FAMILY

Sounds of a Yamhill County summer

Pull up a lawn chair and listen to concerts ranging from gospel to heavy psych

July 9, 2019 // CULTURE, FAMILY, MUSIC, YAMHILL //

This week’s survey of Yamhill County’s cultural scene is All Things Musical — or as close to “all” as is possible to get without being omniscient. The opera-oriented Aquilon Music Festival is in the thick of it, but they’re not the only musicians in town. McMinnville and Newberg each host a series of free summer concerts, while out in Willamina, folks are getting ready for the Wildwood Music Fest, which has been hosting regional bands since 2010. Let’s start there, as that’s a ticketed event. 

WILDWOOD MUSIC FEST: On Yamhill County’s east side in the Sheridan and Willamina area, we find Katie Vinson of the Wildwood Hotel and Kim Hamblin of Roshambo ArtFarm once again organizing a grassroots musical affair and family camp-out that benefits local nonprofits. The nearly 20-year-old festival will be held July 19-21 on the farm, 22900 S.W. Pittman Road. Tickets and all the details you could possibly need are available here. The lineup includes the Eagle Rock Gospel Singers, Sam Chase and The Untraditional, Drunken Prayer, Willy Tea Taylor, and many, many more.

McMINNVILLE CONCERTS ON THE PLAZA: Organized by the McMinnville Downtown Association, these Thursday evening concerts are held on the U.S. Bank Plaza at the corner of Third and Davis streets. The street is closed, and some seating is available, but it goes fast, so best to bring a lawn chair. Concerts run 6 to 9 p.m.

The series kicks off July 11 with the Portland heavy-psych band Blackwater Holylight, founded by vocalist/bassist Allison Faris in 2016. At the website for Portland label RidingEasy Records, which represents Blackwater, Faris describes the band’s genesis: “I wanted to experiment with my own version of what felt ‘heavy’ both sonically and emotionally. I also wanted a band in which vulnerability of any form could be celebrated.”

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‘Romeo and Juliet’ kicks off summer theater in wine country

Penguin Productions brings Shakespeare's tragedy to the outdoor stage, plus more Bard outdoors in Beaverton, and World Beat Festival in Salem

June 25, 2019 // CULTURE, DANCE, FAMILY, MUSIC, THEATER, VISUAL ART, YAMHILL //

Penguin Productions was the new kid on Yamhill County’s theater scene just a couple of years ago, mounting productions of Macbeth and As You Like It right out of the gate. Last year, they forged ahead with Hamlet and Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. On Friday, the company opens its third season with more Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet.

Cambria Herrera will direct "Romeo and Juliet" at Penguin Productions.
Cambria Herrera will direct “Romeo and Juliet” at Penguin Productions. Photo by: Piper Tuor Photography

These are professionals, many of whom have been seasoned on Portland stages in recent years, and for season three we have a couple of George Fox University alums who are doing some heavy lifting for one of Shakespeare’s oft-performed tragedies.

Director Cambria Herrera earned a BA in acting and directing from the Newberg-based Christian college. Recent credits include: Peter/Wendy at Bag&Baggage, The Little Mermaids Project at Enso Theatre Ensemble, Proof at Valley Repertory Theatre, and Balkan Women and Twelfth Night at George Fox. Herrera is also a facilitator/co-founder of the AGE Women of Color in PDX Theatre Collective and serves on the leadership committee for PDX Latinx Pride.

Also from George Fox is Olivia Anderson, who spent a year at the university as an adjunct director for University Players, a traveling, student storytelling-ensemble that tours original shows around the region. She will play Juliet across from Brandon Vilanova’s Romeo. Vilanova hails from the Pacific Conservatory Theatre Professional Acting Training Program and has worked at San Diego Repertory Theatre, San Diego Old Globe Theatre, Santa Maria Pacific Conservatory Theatre, and Bag&Baggage. Stephanie Spencer, who played Ophelia in last year’s Hamlet and Mabel in An Ideal Husband, takes on the coveted role of Mercutio.

