If it’s from the mind of Rikki Rothenberg, one of the founders of contemporary dance group Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner, you can bet I’ll be there. Rothenberg has a B.A. in sculpture from Massachusetts College of Art, but most of us know her as choreographer and dancer in one of Portland’s most adventurous and engaging dance groups, marking paths from the pedestrian and modern idioms into a fabulous future.

Nationale tonight opens a solo show of recent work by Rikki Rothenberg, Linus and Osa: We Are Cats. Rothenberg has a sharp and adventurous mind, and I’m curious how it manifests in two dimensions. Expect “glitter silhouettes and repetitive, kaleidoscope-like pen drawings.”

Opens tonight, First Friday, June 5 from 6-9 PM. Woolly is scheduled to perform, but I’m using the word scheduled loosely as I only know that it will be sometime during the hours of the reception and probably more than once.

Seeing, seer, and seen are the subject and object of Tahni Holt‘s dance piece event.space. that happened Thursday and Friday nights at The Cleaners. Not “seer” in the sense of fortune teller but in the sense of the seen asking, “What are you lookin’ at?” And more precisely, through what means do you see what you see? The large panes of glass of the windows of The Cleaners separated the audience on the sidewalk from the dancers within, thus providing the biggest of big screens through which we witnessed Holt’s dance as if on faux TV or computer monitor.

I recently had interesting conversations with Portland artist Paige Saez about YouTube as vehicle, as voyeurism, as window, as feedback loop…teen girls, in the case of Saez’ recent work, lip syncing and dancing in their underwear/pajamas to a pop song. For her video work, Saez recruited fellow artists to reenact the amateur reenactment of whatever the original video was, feeding back to the feedback.

In event.space. the dancers are subject (object), audience, and symbol (of pixel). There are three “primary” dancers–Sally Girrado-Spencer, Suzanne Chi, and Julie Katch–costumed in primary colors: red, blue, yellow. And there are perhaps a dozen more movers dressed in white. Holt herself did not dance in the piece, but the primary dancers wore quintessentially Holt movement well. The majority of the primaries’ movement was as if they were being controlled, pulled (often backward) in a jerky, marionette kind of way. Intentional, forward-directed movement was a lesser part of the mix, and often meant following or really marking, blankly, the movement of another. A particularly exciting sequence, executed thrice was the forward progression of Chi in a bent and tortured way, followed by Katch, appearing from behind a white curtain enacting a more joyful, armswinging phrase, then <PAUSE> both abruptly <REWIND> the phrase with Katch exiting. <PAUSE> <PLAY> Repeat. The blank-faced execution here was so brilliant, aping the confessional video face of the communicator who cannot see his audience through the video camera and so the eyes never connect, engage the viewer.

At first, the white-clad movers rivetingly play observer, adhering to the wall, they watch and track: moving in the direction of the  “primary” dancers. And if you weren’t already clued into the nature of the piece, their role as observed obervers sets the stage. Later they are facilitators of movement for the primaries, armature, foil, and briefly container. And near the end they engage in a great moment in which they walk in seemingly random directions into and out of line formations, held briefly.  Several times throughout the piece, the movers in white gather around a long-haired blond “singer” in a lavender shirt aping a music video while we, the audience, hear a “Lilias Yoga and You” type of voice issuing calm movement instructions that have nothing to do with what we’re seeing. The one sour/obvious note of the whole piece–missed by my companion so maybe missed by the majority of the audience, remaing the performers’ inside joke–was that the singer and silent chorus were mouthing (while pointing at us) “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” That the watcher is the lonely, pathetic individual, face illuminated by the glow of the screen, is a simplistic take on a complex phenomenon that ignores, among many other things (social media) the participatory culture of feedback, remix, and connection associated with consumption via the screen.

The primaries do address the glass wall between them and audience in movement sequences on the window sills pressed up against the glass, but they operate at a cold, detached remove from the viewer. Because the space is on a streetcorner with two walls of glass, the audience also watches the audience watch the piece.

And when was the last time you saw the lighting elements as actors in a dance piece? Here, red, yellow, blue spots created by spotlights on wheeled carts moved by movers in white engaged space and dancer, slowly, deliberately as if they were John Baldessari spots (transparently) come to life. They played over ceiling, wall, dancer, and occasionally audience member bathed in red. Kudos to Malina Rodriguez for lighting design.

