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.

Death & Taxes by Paige McKinney. Pictured: Beth Rankin Loy, Leah Wilmoth, Bonni Stover, Esther LaPointe, Taylor Young

Death & Taxes
Performance Works Northwest
4625 SE 67th
April 15-17 at 8:00 PM, and April 18 at 3:00 PM
$12-$15

This weekend, appropriately, Death & Taxes by Portland-based choreographer Paige McKinney concerns itself with, “how we confront uncertainty and negotiate the fraying edges of the things we hold dear.”

We couldn’t watch McKinney developing the work in the studio, but we can watch her think through the process as she writes several versions of program notes for Death & Taxes on her newly-minted blog. This is my favorite:

From a short list of common human behaviors, like walking, talking, looking around, and a compendium of gestures both mundane and rococo, I culled a movement vocabulary expansive enough to provide fodder for an evening (albeit a short one) of dance performance, yet conceptually flexy-bendy enough to lend itself to recombination, extension, abbreviation, and all the varieties of loving mutilation we inflict on our material in the dance studio.

Even though these sometimes deeply personal gestures have undergone many rounds of abstraction and de-personalization, they are a little shy around strangers. Performing this vocabulary, this movement-language, is like whispering in your ear: you might hear it, you might not, but the important thing is that you leaned in close to hear it at all.

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