Performance

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Review by Temple Lentz Lemon Andersen is a hell of a performer, and the press pictures and descriptions for this show just don’t do him justice. He’s a hard-edged, roughneck kid from Brooklyn, more at ease on the streets than in a theater seat, and gifted with a silver tongue and a way with words […]

If you saw Reggie Watts perform Disinformation at TBA last year, you’ll probably be disappointed by his new show. Transition isn’t bad–in fact, parts of it are amazing–but it’s more produced, more conceptual, and less immediately gratifying than last year’s jawdropper. Disinformation was an absolutely riveting introduction to Reggie’s bag of tricks: the beatboxing, the […]

The stage lights remained dark during the first song of last night’s devastating performance from Antony and the Johnsons, in collaboration with the Oregon Symphony. Though I was completely entranced by the lilting vocals and the rich thrum of strings, I had an awful feeling that this would be it: some sort of “conceptual” show […]