If I could introduce you to the work of Portland-based choreographer/dance artist Linda Austin with any performance of hers sight unseen, I’d choose Paired Spectacular: a performance diptych in honor of Deborah Hay & Yvonne Rainer opening Friday, June 18 at 7 PM with performances June 18-20, Friday and Saturday at 7 PM and 9 PM and Sunday at 7 PM at Performance Works NorthWest (4625 SE 67th).

Austin stands out among Portland choreographers as her solo and group works generally extend further into performance to include interaction with mundane props, the use of voice, body-triggered sound, and uniquely: humor. They are less about movement as movement, and yet they don’t wander off the contemporary path into the reactionary world of narrative. The reason Paired Spectacular will be a great intro to Austin is that it finds her addressing the work of two influential dance makers, so you’ll get an intro to the work of Hay and Rainer in addition to Austin’s work, while witnessing one of our best dig into her own influences.

As Austin puts it, “Paired Spectacular is a love letter in the form of a performance diptych, dedicated to Deborah Hay and Yvonne Rainer, two dance pioneers whose work continues to resonate in the bodies and minds of dance experimenters today. Each half of this hinged work pits choreographer [my] own history, compositional inclinations, and processes against that of the two iconic figures.”

Dancers Linda K. Johnson and Richard Decker join Austin for “Part One: Universe,” in which each performer makes an exacting effort, a la the practices of Deborah Hay, to navigate ephemeral states of consciousness, summoning up an unpredictably arcane universe from mundane objects and dancing that remains stubbornly unfixed to any strict pattern.

“Part Two: MUTT” is an homage to, and ersatz version of, Yvonne Rainer’s seminal 1966 work Trio A. After performing a continuous series of highly specific, multi-layered movement tasks as a solo, and then as a duo with Richard Decker, Austin is joined by a mob of 14 Portland dancers in ruffled shirts for a chain-letter version of the piece. Threaded throughout both halves is Austin’s penchant for revealing the magic in everyday materials—dental floss—popcorn—paper bag—brick—used in unfamiliar ways. Even more magic is revealed via the expertise of lighting wizard Jeff Forbes. MUTT features Linda Austin, Jin Camou, Richard Decker, Nancy Ellis, Anne Furfey, Dora Nicole Gaskill, Bonnie Green, Rebecca Harrison, Paige McKinney, Kaj-anne Pepper, Chelsea Petrakis, Danielle Ross, Robert Tyree, Fawn Williams and Taylor A. Young.

Tickets: $12 – $15 sliding scale. Reserve at 503-777-1907.

This weekend is the next in the Alembic series of nights of new performance at Performance Works NorthWest (4625 SE 67th). Alembic #9: Organizam: A Mutant Cabaret of Non Acts runs two nights, Friday and Saturday, April 2-3 at 8 PM.

Curated by sound poet, Fluxus artist Mark Owens, Organizumb is “humor-based, conceptual, non-dramatic events informed from experimental traditions such as Dada, Situationists, and Fluxus. Two nights blending words, laughs, music, dancing, props, concepts, video, (non-) acting, games, sounds, implosions, with live humans with John Berendzen, Tony Christy, Maria Jose Gonzalez, James Yeary, Maryrose Larkin, Eric Matchett & Jake Anderson, Anna Daedalus, Leo Daedalus, David Abel, J.A. Lee, Crag Hill, Linda Austin. ”

“And then I’ll come over here and do this.”
“And then I’ll come over here and do this.”

On Friday, Linda Austin and JP Jenkins traversed the mezzanine of the Armory in a performance of Mark Applebaum’s visual score “The Metaphysics of Notation” that was loose, wacky, and charming. In paper jumpsuits, with a truckload of inspired props from vases of tired flowers to piles of clothes (robe/disrobe), a slinky and a couple of ping pong balls, Austin and Jenkins scrolled through movements best described as serious play. I’d expected Austin simply to improvise a solo to the graphic score (which I was really looking forward to). What I got instead was a series of delightful surprises that made my day.

Jenkins scored the piece with vocal improvisations (any/everything but singing), guitar, hitting and or trailing a big fake gem ring along the railing and a metal panel wired with contact mics, oh and a Linda Austin solo for piano and toy keyboard.

This was the last of four noontime performances at the Gerding Theater at the Armory co-sponsored by Portland Center Stage and Third Angle New Music Ensemble, which will perform “Metaphysics” in a program of other adventurous music on March 5 at Hollywood Theater.

Portland-based choreographer Linda Austin is the final artist to perform “The Metaphysics of Notation” today at noon at Portland Center Stage on the Mezzanine, Gerding Theater at the Armory.

Performance series “The Metaphysics of Notation” finds abstract notation interpreted through a kaleidoscope of methods: theater, movement, music, and sound poem. Third Angle and Portland Center Stage have invited a number of artists from different disciplines to interpret “The Metaphysics of Notation,” an epic, 72-foot graphic score by Mark Applebaum currently installed on the mezzanine at the Gerding Theater at the Armory.

The series is in anticipation of Third Angle’s concert “Chance/Perchance: A Musical Happening,” on Friday, March 5 — featuring work by David Schiff, Terry Riley and Mark Applebaum — at the Hollywood Theatre.

