By Bob Hicks

The other day I posted this essay, BodyVox cuts to the Hollywood chase, on Oregon ArtsWatch. It’s about BodyVox dance’s cannily amusing ode to the movies, The Cutting Room, which continues through May 19. In the piece, I dive into the pool where film, dance and music swim around in existential, essentially nonverbal waters, and I try not to sink. An excerpt:

What The Cutting Room achieves is to distill the essence of movie storytelling without weighting it down with any actual story. And it has fun doing it. It’s a situational comedy, a comedy of mood and ritual trappings. “Stella!” a voice cries; or, “I’ll have what she’s having”; or “I know that you and Frank were planning to disconnect me, and I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen”; and we all know what the scene is and where, in Hollywood dreamland, we are. It’s as comfortable and comforting as reciting The Lord’s Prayer.

Photo courtesy BodyVox: Jonathan Krebs (top) and Jamey Hampton.

Portland, a city at last? It’s just possible that Peter Pan is growing up.

Last weekend I saw three plays – the premiere of The Storm in the Barn at Oregon Children’s Theatre; Next to Normal at Artists Rep; and The Bridge, an adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, at Cerimon House. The experience led to this post, What if we woke up and found we’re a city?, on Oregon Arts Watch.

In the post, I discover myself wandering amid “an unruly flowering of culture, often in surprising places.” An excerpt:

“It’s easy to poke fun at it, Portlandia-style. And in the not-so-grand Portland tradition it’s still being done on a broken shoestring. To be clear: Portland isn’t New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, despite a lot of hopeful hype. For one thing, those cities actually put their money where their mouths are. Plus, they’re simply bigger, and size does make a difference. Yet there’s little denying: In spite of ourselves, we’re in the midst of a cultural revolution. And the seeds are blowing all over the place.

“Simple fact: It’s impossible for any one person to keep up with all the theater happening in town. Can’t be done. That alone suggests the end of township and the beginning of city status: Cities are places that are too big to be known. In a real city, no matter how well you know it, you’re always also a stranger. And that can be exciting.”

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Photo by Owen Carey: Jack Clevenger in “The Storm in the Barn”

Art Scatter’s chief correspondent, Martha Ullman West, keeps a sharp and steady eye on the dance world for a variety of publications. A week ago she reviewed the opening of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s “Chromatic Quartet” program for The Oregonian. (Art Scatter’s Bob Hicks followed with this take on Oregon Arts Watch.) Then, on Friday night, Ullman West returned to the Newmark Theatre to see what a week’s experience and some different casting had done to the show. Sometimes, quite a bit. Here’s her report.

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By Martha Ullman West

Just as you think you can’t stand to see Lambarena again, ever, Yuka Iino dances the lead female role with such charm, such energy, such abandon and such pleasure, you want to see her do it again.

I had fully intended to leave the Newmark Theatre at the second intermission Friday night, having watched many companies (well, three) perform a ballet I don’t think really works. But I was curious to see how convincingly Iino and Chauncey Parsons would de-classicize themselves in Val Caniparoli’s blending of tribal dance and ballet. In movement that is antithetical to classical epaulement, Iino was terrific, Parsons had the right energy, and Yang Zou’s undulating shoulders looked like they’d been oiled at the joint.

What I’d wanted was to see Iino and Parsons dance principal roles in Balanchine’s Stravinsky Violin Concerto. Instead I got the opening-night cast, abandoning opening-night caution to the winds, the complicated counts and fancy footwork thoroughly in their minds and muscles, giving the piece what Nancy Goldner in her book Balanchine Variations calls “that gotta dance energy.” This was especially true of the corps, and of Grace Shibley, who is the physical embodiment of the Balanchine ballerina: long limbed, high-waisted, built for speed.

Shibley, as my seatmate pointed out, has come into her own this season, and what a pleasure it is to watch her. In Friday night’s performance there were plenty of opportunities: in addition to Violin she was cast in The Lost Dance and Lambarena, three very different roles, calling for very different style and musicality, although social dancing of various kinds is a component of every one of them.

