What makes art and daily life powerful and prescient is a little thing called consensual reality–that notion that all things are considered real when there’s mutual agreement on the part of the entire community involved. Like this: you and I agree the world is round, it is thusly so. . .even if you or I can’t show a lick of independent proof or pudding for it to go in.
Rinde Eckert’s On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds (originally intended as a choral piece for hundreds of voices) was a wonderful piece of public promise that may not have succeeded on a reception level but electrified my hope and faith in the civically charged consensual reality of public art.
Missing the wallop that a multitudinous throng of 400 might have produced, the work featuring a cool 100 Portland voices in Pioneer Courthouse Square , was both sublime and frustrating. However, small gestures and extended techniques (mouth sounds, flapping paper, whistling) were obscured by work-a-day urban shuffle like lightrail, car engines and a sea of bodies that made up the far-from-madding crowd. You just couldn’t hear or see the elliptical activity.
When I could hear the voices of many as one, I was uniquely moved. There’s something about people singing together that, loaded with layers of reference to celebration, ritual, and we-shall-overcome defiance, is vividly gripping. As things in the world sway, change and vanish, the swell of a crowd singing on a September evening made me think of R. Murray Schafer’s puzzlement: “Where are the museums for disappearing sounds?”
Eckert is an artist of deep generosity and largesse–talented and likeable as the day is long. His own work (the utterly fantastic The Gardening of Thomas D and the more recent And God Created Great Whales), his bond with composer Paul Dresher and especially his early scores for choreographer Margaret Jenkins’ company are rich, other-wordly, yet accessible. That said, perhaps the piece wasn’t about hearing or seeing, but the transient (or in Eckert’s case migratory) nature of voice and song, shape and shadow and our so-human-an-animal sociability.
Events of this scale and public-ness are essential to Portland ’s identity (and part of what makes this such a magical realist city at times)–the drawing of otherwise out-of-reach aesthetics away from the margins amplifies our experience of the center in some singular way-out ways. Think of it as art transmuted into civically valuable disposition (shared values like openness, cooperation and community, tolerance, and respect).
One of the TBA Festival’s great mutable properties is the public collage effect this kind of art embraces–think of Eiko and Koma at Jamison Square, David Eckard’s Float on the Willamette River, or John King’s guitar-apalooza last year with dozens of PDX guitarists. Events like this underscore the improvisational nature of living in a city. These kind of events are powerful. They allow us to create together and recycle, renew social capital. Most of all, their town-squareness removes the double-coding that many kinds of art love–the surface appeal of populism wrapped up in winking snark, art/design so often created for the effete edges and creases, despite the illusion of embracing social practice and community–and allows some common humanity to emerge.
Whereas John King’s guitars presented a classic “wall of sound”–a coiled and reverberant steel equivalent of a musical cyclone fence, Eckert’s piece, when it worked created the effect of a chalice, a site-generated-conditional moment that turned Pioneer Courthouse Square into an enormous singing bowl–creating something Jean Cocteau craved: “everyday music . . . music one can live in like a house.”
–Tim DuRoche
Tags: art
wow! stunning entry. thank you for your insight. i was feeling blue about the lack of some bombastic entrance to the festival and then i thought about eiko and koma and the beauty in simple gestures making way for the rest of the stuff we are all about to experience. see you in the streets.
kk