Jeff Forbes Last night, PICA’s artistic director Angela Mattox introduced Three Trick Pony referring to Linda Austin as a cornerstone in Portland dance. What does a cornerstone of Portland dance look like? Last night’s performance looked partly like an absurdist play—there’s no plot, just atmosphere—and partly like a quirky creative person (*cough*myself*cough*) alone in his/her […]
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Like a Villain’s Make Well: Better Than When We Started
Photo: Dina Markosian Before the Nick Hallett show last night at The Works, I ran into Alison, who told me she’d just been to see The Blow at the Winningstad Theatre. She gushed (yeah, I’m gonna go with “gushed”) about how charming Khaela Maricich was, and how solid the show was because of it. I […]
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Nick Hallett’s Rainbow Passage: Phoneme Music
A separate performance of “Rainbow Passage” at the Avant Music Festival. Photo: Stern Weber Studio courtesy Avant Media Nick Hallett’s Rainbow Passage is based on a diagnostic text by speech scientist Grant Fairbanks. It’s a description of rainbows—the science, history, and myth of them—but its content is secondary to its purpose: it also contains every […]
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Saturday Night at TBA: Meow Meow and the Drag Ball
Karl Giant I don’t think I’ve ever had as much fun at TBA as I did on Saturday night. Evidence: cabaret with bluehairs, drag queens galore, and cheese-curd hotdogs. Can’t beat that evening with a glitter stick. I think the Schnitzer crowd got some blood flowing to their wrinkly bits at the Meow Meow show. […]
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TBA Review: Deconstructing Pop with the Blow
Marina Ancona At last night’s performance of We Put It Together So We Could Take It Apart, the collaboration between musician Khaela Maricich and visual artist Melissa Dyne (AKA the Blow), I was reminded of Reggie Watts’ TBA performance at the Someday in 2008, where he collaborated with dancer Amy O’Neal and used a loop […]
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The Blow: Cabaret Breakdown
Marina Ancona At last night’s performance of We Put It Together So We Could Take It Apart, the collaboration between musician Khaela Maricich and visual artist Melissa Dyne (AKA the Blow), I was reminded of Reggie Watts’ TBA performance at the Someday in 2008, where he collaborated with dancer Amy O’Neal and used a loop […]
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Peter Burr’s Special Effect: Should Have Done My Homework
image courtesy Cartune Xprez Friday night at The Works, Peter Burr’s hodgepodge “live television program” Special Effect hit the stage. Burr, moving eerily slowly in front of a large video screen, blended animation, music, and live performance in what was ostensibly an adaptation of (tribute to? comment on? explanation for? tangent from?) The Andrei Tarkovsky […]
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TBA Weekend Update: Drag Ball, Giant Pickles, and More
We’re on day four of PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival, and I gotta say: It’s been a good one so far. LOOK AT THE SIZE OF THAT PICKLE Northwest Portland’s Con-Way warehouse is a fantastic venue. The giant warehouse has been built out into a main performance stage and a smaller blackbox theater; there’s also an […]
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The Year I Was Born: Messy, Personal, and Totally Worthwhile
David Alarcón The performers in Lola Arias’ The Year I Was Born are young Chileans in their 20s and 30s. Most grew up in Chile under Pinochet’s dictatorship; some grew up in exile, thanks to the politics of their parents. Over the course of about two hours, the show delivers biographical information about each of […]
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Review: This Is How We Disappear
Lindsey Rickert Sometimes a performance tries to do too much. Too many ideas, too many techniques, too many emotions are corralled together. It gets messy. I think this is what happened in bobbevy’s This is how we disappear, which has some gorgeous segments but overall feels incoherent. From PICA’s TBA brochure: “This is how we […]
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Eyes Wide Open: A Q&A with Lola Arias
David Alarcón Here’s an extended version of the interview the Mercury conducted with Lola Arias, whose excellent show The Year I Was Born has one more showing tomorrow night. – eds MERCURY: The show you are bringing to Portland, El año en que nací (The Year I Was Born), tells the recent history of Chile […]
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Still Standing You: This Show is Delightful and I Want You to See It
Phile Deprez Guilherme Garrido and Pieter Ampe: Really, really intimate While you file in to the Winningstad, Guilherme Garrido is watching you. He is perched aloft on the feet of his majestically-bearded partner Pieter Ampe who is laying on his back with his legs up. Before the lights go down over the audience, Gui chats […]