By Bob Hicks
I’ve just posted this story at Oregon Arts Watch on last night’s opening show of Skinner/Kirk Dance Ensemble’s run at BodyVox Dance Center. Four good dances, including Josie Moseley’s splendid new Flying Over Emptiness. Pictured above: Eric Skinner and Daniel Kirk in Moseley’s new dance, a tribute to fellow choreographer Mary Oslund. Photo: [...]
Art Scatter chief correspondent Martha Ullman West sends along this note about the Portland memorial service for Mark Goldweber, the founding ballet master of Oregon Ballet Theatre, who died last month from lymphoma at age 53. Goldweber, who made and kept many friends here, moved on to ballet-master positions at the Joffrey Ballet and then [...]
By Bob Hicks
What’s been cooking lately in the Scatter kitchen? Well, a lovely baked dressing made up mostly of mushrooms, celery, onions and leftover bread slices (Mrs. Scatter’s clean-out-the-fridge creation). And another batch of baklazhannia ikra, or “poor man’s caviar,” an addictive eggplant/tomato/onion/pepper relish that William Grimes discovered recently in one of those great old [...]
Patrick Weishampel
By Martha Ullman West
I’ve already expressed my outrage at the comments posted on Marty Hughley’s preview of Oklahoma! in The Oregonian that confirmed what I already knew: We are decades away from a post-racial society, whatever that means. It will be a joyful day when we celebrate our differences rather than [...]
James McGrew
By Martha Ullman West
Last night I returned to Keller Auditorium because I wanted to see again Nicolo Fonte’s highly detailed urban rendering of Petrouchka, and to see Haiyan Wu dance Micaela in Carmen. I’m very glad I did.
Apparently, for some readers, I failed to convey in my original review for The Oregonian that [...]
Blaine Truitt Covert/OBT
By Bob Hicks
Last weekend I went to two dances and a play. The dances were Petrouchka and No Man’s Land. The play was Carmen.
This was odd, because No Man’s Land, a sort-of-comic psychic tussle at Artists Repertory Theatre, is by the revered British playwright Harold Pinter, whose brand of rhythmically menacing theater has [...]
25 candles for First Thursday
BodyVox leans horizontally
William Hurt and Harold Pinter duke it out
Wordstock throws a bookapalooza
Oregon Arts Watch puts on a show (times three)
A double feature at Oregon Ballet Theatre
Portland Open Studios’ peek behind the scenes
By Bob Hicks
Good lord, what a weekend. Used to be, a person who really tried could actually keep up [...]
In the past few months Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, has been (as The New Yorker likes to say about its own correspondents) far-flung. We could tell you how much flinging she’s been up to, but it seems more appropriate to let her tell you herself. We will mention, however, that one of [...]
By Bob Hicks
Bless me, reader, for I have sinned.
For 40 years Moses wandered in the wilderness. And for roughly the same amount of time I have stumbled through the landmines of contemporary culture, wearing the sackcloth of the most extreme form of penitent journalist.
I have been a critic.
Well, apparently I have. That’s what everyone tells [...]
By Bob Hicks
Shoving Deborah Jowitt out the door because she’s not “negative” enough is like firing God because he took that seventh day off. It’s short-sighted, presumptuous, and bound to come back and bite you in the butt.
So, ouch to Village Voice arts editor Brian Parks, who pulled the plug — at least, in the [...]