The opening moments of Friday night’s Oregon Painting Society show were dark. With the stage lights off, three women in shiny shirts and leotards crossed through the audience crowded onto the cement floor close to the stage. The three women took their places on the step leading up the stage and raised three brooms. Together they brought the brooms down with a “boom!” and from the stage voices spoke, “It’s a spiritual crisis.”

Slowly, lights came up and the crowd was able to see the spooky performance collective that is the 10-member Oregon Painting Society. What distinguishes this crew of art school kids who wear strange costumes and create collaborative experimental music performances from the hundreds of other Portland art school kids who wear crazy outfits and play dissonant music, too, is that Oregon Painting Society is defined by a profoundly serious quality. Their movements, music and recitation of words feel funny and spontaneous, but their performances are obviously carefully orchestrated and highly intentional. When the 10 young Portlanders donned witch hats and home-sewn white headscarves and formed a circle chanting, “Why must I be a teenager in love?” the effect was comic but startlingly spiritual.

• Homemade hats, interpretative dancers: essential.

Another moment of bizarre awe came midway through the work, when the Society knelt in pairs around three plants placed in the center of the stage. As soon as the performers touched the plants, it was revealed that the plants were not props or decoration but instruments themselves. Wired to amplifiers, the plants emanated sounds when the performers touched their leaves and stems. The electric, dissonant noises changing pitch and strength depending on the performer’s touch and the Washington High School auditorium resounded with sounds that can never be recreated, since they were audio artifacts of unique interactions.

For people disillusioned with Portland’s laid back, collaboration-oriented experimental performance scene, Oregon Painting Society is a refreshing reaffirmation that sincere innovation is always possible.

There was a simple, moving moment during PICA's TBA Festival this past Friday night at the Newmark Theatre. One that left the audience breathless.

It happened when PICA artistic director Cathy Edwards, in another of her graceful and understated pre-performance speeches, described the conditions under which dancemaker Raimund Hoghe's company entered the United States earlier in the month for this, their American debut.

Edwards described a process by which all six members of Hoghe's international company were admitted into the country for their much-anticipated debut — except for one, an Algerian-born performer, detained solely because of his country of origin. There was an audible gasp in the audience, and then: silence.

That Hoghe's work which followed this dramatic opening - the US premiere of his “Bolero Variations” - failed to captivate me as much as his company's story is due, in part, to the artist's own aim with the work. “Bolero Variations” offers much to like: the chance to hear legendary figure skating duo Torvill and Dean's legendary 1984 “Bolero” performance on ice (not once, but twice!), the opportunity to watch five unique and interesting movement artists do unique and interesting things with their hands and bodies. Maria Callas makes an aural cameo.

Erik Friendlander's Block Ice and Propane was not a show I was particularly excited to see. A cellist playing songs to accompany videos and photos from his childhood—it sounds pleasantly snoozy. The reality is far more beautiful, and more moving, than I'd anticipated. Friedlander's show is structured like a road trip, based on the trips his family would take every summer, as his photographer father hopped from gig to gig around the US. It's a nostalgic vision, and a relatable one—anyone who ever packed into the family car (or truck camper, in Friedlander's case) will remember the feeling of staring sleepily out the window, playing games with passing cars and with one's own perspective as the scenery passes by. Friedlander tells a few stories to supplement his songs, giving context to some of the snapshots, and his storytelling style is casual and conversational. It feels less like a rehearsed performance, and more like watching old home videos with a friend. When he picks up his cello, though, any sense of casualness slips away: Friendlander is an incredible cellist, his rapid fingerpicking and expressive sound perfectly accompanying videographer Bill Morrison's footage of clouds, flashing roadsides, and the endlessly unfolding highway. Every summer when I was a kid, my family took road trips back east to visit my parents' parents—I was surprised to find myself getting a little misty as Friedlander brought those trips back with perfect clarity, and a little relieved when the friend I saw the show with confessed she'd teared up a bit too. In a festival full of aggressively challenging and often impenetrable work, it was refreshing and moving to see a show that reflected, subtly yet directly, such a quintessentially American experience.

• Oliver Paul

Pan Pan Theatre's The Crumb Trail is a neurotic little piece of theater that finds sources of anxiety everywhere: in fairy tales, in food, and especially in the internet. Pan Pan takes Hansel and Gretel as its starting point, a cautionary tale about two children whose parents abandon them in the woods. The metaphorical woods of The Crumb Trail is the internet, its dangers made explicit here: Sex is everywhere, and not the sexy kind. There's no gingerbread house, but internet memes—the Star Wars kid flails, the cast of Peanuts singing "Hey Ya"—serve the same function, action as distracting, candy-coated enticements.

