2022: Dance in the rear view mirror
Jamuna Chiarini
December 31, 2022
Jamuna Chiarini considers the resilience, grit, and transcendence of Portland’s dance community in 2022.
Jamuna Chiarini considers the resilience, grit, and transcendence of Portland’s dance community in 2022.
January and early February bring a festival filled with dance, and several co-minglings with other art forms.
From dance on film at the start of the year to a flurry of Nutcrackers at the end, the ups and downs of Oregon’s Covid-tinged dance year.
Portland’s I Am MORE helps traumatized young people heal by sharing their stories
We are still dancing, but mostly we are watching dance on screens. And we are getting better at it, too.
I recently spent three marvelous hours watching Echo Theater Company members negotiate a system of harnesses, ropes, and pulleys to move a butterfly with gigantic opalescent wings and a mad, spiky hermit crab-like monster around a stage. The atmosphere was electric: it
At the Fertile Ground Festival performance of Just This One, a jukebox musical based on the eventful life of late Portland bluesman Paul deLay, I went to a play and a great blues concert broke out. I never got to hear deLay,
Putting history on stage can be challenging when the figures aren’t well known. Playwrights must provide much historical context, and after months or years of researching their lives, it can be hard to maintain audience perspective. Two of this year’s Fertile Ground
An agitated, hooded man angrily approaches a Transportation Security Administration agent at an airport security station, demanding to know what they’re doing to his son. Violence seems likely to erupt any moment. That was the arresting opener of Contraband, the opening play
Not all the characters in Archie Washington’s enchanting new musical Living Things are, strictly speaking, alive. Carnival bowling pins that get knocked over and set back up again over and over; components of a science fair rocket; a robot Mars lander and
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