art, performance

Children Get Stuck Places Underground

What’s important is you can pretend about things and dream about things you don’t completely understand. —Mr. Rogers

Opening tonight, “Children Get Stuck Places Underground” is an an opera by poet, performance and installation artist, Bethany Ides, part of the H/D +Projects series at Half/Dozen Gallery.

Ides is weaving together true and not as true stories of children who fall down holes and what happens when they reemerge, but, as you’ll see in her description below, she equates falling with possession. She may be basing this on the operas in the Land of Make Believe in Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, but “Children” will take a decidedly darker and more complicated turn. Ides 2009 performance/installation cycle “Approximate L” at galleryHOMELAND and WorkSound, was a sophisticated and delicious complication (and I mean that in a very good way) of a simple premise, like seeing a subject through a bug’s compound eye that collects visual information from a thousand sources. “Children” will be Ides’ last work in Portland before she returns to New York later this summer. There are four performances at 7 and 9 PM Friday and Saturday, June 25 and 26. Free admission. Don’t miss.

When memory is rendered make-believe, specters take shape. A dark hole’s hollow form animates as snake; its ability to shed its skin becomes infectious. Processed traumas wend a trail through one creature’s digestive track into another, moving from mouth to mouth. Four guises (played by Ides along with David Weinberg, Morgan A. Ritter and Devin Lucid) represent the four Greek humors, figured within the two sides of a single, shadowy figure: O/Doe, whose perispirit inhabits other well known children who’ve spent time singing to themselves below the surface. The narrative of Baby Jessica McClure, epically rescued from a backyard well shaft in 1987, is woven together with those of Pauline Réage’s transgressive non-character, O, to effect a chronicle of possession, transformation and fortitude. Countless children (count among them Alice, Tikki Tikki Tembo and the Old Testament’s Joseph) have emerged from such holes wholly altered. This work celebrates their veracity and ingenuity.

POSTED: June 25th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art, performance | No Comments »

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