At the beginning of the show, the actors introduce themselves and explain what roles they'll be playing. "When I'm Gretel, I have built-in GPS," announces actress Aoife Duffin; Hansel, played by Bush Moukarzel, is quick to call bullshit. The aptly titled production picks its way over a terrain that splices fairy tales and YouTube videos, that explores creepy subtexts without ever losing its sense of humor. Most surprising of all, in fact, is how funny the show really is: just funny enough to make a cryptic modern day parable about the internet era completely palatable. In other words, this ensemble knows exactly what it's doing. Multiple laptops and projectors are integrated with deft use of shadow and sound; there's even a fuzzed out pop song about the limits of maternal love.

I'm reluctant to say too much about this show—much of the fun, as one of the actors points out, is heading into the darkness, not quite knowing what's going to happen. I will say, though, that of what I've seen so far at TBA, it's my favorite.

The Crumb Trail runs tonight through Saturday, 6:30 pm, details here.

• Jeff Busby

Steve (Simon Laherty) is deep in an existential crisis brought on by thoughts of losing his friend Gary (Sonia Tueben) to a routine knee operation. Unfortunately, his crisis is standing in the way of a major deal. Without Steve nothing will move forward, but he’d rather stand in Pioneer Square trying to work things out. For corporate bigwigs Alan (Jim Russell) and Carolyn (Genevieve Morris), who are on the other side of the deal, it’s a situation that will not do. They will pull out every trick of coercion they know to exploit the presumed vulnerability of their counterparts.

We are in Pioneer Square with them—a rapt audience in silver headphones—looking on. Passers-by glance up at us as we stare out at the bricks. Some even stop to see what we’re looking at, but we’re the only ones privy to this drama. We’re the only ones who can hear Steve and Gary as they discuss the dilemma. We’re the only ones who really know them. This is our private spectacle, and we in turn are a very public spectacle.

• Gabriel Bienzycki
• Zeke Keeble of locust

The intersection between modern dance and hip-hop can be hard to traverse without diluting the energy of both forms. Fortunately Amy O’Neal, Zeke Keeble, and their Seattle-based dance company locust have been able to combine the more lyrical aesthetics of modern movement with the dynamics of funky club dancing (to great effect) in their amazing hour-long performance, Crushed.

Above all else, Crushed is a highly entertaining dance performance. Using a physical vocabulary that draws from disciplines as diverse as pop n' lock and tango, choreographer Amy O’Neal leads the audience through a dream of night spaces, full of pushing, grasping, dance battles and the calculated sexuality of dance floor. Musician and co-creator Zeke Keeble, adds live rhythm and atmosphere, beat-boxing, programming and mixing taught intelligent dance music—heavy on the bass beat and tricked out with beeps and clicks.

But music and dance aren’t enough for locust, to add another layer of complexity the company takes full advantage of projected video that extends the depth of field beyond the stage. At one moment in Crushed a fuzzy video of dancers at the end of a long dark hallway comes into sharp relief onstage as O’Neal and her performers mimic the action on screen. That the movements between screen and stage aren’t completely synchronized causes an amazing elastic tension as background and foreground coalesce and fall apart again and again.

Locust is very adept at creating tension. It’s seen (and heard) again and again in the live accompaniment of Keeble. As he performs, he is able to react to the dancers movements, creating trippy electronic sound effects to match. The end result is that dancers seem electrically charged, sending up swishes of static as their limbs cut through the air.

I can’t presume to say what Crushed is about. Is it the final death vision of an insect? The coma dreams of a once club-hopping hipster? I’m not sure, and frankly it doesn’t matter to me—like all good entertainment Crushed is simply far too engaging to worry about a deeper meaning. Which is not to say that there isn’t one (I’m sure there is), I just don’t know if the performance would be improved by knowing it.

It’s good to see these TBA veterans returning, and you can bet I'll be have my ass in the seats anytime they come to town.

Let me ask you a question.

What was the last TBA Festival event that had one (and only one) idea in its head: to entertain the masses with frenzied song-and-dance enthusiasm, and send you home with a mile-wide grin?

None in recent memory come to mind, which makes Pink Martini and friends' Saturday night performance at the Oregon Zoo that much more of a treasure. “Oregon! Oregon!”, the rarely heard — and never before staged — mini-musical that was the centerpiece of this show, swept up the 4,000-plus audience into a Beaver Thumping frenzy never seen before at any TBA event.

