Being in Love With Nature Theater of Oklahoma

Get this set up: the performance is built from over 100 hours of recorded telephone conversations between members of the company, their family and friends. There’s no script, just a four-hour recording of the conversations fed into the performers’ ears from iPod nanos. They sync the nanos just before they go on stage. None of the performers deliver dialogue from their own conversations. The performers actions and locations on the stage are chance-based, in this case determined by a draw of playing cards, not dice, hence the title, No Dice.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma performs the four-hour No Dice as part of PICA’s TBA Festival in an undeveloped space in the Art Institute for the few nights beginning at 6:30 PM. If four hours seems a bit long to you, know that it comes with a ham sandwich and a soda.

These are ferociously committed performers who are capable of making you laugh until you hurt.

Liz Haley: Polygraph

In a little glass room on the mezzanine at Portland Center Stage’s Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW 11th), artist Liz Haley will tell you anything, just ask. Of course her answers may be lies, she doesn’t promise to truthtell, only that she will answer you while hooked up to a custom made polygraph machine. Polygraph is Portland artist Haley’s latest project, this time for PICA’s TBA Festival.

If, as was acknowledged yesterday at the noontime discussion for PICA’s TBA Festival between members of the Dutch performance group Kassys and NYC theater group Nature Theater of Oklahoma, all theater is lies and levels of fakery, it’s only slightly more lie-y than real life in which CEO’s, the President, and your lover tell you varying degrees of their own self-serving truths with various degrees of sincerity. And what about art and performance? Artists may make work with the conceit of getting at truths, but are just as prone to the convenience of untruths (great how we keep saying truth in the plural…as if there can be more than one! Where are the absolutes?! Is it all shades of grey? Oh.)

Would you take a polygraph test? Is there anyone you’d care to hook up to the polygraph? How much truth is too much? Consider the questions you will ask Liz Haley (friend or stranger) and what they say about you? What will you ask knowing that the performance/installation is videotaped?

Haley’s program notes quote Mark Twain, “A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.”

Liz Haley is holding regular office hours at the Gerding Theater at the Armory tonight until 7 PM and Friday through Sunday from 1-3 PM.

Kommer

The best humor doesn’t come in with a sledgehammer but a feather duster, each feather a tiny shock of recognition. In Kommer (Sorrow) by the Dutch company Kassys in town for PICA’s TBA:07 Festival, six people deal with the discomfort of not knowing just what to do with themselves and each other in the face of a loss. They make stabs at expressions of grief, at empathy, and an everything’s-okay normalcy that repeatedly go subtly, comically awry. Fidgeting, for example, has never been so funny. Hang onto your house plants.

I want theater that holds up its mirror as a kaleidoscope, that issues an invitation not a command, patient theater that allows for discovery and innovates smartly to “make it new” (i.e. gambit not gimmick). Kassys delivers.
The piece starts with the line, “How are you?” and continues in its second half with an unspoken, “No really, how are you?” asked of its solitary characters in circumstances that, like the lines of dialogue reportedly culled from a soap opera, seem all too familiar.

The final performance of Kommer is tonight at Lincoln Hall at PSU at 8:30 PM.

–Radon

We Are The Excellent Birds

“Once a great flock of migrating birds gathered in a shallow river….”

Last evening, a flock of 100 (or so) Portlander singers gathered on the brick steps in Pioneer Square for Rinde Eckert’s performance On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds for the launch of PICA’s TBA:07 Festival.

The piece was conducted by Eckert (and an unnamed chorus master) who turned over his shoulder to instruct the five accordionists behind him and guided the chorus in front of him with hand gestures and a fire whistle to begin and end actions like whistling and birdlike, twitchy head movements alternating with primarily simple and repetitive choral segments (“We Aaaare The Ex-cel-lent Birds!”) that were lovely and powerful as only a group of 100 voices can be. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to Time-Based Art

In about one hour, we’ll be able to officially say, “It’s on.” Today is Day One of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival. At noon-thirty today TBA:07 Artistic Director Mark Russell, Performing Arts Program Director Erin Boberg Doughton, and Visual Arts Program Director Kristan Kennedy give a fest overview while the Rinde Eckert kickoff is in Pioneer Square at 6:30 PM for On the Great Migration of Excellent Birds featuring a guest chorus of all of your friends and neighbors who can sing.