Portland Spoke – The Official Blog of Travel Portland

Every year, the City of Roses throws itself a big party, and this year the Portland Rose Festival (May 24 – June 9) has adopted ”Portland’s Party” as its theme, promising more fun and festivity than ever. Best of all, you’re invited!

The fest kicks off with a spectacular fireworks show on Friday, May 24. For a great view, grab a seat on the Ferris wheel in the waterfront CityFair, which features rides, food and beer and live music. (This year, there’s also a second night of fireworks, on June 7.)

The 2013 concert lineup includes pop sensation Carly Rae Jepsen (June 9), country quartet Little Big Town (June 2), and indie rock bands Fitz And The Tantrums (May 26) and Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (May 25).

The evening Starlight Parade (June 1) features illuminated floats and a “Portlandia” section with syncopated drummers, roller derby teams and the Portland Zombie Walk. The fest’s hallmark event, the Grand Floral Parade (June 8), travels from Memorial Coliseum (where reserved seating is available), across the Willamette River and through downtown, delighting crowds with 17 all-floral floats, 18 marching bands and 19 equestrian units – in addition to vintage vehicles, colorful dancers and more. For a closer look at the impressive floats, check out the Grand Floral Float Showcase (June 8-9), adjacent to the CityFair.

Get to the fragrant source at the Portland Rose Society 125th Annual Spring Rose Show (June 6-7), the nation’s largest and longest-running rose show with more than 4,000 blooms in the Lloyd Center Ice Rink.

Last but not least, the Portland Rose Festival Dragon Boat Race (June 8-9) brings the party to the river as 80 local, national and international teams compete in ornate boats provided by the Portland-Kaohsiung Sister City Association.

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…)

With car sharing, pedal-powered gyms and 10,000 acres of leafy and grassy parkland, it’s no secret that Portland is a big fan of all things green. In fact, with the way that locals go about composting, recycling and repurposing waste, you could say we revel in eco-friendly fun every day. But the party becomes official when World Environment Day (June 5) is celebrated as a part of the Portland Rose Festival, the city’s signature event for going on 106 years.

An annual United Nations program dating back to 1972, World Environment Day (WED) is observed worldwide, raising awareness for climate and ecological issues while encouraging political attention and action. Portland’s piece of the party will be a rally at the RoZone fair in  Waterfront Park. The free afternoon event includes educational activities like story-telling sessions, mask-making seminars, fly-casting and -tying lessons, a trash art exhibition and the Procession of the Species mini-parade, where people dress as their favorite animals to give praise to the planet. Additional WED events are planned around the city.

The inspiring event is just a small part of both WED and the Portland Rose Festival, which for the last 14 years has been named the “Cleanest and Greenest Festival in America” by the International Festivals and Events Association. Get in on some of its old-fashioned, good clean fun, including perennial highlights like the opening-night fireworks (May 24), Starlight Parade (June 1), Grand Floral Parade (June 8) and Dragon Boat Races (June 8-9).

Photo by Dolan Halbrook via Flickr

It’s a small outdoor venue unlike any other: a grassy lawn, sloping down to a modestly-sized stage and bandshell, with an elephant yard on one side and a red ape reserve on the other. For the past 35 years, musicians and fans alike have flocked to the Oregon Zoo each summer to revel in music, sunshine and friends — including those of the feathered and furry varieties.

The 2013 Oregon Zoo Summer Concert Series (June 22 – Sept. 6) boasts a roster of artists as diverse as the park’s residents, which range from African bullfrogs to Visayan warty pigs. Folk singer/songwriter John Prine takes the stage on opening night; maybe he’ll perform “Crazy as a Loon,” a favorite of the birds in the nearby aviary. Ziggy Marley brings his Jamaican reggae to town on June 30 — his song “Black Cat” might elicit a roar from the zoo’s resident big cats. Other musical acts on the schedule include Weird Al Yankovic, the Indigo Girls, Randy Newman, the B-52s, Los Lobos and the Doobie Brothers. Alas, no Snoop Dog, er, Lion.

Shows start at 7 p.m., with access to the concert area at 5 p.m. Concert tickets also grant zoo access for the full day, so plan to visit the animals before the show. And whether you bring a picnic (no outside beverages) or enjoy the zoo’s selection of local food, beer and wine, be sure to fill up — after all, you wouldn’t want your stomach growling louder than the Amur tigers (or the bands).

It’s not easy to get to Hogwarts — the only train to travel there departs just once a year, and it leaves from a platform that’s nearly impossible to find. Instead, it may be easier to bring the entire Harry Potter universe to you, which is just what LeakyCon (June 27-30) will do.

An annual celebration of all things spellbinding, this fan gathering goes beyond the popular books and movies with a four-day program that includes everything from serious discussions of good and evil in the Harry Potter series to concerts by wizard rock bands. Talent shows, costume competitions and other such extravaganzas round out the event, which promises to be more fun than the Triwizard Tournament. (more…)

True story: Radiohead’s Thom Yorke once wanted to be Jim Morrison. Well, at least that’s what the band’s frontman sang in one of their earliest tracks, “Anyone Can Play Guitar.” During Rock Band Tuesdays at Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade, not only can anyone play guitar, but they can also be Yorke, Morrison or one of hundreds of other musicians in the iconic video game.

Ground Kontrol is a video-gamers’ Valhalla, crammed with 90+ classic coin-op masterpieces ranging from Pac-Man to Dance Dance Revolution. Serving beer and wine in the evenings, it’s a great place to relive 8-bit memories and also hosts DJs, twice-monthly free play nights and tournaments, in addition to Rock Band Tuesdays. (more…)

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…)

This year’s Bridgetown Comedy Festival (April 18-21) features a weekend full of shows at venues across the city. The intimately set stand-up acts, panel discussions and other special events invade Portland’s quintessential nightclubs and stages, from Helium Comedy Club, which hosts acts year-round, to Hawthorne Theater, better known for its high-voltage rock shows.

The just-announced roster includes laugh legend Dana Gould — who’s been around since the ’80s and has written for The Simpsons, internationally renowned beatboxer/musician/comedian Reggie Watts and British comics Robert Popper and Peter Serafinowicz, along with about 200 others. Whether you know their names or not, they’re pretty much guaranteed to make you laugh.