ON TUESDAY, THE BIGGEST CULTURAL NEWS OF THE WEEK – maybe the biggest since the January 6 insurrection in the nation’s capital – came down. Derek Chauvin, who almost a year ago, as a Minneapolis police officer, pressed the life out of George Floyd with his knee, was found guilty of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter. It was a rare case of a police officer being held accountable in the killing of a citizen – even, as with Floyd, of an unarmed citizen – and it seems, at least for now, to have topped off a year and more of intense cultural division. Any other decision by the jury most likely would have set off a firestorm across the nation.
The political and cultural fissures of the past year have pulled the arts & cultural world into the fray, perhaps inevitably: If art reflects its culture, how can it possibly stay uninvolved? In Portland, public statues have come tumbling down and institutions have been under attack: Two men were arrested and charged with smashing another $10,000 or more worth of windows at the frequently targeted Oregon Historical Society during rioting last Friday. The window-smashing and other acts of destruction came during protests against recent national killings of Black citizens by police, and a police killing in Portland’s Lents Park of a man with a history of mental illness.
In the past year a rapid growth of public protest art has transformed the sides of many buildings in the city and the plywood covering boarded-up storefronts. Across the nation, in arts and cultural organizations large and small, racial equity has become the issue of the day, an overdue conversation in search of action, and an issue that is unlikely to be resolved by a single decision in a single courtroom on a single day.
In a way, the jury’s decision Tuesday was the result of a form of art – of the documentary, eyewitness video made by an unflinching onlooker, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier, depicting a reality for the world to see. In the end, it seems, the evidence of the hand-held telephone camera was too much to overcome even for a system stacked in favor of police nonculpability.
The mixture of “art” and “real life” has always been muddy, and in light of the nation’s deep divide it’s unlikely to become clear anytime soon. Times of crisis breed art of crisis, from Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War to Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, Käthe Kollwitz’s haunted German Expressionist prints, Horace Pippin’s World War I paintings, James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Lorna Simpson’s photographs and works in multiple media probing the roots of race and gender and identity, Portland artist Arvie Smith’s satiric paintings about America and race, and much more. For better and for worse, art is in the mud with everything else, slugging it out, reshaping the argument, and maybe – just maybe – helping to alter the way people see things. Keep tuned in. This show is far from over.
Curator Dawson Carr tops off a grand career
DAWSON CARR’S PORTLAND ADVENTURE. After eight years of creating shows about European art (and the occasional volcano) and building the collection as the Portland Art Museum’s first full-time staff curator of European art, Carr is retiring on April 30. He came to Portland from prestigious postings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and London’s National Gallery, then rolled up his newly Northwest sleeves and started to work, topping off his major exhibitions with last year’s Volcano! Mount St. Helens in Art, a personal enthusiasm. Recently Carr, who quickly became known in Portland for his erudition, deep knowledge, connections, and a certain whimsy, sat down for a long Zoom conversation with Laurel Reed Pavic and reminisced. “Carr’s Portland ‘adventure’ seems to have been a smashing success,” Reed Pavic writes, and then quotes him on the subject: “I’m glad I did it. I’m very happy. The idea all along was to find a great place to retire. I found it and I think I’ve made a difference in the representation of European art in the collection.”
Sponsor
Dance: Diving for pearls, jazzing it up, being a ballerina
WHAT KIND OF DANCE DO YOU MAKE IF YOU’RE NOT A CHOREOGRAPHER? That’s the vital question in the dance company BodyVox’s series Pearl Dive Project, a fascinating and often rewarding continuing experiment in de-siloing creativity. In it, the company and its dancers pair with other kinds of artists – painters, writers, musicians, cartoonists – to see what might happen if the non-dancing artists are given a chance to work with a few excellent dance professionals and develop a piece of their own. How might their own brand of creativity mesh with a group of artists who specialize in the skills of dance, and who would be tasked with taking their ideas and transforming them into movement?
BodyVox is immersed in its newest Pearl Dive Project – this time around, with yet another curveball thrown into the mix: The chosen creators can’t be in the studio with the dancers, swapping ideas and feeding off the energy in the room. It’s all done by Zoom. A couple of days ago I watched the first of five pieces in Pearl Dive Project 2021, a creation by the distinguished dance photographer Lois Greenfield: If it’s in New York and it moves, she’s probably photographed it. She’s done a gorgeous session, for instance, with BodyVox’s co-director Ashley Roland. The other four neo-dancemakers are equally intriguing: Italian pianist and composer Ludovico Einaudi; Chinese-born writer Yiyun Li; drag queen Poison Waters; and Portland homie Matt Groening, father of The Simpsons and the legendary comic Life in Hell.
