• photo by Lord Blakely, via

The idea behind Andrew Dickson's latest TBA offering—following his performances about how to be an eBay PowerSeller and how to sell out—is, on the surface, pretty gimmicky: Dickson acts as a life coach for someone. Participation is free for both the audience and the pre-selected coachees; in a setup that more or less mirrors that of any shrink's office—quiet, two chairs facing each other, low lighting—Dickson and the coachee sit for the better part of an hour, talking through any life challenge(s) the coachee has asked for help with. The biggest difference from a normal life coaching session, I guess, is the fact that there are like 40 people watching, and occasionally weighing in. Well, that and the fact that Dickson totally isn't a trained or licensed or even particularly experienced life coach.

The performance/session I attended yesterday afternoon started off somewhat worrisomely: Dickson asked everyone in attendance to take a few moments to reflect on why we had chosen to attend and what we wanted to get out of the experience, and then he had us turn to whoever was sitting closest to us and, making eye contact, discuss these reasons. This was about 98 percent awkward and terrible, for me at least, in no small part because I felt more than a little guilty and voyeuristic about my reasons for attending. (In short: "I am a terrible and curious and nosy person, and I figure this is the closest I'll ever get to eavesdropping on a stranger's therapy session.")

So that part was clunky and weird, and ultimately, didn't add a whole lot to the experience. What happened next, though, was pretty great: Dickson invited up the coachee, Wayne, a middle-aged or maybe slightly more-than-middle-aged man with a gray shirt, gray hair, glasses, and a soft voice. Wayne had applied to be Dickson's coachee because he had a problem. A math problem.

Continue reading »

• Ian Douglas

In his disarming new show Heavens What Have I Done, the New York-based Gutierrez invites the audience onstage to witness firsthand the anxiety, excitement, and inspiration that goes into creating a performance piece. Much of the show takes the form of a deceptively casual monologue, as Gutierrez—face painted, fake eyelashes in place—jokes and rambles his way through his preparations for a piece. Early in the monologue, Gutierrez mentions a stint he did as a teacher at a dance school, where he found a disconcerting sameness in the student work he was seeing: It was as though, he explains, the students felt they had to erase themselves before going onstage, to limit their entire presentation and focus to a single idea. Heavens What Have I Done is an explicit rejection of that approach: Gutierrez brings everything onstage. In a literal unpacking of baggage, as he prepares his set and dresses in a clownish costume, Gutierrez shares his insecurity about his intelligence, his desire to impress a judgmental ex-boyfriend, his philosophical interest in the notion of binary constructs like gender and the mind/body split, and how much, exactly, his shoes cost. (I won't attempt to analyze the symbolism of the pennies he rains upon the stage at one point.)

When Gutierrez finally begins to dance, it's a forceful, aggressive assertion of his right—as a gay man, as the son of immigrants, as an aging dancer having trouble fitting into his skinny jeans—to make art on his own terms. In a ruffled rainbow collar and a Marie Antoinette wig, looping French phrases and singing along with opera, his show appropriates bits of Western "high culture" in order to effectively subvert our often-unquestioned assumptions about ownership and participation.

That's what I got out of it, anyway. Gutierrez had a few harsh words in the piece about festival programs, which glibly attempt to pin a performance down to words—but it's kind of my job, and that's what I came away from the show thinking about.

A few more stray thoughts: (1) Don't wear a short skirt. (2) The piece has a conversational tone, but that doesn't mean you need to do any talking. Seriously, no one likes that guy.

Gutierrez performs two shows, tonight at tomorrow at 6 pm at Washington High. Reservations are required for passholders; individual tickets are $20. Details here.

I had two thoughts as I walked out of the premier TBA performance of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol's El Rumor del Incendio. The first: "well that was charming." The second: "I want to watch that all over again and not pay one shred of attention to the supertitles." This is not to say that supertitles are superfluous to the show. Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (you can brush up on them here and here) is a Mexico City based theatre collective and they present El Rumor... in their native tongue so supertitles are necessary for us monolingual dummies, as Alison so nicely put it, to keep up with the dialogue.

