Skip to main contentHow often does one really enjoy modern dance? Seriously. Yes, it can be moving, challenging, thought-provoking. But I defy you to count how often it's produced the type of laughing goodwill and pure sweetness that's found in local talent Gregg Bielemeier's latest, Poodle Farm: CityBoy Born in a CountryBoy's Body.
A soufflé-light work of dance theater crafted from a series of stylized vocal and body monologues, Poodle Farm explores the formative years of this gifted Portland dance eccentric, who has shown work in venues from Southwest Yamhill Street to Europe in the course of his 30-odd-year career.
Poodle Farm is a place where memory and lunacy meet. Poker chips become high heels, ballet shoes equal offal and, in his hilarious duet with dancer Joan Findlay, Steven Edie, a buoyant pink plastic couch can thwart the Herculean effort of misguided love (opera aria and disco ball included).
"It's all true. That's my life," laughs the 52-year-old choreographer whose last ensemble offering, 1998's kinetic wonderball Odd Duck Lake, was summarily praised as a Portland gem. His newest work is a scrapbook tribute to his childhood and teens growing up in the tiny hamlet of Mount Angel, a German-Catholic farming community 40 miles from the urban mecca of 1950s Portland. "Poodle Farm is about truth. It's about my evolution from a country kid who didn't feel comfortable with small-townness."
The evening is kick-started by the faux-leopard moxie of Hoot n' a Holler (the whisky-drenched duet of the Trailer Park Honeys' Lisa Miller and lounge diva Lyndee Mah), whose sharp little tales of "love gone wrong and revenge" charmingly set the stage for Bielemeier's next goofy/lovely piece, CowboyGirl. Mooning and monologue ensue (brightly staged by Susan Banyas), which segue to a pair of pieces (Dressed I and Dressed II) danced by a trio of fanciful muses/poodles, Joan Findlay, Dorinda Holler and Jae Diego.
A visual slice of funhouse, this pack of movers does Bielemeier's whiplashing choreography and skewed vision justice. In truth, though, the highlight of the work is seeing Bielemeier himself. Knee slightly turned in, the pad of his foot lightly tapping the floor, head turned heavenward and prancing, this is a man who manages to embody Ed Grimley and Nijinsky--catfighting in a burlap sack. His humor may hook his audiences, but it's his articulate and purely original movement that cements their interest: loose-limbed gallops that lock joints, teeter and smack the body down to the ground, only to suddenly bounce and recover with an errant sense of composure. His is a wonderfully ungainly grace.
When dressed in hot pink by costumer Pamela Johnston and cleverly lit by Bill Boese, he's a killer. "In the last 15 to 18 years I realized that this was where my work was going," says Bielemeier. "The humor was always back there, but I wasn't in a position to let it happen because I was always so seriously dancing. I think a lot of things are too serious, I think everything is too serious. I think that humans take things too seriously."
Thank goodness for us, Gregg Bielemeier isn't, and never has been, just human.
Poodle Farm
Conduit, 918 SW Yamhill St., Suite 401, 221-5857. 8 pm Friday- Sunday, Sept. 20-22. $15.
WWeek 2015