Greenfield’s piece, called Photo Synthesis, is intensely cinematic, and includes brief interviews with the makers. “Her idea was to push us in the direction of musical reflection,” Roland notes, and Greenfield comments on the challenges of the project: “It’s easier to make a photograph out of a dance than a dance out of a photograph.”
Photo Synthesis, which plays out to music by Philip Glass and DJ Shadow, begins with a woman dancer lying down inside a flexible fold of shiny material that looks something like a length of film without the sprockets. Slowly she stands, and begins to move, with the material as a “partner.” A real partner, in his own flexible fold, joins her, and then a third, fourth, fifth, sometimes slow and fluid and sinuous, sometimes wrapped in clumpy golden foil that makes them seem like geological beings. Images ripple like water; the camera is an integral partner in the dance. There is something here about pure form – and then, finally, a lone male dancer arrives, in his own unadorned shape amid the geodes, and they all emerge, like chrysalides from their shells, which slump back to the floor. All that’s missing is the communal energy of being in the same room at the same time with the performers – that indefinable heightened awareness that’s been absent from performance for more than a year now.
The Pearl Dive Project is building on its own intriguing history, which goes back half a dozen years. “What do they know about choreography?” I wondered about the non-dancing dancemakers in the series’ 2019 version. “Maybe not much. But the meeting of the minds reveals the difference between creativity, which is a way of thinking, and technique, which is a learned skill. And because the ‘tools’ the novice dancemakers are using – the minds and bodies of the dancers – are themselves creative, a painter, for instance, can describe a certain mood or action and the dancers possess the skills to interpret how that mood or action might move. Ideas are roughed out, recalibrated, shaped. In a sense, the most valuable tool in the creative toolbox is the ability and willingness to collaborate.”
Sponsor
- DYAD: DANCE & MUSIC DUOS. Cross-disciplinary collaborations are in the air this week. At 7 p.m. Sunday online, the Portland Jazz Composers Ensemble and contemporary performance hotbed Performance Works NW team up for another round of jazz and dance – this time featuring dancer Crystal Jiko Sasaki with multi-instrumentalist Darian Patrick Anthony, and dancer/experimentalist Marissa Rae Niederhauser with bassist/composer Andrew Jones.
- A LIFE IN THE DANCE THEATER. “I never wanted to dance ‘to’ the music, and not even ‘with’ it, but as if we were the same thing,” Gavin Larsen writes in her new memoir, Being a Ballerina. Larsen, the former Oregon Ballet Theatre star, tells a tale of a lifelong obsession that began when she was 8 and entering a ballet school in New York City for the first time. In my review I write that Being a Ballerina “is a pleasure to read not just for the backstage stories it tells but also for the line-by-line, sentence-by-sentence reward of her way with words. Like a good dance, it’s swift, taut, and abundant.”
Streamers: An Oscar nod for victims of a horrific war
PORTLAND DIRECTOR’S ‘HUNGER WARD’ EARNS OSCAR CRED; FILMS IN THEATERS? In his new “Streamers” movie column, Marc Mohan talks with Portland’s Skye Fitzgerald about Fitzgerald’s film Hunger Ward, which is nominated for an Oscar as best documentary short. Hunger Ward, Fitzgerald’s second Oscar nominee (he was also nominated in 2019 for Lifeboat), takes a deep look at the devastating war in Yemen and two women’s struggle to aid children and infants caught in the nation’s war-caused famine. The film, Mohan declares, “bears witness to hell.” The column also takes note of a handful of new movies either streaming or actually opening in movie houses.
Portland’s creative laureate on the way things are
SUBASHINI GANESAN: CREATIVE LAUREATE CHECKS IN. In her newest Stage & Studio podcast, Dmae Roberts has a conversation with Portland’s official arts advocate – Subashini Ganesan, Bharatanatyam dancer and operator of the valuable New Expressive Works performance space – on subjects ranging from Covid-19 relief for artists to the outlook for equity, diversity and inclusion initiatives, the post-Covid outlook for the city’s creative community, and what lies ahead for her successor as Portland Creative Laureate. As we noted in this space last week, Ganesan’s term ends in June, and applications to succeed her for a two-year term are being accepted through April 30.
