January DanceWatch: Moving into a new year
From dancerly Broadway musicals to Éowyn Emerald’s return to a Bantu circus, a mystical being from Buenos Aires, Linda Austin’s birthday bash and more, 2024 kicks off in grand style.
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From dancerly Broadway musicals to Éowyn Emerald’s return to a Bantu circus, a mystical being from Buenos Aires, Linda Austin’s birthday bash and more, 2024 kicks off in grand style.
Our LitWatch columnist looks back on a year of good reading, writing, and talking about books.
Graham Cole’s newest production, featuring dramatic lighting design and a joyful solo performance by Elenaluisa Alvarez, struck an incongruent note with the introspective, feminist poetry which was its inspiration.
From a magnificent dancerly takeover of Zidell Yards to a push/FOLD contemporary festival to her own solo Odissi show, our DanceWatch columnist steps deftly through a busy year.
From coast to desert to hills and valleys and places in between, culture thrived in towns large and small around the state. Wherever people were, so was art.
For this dance teacher and Contact Improvisation devotee, gender and movement are fluid: “We are in constant motion—that’s life. We’re constantly evolving. We are the transition.”
In her newest podcast, Dmae Lo Roberts talks with ArtsWatch’s Bob Hicks about the cultural highs and lows of 2023, and the lingering effects of the pandemic on the arts.
From the Rothko Pavilion to Converge 45 to the Hallie Ford’s 25th anniversary and much more, a look at some of the highlights of Oregon’s year in the worlds of museums and visual art.
The 12-minute show, free and visible from the Bayfront, brings to life images of Native Americans, loggers, fishing fleets, and farmers.
Sure, it’s an entertaining action flick. But its connections to Christmas are surface stuff. Go ahead: Watch it, and have fun. But when it comes to the spirit of the holiday, it doesn’t fit the bill.
Photographer K.B. Dixon takes a tour of Portland’s neighborhoods and discovers an impromptu people’s garden of inflatable statues celebrating the holiday season.
Suggestions range from Brian Doyle’s “Mink River” and a collection of speeches by former Gov. Barbara Roberts to picture books and poetry.
Breathe in, breathe out: Yes, there’ll probably be disasters. But Portland therapist, astrologist, and Pushcart-nominated poet Dr. Mindy Netifee also says the “whole end of the year could be very sweet.”
Get in the holiday spirit with a festive crossword puzzle for the whole family.
Through personal interviews, intergenerational research, and visual art, the Rogue Valley native is leading the Latinx community of Southern Oregon on a journey to challenge cultural stereotypes and change society.
The Portland dance company continues their 20th anniversary season with a winter showcase of new works by five Portland-based women choreographers, including Carla Mann and Andrea Parson.
Creating the special condensed version of the holiday classic, which will premiere on December 19, is part of Artistic Director Dani Rowe’s vision for making classical dance more welcoming to a broader audience.
The Portland actor and friends are staging a one-night performance of a modern adaptation of Homer’s classic Greek tale before taking it back on the road – including to prisons.
Seattle’s theater companies are hoping a sleigh full of holiday shows will bring in audiences and help overcome a slow bounceback from the pandemic and a soaring cost of living.
Community organizer Nik Portela embraced The Dalles as their home, tipping the rural town’s local culture toward more LGBTQIA2S+ acceptance.
Margles, the longtime executive director of the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, retires after 24 years of inspired leadership.
The weekly McMinnville gathering, like others around the state, draws participants who say they are both energized and calmed by the practice. “The primitive nature of the drum in the story of humanity,” says one drummer.
Through annual residencies in local schools, Salem native Caitlin Lynch and fellow artists give music students firsthand experience of how professional musicians collaborate to create a performance.
Settle into winter with a holiday book fair, a new cookbook from a Northwest Jewish kitchen, an author appearance by Henry Winkler, and a solstice story time.
Dmae Lo Roberts talks in her new podcast with Jerry Foster, leader of the Black theater company PassinArt, about staging Langston Hughes’ gospel musical version of the Nativity story.
More nuts than you can crack a whip at, classical Indian dance, contemporary premieres, the return of “ZooZoo,” five women choreographers at NW Dance Project – and even a “NOT-Cracker.”
Bobby Bermea: The talented actor Lester Purry, who’s created a bond with Portland Playhouse, is back in town and creating his own kind of skinflint in the Playhouse’s “A Christmas Carol.”
For 16 years, the center has provided cultural programs – everything from ceramics to concerts to yoga – out of the historic Delake School, but it hasn’t been easy.
As the giving season moves into high gear, the state’s innovative tax credit system allows you to double the impact of your donations to nonprofit cultural groups.
At the Portland Art Museum, a shining show of fashion from Africa, an energetic celebration of Black artists that feels like the start of a much bigger picture – and a third show, “Throughlines,” that mixes and matches from the museum collections.
K.B. Dixon’s cultural-portrait series continues with a “special edition” featuring trailblazing women artists Lucinda Parker, Judy Cooke, Phyllis Yes, Sherrie Wolf, and Laura Ross-Paul.
Art on the Road: In Los Angeles, links to past and present, peace and war in the art of William Blake and Arthur Tress
Creating a bigger table for a more sustaining and convivial feast.
Thirty years after his death, a resilient Shoalwater Bay tribal artist has an exhibit in Astoria side by side with young tribal artists inspired by his example.
Amy Leona Havin sits down afterwards with the company’s founder and artistic director to discuss SKC’s merger with Conduit and what’s next for the contemporary dance company.
Put your best foot forward and try to solve this dance-themed crossword puzzle.
The artist’s glass installation and collages on view at Adams and Ollman explore the ties that bind, both humans to one another and to the environment. Feddersen’s heightened visibility in the art world fits with a larger trend of renaissance for Indigenous art.
Financial difficulties for the 1905, which has just gone out of business, raise larger questions about the history and future of jazz in Portland.
Hannah Krafcik speaks with three gender-nonconforming folks about how it is possible to feel thousands upon thousands of years old and very young all at once.
In a Southern California museum dedicated to the work of Latin American artists, a trio of exhibitions offer food for thought and a feast for the eyes.
The library has weathered budget and staff cuts, an unwieldy inventory, and the pandemic to deliver everything from books to workshops, games, and homeless outreach to the Yamhill County community of 2,200.
The two award-winning authors talked about memory, racism, and finding common ground among marginalized groups.
Many venues were near or at capacity as book-lovers flooded the South Park Blocks to listen to more than 100 speakers. And to buy books.
The Hiroshima-based artist-in-residence at the Portland Japanese Garden’s Japan Institute discusses his parallel explorations of time, place, and what lies beneath.
The embattled regional arts funding agency cuts its ties with leader Carol Tatch amid a continuing dispute with the City of Portland, The Oregonian reports.
The three poets reflect on their relationship to poetry, offer reading lists, and advise fellow poets to persist, revise, and follow their curiosities.
The novelist and National Book Award winner says, “There’s a certain brokenhearted feel to our country…. We’re going through a convulsive national division where civility itself has collapsed.”
The Turkish-born professor populates his politically charged work with images of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, Allen Ginsberg and Gollum.
The popular library system is using its bond-funded resources to expand its free arts and cultural opportunities at neighborhood libraries, with the programs offered determined by the diverse communities themselves.
The nonprofit supports the Yachats Celtic Music Festival, happening Nov. 10-12, an art quilt show, a banner project, and the Yachats Arts Guild, among others.
Give to our GROW FUND.