Lost Dance, which had the same male cast as opening night performing this time with Candace Bouchard, Julia Rowe and Kathi Martuza, doesn’t hold up very well for me. I found my mind wandering, maybe because the music isn’t very interesting, maybe because it follows Balanchine’s choreographic genius on the program. (I know, that’s not fair, and the audience, as it did opening night, liked it much better than Violin.) It was, however, lovely to see Martuza, back from maternity leave,  as one of those very elegant women. Her arm and hand movements were sharp, hard-edged, and made sense. Rowe, too, was terrific in this ballet, especially in a short, punchy duet with Javier Ubell.

Wheeldon’s Liturgy, danced on Friday by Alison Roper and Brett Bauer, certainly has its moments, particularly in the Asian-style port de bras, and this couple’s rendering makes it look quite different from Haiyan Wu’s and Simcoe’s, in quite subtle ways. The tone is different, like the glaze on two pieces of pottery that are molded the same way. I’d like to see Parsons and Iino dance it as well.

OBT’s spring repertory show is always challenging for the dancers, requiring them to shift aesthetic and technical gears as fast as they change from tights to trousers, leotards to skirts. They met those challenges and more in Chromatic Quartet, as did ballet master Lisa Kipp, who’s in charge of the details of these ballets once the choreographers and stagers have departed. Arguably, this was OBT’s best repertory show to date, showing the company’s enormous growth and maturity in quite a short time.

• Top Photo: OBT performs the world premiere of Matyash Mrozewski’s “The Lost Dance.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert
• Inset: Grace Shibley and Brett Bauer in Balanchine’s “Stravinsky Violin Concerto.” Photo: Blaine Truitt Covert

Art Scatter regulars will remember essayist Trisha Pancio Mead’s recent struggle with the concept of kale. Her gardening roots run deeper yet: thanks in a roundabout way to Barbara Walters and Keanu Reeves, she’s a budding artist of the side yard plot. Read on to see how the plot thickens – and savor the garden-fresh recipes at the end.

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By Trisha Pancio Mead

The pea shoots are up in my garden. The collards and rainbow chard and arugula seedlings are finally gaining the upper hand against the hordes of slugs that have been decimating them this particularly wet spring. The watermelon radishes are popping out little heart shaped leaves and the “cosmic purple” carrots are sitting patiently in their packets for the next sunny day.

Our garden plan this spring is a painter’s palette of unusual hues, heirloom textures and pickle-able curiosities. Golden beets. Red and white speckled cranberry beans. Giant picturesque turban squash. It’s an artist’s garden and a foodie garden, focused on the rare, the expensive, the edible and the beautiful.

I couldn’t be more delighted by it. I find myself out there every morning and every evening, tucking a few more eggshells around some vulnerable seedlings, checking the progress of the dill sprouts, and dreaming of the day, someday soon, when I can pass breezily by the produce section on my weekly grocery trip, rolling my eyeballs at the “local, sustainable” sticker on the tomatoes and announcing to anyone in ear shot that everything in my garden salad will be sourced from my OWN BACKYARD.

It wasn’t always this way.

I have typically had a life too packed with performances and play dates and unrelenting long hours to do much but pass apologetically by the few tortured houseplants given to us by well-meaning friends and family.

I would like to say that my journey to become a joyous (if slightly precious) Portlandia-style urban gardener was launched by an epiphany about supporting local food systems and lowering the carbon footprint of my food sources.

But it would be a lie.

It started as a cocktail conversation excuse.

When I was in college, I had a friend whose doctor dad treated celebrity clients. As a kid, she recalled, it was pretty normal for Barbara Walters or Keanu Reeves to drop by for drinks and it was her duty to make small talk. It was one of her chores. Like taking out the trash. Or doing the dishes. Some 13 year olds would have been ecstatic, chattering happily about a recent movie or asking for autographs. My friend couldn’t stand to be seen as an airhead celebrity chaser and was too shy to talk to anyone without a carefully plotted conversational strategy. So she developed a secret weapon.