The musical was only one-third of the 2-hour plus performance, but it was unquestionably the highlight. First commissioned and premiered on radio to celebrate Oregon's centennial birthday in 1959, radio artist Stan Freberg penned a delirious romp through the first 100 years of Oregon: one brief act each to mark the birth, 50th and 100th anniversaries of Oregon's statehood.

• Eric McNatt

When Hollywood legends die, they leave behind a body of work that’s almost more important to those left behind than the legend’s actual life story. The movies of Garbo, or Monroe, or whomever are almost like a magic trunk of forgotten costumes. They can be pulled out, dusted off, and inhabited for a time. The characters and emotions left there on the celluloid are like a band of sequins, and we can rest inside the sparkle until the final musical swell that marks the end of the film.

In Last Meadow, Miguel Gutierrez has used the work of James Dean as a starting point. He’s opened the trunk, pulled out the costumes, and taken a seam ripper to everything he could get his hands on. The resulting reassembled ensemble is at times ill-fitting, elegant, lyrical, ugly, and beautiful.

Over the course of the 90 minute Technicolored feat of endurance, Gutierrez and fellow performers Michelle Boule and Tarek Halaby push themselves to their physical limits as they scream, convulse, and dance through source material pulled from Dean’s East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant.

• Paula Cort

I was admittedly tepid about playwright Young Jean Lee's 2007 TBA offering, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a show that seemed as though it was trying to push buttons I don't actually have. Her new show the The Shipment, in which the Korean American Lee set out to examine the African American experience, is an infinitely more cohesive and successful production—not merely button-pushing, but provocative, in the best sense of the word.

There are moments in Meg Stuart and Philip Gehmacher's "Maybe Forever" that you may never forget. The slow spread of Gehmacher's arms, sunward, as a soft guitar crescendoes. A wrenchingly expressive duet between the dancers that bubbles with a darkly sexual subtext.

Then there's the other 80 impenetrable minutes of this show.

The question is whether you're willing to stomach the long stretches of herky-jerky movement, tinkling softcore guitar—with unintellegiable lyrics sung on top (Niko Hafkenscheid, electric guitar/singer)—and pretentious pseudo-monologues that comprise the majority of this interminably long performance. I longed for a curtain to drop right around the 50-minute mark (I know because I checked my iPhone). My seat-mate dozed off 60 minutes in. At 70 minutes, the young men in front of us started giggling uncontrollably. The applause at the performance's end was likely the most tepid I've heard yet at TBA (and - OMG! - there were at least two lusty "boo's" in the mix).

We didn't have room in the paper to print the entirety of Marjorie Skinner's interview with Back to Back Theatre's artistic director Bruce Gladwin, but the whole thing is online: Check it out. Back to Back's small metal objects, which will place a headphoned audience on risers in Pioneer Square to watch mic'd actors with disabilities perform amidst the crowds of the square, has already emerged as one of the most-anticipated shows in the TBA:09 lineup. The show requires reservations even for TBA passholders, which can be made at PICA's box office; make reservations or buy tickets here.

In the least successful line of Bob Dylan's otherwise devastating "Hard Rain's Gonna Fall," the narrator, while describing the hallucinatory events he'd witnessed, reports that he "met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow." Never a sentimentalist, it's hard to determine how Dylan intended this rendezvous with Roy G. Biv's altruistic, feminine purity to sound. Thirty-five years after he wrote the lyric, though, it stands out as a goofy image of flower-child dippyness.

While the sentiment of wanting to give the world a rainbow surely lies in wait, anticipating its un-ironic comeback, contemporary artists with Romantic hearts are guarded about loosing these impossibly sappy intentions. The dominant strategy these days, as best illustrated by Michael Gondry in The Science of Sleep, is to bashfully and earnestly produce a handmade, pocket-sized rainbow, thereby invoking the patina of sensitive, creative wonder while acknowledging the futility of trying to deliver anything more than a crumpled arch of colored foil. (Said gift also doubles as a nifty stand-in for the artist's radiant but scuffed heart.)

Tiago Guedes, a 30 year old Portugese artist, mines this twee-craft aesthetic in two TBA performances: Materiais Diversos (Diverse Materials) at PCPA and the smaller Um Solo (A Solo) at PNCA. In each, Guedes wordlessly tramps around the stage with unembellished industry, methodically producing his own version of pocket-sized rainbows for clearly enchanted audiences.

This six-hour ambling little thing was engaging enough for a while, but I don't think it fully shows off the "groundbreaking" aspects of experimental theater maker Tim Etchells. The premise: Etchells and two other dudes sat in a room with some Christmas lights strewn around and stacks of paper with thousands of questions written on them. The men sat or stood, or paced, and just took turns asking each other questions from the papers, and in turn answering them. This they did for six hours, or so I'm told. I wouldn't know because I left after an hour. This you were encouraged to do and I was not violating any rules. I also took pains to come later on in the piece to try and detect if it might be building to anything that wouldn't be detectable in, say, hour #2. It wasn't.

