Portland Spoke – The Official Blog of Travel Portland

Here are some of Portland’s performing arts highlights for May and June (also see classical music and visual arts highlights)

"The People's Republic of Portland" at Portland Center Stage.z

The People’s Republic of Portland
April 23 – June 15
Portland Center Stage, 117 N.W. 11th Ave.

Comic writer/performer Lauren Weedman (“Bust”) has lurked around Portland for a couple of years now, and her account of what makes the city tick (or her take on the city’s tics) should be both hilarious and enlightening. Think of her as a Stranger in a Strange Land in this world premiere.

Ten Chimneys
April 23 – May 26
Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 S.W. Morrison St.

A cast loaded with excellent Portland actors and directed by incoming Artistic Director Damaso Rodriguez has already received excellent notices for the West Coast premiere of this Jeffrey Hatcher comedy. It’s a theater play, set in the Wisconsin home of famous Broadway couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, where it’s hard to tell when someone is acting and when life is unspooling on its own.

Bodyvox celebrates its 15th season

Fifteen
May 2-18
BodyVox, 1201 N.W. 17th Ave.

This Portland company is hard to describe: a blend of modern dance, ballet, acrobatics, film and slapstick comedy, all intended to subvert expectations — for what’s next, for what “dance” is supposed to look like, for the limits of physical comedy. Celebrating its 15th year, the company (led by Jamie Hampton and Ashley Roland) revisits its repertory for a “best of the best” in two separate programs.

The Left Hand of Darkness
May 2 – June 2
Portland Playhouse, 602 N.E. Prescott St.

One of the city’s best small theater companies, Portland Playhouse, has joined forces with one of the most inventive performance units in town, Hand2Mouth Theatre, to adapt the great 1969 science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, another Portlander. “The Left Hand of Darkness” takes place on a cold planet where the humanoids are both male and female (or neither), leading to a variety of speculations about gender, behavior, politics and psychology in our own world. (more…)

Here are some of Portland’s classical music highlights for May and June (also see performing arts and visual arts highlights):

"Falstaff" by the Portland Opera at the Keller Auditorium (Photo courtesy Portland Opera)

Falstaff
May 10-18
Portland Opera, Keller Auditorium, 222 S.W. Clay St.

A comic masterpiece, Giuseppi Verdi’s final opera puts Shakespeare’s greatest fool front and center and surrounds him with some of the composer’s finest music.

The Big Oh!
Resonance Ensemble
May 11 (Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road) and May 12 (Alberta Rose Theatre, 3000 N.E. Alberta St.)

The top-flight choir’s season comes to a climax in a clever concert featuring music about the peak of pleasure, from Verdi, Wagner, Bruckner, Monteverdi, Mozart and other randy classical composers.

Spring Concert
May 12
Portland Youth Philharmonic, Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 S.W. Broadway

The quality displayed by the nation’s oldest youth orchestra continues to belie its teenage members’ ages, and conductor David Hattner crafts an excellent program of masterpieces from the 21st (Christopher Theofanidis’s dazzling “Visions and Miracles”) and 20th centuries (Stravinsky’s game-changing “Symphonies of Wind Instruments” and Bartók’s thrilling Concerto for Orchestra), plus Romantic Polish composer Henryk Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No. 2.

Theo Bleckmann, Refuge Trio singer (photo by John Labbe)

Refuge Trio
May 16
Mission Theater & Pub, 1624 N.W. Glisan St.

Two stars of the jazz-meets-contemporary-classical movement, singer Theo Bleckmann and drummer John Hollenbeck, join the superb erstwhile Oregonian pianist/keyboardist Gary Versace in this PDX Jazz concert.

Arrivederci Portland!
PSU Chamber Choir
May 17 (St. Stephen’s Catholic Church, 1112 S.E. 41st Ave.) and May 19 (Kairos-Milwaukie United Church of Christ, 4790 S.E. Logus Road, Milwaukie)

The award-winning choristers sing for their plane fare to Italy, where they will be the first American choir to compete in the prestigious, half-century old Seghizzi International Competition for Choral Singing. They’ll regale the judges there, and Portland listeners here, with American folksongs, hymns, spirituals and music by contemporary composers such as Eric Whitacre and Eriks Esenvalds, plus Romantic masters like Verdi, Mendelssohn and Rachmaninoff.

Oh, Those Gershwin Boys
Portland Chamber Orchestra
June 8 (Century High School, 2000 S.E. Century Blvd., Hillsboro) and June 9 (Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road)

Rocky Blumhagen and Susannah Mars join the orchestra for a musical biography of one of America’s greatest masters of music, as viewed from the perspectives of his brother/collaborator Ira and his paramour Kay Swift.

A Muse of Fire
Chamber Music Northwest
June 24 (Kaul Auditorium, 3203 S.E. Woodstock Blvd.) and June 25 (Catlin Gabel School,  8825 S.W. Barnes Road)

The venerable annual summer festival kicks off with the renowned husband-and-wife, cellist-and-pianist team of David Finckel and Wu Han, playing music by Brahms, Beethoven and Bruch.