“Do you garden?” she would ask. And inevitably, whether they waxed philosophic about the pleasures of peonies or launched into the litany of plants lost to neglect and bad behavior, a pretty interesting conversation would ensue.

As a closet introvert myself, I found this tactic incredibly useful. It helped me navigate my own first meetings with celebrity types and has proved equally successful with grandmothers and board members and bar acquaintances. One day, I asked that question of a filmmaker’s girlfriend who had showed up at my house for a party. I was secretly hoping to steer the conversation away from the creepy vibe I was getting from her boyfriend.

As it turned out, she was a pioneer in what has become the “urban gardening” movement. She share-cropped a dozen tiny side yards and easements in inner SE Portland, selling her hyper-local, hyper organic produce to restaurants like Genie’s and Murata and sharing the rest in the form of “rent baskets” to the various friends and neighbors who had loaned out their yards to her endeavors.

She had been eyeing our idle side lot greedily.

So we struck a bargain. She got a half-lot of rich Willamette river “farmland” in full sun and we got something really cool to talk about whenever we had people over for dinner. For two years she introduced us to mizuna and celtuce and lemon cucumbers and we introduced her to writers and enthusiasts interested in new models of “living off the land.”

Then her relationship went south, geographically and metaphorically. She had an “apocalyptic” vision that told her to move to Southern Oregon to avoid an unspecific catastrophe fated to befall Portland. These sorts of visions are moderately common in the bohemian circles we run in. She was having a rough year. So we wished her well and said goodbye.

Now we were left with a side yard rapidly turning to dinosaur-sized weeds and a landlord who started making ominous noises about “re-sodding costs.”

How hard could it be? She had already done all the work of preparing a site and amending the soil. There was even a beautiful bed of perennial herbs still thriving… so we scared up some garden tools, spent a ludicrous amount of money on vegetable starts and decided to make a go of it. After 15 years of faking it at cocktail parties, I looked forward to proudly showing off my newly discovered green thumb.

We planted peas, carrots, potatoes, corn. It was a pot pie garden, an Irish share-cropper garden. The cucumbers failed (who knew you couldn’t plant them next to sage?) The tomatoes went crazy (but what do you do with 70 lbs of tomatoes that all ripened the same week?!?) The peas got hopelessly tangled with the corn. When it was all said and done, it ended up costing about double what we could have paid in the store with no noticeable improvement in flavor. The weeds got horrifying and the work got repetitive. We got discouraged. It felt pedestrian. Something was missing.

This year I had a revelation: We should stop focusing on the practical and instead create a garden just as weird and wonderful as our lives. What if we selected only plants that thrilled our eyes AND our appetites? Most importantly, what if we started with the recipes we wanted to make, and worked backward to the seeds we’d need to make them a reality?

Armed with a pin-up book of turban squash soup cooked in its own shell, watermelon radish salad, pickled beans, roasted beet tartlets and green tomato piccalilli, I started this year with my eyes on a completely different prize. Instead of cocktail party bragging rights, I wanted art. On a plate.

I’ll keep you posted on how it all turns out.

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What were your garden goals this year? And what recipes are you dying to make with the results? Do tell.

ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

• Vincent Van Gogh, “Marguerite Gachet in the Garden,” Oil on Canvas. Auvers-sur-Oise: June, 1890. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
• Claude Monet, “The Artist’s Garden at Vétheuil,” oil, 1880. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

The School of Oregon Ballet Theatre delivered a promising and rewarding evening of ballet on Thursday night. It repeats on Sunday, and it’s  well worth seeing even if you’ve no little hostage-to-fortune performing on the Newmark stage.