I've been sitting on this Superamas blog post for two days, hoping that in sleeping on it--and sleeping on it again--some strikingly intelligent or insightful way to describe this show would occur to me.

That did not happen.

As far as I can tell, this bright, superficially stunning show sets up several scenes and then, through repetition, unpacks them, laying out the often dark and occasionally absurd forces that lie beneath our day-to-day expectations of both life and entertainment. In the first scene, four shirtless men in blue jeans practice the intro to Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," stopping each time just before the vocals kick in. One of the men isn't playing well, because he's upset: He's just found out he's gotten a woman pregnant. His three bandmates console him, in a manner of speaking--they mostly just encourage him to convince the woman to get an abortion, in a blatant display of bro'd down misogyny that's complicated by the realization, at the end of the scene (which is repeated several times) that the woman in question is the band's lead singer. This scene culminates in a sexually evocative, lip-synched version of Cobain's hit in which the vocalist masturbates with the mic, band members feign performing oral sex, and the audience is left to wonder if this is really the point that "Here we are now/ entertain us" has brought us to.

The next scene takes place in a club, with a dancefloor full of women busting moves to Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy." What follows is a completely, unabashedly awesome (there is no other word for it) dance off that sees the two competitors doing pirouettes and backbends, popping, breakdancing, and more. This is one of the few scenes in the show that only gets one run through, and it ends with bunch of dudes rushing the dance floor, raised beers in hand, as though these women were dancing for the benefit of these men all along. (A glowing bottle of Trumer Pils sits onstage, giving scenes like this an advertorial quality as well.)

Then it's on to the dance studio, where three topless women are preparing for dance class. It's super hot, on purpose--all the women are gorgeous; one of them demonstrates how to use a new vibrator she's just received--and it's interrupted at various points by a scene from What's New, Pussycat? in which Peter O'Toole and Peter Sellers discuss why men go to strip clubs, and a video from a dance class in which the hilariously New Age-y "dance of liberation" is being taught. The deliberate sexiness of the scene between the women, meanwhile, is undercut in repetition by the inclusion of melodramatic elements--one woman describes an upcoming surgery; at one point a spectacularly well-orchestrated car crash (represented powerfully through light and sound) tears through the scene.

I don't think I understood this show particularly well, and I certainly haven't figured out how to talk about it in a way that makes me sound, you know, smart--but I loved every minute of it and was actively disappointed when it ended. The hilariously protracted ending credit sequence gave shoutouts to Sex and the City and Milan Kundera, a pairing that nicely captures the show's overall effect: It's a perfect balance of crowd-pleasing spectacle and heady attempts to deconstruct audience expectations of (and for) happiness.

The Imago Theatre is my least favorite TBA venue. Granted, the sound is better than at PSU's Lincoln Hall, but the seats are uncomfortable, it's always freezing, and the women's restroom has curtains instead of doors so you can never tell if the stalls are occupied. Somehow, though, my least favorite venue manages to house my favorite shows, from last years six-hour Gatz to this year's L'Effet de Serge, by Philippe Quesne's Vivarium Studios.

Serge is a quiet, understated rumination on the comforts of routine and the role of art in the everyday. The entirety of the 90-minute piece takes place inside a half-decorated apartment; one side of the big room holds a ping pong table, a TV, and various electrical odds and end (like a remote control helicopter and an "electronic decision maker"); the other half of the room is empty, with a sliding glass door opening onto the driveway. We're introduced to the space by a man in an astronaut costume, wearing an outsized illuminated bubble over his head, who walks us through the apartment like Neil Armstrong bobbling across the moon's surface. He explains that the apartment is inhabited by a man named Serge, who lives alone near a strip mall, and that every Sunday Serge creates short shows for his friends.

When the show proper begins, it's just as described: The quiet Serge comes home from work, watches some TV, orders a pizza, tinkers with some electronics, and then a friend arrives for the "show." Serge provides a folding chair and a glass of wine for his friend--little dialogue is spoken. The show begins; "Rolling Effect on Music by Handel," in which Serge steers a remote controlled car around the room in synch with the music, or "Light Effect on Music by Wagner," which features car headlights flashing through fog in time with "Ride of the Valkyries." After each show, his friends stay a moment to converse, struggling to find things to say ("it was interesting"), and then Serge escorts them out, inviting them to return. In between each Sunday show, a narrator informs us that "time goes by, time goes by," as Serge sits and eats pizza, sits and watches TV.