Here are some of Portland’s visual highlights for May and June (also see performing arts and classical music highlights):

Fred Sandback/Julia Dault
April 5 – June 8
The Lumber Room, 419 N.W. Ninth Ave.

This two-artist exhibition in one of the Pearl’s most architecturally beautiful and quietly hidden spaces takes simplicity and tension as its key. Dault’s softly threatening sculpture of bound plastic in the lower gallery gives way to Sandback’s minimal installations in the main room. Existing almost as drawings in space, his skeins of yarn transform the sunlit gallery into a three-dimensional canvas.

George Kuchar (photo by Mary Pacios)

George Kuchar: An Exhibition
Through August 2016, see website for showings
YU Contemporary, 800 S.E. 10th Ave.

Part of an ongoing exhibition of Kuchar’s films, YU Contemporary is endeavoring to screen all of the filmmaker’s more than 200 works. Some will be introduced and guest curated by local artists and critics, lending a semi-structure to the lo-fi, no-budget oeuvre that has been deemed at once campy as well as sublimely profound. Some are bad, some are good, some are both.

Julie Green and Buddy Bunting
April 16 – May 17
The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, 17600 Pacific Hwy, Marylhurst

Addressing incarceration and the prison system, Julie Green’s “The Last Supper: 500 Plates” and Buddy Bunting’s “The Prison Industrial Complex” are two exhibitions that use traditional methods to explore highly pertinent contemporary sociopolitical issues. Green’s painted plates of death row inmates’ last meal requests resemble the delicate intricacies of blue and white Delftware while Bunting’s watercolors of prison architecture are anything but cold and gray. (more…)

Solling Pedersen, 1978, Denmark

Bikes are big in Portland. Like 300-plus miles of bike lanes big. So big that we were dubbed “America’s Best Bike City” by Bicycling Magazine in 2012 — another in a list of accolades that stretches about as far as the aforementioned bike lanes.

Since art imitates life, it makes sense that the Portland Art Museum will feature a stunning array of iconic bicycle designs with “Cyclepedia” (June 8 – Sept. 8), a special exhibition of 40 two-wheelers integral to bike design.

T & C Pocket Bici, c. 1963, Italy

Featuring touring, racing, mountain and even children’s bikes, the display is a comprehensive look at the evolution of bicycles, and is required ogling for riders and design buffs alike. Fittingly, Portland is the only U.S. stop for this European collection.

With accompanying programs like public workshops, lectures, locally made bike displays and even free bike tours in June and July, this exhibit offers an excellent way to get a peek at Portland’s pedal-powered culture.

Heading into its 29th year, Portland’s Cinco de Mayo Fiesta (May 3-5) kicks off a summer of celebration in Waterfront Park, downtown’s stretch of green space along the Willamette River that’s home to concerts, festivals and events of all kinds. This three-day fiesta, presented by the Portland Guadalajara Sister City Association, celebrates Mexican-American culture with music, dance, carnival rides, lucha libre wrestling and plenty of authentic food.

Happily, Portland enjoys great Mexican food year-round (and all over town) tucked, folded and wrapped into a variety of burritos. Here are five favorites you can enjoy anytime: (more…)

If you could do it all over again, would you? Beware if you say yes, because you might end up seeing things quite differently the second time around.

In Anything But Brilliant – A Love Story, Sam, a middle-aged playwright, turns back the pages of his own life in the days following the death of his partner, Jesse. But the story he relives is two parts memories and one part fiction, an intoxicating tonic that stirs through him as he struggles to complete a script that, in many ways, holds his own personal narrative together. Running Thursday – Saturday through April 20 at Southeast Portland’s Profile Theatre, this rich yet earnest production interweaves multiple art forms, including music, poetry and experimental staging, to explore the love that exists — in life and in death — between these partners. Both sorrowful and seductive, Anything But Brilliant is as much about learning and loving as it is about letting go.

Every Thursday during its run, you can see the play for a “pay what you can” rate, and the April 13 show will benefit Basic Rights Oregon and will be followed by a discussion of marriage equality.

Tickets are available in advance at Lights Up! Productions.

Here are some of Portland’s performing arts highlights for March and April (also see music highlights):

“The Whipping Man”
Feb. 26-March 24
Portland Center Stage, 117 N.W. 11th Ave.
The Civil War is suddenly in the national consciousness, thanks to “Lincoln”� and “Django Unchained,”� and this odd and very successful play by Matthew Lopez is set in the aftermath, when a Jewish Confederate returns home, just in time for Passover, to find the family mansion occupied by two former slaves, who were also raised Jewish.

Don Kenneth Mason and Ben Newman in Blood Knot. Photo by Jamie Bosworth.