The score by Thomas Thorson was occasionally funny: Holt’s opening lip-synched welcome–out of sync by a mile–drew laughs as did (oddly) the occasionally cougar growl during the piece. There were moments of processed (echo, metallic) water sounds and scritchy crackling which worked well with the jerkier, marionettesque movements. One downside: while the audience chuckled at the recorded sound of streetcar (the site is located between streetcar rails on 10th and 11th) incorporated into the score, this inclusion felt wrong: this piece was not about the space it inhabited but something else entirely. To allow sound of place to be recurring element of score would have worked better for a dance piece that was concerned with its site.

A gripe (and I’m probably one of few who will be bothered by it): red, yellow, and blue, while primaries are not the colors from which your screen experience is created. Screen colors are RGB, or red, green, blue, the palette of colored light from which the millions of colors you see on television and monitor are created, pixel by pixel. So for me, the costumes, as crisply stunning as their colors were (considering they were essentially 80s thrift store dresses) did battle with what I perceived to be the conceptual underpinning of the piece concerning the audience’s experience of the work through the “monitor” or “screen.” But there’s no argument that they weren’t visually arresting.

One of Portland’s most interesting choreographers, Tahni Holt, has been thinking about our almost universal voyeurism and our mediated culture, the ways we experience viewing others at a remove through the technology of recording device and screen.

Continuing work began when Holt was artist-in-residence at the South Waterfront in 2008, Holt stages .event.space. at The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel tonight and tomorrow night, April 9th and 10th at 7 and 9 PM with a live feed at tahniholt.com. As before, the performance takes place inside a space with generous windows; the audience watches from outside, separated from the action by the glass, a circumstance (monitor, television screen) to which we’ve become accustomed.

Holt says, “.event.space. ruminates on our voyeuristic tendencies in our everyday lives and how these tendencies manifest in modes of architecture and technology.” Expect strategies of recording and playback (fast-forwarding, rewinding and slow motioning) “lighting plots are powered by human form [lighting design by Malina Rodriguez], colored animation arises amidst black and white, and a song split in thirds [score: Thomas Thorson] becomes a place keeper of time.”

Don’t miss it.

ultra cannot make any higher recommendation than this: The most important Portland cultural event of the year happens Sunday, September 14 at 1 PM and 4 PM. City Dance takes place at four public spaces/fountains in Portland that are among our public treasures, if little known by many of us.

It delivers likely the only truly site-specific work you will see this year, work that could happen nowhere else, where the choreographers craft work that interacts with space (and water) in ways that are dramatic, compelling, quirky, magnificent; where musicians (and audio technology) deploy in these spaces to use the sonic properties of proximity and distance (and water) to great effect.

It delivers likely the only chance you will have this year to hear work by important avant-garde composers Morton Subotnik, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley performed en plein air led by Ron Blessinger the fine musicians of Third Angle.

It shines the spotlight both on the groundbreaking work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin, whose aesthetic and spirit infuse the works by four Portland-based contemporary choreographers: Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, Linda Austin, and Linda K. Johnson.

It introduces a crop of exciting fresh contemporary dance blood like Jennifer Camou, Lucy Yim, and Kaj-anne Pepper,  integrating them with Portland’s finest like Keely McIntyre, Carla Mann, Jenn Gierada, and ultra faves Rikki Rothenberg, Emily Stone, and Julie Katch.

This is the crown jewel of PICA’s TBA Festival. As much as we appreciate the yearly importation of great work from around the country (and the world), how beautiful it is that this best of all possible dance events is challenging, illuminating, and so very local.

We are particularly interested in Lucy Yim’s work; prior to coming to Portland, she did a collaborative piece based on the way bees communicate through dance (!). From what we’ve seen so far (including a piece at the recent Richard Foreman Festival at Performanceworks Northwest) she incorporates brief tableau, beautiful movement that is dancerly, but not too (as danced by Yim, Jen Camou, and Sara Naegelin), and plays with spinning dancers in and out of unison. That’s a bit reductionist, but we’re eager to see more of these dancers’ work. Yim will be performing in City Dance with Cydney Wilkes.

Hot Little Hands, directed by choreographer Suniti Dernovsek and visual artist David Stein, have employed a high theatricality (costume, set, prop) in works like Lawn of the Limp and Avian Fable. For TBA, dancers Kerry Ratza, Erin Seaman, and Jesicca Burton with cardboard box blockheads and tough-guy arms ending in fists flat-footedly trudged through a mechanical choreography that was more winning than that description suggests.

Ten Tiny Dances goes al fresco this Saturday, August 2 beginning at 4 PM, with ten dances performed ten times each on ten 4′ x 4′ stages scattered throughout the South Waterfront neighborhood.

