When Hollywood decides to depict a specific trade, dramatic license usually trumps veracity. Think all those cop movies truly depict an average day in the life and thinking of a policeman? How about the hilarious world of newspaper hacks in the likes of The Front Page? Black Swan, the new horror film with a ballet [...]
As regular readers may recall, the Small Large Smelly Boy (a.k.a. Felix/Martha) is a lover of the ballet. Not so much contemporary dance — at 13, he’s a classicist at heart — but definitely the ballet. That made a trip to this year’s production of George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker at Oregon Ballet Theatre a command [...]
Martha Ullman West, Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, shares some modern and classical moments with dancer/choreographer Rachel Tess and rediscovers that the distance between old and new is often whisker-thin.
By Martha Ullman West
I took thoroughly modern choreographer Rachel Tess to the opening matinee of Balanchine’s The Nutcracker with me on opening day last Saturday, the day [...]
By Bob Hicks
Shocking as it may seem, sometimes the denizens of Art Scatter World Headquarters don’t give it away for free.
“If I can’t sell it gonna keep sittin’ on it, never gonna give it away,” the hard-bitten narrator of the bawdy blues tune Keep on Truckin’ declares. Her hardcore-capitalist sentiment is definitely not the motto [...]
By Bob Hicks
HARD NUT: It’s been a lot of years since I’ve seen The Hard Nut, Mark Morris’s pared-down version of The Nutcracker, but I’ve always more than liked it. It’s lean yet lush, beautifully framed, and intensely musical.
You still occasionally hear people refer to it as Morris’s winking bad-boy spoof of the ubiquitous holiday [...]
The place to be in Portland Tuesday night was the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company was performing in town for the first time since 2004. As if that weren’t draw enough, the program provided the world premiere of Portland choreographer Josie Moseley’s “Inherit,” a solo for Graham dancer Samuel [...]
By Bob Hicks
The thing about so many Scatterers is that they don’t just observe, they also participate. Bronislaw Malinowski and Margaret Mead would be so pleased.
Tonight we head to the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, where the legendary Martha Graham Dance Company trods a Portland stage for the first time since 2004. One way to think [...]
By Bob Hicks
It’s true. Mr. Scatter, in his semi-official capacity as regional chronicler of the wintry festivities, has published a pair of guides to holiday concerts and shows in this morning’s A&E section of The Oregonian.
Three weeks before Thanksgiving. But not, in Mr. Scatter’s defense, before Halloween. (And in that regard, ask Mrs. Scatter sometime [...]
By Bob Hicks
If the theater is truly the Fabulous Invalid, is any subsection of it any more fabulously ailing than the Broadway musical — and more of a fabulously unlikely survivor?
Before last night’s opening of the eagerly anticipated touring production of In the Heights at Portland’s Keller Auditorium, the last musical Mr. Scatter had seen [...]
By Bob Hicks
“People must love fairy tales,” the fellow said, and then he laughed, in something that sounded like happy, faintly embarrassed resignation. “Me, too, I guess,” his laughter seemed to say.
The man and his companion were standing behind Mr. Scatter’s shoulders, in a Keller Auditorium crowded with people on their feet, most clapping loudly [...]