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On Oct. 14, 400 in the audience at the nearly 3,000-seat Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall will have gotten into the night’s dance performance for free. They didn’t win a contest, not exactly. And tickets to see Circa, an Australian troupe billed as a progressive, “movement-based circus,” were not gratis because of any need-based financial aid program.
“I had a lot of explaining to do,” says Deanna Reeves, marketing and communications director of Portland’s sole year-round dance presenter, White Bird. At a booth this summer during Portland’s annual Pride festival on the waterfront, Reeves handed out tickets to see Circa perform Wolf. The dance work—through aerial maneuvers, acrobatics and athletic choreography—uses the wild animal as a metaphor for humans’ primal instinct to form packs amid chaos.
People wanted to know the catch, but the tickets were free thanks to an anonymous donation (“in the thousands, not tens of thousands,” the company tells WW). And the campaign is simply another version of what the 29-year-old nonprofit has been doing for decades: getting the city interested in performance dance.
Name-checking Cirque du Soleil gave passersby at Pride some expectations for the Circa show. Explaining that White Bird is not a dance company or theater (there are no house dancers, nor is there a house) but instead a go-between that schedules internationally touring dance companies to perform at local venues—that was easy enough to understand.
Articulating the nuances of exactly which kinds of dance White Bird presents, however, proved more complicated.
Earlier this year, the company dropped “contemporary” from its mission statement, transforming into simply a dance presenter.
“I have a degree in contemporary dance,” says Graham Cole, White Bird’s executive director since 2021. “It’s not a very useful description for the breadth of the dance world.”
The label is constantly in flux. Whereas “modern dance” is a form developed in the 20th century to rebel against traditional ballet, and “traditional dance” draws on generations of historically significant cultural and folk heritages, “contemporary dance” is an amalgamation of all of the above plus a current of new styles.
A good chunk of Portland’s exposure to the international contemporary dance scene is thanks to two guys named Walter Jaffe and Paul King, who started White Bird in 1997. They named it after their pet cockatoo, Barney. However, it is telling that the Paul Taylor Dance Company, a pioneer in the modern dance world, marked White Bird’s first show at the Schnitz that October.
“In this country, if you were a dance fan, it was either modern dance or ballet that you were going to see on the stage,” Cole says. “Maybe if you went somewhere of a club environment, you’d see some jazz dance or some cabaret.”
White Bird’s ambition has always been to expand that scope by putting all kinds of dance on the concert stage. While cost is always a barrier in the performing arts, and the city’s ritzier venues are most appropriate for this type of performance, White Bird tickets range from $5 to $130, in line with a rock show at Revolution Hall.
Across the board, long-standing arts institutions are seeing their audiences age and not be replaced by young people. “One of the biggest barriers we’re facing isn’t necessarily affordability,” says marketing director Reeves. “It’s really just awareness.”
Free of the “contemporary” label, White Bird’s 2026–27 season is more diverse than ever. The shift opens the door to modern and progressive acts. But it also lets White Bird host traditional dance companies across various cultures, like the Buenos Aires–based Social Tango Project (March 3) and the South Indian Ragamala Dance Company (June 9 and 10) from Minneapolis.
Starting over, in a sense, also means building a new audience. One tactic is pairing modern and contemporary dance with popular music. Last season, White Bird hosted a performance of For Crying Out Loud, New York company Complexions Contemporary Ballet’s piece based on the 2023 U2 album Songs of Surrender, as well as Ballets Jazz Montréal’s Leonard Cohen tribute, Dance Me.
Acts incorporating street and club dance mark a bigger shift, which Cole says have been a priority in recent years.
“Obviously, hip-hop was born out of Generation X,” he says. “But street dance has exploded on social media, especially. You see a lot of hip-hop dancers, but also voguers, tutters. Now you see some of the same elements being folded into K-pop choreography.”
Turning a person who watches dance videos online into a concert dance patron is not a one-for-one swap. Instead, the idea is that if you like this, you might also like this. You might recognize the geometric upper body movements from street-style tutting videos online. Or perhaps you note the stylized poses of drag ballroom voguing. Or maybe it’s a reference to voguing’s disco-fueled L.A. counterpart, waacking, that convinces you that you somehow “get” what’s happening onstage.
The Montreal group Tentacle Tribe represents street dance this season. Its piece Prism (April 22–24) spins popping, tutting and breaking styles with the larger artistic premise characteristic of contemporary dance works—using a mirrored floor and distinct partnering techniques to reflect on “what we see and what we miss.”
White Bird’s near-30-year tenure alone proves its ability to grow alongside its audience. But the continuous reinvention required to do so poses a different, more existential question about the desire to promote dance—any kind of dance—in general.
Cole says dance is ingrained in the “propagation of joy,” which is why every culture in the world around has its own traditional dance. But if the audience needs to be convinced—even plied with free tickets—why is this type of staged, concert dance so important to maintain?
“Beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Cole says, “seeing other people dance onstage—whether those people are just like them, or from a completely different culture—helps [audiences] understand those people better than they would just by seeing them or talking to them.”
SEE IT: Wolf by Circa presented by White Bird at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 503-245-1600, whitebird.org. 7:30 pm Wednesday, Oct. 14. $5–$130. All ages.