Serge's routine changes not at all between shows; the Sunday shows seem to be what he waits for all week, yet there's also a sense that when his friends linger to discuss the work, he's hoping for a reaction--an understanding==that he never quite gets. For the final show, all of his friends converge, and it is only in this scene that the word "friend" seems to mean anything: Serge is reserved, as he has been for the duration of the piece, but his friends know each other, and they greet each new arrival with hugs and kisses, raising questions of how the social dynamics of this group function. Is Serge the weird friend that they all both humor and worry about? Does the cute girl who brings him a gift have a crush on him? Serge seems oblivious to all of this, sticking to his routine, taking jackets, offering juice, preparing for the show. It's sweet, funny, and just a little bit sad. Serge is not only a deeply sympathetic portrait of one man's attempt to find some grace, however small, in his crappy apartment surrounded by generic chain stores--it's also an acknowledgement that grace can exist in these settings; and, as you might've gleaned from the astronaut in scene 1, it's also a quirkily funny show that breezes through its running time so effortlessly that you'll barely notice the uncomfortable seats.

I think people at this year's TBA festivities have been spoiled by the likes of Mike Daisey, Daniel Beaty, and other folks who, while certainly subversive and cutting-edge and blah-de-blah-blah-blah, also offer up plenty of good old fashioned straightforward entertainment to keep you engaged. How else to explain why more than a dozen people simply walked out of tonight's performance by Jim Fletcher of a solo piece written and directed by Tim Etchells? The show was certainly not as accessible as they come, but it was also far from entirely unapproachable, and was barely an hour long. People who walked out and who made noise in preparing to walk out and who thereby disrupted us all: What did you expect? This is performance art here, and some of it's gonna be funny and fun and entertaining, and some of it's going to be super-heady, confrontational, and/or pretentious and boring. That doesn't mean you should walk out and disrupt the people who paid to see the show and feel obliged to stick it out whether they like it or not. Fucking pussies.

But beyond even that, "Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First" wasn't even all that walk-out worthy.

Here is a brief survey of topics in Mike Daisey's new work, If You See Something, Say Something:

Airport Security
The Department of Homeland Security
The Trinity Nuclear Test Site
Apocalypse
The Rand Corporation
Herman Kahn
The Neutron Bomb
Pickpocketing
World War Two
George Washington's Farewell Address
The Worst Hamburger in the World

Looking over this list, you might think this performance would be a big old bummer. In fact, I'm certain it would be, in the hands of anyone else but Mike Daisey. Luckily, Daisey has an amazing sense of humor and riveting stage presence. His comic timing is honed to a fine, sharp point. In fact, if I hadn't been so amused by Daisey, I probably would've walked out of the theater in a deep depression.

You see, after being exposed to Daisey's savaging of festival goers during Occurrence, at the Works last Tuesday night, and his current show, running until Sunday at the Winnigstad theater, I've become aware that he deals in hard truth. It's just that he does it with such humor and energy, you forget what he's saying is piecing you like a sharp needle. It's kind of like a doctor holding up a stuffed animal to distract the child receiving an inoculation. The kid walks out of the doctors office, just slightly upset, but thinking, "Hey, it wasn't that bad." But later, that little spot under the band-aid begins to ache.

Dr. Daisey isn't saying very nice things about our American experience over the last several decades. He talks about nuclear annihilation, the restlessness of standing armies, and the inefficacy of politicians who have been seduced by think tanks. Before long, there is a realization that you are learning some new things, and maybe those new things... Well, you didn't want to learn them.

If You See Something, Say Something is essentially a meditation on security: personal, national, and psychological. He is very adept at drawing the line that connects these concepts. He reveals the mistakes, misconception, and deception we fall prey to when thinking about how to keep ourselves safe, and what we agree to sacrifice in return.

Last nights show ran a little over two hours long. Being the anniversary of 9/11, there were some particularly poignant moments in Daisey's monologue. The one that affected me most, was when he reminded us of the passengers of Flight 93, who sacrificed themselves in order to "keep a bad day from getting worse." Daisey reminded the audience that this was an act performed by everyday citizens like us. It wasn't a military action. It wasn't ordered. It had nothing to do with the government. Their act was a grand act of democracy: American citizens keeping their fellows safe.

That was what I walked away with last night—a sense that we do not need government oversight to keep one another safe. Because when you get right down to it, once that kind of oversight and power is given to a bureaucracy, it has a very hard time giving that power up. And that power leads to a kind of myopia that's able to view the deaths of thousands and thousands of women and children as completely acceptable.