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Festival changes with tide and time

Siletz Bay Music Festival, with roots stretching back 32 years, begins Wednesday and offers chamber, jazz, cabaret, and symphonic concerts, but no hip hop -- yet

June 19, 2019 // COAST, FAMILY, MUSIC, NEWS & NOTES //

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 only chamber or classical music for some time, opening its program to performances of jazz, cabaret, big band, musical theater, and beyond.

Yaacov Bergman, artistic director of the Siletz Bay Music Festival since 2009, says of artistic fusion at the 32-year-old festival, “let’s bring it on.”
Yaacov Bergman, artistic director of the Siletz Bay Music Festival since 2009, says of artistic fusion at the festival, “let’s bring it on.”

“It started out so much more conservative from where we are today,” said Bergman, who has been the festival’s artistic director since 2009. “This festival attracts remarkable composers and performers. They come with a repertoire they always wanted to do, one that stretches the imagination. This is so advanced and so stimulating, I imagine that will be one of the things that helps us bring in a younger audience in the future, too. We already see younger members in our audience. My philosophy is artist fusion, let’s bring it on. Anything in good taste, anything not mediocre, I’m totally open to.”

Even, I ask, hip hop?

Bergman laughs. “Are you kidding? I grew up with hip hop.”

The festival begins Wednesday, June 19, and runs 16 days. Performances in four Lincoln City-area venues include eight chamber music concerts; four evenings of jazz, cabaret, musical theater and American songbook concerts; and three symphonic concerts, including a free Young People’s Concert, Peter and the Wolf. Seating is full for two other free concerts, but concert rehearsals also are free.

Sarah Kwak
Sarah Kwak

Performers include Sarah Kwak, violinist and concertmaster of the Oregon Symphony; Mei-Ting Sun, gold medal winner in the 2005 National Chopin Competition; and Ken Peplowski, the clarinetist often referred to as the “living Benny Goodman.”

The festival’s roots stretch back to an informal series of salons held in the 1980s in the home of music professor and part-time Coast resident Sergiu Luca. In 1987, the  Cascade Head Music Festival was born, with Luca as artistic director. The festival was renamed the Siletz Bay Music Festival in 2011.

But as the festival racked up the years, so did its most loyal fans, leaving its fate in the hands of a younger audience.

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

From children making masks to adults learning about the Japanese art of fish-printing, the Coast offers a multitude of artful happy happenings this summer

June 12, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, NEWS & NOTES //

School’s out, but here on the Coast, classes are just beginning, and they’re not just for kids.

Mary Ann Gantenbein will teach a class for adults on collage during the Cannon Beach Summer Art Camp.
Mary Ann Gantenbein will teach a class for adults on collage during the Cannon Beach Summer Art Camp.

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 4-12), 3D mask-making (8-12) and for the really wee ones — ages 3-5 — “Mini Makers.” The brochure describes the class as a “happy happening” for young and aspiring artists, who will draw, paint, create collages, and just plain play. 

Adult Art Camp offers three classes including “Watercolor by the Sea,” an introductory class in which artists will create a watercolor inspired by Cannon Beach and learn tips and tricks about painting with watercolors. It’s open to all levels, but designed for beginners.

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.
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.

THE SITKA CENTER FOR THE ARTS is also gearing up for summer workshops — many are already full, but wait lists are available. Those still open include “Color Confidence for Artists,” a class for anyone working in any medium. Instructor Cynthia Herron will demonstrate mixing and matching paint, discuss color schemes for a variety of media, and talk about color as it is found in nature around the Sitka campus near Otis. In “Photography and Place,” students will examine the “potential of photographic practice to address contemporary issues of land use and environmental concepts.” And in “Mining Your Life for Laughs,” teacher Robert Balmer will take a look at “how humor writers turn the painful, the absurd, the odd, the embarrassing, the memorable,” into something to laugh about. Who couldn’t use that?

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Fermenting on South Coast: Live Culture

The 10-day celebration this fall is seeking proposals to build a "culture stand" that will be visitor center, merchandise table and gathering spot all in one

June 5, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, NEWS & NOTES, VISUAL ART //

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 Culture Stand? Live Culture Coast? I had no idea, so I put in a call to Amber Peoples, the creative director behind the event. We began with the obvious.  