Performance series “The Metaphysics of Notation” finds abstract notation interpreted through a kaleidoscope of methods: theater, movement, music, and sound poem. Third Angle and Portland Center Stage have invited a number of artists from different disciplines to interpret “The Metaphysics of Notation,” an epic graphic score by Mark Applebaum currently installed on the mezzanine at the Gerding Theater at the Armory. Today at noon, sound poetry ensemble Blum Blum Shub Sound Poetry Coincidence (featuring David Abel, Leo Daedalus, and mARK oWEns) interpret the 72-foot long work.

Leo Daedalus of Blum Blum Shub (named for a random number generator) said this about the performance:

“The Metaphysics of Notation” score comprises three sets of graphic expression:

Applying to those sets the methodologies advanced in E. S. Segrob’s Handbook of Unforeseen Categories (El manual de las categorías imprevistas, Naguara, 1936) I will construct a vocal body of filler concepts (see Wirklichstein, Der Füllselbegriff) in blind concordance with the blackbox predicates (Bazzutti, Gli sguardi incombenti; Jäänenä, Miksi kuka?) of my colleagues, Messrs. Abel, Owens, and Nenhum (in absentia).

The series is in anticipation of Third Angle’s concert “Chance/Perchance: A Musical Happening,” on Friday, March 5 — featuring work by David Schiff, Terry Riley and Mark Applebaum — at the Hollywood Theatre.

Performances happen each Friday in February at noon at Portland Center Stage on the Mezzanine, Gerding Theater at the Armory. Next up are the Quadrophonnes Saxophone Quartet on the 19th and dancer/choreographer Linda Austin on February 26.

There’s been an uptick in performance as a visual art strategy in Portland recently along with some healthy chocolate-in-my-peanut-butter/peanut-butter-in-my-chocolate overlap between performance and visual art spaces. During December is Action Art at Rocksbox Fine Art, among the handful of visual artists who did performance pieces were Sean Joseph Patrick Carney doing “Joaquin Phoenix’s Donner Dance Party” and Michael Reinsch composing a poem of found fragments of speech by using the remote control to change channels on a television in the gallery. Arts collectives Weird Fiction and Oregon Painting Society embrace performance as well as installation (OPS installations employing elements that invite performance…plant synthesizers!). Bethany Ides’ “Approximate L” project was a complex, interlocking series of performances and visual art collaborations culminating in an installation at Worksound. Stephanie Simek’s “Brea(d)th” live international video piece at the Odds and Ends (Karl Lind)-curated Alembic knocked my socks off. The Alembic series at Performance Works Northwest blends performance, dance, music, and visual art while the Half/Dozen + Projects series at Half/Dozen brings performance into the gallery space: it was great seeing so many visual artists at Lucy Yim’s “merriment and a fleet of hooves” at Half/Dozen. And more collaboration between worlds of performance, dance, and visual art can only be to the good. See: Rauschenberg + Cunningham + Cage.

Tuesday night at 9 PM at Valentines (232 SW Ankeny), Through The Lens gathers artists (primarily choreographers and musicians) working around the concept of found performance. Choreographer Danielle Ross, who put the evening together, is interested in the idea of found performance, both in the sense of the artist creating work from the found, and the audience “finding” or participating in performance (she calls it “found opportunity for viewership” which sounds to me like performance in unexpected places). The evening will play with found interaction, found dialogue, found noise/sound. It’s a strong lineup mostly featuring performers coming from contemporary dance with the exception of arts group Future Death Toll. See you there.

Danielle Ross with Jean Paul Jenkins (and performers Keyon Gaskin, Leah Wilmoth, Lillian Rossetti, and Robert Tyree)
Linda Austin
Paige McKinney (and performers Esther LaPointe, Beth Loy, Bonni Stover, Taylor Young)
Tahni Holt with Thomas Thorson
Future Death Toll
Little Friction Dance
Suniti Dernovsek

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.

Dance needs space; space to rehearse, space to perform. And excellent site-based work aside, a great deal of innovative dance in Portland—from experienced choreographers and the young and hungry—happens at Conduit Dance (918 SW Yamhill Avenue, Suite 401) in the Pythian Building downtown. Here, audiences find performance, dancers find classes and space to dance, choreographers find space to work out their ideas and rehearse their companies. And Conduit has been at it or 14 years.

Now is the time for all good dance lovers to come to the aid of their Conduit. If you followed the hullabaloo over OBT’s financial crisis, you know that it’s tough times for arts organizations. And the small-to-mid sized are even harder hit. So go out and enjoy the We Are Conduit DANCE benefit concerts, July 31-Aug 1 & Aug 7-8, 8 PM nightly, $15-$100.

Here are the lineups for each night:

July 13-August 1
Ben Asriel, Linda Austin, Gregg Bielemeier, Key Turn Projct, Gavin Larsen (OBT), Josie Moseley, Tere Mathern Dance.

August 7-8
James Healey, Jim McGinn, Anne Mueller (OBT), Oslund+Co/Dance, POV DAnce, Tere Mathern Dance (Friday only), Candace Buchard & Adrian Fry (OBT) (Saturday only)

Read this history of Conduit and where it fits into Portland dance history that Martha Ullman-West wrote on the occasion of Conduit’s ten-year anniversary.

And Barry Johnson reports on the situation Conduit finds itself in, some ways out of it,, and why Conduit matters.