Review: Linda Austin and The Metaphysics of Notation

“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.

Through the Lens

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

Temporary Roadmaps

Looking foward to Temporary Roadmaps, the trio of artists and their video/performance/voice/installation/sound pieces sound x-citing. Part of the Alembic Series at Performance Works NorthWest (4625 SE 67th), Temporary Roadmaps is an evening of experimental video performance curated by Karl Lind (ODDS AND ENDS screening series) featuring artists Ed Mellnik, Stephanie Simek and Adam Keller.

Temporary Roadmaps runs two nights July 17 and 18 at 8:30 PM. Admission is $8-10 (sliding scale) and you can reserve tickets at 503 777 1907 or purchase at Brown Paper Tickets.

Here’s the program:
ED MELLNIK

1) The Moment—A poem for three voices by Toby Lurie performed in live and video space.
2) The Door—a short video
3) Subjective Space- Third Movement—a short video with music by Roger Luther.
4) Excepts from “The Other Side of the Echo”—a work in progress involving both live actors and projected video. Music by Mother Mallards Portable Masterpiece Company

STEPHANIE SIMEK

Statement for Brea(d)th:

It’s sad that the air is the only
thing we share.
No matter how close we get to each other,
there is always air between us.

It’s also nice that we share the air.
No matter how far apart we are,
the air links us.
-Yoko Ono

Drawing from the poem “Air Talk” by Yoko Ono (which later became a song on her Approximately Infinite Universe album in 1973), this performance connects participants in various cities around the world in a real-time experience of global community. Brea(d)th uses webcams positioned at the sky from these different locations, with each member reciting a dissected part of the poem, causing the fragments of speech to converge, disengage, and layer when broadcasted together.

ADAM KELLER

An ArcEnabled Performance
Described as “Part ritual, part laser light show,” ArcEnabled is based on a video installation Keller created for the PDXFest. “Thousands of strings hanging from above form a canopy of colored lights, and are accompanied by sound collage and vocal performance. This piece follows an arc from the quiet hum of nighttime rainfall to a fully enabled state of awareness, where anything is possible, and all choices present themselves at once.”

Mr. Watts and Co.

The award for best use of a stage hand for PICA’s TBA Festival 2008 goes to Reggie Watts who employed a ski-masked stage hand in numerous clever and deadpan tasks.

Seattle performer Reggie Watt’s Transformation (playing again today and tomorrow) was essentially a smart musical variety show, funny/entertaining, not unlike Sonny & Cher (skits, stories, sketches, songs…you know the drill) except with much better music: Reggie Watts is an incredible musical performer, creating layered R&B vocals with witty, self-effacing lyrics on the fly over his own beatboxing with his little looping box.

When we were sitting in the boxy Winningstad before the show began, we were thinking it felt a bit like the Globe Theater, with two tiers of wrap-around balconies. So it was great that the show started off with fake high theater: Watts doing “An Soliloquoy” as the projection noted was brilliant, musing on love with pompous tone and liberal misuse of language. The show hit sex, drugs, rock n roll, as well as racism and guns, had a good supporting cast, but was ultimately uneven. Video, it should be noted, was used to great effect a couple of times, particularly in a bit about the socially net(over)worked.

Extra points to Watts for use of the word “zenith,” a favorite.

In the ladies’ room afterward a sexegenarian was overheard saying that she thought she was too old to appreciate the show, “It was meant for a 23 year old,” she said. A septuagenarian disagreed as do we. It’s numerous pop-cultural references including a story Watts told about an incident involving fire extinguishers, Robitussin®, and a borrowed car clearly put the target audience closer to latter tricenarian/early quadragenarian.

Also: one of the Watts’ company was a Sam Adams doppleganger. Yes?

Richard Foreman Mini-Festival Times Six

10 days, a chunk of text from the online notebooks of avant-garde writer/director Richard Foreman, and 15 teams of Portland performers, dancers, actors, musicians, writers, and filmmakers are the ingredients of the Sixth Annual Richard Foreman Mini-Festival, a benefit for Performanceworks Northwest (4625 SE 67th). The teams have a little over a week to take pieces of Foreman’s notoriously abstract, confounding, approaching-narrative text (often mini-conversations or declarations) and make a short piece out of it. See the results this Friday and Saturday nights, August 15 and 16 at 8:30 PM. Tickets $15 and up, sliding scale.