PCS Liberace & Liza
June 2019
Cascadia Composers Fearless

Exquisite Gorge 4: The Bee Maven

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER “The bees build in the crevicesOf loosening masonry, and thereThe mother birds bring grubs and flies.My wall is loosening; honey-bees,Come build in the empty house of the stare.” W.B. Yeats wrote these words in the sixth section of

Singers Zachary Lenox, Hannah Penn, and Vanessa Isiguen, and basset horn players Todd Kuhn, James Shields, and Richard Hawkins perform Mozart at CMNW. Photo by Tom Emerson.

MusicWatch Weekly: clarinets cut loose!

“Good afternoon! I’m David Shifrin, and I play the clarinet!” A big roomful of laughing clarinetists goes “woooo!” and welcomes the Chamber Music Northwest Artistic Director to Portland State University’s Lincoln Performance Hall for the first of the festival’s five New@Noon concerts.

DramaWatch: A vintage Storm

Around 2002 or 2003, not long after Storm Large had moved to Portland and started to establish herself as a local cultural phenom, several friends told me I had to go to the Old Town nightclub Dante’s to hear this amazing rock

Bass-baritone Eric Owens. Photo by Dario Acosta.

Oregon Bach Festival: riding out the storm

The 49th Oregon Bach Festival has lately been looking a bit like a Blah-ch Festival. If the venerable University of Oregon music institution is ever to regain the cultural primacy it once enjoyed in its glory days, I’m afraid we’ll need to

Makrokosmos Project: expansive vision

When Portland native Stephanie Ho first heard Makrokosmos, the massive, four-volume cycle of amplified piano and percussion music written in the 1970s by one of America’s greatest living composers, George Crumb, she thought, “I haven’t lived on this Earth until I heard

Exquisite Gorge 3: The Listener

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER How does an artist decide which questions to raise and which, if any, answers to provide? How does an educator reach an audience and communicate innovative ideas hoping to stir up responses that foster curiosity and

Column Zero: Summer comes alive

We here at Oregon Arts Watch tend to pay a lot of attention to Oregon composers. In a sense, our job is made easier by the problem outlined yesterday by Senior Editor Brett Campbell: we like local composers, living or recent, diverse

Micah Fletcher and Pyxis Quartet at The Old Church in 2018. Photo by Seth Nehill.

The Sound of Changing Times

A concert is never about only the music. Otherwise we’d just listen to a recording on headphones. At Pyxis Quartet’s Feb 15 concert at Portland’s Old Church, which on that rainy evening felt like the most consequential performance I’ve attended in Portland,

OUTwright: a Booty Candy tale

For a long time now, Fuse Theatre Ensemble has been one of the most openly political theater companies in town. Queer-forward, inclusivity has been a hallmark and a principle of its work for years. But this season is different. This season, the

Yaacov Bergman

Festival changes with tide and time

Can a festival founded three decades ago and dedicated to chamber music remain relevant today with a younger crowd?   As a matter of fact, says Siletz Bay Music Festival conductor Yaacov Bergman,  it can and does. The festival hasn’t been about

Exquisite Gorge 2: The Witness

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER HOW DO YOU TELL A STORY that is not necessarily your own? How do you draw a landscape that did not always belong to you? How do you document reality without appropriating someone else’s history? These

"Dreamer," by George Rodriguez, greets visitors at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art as they enter the chamber featuring the sculpture series "Sanctuary" (2017, stoneware with glass, courtesy of the artist and the Foster/White Gallery in Seattle). Photo by: David Bates

Stretching from cultural borders to the state’s borders

We have another gallery show in Newberg this week, but before that, please indulge a brief diversion as we drop in on Salem. My ArtsWatch colleagues may write more about this later, but for now you should know that the Hallie Ford

Sing Portland!

Music Notes: transitions & triumphs

Oregon’s leading classical music public radio station All Classical Portland has launched a brand-new second radio network, for children. The International Children’s Arts Network (ICAN) is a 24-hour radio service and, the station announcement says, is the first of its kind in

The unkindness of strangers

The funk and sweat and desperate seediness of New Orleans are so thick in the air above James Canfield’s new dance Sketches of Connotation that you can almost smell them rising from the stage of Lincoln Performance Hall. It’s an intoxicating aroma.

Finding a voice for black media

Something’s happening. And you’d better know what it is. On Friday, June 14, Open Signal Labs is giving six black filmmakers a chance to showcase their work and let the Portland media world know they’re here, they’re thriving, and they’re ready to

Exquisite Gorge 1: Getting started

STORY AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRIDERIKE HEUER I have on previous occasions written on this or that aspect of Maryhill Museum of Art in Washington, which I like to visit as often as I can. An eclectic collection of paintings, fashion, artifacts of some Eastern

Among classes at Sitka Center for the Arts is an August workshop on the “Art of the Letter. " Besides creating illustrated envelopes, the class will explore how letter-writing can survive in the digital age.