And oh is there dialogue. The show is essentially a history lesson in and of itself, mapping out in great detail the tumultuous history of young Mexicans revolutionaries in 1960s and 1970s Mexico. A movement, that to my knowledge has received very little attention in the history books (at least not at my high school) and one that Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol give a very stirring account of. Much of the show, perhaps a good 60% of it, is exposition. There are many events to follow, many names to try to keep track of, and it is easy to get turned around and hard to keep all the people and places straight. Found letters, historical accounts, and audio clips that the group have uncovered are shown and heard, and at times the information coming at the audience in this "documentary play" can be fairly overwhelming.

But lucky for us, Lagartijas Tiradas have found not only creative ways to communicate this information, but they've paired it with action brought charismatically alive by the ensemble Luisa Pardo, Gabino RodrÍguez (Largartijas' founders) and Harold Torres. I seriously could have watched this trio for hours, dialogue or no, they were captivating, personable, and heartwarming.

Which brings me to my point about the supertitles. While the story and the history that Lagartijas Tiradas unwraps in El Rumor del Incendio is mostly conveyed through words, it is the action on stage, in the present, that is the most engaging. The group uses real-time video, models, masks, toy soldiers, even a fish tank (seriously the set is fucking great), to help bolster and convey the history they are telling. And it is this action matched with the stern performances of Gabino, Pardo, and Torres that really make the show worth seeing. Words are great, but it was refreshing to see a play's themes displayed in such a physical and visceral way.

Of course there is a catch-22 here. I probably wouldn't be as excited about the play's physicality if I hadn't been in tune with the narrative the dialogue was mapping out. And that I had to obtain through those dreaded supertitles. But is there a way to tell? I suppose I could go twice. Ah screw it, I'm going twice.

So, full disclosure guys, I was pretty stoked to go see opening night of Big Art Group's The People: Portland tonight. After interviewing both of the New York City based collective's co-founders, Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, I was fairly convinced that I was going to dig what they had to offer...

Recorded interviews of Portlanders answering questions about concepts like democracy, justice, terrorism projected on the walls of Washington High School? Ok sounds neat.

A live footage and live theater mash-up woven into the plot and themes of the Oresteia? Awesome, I love those plays.

A piece of art blending local thoughts with larger universal human ideas? Well that just sounds like that whole "think global, live local" motto jammed packed into one night of performance. Sign me up.

• Pat Moran

So yes, I suppose you could say I had high hopes for the spectacle Big Art Group had set forth to bring to Portland's TBA audience. Were my hopes met with coinciding results? To put it bluntly, they were not. But before I get all negative, let me first list some things that I thought succeeded in Big Art Group's The People: Portland:

-I found the group's use of technology (aside from several glitches last night) to be quite thrilling. Albeit this wasn't a surprise. Big Art Group is well known for their technical innovation. Seeing the real live performance occurring inside Washington High's classrooms (where most of the piece's action took place) projected in real time outside on the school's walls was certainly an engaging feat, if not awe inspiring. As the piece continued however, this function became increasingly hard to follow.

Continue reading »

• PICA

About an hour before seeing The Quiet Volume, while flipping through the new David Foster Wallace biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story at Powell's, I landed on a passage describing how Wallace's ideas about language were influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's early work characterized language as a rigidly logical system, a notion he later rejected in favor of the position that language is communally defined, by usage. ("Meaning as use," as a character in The Broom of the System puts it.) During his career as a fiction writer, Wallace explored both of those positions, as he constantly grappled with the philosophical underpinnings of language.

I read that and I thought "poor David Foster Wallace" and "how awful to feel so stressed out about language" and "I don't really remember my college philosophy courses very well," and then I put the book away and headed to the Central Library for Tim Etchells and Ant Hampton's The Quiet Volume, a show that blew me away by creating just the sort of anxiety about language I'd been pitying Wallace for having.