The Ten Tiny series, programmed by Mike Barber, began because the performances were held in little bars or restaurants where there was only room for the tiniest stage. Here, the juxtaposition of scale, of tram tower, skyrise, freeway, river, and wide openness of the unfinished ‘hood to human dancing in circumscribed space opens up interesting possibilities. And the stroll from one performance location to another gives time between dances to breath, react, reflect, and bounce the experience off the surroundings. Each one of the dances, by an all-star roster of innovative Portland choreographers and artists, will be performed ten times so that audience members can see one dance, find the next location, and see the next.

You’ll see work by Linda Austin, Mike Barber Hand2Mouth Theater, Hot Little Hands, KO & Co., Tere Mathern, POV Dance, Rhiza A + D,  Sojourn Theater, and Cydney Wilkes.

Maps of the performances will be available at SW Moody Avenue & Curry Street. The performances last about 7 minutes each and begin every 15 minutes, so the whole show ends at 7 PM. There will be food vendors, but you might want to bring something to sit on and some sunscreen!

A hyper-extended web of performers and musicians loved by contemporary dance collaborative Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner are throwing a blowout, party, performance extravaganza tonight March 2 at 8 PM at Holocene (1001 SE Morrison). The night will be a dim sum menu of sensational performance with music in the back room from Starfucker, Evolutionary Jass Band, Cexfucx, Tara Jane O’Neil, and Bryce Panic and performance in the front with Ten Tiny Dances special presentation of 4 Tiny Dancers: Woolly, Linda Austin & Tuning Friends, Rush-N-Disco, and Fever Theater plus a silent auction.

This headspinningly good night is going to help send Woolly Mammoth Comes To Dinner to Mexico, where they’ve been invited to teach and perform at an international performance art festival Performatica, where every student (from all over the world) attends any class for free.

myspace.com/woollymammothcomestodinner
Read Woolly’s answers to the ultra q

Argentine choreographer Diana Szeinblum’s new work Alaska is a raw and unapologetic piece of dance-theater that simultaneously inspires mystery, hope and a worrisome sense of helplessness (think of the voyeuristic discomfort of seeing Gena Rowlands’ unraveling in Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence). “Gloriously alive,” Alaska marks the choreographer’s first visit since her 2003 Secreto y Malibu, a fantastically arch piece that seemed one part Buñuelian tease, one part a nod to Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures.

Trained in the tanztheater weltanschauung of Wuppertal’s Pina Bausch, Szeinblum is a cunning synthesist who avoids the trappings of overly mannered and emotive, Ach-Ich-Bin-So-Unglücklich-und-Existenzial costume/set-driven Ausdrucktanz–instead mining a dance dialectic of frenzied releases and collapsed resignation. Rigorous dance, athletic and precise, yet unafraid of small inward gestures, Alaska, “speaks of that place that we all recognize, but where no one has ever been.” Like Glenn Gould’s “idea of North,” “Alaska,” remains (in the words of Gould), “a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about, and, in the end, avoid.”

Danced by two women and two men to an original, tensely cinematic score, the evening-length work charts the terra incognitae of bodies rising and falling apart, stolen snapshots exposing intimacy, dominance, and obsession. From the comedic to the cathartic, the piece is brutal and fiercely seductive. Szeinblum successfully exploits many of Bausch’s hallmark devices—angst, alienation, frailty of human connection, the blurring and loss of self—and tempers them with her own wickedly dark humor, extremes of movement (from the pedestrian, workaday to mechanized, operatic violence), a minimalist/conceptual mise-en-scène, and shards of hope producing a pandemonium of “interior spaces,” disturbing little lonelinesses. Some of the best unsettling movement poetry you’ll see this season.

PICA presents Alaska at PSU’s Lincoln Hall, 1620 SW Park Avenue, on Tuesday and Wednesday, January 29 & 30, 8 pm. $25 ($20 PICA members). Tickets: (503)242-1419

Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner is a Portland-based contemporary dance collective that will knock your socks off and back on again. Fresh and smart with a combination of choreographed and structured improvisation, with humor, manic elements, and Tammy Faye eyes, Woolly Mammoth Comes To Dinner—Katie Arrants, Rikki Rothenberg, Kathleen Keogh, and David Rafn (who brings much of the music and is a fashion student at AI)—make movement performance that might happen just about anywhere. What’s in a name? They, “use this moniker as an excuse to indulge themselves in non-sense, and then attempt to make something coherent out of it.”

