz.Brazil, of course, is a big country, and its dance scene isn't limited ...   More

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