Then, it becomes necessary for us to walk into the crater and the fallout and take that power back.

Even though it features a video of Neal Medlyn humping a mattress while wearing a tight blue unitard, Sexercise Live! isn't really performance art. It's purely performance or purely art, depending on your perspective. My perspective (and rightly so in my opinion) was drunk. From that perspective, I was perfectly comfortable, sitting in the darkness of Someday Lounge, listening to the indomitable Bridget Everett tear her way through soul songs and talk about cunnilingus. I only wish that the place had been more beer soaked and full of smoke.

Sexercise Live! is a show that would be completely, un-ironically at home in a low-down dive. It would be at home in the kind of place where ragged men—love beaten and heart sick—sit around tables, believing that the vision with the smoky voice up on stage is singing just to them. Not only does it offer catharsis, in Everett's unbridled performance, it offers blue laughs as a salve to the weary ways of sex and love.

Kenny Mellman and Bridget Everett created Sexercise Live! as a tribute to Millie Jackson. Jackson was a seventies era soul singer with a raunchy streak, who sang and rapped about getting together, fucking, and breaking up—not necessarily in that order. She was well regarded by her musical compatriots but has since been relegated to the back bins. Luckily, her album, Caught Up, was re-released this year. It's a good thing too... Her version of If Loving You is Wrong (I Don't Want to be Right) is a sad, luscious masterpiece,

Bidget Everett is also a sad, luscious masterpiece. Actually, far less sad than luscious. Her voice is powerful and full of cigarettes and bourbon. On stage, she is completely commanding. The first part of her set found her in a sequined blue dress, split up the thighs. She reminded me of one of those sparkly, sugar coated, wedge shaped candies from back in the day. God help me, I'm a married man, but I wanted to take a bite.

Mellman is something altogether different. He is gloriously ungentle on the keys, yelling along in the background. In association with very capable musicians on bass and drum, the whole ensemble creates a writhing, sweating beast with four backs.

But like I said, it's either all art or all performance, depending on your perspective. through my particular haze of cocktails and sleep deprivation it was all performance... and a goddamn good one. But I gotta tell ya, walking out the door, listening to festival goers discuss the finer symbolic merits of Sexercise Live! made me want to find a real dive bar and a real Millie Jackson to sing me to my stupor.

This is too little too late on Sojourn Theatre's excellent BUILT, which ran last week at the South Waterfront, but here's what I say in the paper this week about the show:

As exciting as it is to experience top-tier national and international performing artists, it's also a sheer, smug pleasure to see how well our local acts chalk up. Sojourn Theatre does the Portland art scene proud with BUILT, a site-specific, highly interactive show set in the South Waterfront neighborhood. BUILT takes an open-ended approach to the questions of urban planning, asking the audience to consider how Portland's projected population growth should be handled. Do we build up, cramming in condos until the entire city looks like the South Waterfront, or push our already straining urban growth boundary even farther out? Is it better to live in a brand-new condo with an energy-efficient stove and three-pronged electrical outlets, or a charming, poorly insulated old house with a big porch, a breakfast nook, and an ant problem? What does "better" mean, anyway? Better for whom? The show is interactive but never pushy, as Sojourn ensemble members guide the audience through a series of games, questions, and presentations, all geared toward encouraging audience members to identify the principles that underlie their assumptions about cities and homes, wants and needs. It's a stunningly successful example of theater's power to engage with contemporary issues in a meaningful, potentially transformative fashion. And it's homegrown, so suck it, France.

I'll add that in a festival that can feel very abstruse at times, it was refreshing to see a company doing something more than pushing the boundaries of art for art's sake. This production used theatrical techniques to communicate clearly with the audience about the world we live in. It was relevant, accessible, and genuinely thought-provoking. Not necessarily in its ideas about urban growth (the density versus sprawl conversation is not a new one), but in the ways it asked audience members to consider what really matters to them, by asking deceptively simply questions. "Where do you like to spend your free time? What do you want to be able to say about your city in 20 years?" The audience is asked to pit wants against needs; to consider how their own ability to live where and how they want to might affect others' access to basic needs.

The staged dialog between avant garde French choreographer Jerome Bel and traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchen takes place on a stage empty save for two chairs, stage lights up. The two men sit, facing one another; one clad in simple black, compact and lithe, the other unshaven and kinda schlubby, wearing a green windbreaker and shorts. It's immediately clear who's who.

Bel begins asking Pichet questions about his work, and Pichet explains that he practices Khon, a highly codified, centuries-old dance in which every single gesture has a literal meaning. He demonstrates some of the meanings: Here is rain falling, here is a woman wiping away a tear.