The spirit of collab extends beyond the four, as they work with designer Diana Lang of )open((clothed) who costumes them (often in garments that invite their own kind of movement) and makeup artist Lauren Hobson. Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner threw down with many players in the larger contemporary dance community in Linda Austin’s Circus Me Around.

Here they take a minute to answer the questions of the ultra Q wherein we ask a few of Portland’s more interesting movers and makers a few pressing questions:

Photos of the Woolly ladies courtesy Chris Mulliken.

Qualities you most admire in design: (or performance)
Katie: Generosity. Also: risky athleticism, emotional rigor, antics. And frequently, absurdity and glamour.

David: I admire honesty and letting the freak-flag fly. It’s the 90s, you can do whatever you want!

Rikki: potential risk, real physicality, pedestrian-ism, humor, real emotion, people doing tasks, curiosity and transparency

Kathleen: imperfect beauty, accidental synchronicity, nonsense, the extraordinary everyday. Also, fake beards.

Qualities you most despise in design: (or performance)

Katie: Exclusivity. Pain.

David: Fear and trepidation. Pledging allegiance to the Satan of appearances, instead of submissively licking the hot Bodhisattva of ergonomics.

Rikki: fakeness, false/dramatized emotion, lazy movement as an excuse, fake beards.

Kathleen: blandness, perfection, lifelessness.

Reading:

Katie: Page 259 of Augusten Burrough’s Possible Side Effects, over and over again. Not that I love him so much, but it’s a challenge. Also, my peers’ nonfiction.

David: Walter Benjamin-”The Arcades Project” Check this out……. “Each generation experiences the fashions of the one immediately preceding it as the most radical anti-aphrodisiac imaginable. In this judgment it is not so far off the mark as might be supposed. Every fashion is to some extent a bitter satire on love: in every fashion perversities are suggested by the most ruthless means. Every fashion stands in opposition to the organic. Every fashion couples the living body to the inorganic world. To the living, fashion defends the rights of the corpse. The fetishism that succumbs to the sex appeal of the inorganic is its vital nerve.” Holy shit! If only someone would say this out loud on “Project Runway”! I’ve also been reading “The Passionate Marriage” by David Schnarch Phd. Self-help is the new self-hurt!

Rikki: Anatomy of the Psyche and Eat, Pray, Love.

Kathleen: can’t seem to focus on anything right now, so I just read emails and case notes at work. I think my eyes are going bad from looking at computer screens. Oh, recently I read an article in Vanity Fair about Pitcairn Island that was shocking! And today I was reading about Joan of Arc.

Listening to:

Katie: It’s My Prerogative by Bobby Brown. The Streets. Also, documentary radio.

David: Always, all the time, SAMUL-NORI. A blistering exorcism of traditional Korean drumming and chanting. No black metal band on earth can do this shit.

Rikki: “in rainbows” Radiohead, Jens Lekman “night falls over kortedala”, Kate Bush “the kick inside”

Kathleen: Mostly Classic Rock on the radio. 106.7, 92.3, 105.9. Or the other day it was The 6ths. This morning it was Arthur Russell.

Dream project:

Katie: Hometown tour. Choreograph music videos. Create an evening-length show for a large audience in an unconventional location (i.e. a burned out building). Teach dance in Mexico.

David: Design costumes for an opera starring Bea Arthur, with set design by Ettore Sotsass, and music by Doug Theriault.

Rikki: Tour the world with a trunk full of sequenced costumes and a bus of our friends playing music and videotaping. Choreographing and starring in a music video. Any of the above mentioned musical acts would do.

Kathleen: a full length musical (maybe loosely based on Joan of Arc, David Bowie, and a pigeon)

Favorite virtue:

Katie: Caring deeply about something.

David: Unconditional willingness to hug. This can be embodied by anyone and I will favoritize it.

Rikki: inclusion?

Kathleen: Love (supernatural virtue! yeah!)

Favorite vice:

Katie: Eating at the New Seasons taste tests without planning to buy anything

David: Robitussin and Red Bull. In this scenario you mess with the Bull and you get the horn; only in jittery, slow-motion. I only do this once every three years.

Rikki: bacon, tuna melts with a side of steamy kale and some kombucha.

Kathleen: favorite—kombucha, bottled water, chocolate, chips and salsa, scallops. Most common—worry, irritability, jealousy

Tragic flaw:

Katie: Paralysis by analysis. And doubt.

David: Thinking that life is perfectible.

Rikki: intestinal bubbling

Kathleen: bad teeth, passive aggressive, constipation, allergic to the world (bubble girl).