What exactly is Live Culture Coast?

Peoples: It’s a 10-day celebration of food, art, and place that will travel the entire South Coast from Reedsport to Brookings, over 135 miles, Oct. 18-27. This is the first. We’re calling it the pilot.

And a Culture Stand?

The Culture Stand itself will be on a 5-by-10 trailer. We’ll put it on the back of a truck and haul it. It’s a traveling visitor center; it’s a merchandise table, a gathering spot. Its location will designate where the celebration is, where the Live Culture Coast is focused that day. We’re also creating a map.

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
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

Let’s say the Culture Stand is parked in Coos Bay on Saturday, October 19. The event happening that day could be a brewery demonstration. It could be an art class, or a coffee roasting. We’re hoping people will sign up for one of these experiences, and that will encourage people to travel and explore the South Coast.

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Aquarium creates a fishy fantasy with “Seapunk”

The new exhibit uses elements of steampunk to showcase sea life. Across the bridge, the arts center welcomes Evan Peterson back to Newport

May 30, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY //

If there was any doubt the new exhibit at the Oregon Coast Aquarium was a success, one only had to listen last weekend as visitors discovered Seapunk: Powered by Imagination.

“This is awesome,” said one.

“This is so cool,” said another.

 And from a third: “I’ve got to come back tomorrow. I forgot to charge my phone.”

 And those were the adults.

A moray eel makes itself comfortable in the “Helmet Memorial” in the “Seapunk” exhibit.

“Seapunk” is a punning nod to steampunk, a genre of science fiction, art, technology, and fashion inspired by 19th-century steam-powered machinery. The exhibit’s story concerns Phineas K. Brinker, “a retro-futuristic and intrepid inventor” who is stranded in his submarine at the bottom of the sea and must find a way to survive. To do so, according to the aquarium website, Brinker “rebuilds the crippled submarine into a modern marvel of engineering by constructing imaginative variations on contraptions one may be familiar with today.”

The underwater fantasy plays out in a series of galleries with exhibits that are at times poignant, at others, humorous, each built around art, antiques, and sea life.

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Coast calendar: Studio tours, exhibits closing, steampunk ahead

Art events this week include a documentary film about art and madness, which may put you in the mood for the upcoming exhibition at the Oregon Coast Aquarium

May 15, 2019 // COAST, CULTURE, FAMILY, FILM, VISUAL ART //

It’s not happening on the Coast, but you could say it is of the Coast. That’s the opening of an exhibit of poetry and photography by Oregon State University faculty member Joseph Ohmann Krause in The Little Gallery on the OSU campus in Corvallis. Inspired by Danish painter Vilhelm Hammershøi (1854-1916), Drawing in the Northern Light combines eight poems with photos, most of them taken on the Oregon Coast.

Oregon State University professor Joseph Ohmann Krause combines his photographs of the Oregon Coast with his poetry in “Drawing in the Northern Light” in The Little Gallery on the OSU campus.
Oregon State University professor Joseph Ohmann Krause combines photographs of the Oregon Coast with poetry in “Drawing in the Northern Light,” a show on the OSU campus.

The idea came to Krause, a French professor, after he happened upon a catalog of Hammershøi’s, said Helen Wilhelm, curator of The Little Gallery.  

“In Hammershøi’s work, a lot of the paintings have to do with an empty room, or you can see beyond into a farther room,” Wilhelm said. “You get the feeling that, yes there are people who live in these rooms, but they just left. There is a sense of mystery, calm. Even a bit of isolation. 

“In Dr. Krause’s photos, there is never a person in them,” she continued. “There may be an empty beach scene, but you get the sense that someone was there earlier. The word ‘absence’ is the major word that comes to mind. The opposite of chaos.”

The opening is 11:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, June 4, in 210 Kidder Hall. Someone will be on hand to read the poems, and Wilhelm is hoping to find musicians to play compositions by Danish composer Dieterich Buxtehude, who has also inspired Krause.  “It’s going to be really elegant and lovely,” Wilhelm said.

The show is on view from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. weekdays (closed during lunch) May 28 through Sept. 30.

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