Changing the world with music: BRAVO
BRAVO YOUTH ORCHESTRAS: SOCIAL CHANGE THROUGH MUSIC. In our continuing series “The Art of Learning,” Brett Campbell profiles the BRAVO after-school orchestras, which are modeled on Venezuela’s El Sistema program of bringing music education to children who couldn’t otherwise afford it. BRAVO works in concert with several Portland public schools in lower income areas. Campbell traces BRAVO’s history in Portland, its many challenges and successes, and the passing of artistic leadership to Portland musician Alonzo Chadwick, with his predecessor, BRAVO co-founder Seth Truby, sliding over to become development director.
Sponsor
Out & About: Hat tricks, onstage, music notes, fish tales
HAT DANCE. “The hat, by virtue of its privileged perch, occupies a special place in fashion’s vocabulary,” K.B. Dixon writes in his photo essay on the many-splendored head adornments he’s encountered on the street. “It is the final piece of the sartorial puzzle, the concluding point in a proclamation of identity, the star placed atop the Christmas tree that is you. … This new age of the hat is very much in evidence here in hat-happy Portland and has been for a while, as this handful of street portraits will attest.”
ACLU SUES CITY OF ASHLAND OVER SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL ACTOR’S ARREST. In yet another case of alleged overpolicing of people of color, OPB’s Sydney Dauphinais reports that the Civil Liberties Union has filed suit against Ashland over what it calls the illegal arrest of former Oregon Shakespeare Festival actor Juan Anthony Sancho, who is Latino. The city declined Sancho’s offer to hold a conversation to resolve the case before litigation was filed. In a separate suit, Sancho has sued Jackson County and several sheriff’s deputies over his treatment at the county jail after his arrest in Ashland in 2019. Daughinais reports: “Jail cell video shows officers wrestling Sancho to the ground and kneeling on his back and neck, reportedly causing him to go unconscious. The officers later handcuffed him to a urine grate on the cell floor for over two hours.”
SHUTTERED VENUE OPERATOR GRANTS. The online application portal for these federal grants has had a few hiccups, but administrators plan to have it up and running again by the end of this week. The $16 billion in available grant money is meant to help operators of theaters, movie houses, performing arts halls, museums, zoos, aquariums, and others who’ve lost money because of Covid shutdowns. If this means you, check out that link.
THE SOUL OF HUMANITY AND THE FATE OF THE PLANET ARE INTERTWINED. Gary Ferrington explores the “exciting array of artists” featured in Ashland-based Anima Mundi Productions’ spring Heart of Humanity concert series, among them HEX Vocal Ensemble, Third Angle New Music, Cappella Romana, and a new film from composer Robert Kyr.
VITAL SIGNS AND SHAKY MARRIAGES. Among theatrical newcomers this weekend are a couple of tried-and-true favorites. On Friday, PassinArt presents a virtual reading of Vital Signs, the pseudonymous Jane Martin’s suite of more than 30 two-minute monologues about contemporary womanhood, which debuted in 1990 at the Humana new-plays festival in Louisville. The reading’s free, but you should sign up for a ticket. Also on Friday, Broadway Rose unveils its streaming production (through May 16) of The Last Five Years, Jason Robert Brown’s popular 2001 two-character musical about a couple of struggling actors who get married, to uncertain result. Kailey Rhodes and Jeff Rosick star. Details here.
LIKE A FISH OUT OF FIRE. Fused glass and blown glass don’t mix? Tell it to artists Ann Cavanaugh and Andy Nichols, whose works at Cannon Beach’s Spring Unveiling Arts Festival make finned figures full of color and movement. Lori Tobias tells the fish tale.
Sponsor
Help us keep the stories coming
DO YOU LIKE WHAT ARTSWATCH DOES? Please consider making a donation. Many of you have, and we appreciate it deeply. Your support makes it possible for us to keep writing stories and bringing you news about Oregon’s arts and cultural life. Your donation at this critical time will go toward our Full Circle Fund, which provides free ads to all cultural nonprofits in Oregon and Southwest Washington for one year. In essence, it’s a double donation: At the same time you give to ArtsWatch, you’re also helping the cultural organizations that advertise with us.
Become a member. Make a donation.
Just press the “donate today” button below.