School’s out, but art classes are in on the Coast

School’s out, but here on the Coast, classes are just beginning, and they’re not just for kids. The Cannon Beach Arts Association has opened registration for its 17th Annual Art Camp, July 8-12. Five-day classes for the younger set include yoga (ages

“River” by Rachel Wolf (chromogenic chemigram - archival digital print)

The alchemy of photography, sans camera

Our lives are saturated with photographic images — pictures taken by tens of millions of people daily on phone cameras, photos that are then Facebooked, Instagrammed, and Tweeted into the world, where our eyeballs are bombarded with this digital hail. Those who

All-American at the ballet

“Dance like you’re real people,” Trey McIntyre told the original cast members of his Robust American Love when he made it on Oregon Ballet Theatre for the 2013-14 season.  McIntyre’s take on the real people, particularly the women, who settled the American

‘Aladdin’: Middle Eastern enough?

By MELORY MIRASHRAFI One month before Disney’s new live-action Aladdin opened in movie theaters nationwide, the Broadway tour of the hit musical came to Portland. While millions of viewers across America are flocking to see both adaptations of the 1992 classic, only

“The Breath of Life”: Boomer regrets

If I were going to guess (and I suppose I am), I’d suggest that the moment Boomers in the audience will react to most immediately, probably with a snort, comes near the start of the first scene after intermission in David Hare’s

‘Sirens of Coos Bay’ & ‘Peter/Wendy’: sporadic magic

At its best, theater makes magic happen onstage. Fairy tales do the same on the page. So I had high hopes for a pair of short-run May Portland theater productions that updated magical children’s tales. Unfortunately, while each provided sporadic moments of

Fermentation Fest in Sauk Country, Wis., bills itself as a “celebration of live culture in all its forms, from dance to yogurt, poetry to sauerkraut,” as well as home-grown sausage. The October event is the inspiration for “Live Culture Coast” to be held along 135 miles of the South Oregon Coast this fall. Photo by: Amber Peoples

Fermenting on South Coast: Live Culture

A press release recently landed on my desk seeking proposals to build a “Culture Stand” for the upcoming “Live Culture Coast” to be held on the southern Oregon coast in October. I confess I was duly – and dually – baffled. A

June Transitions: VizArts Monthly

This June, the arrival of summer isn’t the only big transition on the horizon. Bullseye Projects exhibition space closes after twenty years on NW 13th Ave, Adams and Ollman will relocate to a nearby space on NW 8th Ave, and Nationale announces

Once more, into the thicket

What if the prince who Cinderella married turned out to be a philanderer? What if Jack’s war on giants didn’t end after he came down the beanstalk? What if Rapunzel suffered from PTSD and couldn’t enjoy her happily ever after? Those are

Oregon Symphony review: sins and goose bumps

by BRUCE BROWNE and DARYL BROWNE Opening night at the final classical concert of the Oregon Symphony season showcased two masterful works bursting with the drama and imagination that make composers Gustav Mahler and Kurt Weill especially popular today. Mahler’s Symphony No.

PAMTAs: It’s Guys, Dolls, Rock, Scissors

Broadway Rose’s rollicking revival of Guys and Dolls and Oregon Children’s Theatre’s new musical The Legend of Rock Paper Scissors scored big wins Monday night at the Portland Area Musical Theatre Awards. Guys and Dolls took the best-production award for the 2018-19

Drama Watch: A clown’s tale

One of the things about Joan Mankin was, she was always a surprise: always in the moment, rarely the same thing twice, an improvisational spirit whose free-form antics could throw her fellow performers for a loop, delight her audiences, and send her

Road trip! Seattle festivals packed with dance this June

By SANDRA KURTZ Seattle loves a festival.  Whatever the topic—food, film, music, boats—we’ve got some kind of event that offers city dwellers a chance to dive into their obsessions, and dance is one of those. In June, when a lot of dance

"Suburban Girls" by Bonnie Hull (acrylic on paper). Photo by: David Bates

Bonnie Hull’s ‘Little Me’: Memories of a life

Not to be hyperbolic about it, but my first impression stepping into the Roger and Mildred Minthorne Gallery at George Fox University in Newberg was one of visual perfection. Occasionally, one walks into a show where a cavernous space swallows up everything

Boom! Big changes as season ends

The end of a season is always a moment of transition for a company. But for Boom Arts this year the transition will be much bigger than normal. Company founder Ruth Wikler has announced she is stepping down and taking a position

MusicWatch Monthly: Radioactive glowing disk returns to Oregon!

Caution: Radioactive glowing disk has returned to Oregon’s skies! Remember your sunscreen! Remember your sunscreen! Message repeats. Five weeks and one day There’s an old zen saying: you should meditate 20 minutes every day unless you’re too busy, in which case you

Laura Streib for D2 **FIXED #1**
Imago ZOOZOO
PPH Christmas Carol
PCS Liberace & Liza
Cascadia Composers Fearless
Portland Opera Juliet Letters
Orchestra Nova Restless
MYS Nov 10 Concert
Kalakendra 11/9
ART The Event!
OCCA Monthly
PAM 12 Month
High Desert Museum Rick Bartow
PSU College of the Arts
Candidate Perspectives on Arts & Culture
OAW Annual Report 2024
OAW House ad with KBOO
Oregon Cultural Trust
We do this work for you.

Give to our GROW FUND.