How are Portland-based choreographers Tahni Holt and Linda Austin raising money to support the creation of new work in 2010? They’re doing a dinner series with two guest performers, artists, or writers in conversation with each other and guests at each monthly dinner.

Austin and Holt say the series was inspired by, “Our love for communal eating, a desire for more discourse that touches upon performance as an art among other arts, and a curiosity about other people’s processes: what and how and why they make what they make and do what they do.”

And if you come on May 22, you can eat and talk with me. I’m honored to be in such company.

Feb 27 Angelle Hebert (tEEth)+ Angela Fair

March 20 Linda Austin+ Kristan Kennedy

April 24 Tahni Holt+ Ethan Rose

May 22 Cydney Wilkes + Lisa Radon

June 26 David Eckard + Linda K. Johnson

July 24 Tiffany Lee Brown + Joshua Berger (Plazm)

Each dinner has room for 20 guests. You can email hello@tahniholt.com for reservations. Every dinner is at a different, secret, location that will be given upon reservations. $30-$100 (sliding scale) for one dinner / $100-$200 for four dinners.

From the press release:

Linda and Tahni are both active members in the performance community in Portland whose performing lives have intertwined in interesting ways in the past several years. As individuals they both have received numerous regional grants and awards. Most recently Linda’s work has been seen in New York, PICA’s TBA Festival, and at Performance Works Northwest. Over the past summer Tahni performed in Vienna, Austria and in Seattle, WA. In the summer of 2004 Linda and Tahni were two of ten selected to participate in Regional Dance Development Initiative (National Dance Project/NEFA) in Seattle. In 2005 they fundraised together in order to travel to Scotland for Deborah Hay’s Solo Commissioning Project. They performed back to back solo adaptations of Hay’s Room at PICA’s TBA( 2006), at Reed College Art week (2007) and in the Fusebox Festival (2007) in Austin, TX. They continue to find ways to support each other’s work and have a deep appreciation for the other’s creations.

A little guide for your e-ve-ning. The much-missed Tilt Gallery and Project Space helmed by Jenene Nagy and Josh Smith never really went away, it just went dormant, plotting future exhibitions. Tonight, they launch Tilt Export, a curatorial effort in various spaces that opens with “approximate” at  Gallery HOMELAND (2505 SE 11th Ave) with a reception from 6-9 PM.  Damien Gilley and Ethan Rose take HOMELAND’s unique space as a launch point: Gilley responds visually with a tape installation while Rose responds, characteristically, with sound.

Meanwhile, in the same time frame and not far away, Fourteen30 (1430 SE 3rd Ave) opens a solo exhibition for Matt King (Richmond, VA), “Science Diet” whose sculptures have in past repurposed the readymade (plastic memorial wreath, plastic shopping bag, lawn chair) in intriguing ways…making work that approximates looking at the familiar out of the corner of your eye.

See you there.

Oh, Ethan Rose. We nicknamed our city after you. We planted a flower for you. Because you are one of the reasons we want to listen to the next music, because someone as relentlessly innovative (in the very most subtle ways) as you might be making it. Gertrude Stein was wrong when she said “rose is a rose is a rose.” Meeting you, she’d need to differentiate, delineate. She’d obviously never heard Oaks, your lush new album (unlike any other) crafted by capturing and layering the many and varied sounds of the Wurlitzer organ at the Oaks Park skate rink, another Portland Treasure. Hear here.

Holocene and PICA know a good thing when they hear it. They’ll host the coming out party for Oaks they call “Skate Night” Tuesday night from 8-10 PM at Oaks Park Skate Rink where everyone but you, we imagine, will skate and skate while you manipulate the live and once-live sounds of the mighty Wurlitzer.