The evening began with a clean, musical performance of Balanchine’s Divertimento No. 15; Mozart’s gorgeous score, in a piano reduction, was played elegantly by David Saffert.  As a curtain-raiser, Divertimento works well for professional companies, too: the solos of the Theme and Variations show off the skills of individual dancers, and the group sections – the opening Allegro and closing Allegro Molto reveal a cohesive corps de ballet. Clearly, SOBT is training dancers to feed the company, men and women both.  I was particularly taken by the dancing of Jordan Kindell, a company apprentice, in this and everything else in which he danced, as well as Chloe Shelby in the First Variation.

If Divertimento 15 shows off the pre-professional and upper-level dancers, Jerome Robbins’ Circus Polka, with Ring Master Kevin Poe flicking the whip (thank God) rather than cracking it, gives an excellent indication of the various levels of training, from the tallest kid in blue or green to the littlest one in pink. This was followed by a tidy accounting of an excerpt from Trey McIntyre’s Curupira, a percussive dance with the pointe shoes providing the music, much as they do in Dennis Spaight’s Crayola.

Faculty member Tracey Katona staged The Dance of the Knights from Romeo and Juliet as a showcase for boys of every size and stripe, with a few girls dashing back and forth across the stage.  Wyatt McConville-McCoy, whom we’ve seen as the little prince in Balanchine’s The Nutcracker, and one of the smaller knights, is the winner of this year’s Elena Carter Scholarship and I feel quite sure she approves; he clearly loves being on stage.  The opening movement of Balanchine’s Serenade, with Kanoe Wagner as the girl who came late, just made me and several other audience members want to see the whole ballet, sooner rather than later. Balanchine made this ballet for students in 1934, creating a work that made modern dancers want to shift to ballet, it has such organic flow.

The evening closed with the premiere of Anne Mueller’s deliciously witty Carnival of the Animals: Brush Strokes in the Wild, and it’s a keeper. It’s no small thing to make a piece for students ranging from beginners to pre-professionals to music by Camille Saint-Saens that has piqued the interest of such choreographers as Michel Fokine and Christopher Wheeldon.  Wheeldon’s version takes place in New York’s American Museum of Natural History after hours, and I loved it when I saw New York City Ballet dance it several years ago.

But Thursday night I also loved Mueller’s, which tells the story of a wildlife painter, danced by the very good-humored Justin Hughes, who is televised traveling the world like a National Geographic photographer, capturing animals in paint.  Michael Mazzola’s clever set piece provides an occasional frame, for these animals are kept moving so fast they are mighty hard to “catch.”

Viable children’s ballets are not easy to do: They can descend into cloying cuteness. Mueller avoids that by giving her dancers organic movement based on research of how animals actually behave. Kangaroos, she says in program notes, scratch themselves frantically; giraffes fight with their necks. The most familiar music in the score is of course for the swan; Fokine used this music to make The Dying Swan, a solo for Anna Pavlova, which premiered in 1907, and over the decades it’s become the signature piece for several ballerinas, including Maya Plisetskaya, who once performed it twice in one evening in Portland at the auditorium formerly known as the Civic.

Mueller’s swans embrace life and each other – in the wild they do mate for life – in an eloquent pas de deux danced lyrically by Kindell and Kelsie Nobriga. And by creating roles for jellyfish, fish, sharks, starfish, as well as tortoises, roosters, a busybody of a magpie (danced by Emily Pihlaja), Mueller used a Cecil B. DeMille cast of seemingly thousands, not to mention every note of the score.  If I saw the influence of McIntyre in the television hook, which he used for his Alice in Wonderland, and the deployment of silhouettes, which he and many choreographers use, I also saw much that was innovative and expressive of Mueller’s own personality in life and art.

There is one more performance, on Sunday afternoon. I’d go catch it.

PHOTO by Eric Griswold: Divertimento No. 15, choreography by George Balanchine ©The George Balanchine Trust.