It's interesting, if you find learning new things simply for the sake of learning them interesting. (Ain't nothin' wrong with that.) This is art that is completely graspable, assuming you've got the decoder ring, and as Pichet explains the significance of every gesture, it's gratifying watching the meaning of his dances unfold. Interesting, gratifying, but also an exercise that no one in this audience will ever be called upon to repeat: These dances are closed circuits, internally consistent but externally irrelevant. Pichet is an expert in a form of dance that is certainly beautiful but also virtually dead, a cultural commodity only kept alive because it can be sold to tourists. (Pichet has dedicated himself to trying keep Khon alive by reeducating audiences about the dance.) I think the key, though, is that the audience can be taught exactly how to read it, can be told the "correct" way to understand this dance.

Which contrasts directly, of course, with the controversial, open-ended work of highly regarded contemporary choreographer Bel, who spends his time pushing toward the future rather than excavating the past, and the show changes its tone entirely when Pichet begins asking questions of Bel.

Last I saw the storyteller Mike Daisey perform was the last time he came to Portland: for a run of the monologue that put him on the map, 21 Dog Years, at Portland Center Stage. 21 Dog Years was entertaining enough, if on the fluffy side. It found Daisey wandering about the stage, waxing about his days as a cubicle drone at Amazon.com while living in Seattle during the dot-com boom. A strong topic, surely, though I remember little about the actual content of the monologue--and I even read the subsequent memoir Daisey published about the experience. What did linger in my mind were Daisey's talents as a performer, his enormously expressive face and razor-sharp comic timing.

I believe I will remember Daisey's newer piece, Monopoly (though it's not as new as the nearly brand new piece he will present next weekend, If You See Something Say Something). Daisey has become an even more riveting performer than he was two years ago. No longer a wanderer, he now sits behind a desk, Spalding Gray-style, and speaks directly to you with nothing but a glass of water and a few pages of notes. He is still prone to amazingly hilarious facial contortions and wild, almost Chris Farley-like gesticulations, but with the economy of craft has come an economy of focus. Daisey has broadened his topics but tightened the reigns on his delivery, and the result is a performance that feels both explosive and nuanced.

One gets the feeling Daisey could sit there and talk about any topic you gave him (cat litter, broomsticks, plastic forks) and be entertaining; but Monopoly is also the work of a true writer, an inspiring and compassionate activist, and a relentlessly curious historian. Daisey finds the theme of "monopoly" in corners of life you'd never expect, and thus are surprised, delighted, and sometimes shocked to be informed of. His monologue explores the history of the game of Monopoly itself, the tight-fisted control its distributor Parker Brothers had on the board game market, the exploitation they inflicted on its original creator (an entirely innocent Quaker woman who simply wanted a fun way to educate children about capitalism), and the lies they have printed on the box ever since. It explores the sad and amazing life of Nikola Tesla, a visionary inventor whose ideas met with a lifetime of resistance from the corrupt monopolizer Thomas Edison, who didn't want anyone moving in on his electricity shit. And it explores Daisey's own encounters with monopolies, his awed chagrin at the takeover of his small Maine hometown by Wal-Mart, and his early experience acting with Bill Gates in an industrial video for Microsoft. Each individual story thread is fascinating in its own right and could be served by an entire monologue by itself. Daisey's feat of weaving them together creates, as was the plan, I'm sure, a whole much greater than the sum of its parts. A rich tapestry of historical research, personal memoir, and social commentary that creates the illusion of past and present, of timelessness. The through-line of Monopoly is a story about Daisey's attempts to incorporate an actual Tesla coil into an experimental theater piece he was recruited to perform in New York. Due to its status as a "lightning-throwing death machine," the coil was ultimately denied Daisey (nobody wants dead audience members), but the mere idea of its presence casts a strong metaphorical shadow anyway. He can't end his story with an actual demonstration of its main subject matter, but his words achieve a similar effect to a machine designed, in Daisey's own description, to do no thing but spit huge bursts of random electricity. His storytelling is truly an electrifying experience and will, if nothing else, get you charged up.

This is a great year for solo performance at T:BA. It's weak on women, but the men they've got are telling important stories, and telling them well. Daniel Beaty's Resurrection is a perfect counterpoint to Lemon Andersen's County of Kings. While Lemon told his own story of trying to fulfill his potential when the odds were stacked against him, Beaty weaves the story of six interconnected black men, each looking for another chance.