Continue reading »

The 10th annual Time-Based Art festival kicks off tonight with a performance of Big Art Group's The People—Portland (a mashup of live theater, video, and footage from interviews with Portlanders, loosely based on the Oresteia)—followed by a free dance party at Washington High, and the opening of TBA's visual art exhibits.

I have it on good authority that—for real this time—this is the last year TBA will be based at the school. It's absolutely worth checking out while you still can—the old high school makes a great performance hub, and it's fun exploring classrooms and hallways full of visual and video art.

Tonight's dance party is FREE! and starts at 10:30 pm at Washington High (SE 13th & Stark); it's helmed by NYC DJ Venus X. "Not since DJ Spooky... has a D.J. been appreciated in so many cultural contexts," writes the New York Times of the scene-hopping DJ, who's as likely to perform in an abandoned warehouse as at the Museum of Modern Art. Kinda boring video:

Also at Washington High: Cocktails, a beer garden, and food—tonight provided by Boke Bowl.

One of my favorite articles in this week's TBA guide is "Online Relationship Management," by local writer/artist Dylan Meconis. Dylan interviewed writer/artist Claire L. Evans—whom you might know from her work in YACHT—about a presentation Evans is giving at TBA. The interview discusses Evans' ideas about how online relationships are measured and understood, and it's accompanied by some of Dylan's suggestions for online relationship tools. They are delightful:

Read the whole piece here.

(Oh yeah: This whole business is being streamed live here, if you're curious.)

2:23 pm—And here something pretty great happens: Mike Daisey loses his shit, breaking character and pushing himself back from his table, laughing hard for a long spell, his big chest shaking, he's giddy and enthusiastic and looking—for the first time in like I don't know a dozen-and-a-half hours—like he's having a genuinely great time. The thing that caused this reaction was a joke about raping Jonathan Ames' corpse.

Continue reading »

I'm not going to lie; I had a hard time with this performance. I hardly know what to make of it. Sure, at times I could see themes of nationalism, political oppression, and maybe rebellion, but it was all so conceptual, I could not connect with any of it.

As the audience trickled in to fill the Winningstad Theatre, dancer/choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, who comes to us from France, stood silently on a slowly spinning platform. Once the house lights went down, he started off the piece with a section of increasingly complex semaphore gestures accompanied by only a metronome on a starkly lit, minimal, industrial set... and it never got any more accessible than that. There was just no narrative through-line, and no appreciable attempt to involve or even acknowledge the audience. At some points it felt like Ouramdane was just freestyling in a basement with his buddy jamming on guitar, which is why I felt myself wondering why I was watching this.

Speaking of jamming on guitar, though, I was often more interested in watching composer Jean-Baptiste Julien's performance. His haunting piano melodies, mixed and engineered live and on-the-fly (as far as I could tell), were the best part for me, particularly when Ouramdane spent several minutes lying flat on the floor.

Granted, I may not be worldly or educated enough (how much is enough?) to properly appreciate or decipher this high-minded piece—and your counterpoints and illuminations are welcome in the comments—but I'm betting a lot of you would have also been staring at this puzzling production wondering, "what is this? What is the point?"

• PICA
• Press photo for A Crack in Everything

Prior to the show last night, I caught zoe | juniper’s A Crack in Everything Installed. If you’ve seen it (it’s free), you’d probably agree, it’s totally bizarre and unnerving. There’s a series of women, standing in a line with tubetops on; their hair is up and they’re covered in silver glitter; their mouths are oozing some kind of golden bathballs, and red pieces of string drape down the walls. It’s a lot of discordant elements, and I couldn’t help but feel like I had stumbled on some kind of portal, and that I was seeing something I just shouldn’t be seeing. (The Boston Globe called the performance, “A crazy dream you just can’t shake.” Seems apt.)

Then the show started. I knew A Crack in Everything would be intense, but I wasn’t expecting this intense. Obviously the dancers of zoe | juniper are insanely skilled. I talked with choreographer Zoe Scofield about a month ago, on the phone, and she informed me the work is inspired by memory and non-linear aspects of time, and how our minds reconstruct and revisits traumatic events: this is a challenging proposition when the art of dance is, well, “time-based,” and sequential.

