Tahni Holt and Linda Austin Invite You to Dine

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.

Mike Daisey is Coming for You (and You)

PICA brings monologist Mike Daisey back to Portland with a workshop of his new monologue, The Last Cargo Cult,
Saturday August 1 at 8 PM at the Wieden+Kennedy Atrium (224 NW 13th).

According to the press info, Last Cargo Cult “tells the true-life story of his time on a remote South Pacific island whose inhabitants worship America at the base of a constantly erupting volcano. In this riveting tale, Daisey explores their religion alongside our own to form a sharp and searing examination of the international financial crisis. Daisey wrestles with the largest questions of what the collapse means, and what it says about our deepest values. Part adventure story and part memoir, he uses each culture to illuminate the other to find, between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern, a human answer.”

Oaks

image via holocenemusic.com

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.

Meow Squared For PICA: Unwrapped

A little present for you, a present for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Unwrapped is PICA’s annual holiday fundraiser, and evening of performance with chanteuse Meow Meow doing it up with Pink Martini front-man, Thomas Lauderdale. It’s at the Wieden + Kennedy atrium (224 NW 13th) Saturday, December 6 from 7-10 PM. Tickets are $50.

City Dance

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.