Secret superhero power:

Katie: Being in two places at once! Like Portland, Maine and Portland, Oregon.

David: I don’t have one, that’s no secret though.

Rikki: spitting chocolate on your face.

Kathleen: talking to cabbies, or strangers in general

That which keeps your afterburners firing:

Katie: Tacos. Fried eggs and kale. Sweet potato milkshakes. Imagining Woolly on a kick-ass tour with some fun bands.

David: Beautiful, loving, creative friends and family. That answer is somewhat predictable, however, so I will also say that really terrifying, ecstatic color combinations float my barge. Also, a good Cexfucx show will keep me going for weeks.

Rikki: afterburners firing baby dinosaur egg salad sandwiches

Kathleen: sitting still and watching the world

What you’d like to be when you grow up:

Katie: Famous.

David: An autonomous creator living in dynamic harmony with a visionary community.

Rikki: a big woolly mammoth, with dreadlocks.

Kathleen: flower arranger, donkey tamer, skydiver

Portland’s best kept secret:

Katie: Make-up artist Lauren Hobbs. The music of Sonny Fields. Neko’s haircuts.

David: I don’t know what it is, but whatever it is I’m sure that it has nothing to do with me or anyone reading this, it is that cool.

Rikki: the stairs leading up to the field at Mississippi and Fremont.

Kathleen: no secrets here, or maybe all the places where stairs lead to empty lots and fields. I’m afraid they’ll disappear someday.

Portland heroes (sung or un-):

Katie: Felix Lilly, our ten year old lighting designer who fell out of a tree this summer and sustained serious brain injuries, but is recovering like a champ! And his family, of course. Oh, and DHS case workers! I’m serious. You try being the legal guardian for 50 troubled teenagers.

David: Rollerball. Absolutely dedicated veterans of weird-horror-funk-blissed-out-art-damaged-free-goth-power-pop. They are totally under-appreciated, and they are professional-grade sound-vikings. They do really well in Italy I’m told. I love them.

Rikki: Linda Austin, my acupuncturist and my therapist, ???

Kathleen: Linda Austin and Karen Nelson. And Lisa Sperlin (she speaks something like 11 languages, works in social services helping Asian families in the area with mental health crises, and saved up all her vacation time at work to go to tsunami-affected areas to volunteer and help the doctors and nurses help their patients (the survivors of the tsunamis) with resulting mental health issues. She did that for a month. Today she wished me happy birthday and said, “Long life, wellness, exceed…” and something else. She hugged me.

Interesting on the horizon (PDX):

Katie: A Woolly Reunion!!! And a Woolly fundraiser at Holocene to support our trip to Mexico to teach and perform at the Performatica festival, http://performatica.org/. Also, Linda K Johnson’s on-going project at the South Waterfront.

David: Good question. Oh yes! This years Art Institute fashion show will have some really fresh, young talent showing their senior work. It will definitely be worth checking out.

Rikki: a fundraiser for our trip to the Performatica Festival in Puebla, Mexico.

Kathleen: demolition and construction

Travel to Findhorn, Scotland to commission a solo dance from legendary choreographer, performer, and dance thinker, Deborah Hay. For 11 days, Hay guides and coaches, but does not show, letting you find your own way. At the end of the residency sign a contract. It says that you will practice this solo every single day for at least three months before you perform it. Every day whether you feel like it or not, whether you’re sick or busy or….

Oh, and you can’t pay for the commission out of your own pocket, you have to raise the money from members of your community so that your whole dance community participates in the creation of your piece.

Portland’s most interesting dance duo, the riveting Cydney Wilkes and Ten Tiny Dances impresario Mike Barber have done just that. Together again, only not really, or we should say, not yet, Wilkes and Barber tonight present their solo adaptions of Deborah Hay’s “The Runner.” at Lent School Gymnasium (5105 SE 97th) at 8 PM.

It doesn’t end here. In July Wilkes and Barber go to Marfa, Texas where Hay makes a new duet for them based on their solo adaptations. They bring that duet home to Portland for performance in October 2008.

“Fence” Cydney Wilkes and Mike Barber.

Wilkes and Barber have performed at PICA’s TBA Festival, Seattle-based On The Board’s Northwest New Works, and Ten Tiny Dances, as well as doing Wilke’s “Penta,” a year-long performance on the banks of the Willamette River in the shadow of the Marquam Bridge, and most recently, the duo’s evening length “A Certain Facilitation of Impasse” at Disjecta.