Beaty is a powerful performer, and he holds the audience rapt from the moment the show begins. He inhabits each of his characters completely, transforming from a 10-year-old boy to a 20-year-old student to a 40-year-old shop owner and back, each with just a small shift in voice, the shrug of a shoulder, a glint in his eye. Each character is facing a turning point, looking back in order to look forward, and hoping for the chance to make the right choice.

Beaty creates a symphony of voices, rising to a riveting crescendo and resolving beautifully. He draws on poetry and song, sometimes preaching and sometimes praying but always staying true to the characters he's created. Check him out. His straightforward but utterly artful storytelling is a refreshing change from some of the more bizarre and conceptual pieces in this year's festival. That isn't to say that one form is better than another--just that each allows the other to shine more intensely.

Dancer Jye-Hwei Lin stands on stage, clad only in a pair of tight blue jeans. She looks at the audience as her ribcage expands and contracts as if instead of ribs, she had the wings of a large bird trapped inside her chest. Suddenly, her body bursts into motion.

Geisha, choreographed by Lee Sher and Saar Harari (LeeSaar), has a vocabulary of movement that's a bit difficult to enter. It is sexual, at times forceful and hectic. There are slow passages where the dance undulates like otherworldly outre burlesque, and others where it seems to be barely contained by the dancers bodies.

What begins as a silent solo becomes a duet as Lin is joined by Saar Harari. There is a strange relationship expressed by the male and female dancer, which unfolds over the hour long performance. The two slowly begin to acknowledge one another building a deeply physical conversation that precludes actual touch.

The problem is, like visiting a foreign country where you don't know the language, it's difficult to understand what these two beautiful dancers are saying to each other. The difficulty is compounded as the dance is occasionally interrupted by Lee Sher as a character that I'll call the Kimono Diva.

The Kimono Diva occasionally appears on stage to perform karoake-esque torch songs in Hebrew. The feel of the songs, the slow yearning quality, seems to mimic the emotion of the dancers, but again, because I don't know Hebrew, there's no way of telling what's being communicated here. It's another layer of confounding vocabulary.

Still the Kimono Diva succeeds in breaking the tension, at one point launching into an over the top sing-along (with a pre-recorded audience) that rests somewhere between Night Ranger's Sister Christian and anything from Celine Dion's ultra cheesy repertoire. Singing her heart out, she wanders into the audience, reaching out to touch the hands of audience members.

However, the tension of Giesha is where the dance is most successful. As it reaches the climax, the dancers get closer and closer, and the anticipation of their touch (which is never fulfilled) is absolutely palpable.

Geisha is straight ahead modern dance. For many audience members it may be simply confusing, maybe even painful. But as I've let the images sit with me for a day, it's a performance that has certainly lingered.

Geisha plays again tonight at 8:30 in PSU's Lincoln Hall

Tim Crouch's England is a two-person performance art piece set inside the Elizabeth Leach gallery. At the door, we are instructed to "go in, look at the art... it's part of the show." So we mill around for a while, looking at Sean Healy's installation, until a man and a woman begin talking: Crouch and fellow performer Hannah Ringham. They brightly introduce us to the gallery, explaining the history of the space, and they begin to tell us about themselves: It becomes clear that they're the same character; they live in England, with their art dealer boyfriend, in an apartment filled with expensive artwork. Their brightness soon takes on a brittle edge as we learn that the character is very sick, and alone, save for the boyfriend, who travels often, telling people what art to buy ("he says that good art is art that sells") and making loads of money in the process.The audience stands as the performers move around the space--many of us, myself included, sat down after a while, which I suppose speaks to the physical limits of our attention span when it comes to standing in a gallery looking at art.

After a while the audience is guided into a side room to sit for the rest of the performance, which is more traditionally theatrical. A narrative emerges: The character (I don't believe gender is ever established) has received a heart transplant, and goes to thank the widow of the man whose heart now beats inside the character's own chest. They speak through a translator. The character's belief in the significance of his/her own survival comes to seem as arbitrary and subjective as the dollar value assigned to a piece of art. (Calling something subjective and arbitrary, of course, in no way diminishes its value to the individual in question.)

Performance art inside an art gallery, reflecting on the value of art, on the value of human life. It's an extremely well-structured show, from the initial discomfort of standing in an art gallery at eye level with two actors, waiting for them to perform for you--I've never before felt the strangeness of that expectation so keenly--to the eventual unfolding of the show's central metaphor. And if England's ending segment feels too pat, too plotty, compared to the more ambiguous musings of the first half, it's worth keeping in mind that, by moving the audience into a theater space to watch it, the performance itself acknowledges the artificiality of the device. And it's also worth noting that, as pretentious as that last sentence sounded, the show is funny, engaging, and raises questions about the ways we value art and life that will resonate with everyone.