“Once a great flock of migrating birds gathered in a shallow river….”
Last evening, a flock of 100 (or so) Portlander singers gathered on the brick steps in Pioneer Square for Rinde Eckert’s performance On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds for the launch of PICA’s TBA:07 Festival.
The piece was conducted by Eckert (and an unnamed chorus master) who turned over his shoulder to instruct the five accordionists behind him and guided the chorus in front of him with hand gestures and a fire whistle to begin and end actions like whistling and birdlike, twitchy head movements alternating with primarily simple and repetitive choral segments (”We Aaaare The Ex-cel-lent Birds!”) that were lovely and powerful as only a group of 100 voices can be.
Many of the performance moments seemed designed for the still photos that would document the performance, 100 arms stretched in the air, topped by bird head hands (you know what I’m talking about…do a shadow puppet of a bird with your hand, make it a goose) or 100 people shading their eyes with the book looking in the same direction. What the photos won’t capture, and what many of the hundreds of audience members might also have missed, were the subtleties: moments of coordinated deep breaths, and whispered chatterings that were not amplified and so, in the great crowd with its own chatterings and city noises, lost. The question then, might be whether or not this is just an accepted part of public performance, that you can’t reach all of the people all of the time. Other PICA openers, however, from Eiko and Koma to Streb have put the lie to that (maybe it’s just the sound artists that have to work out new strategies).
Eckert in the program mentioned the power of large numbers in concert and also the inherent danger in a large group with the potential for mob behaviour. “What about conceptual migrations, the popular imagination turning like a flock of swifts from fascination to fascination, a group think that masks growing alienation,” Eckert asks. While interesting backstory on Eckert’s process, the piece didn’t enter this darker territory, instead providing a welcoming start (with the accessible common denominator of Excellent Birds) for Portland audiences to a performance festival. The inadvertent guest star pigeon doing a solo turn overhead punctuated the performance with a grey exclamation point.
–Radon
WHAT TO DO NOW?