“Blood Knot”
Feb. 27-March 17
Profile Theatre, 3430 S.E. Belmont St.

Profile Theatre (like the Signature Theatre in New York) chooses one playwright every year to build its season around, and this year’s is the great South African writer, Athol Fugard, whose descriptions of the moral tensions of living under apartheid are among the very best we have.

MOMIX
Feb. 27-March 2
White Bird, Newmark Theatre, 1111 S.W. Broadway

Moses Pendleton, who was a co-founder of the dance acrobats of Pilobolus, formed MOMIX in 1981 to extend his experiments in movement and illusion. Here, the company will perform the kaleidoscopic “Botanica,”� with puppetry by Portland’s Michael Curry (“The Lion King”).

(more…)

Here are some of Portland’s classical music highlights for March and April (also see performing arts highlights):

Bang on a Can's Michael Gordon

“When Michael Meets Julia”�
Feb. 28-March 1
Third Angle, Alberta Rose Theater, 3000 N.E. Alberta St.

A band, a festival, an organization and a continuing revolution, New York’s Bang on a Can has, for a quarter-century, reinvigorated classical music with the pulsating rhythms of rock, minimalism and other contemporary sounds.

Bang on a Can's Julie Wolfe

For about the same stretch, Third Angle has showcased some of the most original and accessible music being composed in the classical tradition, so this pairing of Oregon’s finest new music ensemble with the striking music of (and appearances by) two of BOAC’s (married) cofounders, Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon, is the season’s happiest combination.

“Back in the USSR”�
March 2 (Resonance Ensemble, Agnes Flanagan Chapel, Lewis & Clark College, 0615 S.W. Palatine Hill Road) and March 3 (Yale Union [YU], 800 S.E. 10th Ave.)

One of the city’s finest collections of singers drawn from other top choirs sings seldom-heard sounds, long imprisoned in the Soviet era’s artistic gulag, by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt and other Eastern European composers.

March Music Moderne
March 7-23
Various venues

The annual citywide celebration of contemporary music reveals that, despite the musty programming of too many of Portland’s classical institutions, the 20th and 21st centuries have produced a cornucopia of compelling sounds. All 32 concerts, many free or low-cost, are worth checking out; top picks include the preview party potpourri (March 7), Free Marz String Trio (March 8), Arnica Quartet (March 15), Beta Collide (March 16), Third Angle (March 21) and City of Tomorrow Wind Quintet and Northwest New Music (March 23).

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From masses to operas, films to cartoons, classical music has found a way of evolving with the times. So it should come as no surprise to fans of complex compositions that video games are now yielding some of the most beloved tunes of our times. And like a trip to the ol’ fairy pond, Oregon Symphony’s The Legend of Zelda: Symphony of the Goddesses (March 16) will have heart containers overflowing with 25 years of classic Nintendo musical scores, reviving nostalgia for everyone’s favorite Triforce-powered hero, Link.

A one-night-only adventure at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, this performance is all-ages, multimedia fun, covering theme songs from Hyrule’s dungeons to Kakariko Village — all set to a cinematic video presentation, and arranged into a four-part symphony. The concert, conducted by Eimear Noone and performed by the Oregon Symphony and Pacific Youth Choir, spans games from The Legend of Zelda to Twilight Princess, and has been approved by the games’ original composer, Koji Kondo.

Attendees are encouraged to suit up and represent the vast reaches of Hyrule, with the winning costume taking home the show’s 6-foot window banner, autographed by the conductor. With all those Zeldas, Ganons, fairies and gorons, there’s sure to be plenty of spectacle along with the symphonics. But please leave your ocarinas at home — it’s time to let someone else play.

Heading into this year’s Oscar season, it’s clear that as much ground as women have gained in the film industry in recent years, they still have to campaign hard for the recognition they deserve. This unfortunate truth becomes evident when browsing the 2012 Best Director Academy Award nominees, which include no female filmmakers, despite several strong entrants.

That’s why efforts like the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival (March 7-10) are so crucial. For the past five years, this annual event (also known as POWFest) has championed female filmmakers of every genre. Each year, in addition to showing dozens of women-directed movies, hosting social mixers and running topical talks, the festival celebrates an industry luminary. Past featured directors include MacArthur genius grant filmmaker Allison Anders, documentarian Irene Taylor-Brodsky, Little Women’s Gillian Armstrong and Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow, who helmed The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. This year’s icon, Penelope Spheeris, can speak to being both a cult legend and pop icon, with a resume that ranges from The Decline of Western Civilization to Wayne’s World.

This year’s POWfest will grace the screens of Portland’s Hollywood Theatre with shorts, features and documentaries from as far away as New Zealand and Kenya — promising four days of hard-hitting, fantastic female filmmaking. The documentary Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines is sure to inspire moviegoers, while the short There’s No Shame in AIDS will likely ground them and encourage them to continue exploring life’s struggles through films directed by women.