Struggling to put the pieces together of last night’s performance, my mind keeps coming back to the work of Matthew Barney. Since Taylor Mac has taught us that “comparison is violence,” yaddayadda, I’ll try and break it down, after the jump.

Continue reading »

Hey demographic, you're about my age, right? Which means we're too young to remember Andy Warhol's experimental art scene of the 60s but old enough to have died of an overdose by now if we'd been a part of it.

And so it went for several of the silent Screen Tests subjects chosen by Dean & Britta (from some 500 filmed by Warhol) as the 13 Most Beautiful.

The idea of playing songs in front of projected film doesn't sound like anything novel or experimental, but there was actually something unusual about this show: it's an equal marriage of film and rock show. I kept trying to figure out whether the focus was really on the film or the music. Andy Warhol is a bigger name than Dean & Britta, but the musicians were the live performers here. After a while I had to tell myself to stop trying to classify it and accept that it was both.

The films in question, from Warhol's Screen Tests series, are each a few minutes of very subtle black and white footage of young, beautiful people doing nothing much. Staring at the camera, blinking, smoking, drinking, looking around, you get the idea—all starkly lit, and with Dean & Britta playing a live score of very chill, psychedelic folk-rock. But the finale was the most erotic teeth-brushing scene I've ever witnessed. Here is a clip that is all too short:

Aside from that, though, the part I was most fascinated by were the stories that Dean and Britta told in between songs/films, filling in the backstory of these mysterious people: their relationship with Andy Warhol and their strange and untimely demises, such as, "he got out of the bath and danced naked out of his fifth floor window."

I'm sitting at a coffeeshop, working on this very post, when I get a text from Mike Daisey:

"Surprising development: there will be a tremendous amount of bacon cooked live when least expected."

Daisey, a New York-based monologuist who's gained a considerable local fanbase over the past few years (including just about every writer at this publication), is following up on an interview we did a few days ago about his upcoming All the Hours in the Day. All Hours is easily TBA's most ambitious, talked-about project: It's a 24-hour monologue, beginning at 6 pm on Saturday and closing out the festival on Sunday night. A few nights ago, Daisey and I sat down in a quiet(ish) corner at Washington High to talk about what inspired the performance, how he's preparing, and why everybody planning to see the show needs to calm the fuck down.

Continue reading »

Following his company's weekend run of The Radio Show, the multi-talented Kyle Abraham performed last night a solo preview of Live! The Realest MC, a work in development that will eventually be an ensemble piece. Here's a clip:

I predicted this piece would be really relevant to our community, with its focus on the tensions and dynamics of gender, racial, and sexual identity, and it was (boy, am I good). But one raw, emotional section in particular, wherein Abraham cowers, stammering into the mic about having been attacked simply for holding hands with someone, hit home the most. Sound familiar? I just wish that the kind of people who commit hate crimes like that were the kind of people who would come see a show like this.

As a dancer, Kyle Abraham seems convinced he has wings, and here we get to see lots of his birdlike stretching, preening, pecking, and attempts at flight. At times funny, always athletic and impressively articulate, the man is a master of his body as a storytelling medium.

I had two minor quibbles with the show as it was last night, which will hopefully be worked out in the next few months before the ensemble production debuts at The Kitchen. The first has to do with the microphone, the only object onstage with Abraham. I just wish it was used more, or out of the way when it wasn't being used. Some of the most electric moments of the piece came when Abraham used his voice as well as his body, so I wanted more of that. My hope is that there's a lot more MC action in the final product to back up the "Realest MC" claim.

The other thing was similar to what Jenna noted about The Radio Show: pacing issues. There were a couple repetitive lulls that leaked momentum, sharply contrasting with the more explosive sections that came in sudden bursts. The narrative line got muddy in spots.

Overall though, I found this preview performance very poignant, intimate, and promising.