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
POSTED: February 8th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: dance | TAGS: beth loy, bonni stover, dance, danielle ross, esther lapointe, future death toll, jean paul jenkins, keyon gaskin, leah wilmoth, lillian rossetti, linda austin, little friction dance, music, paige mckinney, performance, portland, robert tyree, suniti dernovsek, tahni holt, taylor young, thomas thorson, valentine's | No Comments »
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.
POSTED: February 7th, 2010 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: dance | TAGS: angela fair, angelle hebert, artist, cydney wilkes, dance, david eckard, ethan rose, joshua berger, kristan kennedy, linda austin, linda k. johnson, lisa radon, pica, plazm, portland, tahni holt, tiffany lee brown | No Comments »
Seeing, seer, and seen are the subject and object of Tahni Holt’s dance piece event.space. that happened Thursday and Friday nights at The Cleaners. Not “seer” in the sense of fortune teller but in the sense of the seen asking, “What are you lookin’ at?” And more precisely, through what means do you see what you see? The large panes of glass of the windows of The Cleaners separated the audience on the sidewalk from the dancers within, thus providing the biggest of big screens through which we witnessed Holt’s dance as if on faux TV or computer monitor.
I recently had interesting conversations with Portland artist Paige Saez about YouTube as vehicle, as voyeurism, as window, as feedback loop…teen girls, in the case of Saez’ recent work, lip syncing and dancing in their underwear/pajamas to a pop song. For her video work, Saez recruited fellow artists to reenact the amateur reenactment of whatever the original video was, feeding back to the feedback.
In event.space. the dancers are subject (object), audience, and symbol (of pixel). There are three “primary” dancers–Sally Girrado-Spencer, Suzanne Chi, and Julie Katch–costumed in primary colors: red, blue, yellow. And there are perhaps a dozen more movers dressed in white. Holt herself did not dance in the piece, but the primary dancers wore quintessentially Holt movement well. The majority of the primaries’ movement was as if they were being controlled, pulled (often backward) in a jerky, marionette kind of way. Intentional, forward-directed movement was a lesser part of the mix, and often meant following or really marking, blankly, the movement of another. A particularly exciting sequence, executed thrice was the forward progression of Chi in a bent and tortured way, followed by Katch, appearing from behind a white curtain enacting a more joyful, armswinging phrase, then <PAUSE> both abruptly <REWIND> the phrase with Katch exiting. <PAUSE> <PLAY> Repeat. The blank-faced execution here was so brilliant, aping the confessional video face of the communicator who cannot see his audience through the video camera and so the eyes never connect, engage the viewer.
At first, the white-clad movers rivetingly play observer, adhering to the wall, they watch and track: moving in the direction of the “primary” dancers. And if you weren’t already clued into the nature of the piece, their role as observed obervers sets the stage. Later they are facilitators of movement for the primaries, armature, foil, and briefly container. And near the end they engage in a great moment in which they walk in seemingly random directions into and out of line formations, held briefly. Several times throughout the piece, the movers in white gather around a long-haired blond “singer” in a lavender shirt aping a music video while we, the audience, hear a “Lilias Yoga and You” type of voice issuing calm movement instructions that have nothing to do with what we’re seeing. The one sour/obvious note of the whole piece–missed by my companion so maybe missed by the majority of the audience, remaing the performers’ inside joke–was that the singer and silent chorus were mouthing (while pointing at us) “All the lonely people, where do they all come from?” That the watcher is the lonely, pathetic individual, face illuminated by the glow of the screen, is a simplistic take on a complex phenomenon that ignores, among many other things (social media) the participatory culture of feedback, remix, and connection associated with consumption via the screen.
The primaries do address the glass wall between them and audience in movement sequences on the window sills pressed up against the glass, but they operate at a cold, detached remove from the viewer. Because the space is on a streetcorner with two walls of glass, the audience also watches the audience watch the piece.
And when was the last time you saw the lighting elements as actors in a dance piece? Here, red, yellow, blue spots created by spotlights on wheeled carts moved by movers in white engaged space and dancer, slowly, deliberately as if they were John Baldessari spots (transparently) come to life. They played over ceiling, wall, dancer, and occasionally audience member bathed in red. Kudos to Malina Rodriguez for lighting design.
The score by Thomas Thorson was occasionally funny: Holt’s opening lip-synched welcome–out of sync by a mile–drew laughs as did (oddly) the occasionally cougar growl during the piece. There were moments of processed (echo, metallic) water sounds and scritchy crackling which worked well with the jerkier, marionettesque movements. One downside: while the audience chuckled at the recorded sound of streetcar (the site is located between streetcar rails on 10th and 11th) incorporated into the score, this inclusion felt wrong: this piece was not about the space it inhabited but something else entirely. To allow sound of place to be recurring element of score would have worked better for a dance piece that was concerned with its site.
A gripe (and I’m probably one of few who will be bothered by it): red, yellow, and blue, while primaries are not the colors from which your screen experience is created. Screen colors are RGB, or red, green, blue, the palette of colored light from which the millions of colors you see on television and monitor are created, pixel by pixel. So for me, the costumes, as crisply stunning as their colors were (considering they were essentially 80s thrift store dresses) did battle with what I perceived to be the conceptual underpinning of the piece concerning the audience’s experience of the work through the “monitor” or “screen.” But there’s no argument that they weren’t visually arresting.
POSTED: April 11th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: dance | TAGS: art, cleaners at the ace hotel, contemporary dance, dance, portland dance, tahni holt | 1 Comment »
One of Portland’s most interesting choreographers, Tahni Holt, has been thinking about our almost universal voyeurism and our mediated culture, the ways we experience viewing others at a remove through the technology of recording device and screen.
Continuing work began when Holt was artist-in-residence at the South Waterfront in 2008, Holt stages .event.space. at The Cleaners at the Ace Hotel tonight and tomorrow night, April 9th and 10th at 7 and 9 PM with a live feed at tahniholt.com. As before, the performance takes place inside a space with generous windows; the audience watches from outside, separated from the action by the glass, a circumstance (monitor, television screen) to which we’ve become accustomed.
Holt says, “.event.space. ruminates on our voyeuristic tendencies in our everyday lives and how these tendencies manifest in modes of architecture and technology.” Expect strategies of recording and playback (fast-forwarding, rewinding and slow motioning) “lighting plots are powered by human form [lighting design by Malina Rodriguez], colored animation arises amidst black and white, and a song split in thirds [score: Thomas Thorson] becomes a place keeper of time.”
Don’t miss it.
POSTED: April 9th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: art, contemporary dance, tahni holt | No Comments »