By Bob Hicks

Today I posted an essay, Serpents, true believers and ‘Holy Ghosts’, on Oregon Arts Watch. It’s about Romulus Linney’s remarkable 1970 old-time religion drama, which is still fresh and vivid in light of the rise of the fundamentalist right, and worth seeing not just because it’s rousingly good entertainment but also because it’s the farthest thing from a predictable diatribe: it’s funny and sympathetic and engaging, and then every now and again it reminds you that some pretty strange stuff’s going down. Beth Harper’s production for Portland Actors Conservatory is a … well, a revelation.

An excerpt:

“Music is at the soul of the revivalist spirit that haunts Holy Ghosts, and poisonous snakes, the successful handling of which signifies faith and glory to the true believers of the theatrical congregation, are in its grip. Linney’s play is Southern Gothic, and from a rationalist perspective its characters are as nutty as a Truman Capote fruitcake – who are these people, and why are they doing this insane stuff? – but they also follow a rigorous logic of the heart. The craziest thing about the play is how it gets inside fanaticism and allows you to understand and even sympathize with it, or at least with the people who turn to it for solace. …

“Blue state urban bubble-dwellers really ought to see this play, and not to poke fun at the red-state rubes, although the drama has some very funny scenes, but to get inside some pretty interesting skin and begin to understand the culture wars from a different perspective. Among these fervidly holy men and women ‘value politics’ isn’t a matter of partisan tactics but of everyday life. And don’t think you’ll always know what the values are …”

Last night I went to White Bird’s opening-night performance by Goteborg Ballet (the Swedish contemporary company performs again tonight and Saturday night in the Newmark Theatre) and discovered a sort of sister-city alternate universe.

Three dances, all contemporary and very European, all very different from what you see at Oregon Ballet Theatre but also intriguingly complementary, and reminiscent of OBT’s old James Canfield days. I wrote about it in this essay, Sister dance cities? Goteborg meets Portland, on Oregon Arts Watch. An excerpt:

“At the core of OreloB is Jukka Rintamaki’s electronic score, based on the sinuous repetitions of Ravel’s Bolero but scratching them up so they sound ragged and removing the overly familiar undulations while retaining the hypnotic effect. Helena Horstedt’s costumes, with little shoulder-and-back ruffles that seemed like sea-creature gills, lent the piece a slightly sinister science-fiction feel (the designs reminded me a little of the stuff the late lamented Portland theater artist Ric Young used to do). And the dancing was vigorous and unstoppable, inventive and relentless. The energy doesn’t let up: when the dancers walk, they walk with purpose. It’s rhythmic, sexy, trancelike – maybe something like Ravel’s music was when it was fresh, before it became commonplace.”

Photo: “OreloB,” by Kenneth Kvarnstrom

What do nine short plays about gay marriage and a Gilligan’s Island take on Much Ado About Nothing have in common? What do either or both have to say about that old bugaboo, elitism and the arts?

In my essay Gay Marriage, beach-blanket Bard: elitism for the masses over at Oregon Arts Watch, I try to sew it all together in a discussion about Standing on Ceremony: The Gay Marriage Plays at Artists Rep and the beach-blanket Much Ado at Northwest Classical Theatre Company.

On Standing on Ceremony:

“Whatever happened to the old-fashioned curtain-raiser, the theatrical equivalent of the pre-show cartoon and newsreel at old Saturday movie matinees? How about 10 minutes of Labute’s Strange Fruit, just to play imaginary producer for a moment, paired with a production of David Mamet’s Boston Marriage?”

On Much Ado About Nothing:

“The other thing I love about Much Ado is the way that Beatrice and Benedick spin a new reality out of their passion for language. By talking, by creating their stories on the fly, they travel from isolation to consummation. It’s the perfect evocation of the power of language, of art, to transform lives. Beatrice and Benedick don’t fall in love. They talk themselves into it.”

Plus, as they say, much much more if you click the link to the full story. Don’t delay!

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Melissa Whitney and Peter Schuyler, on the beach in “Much Ado.” Photo: Jon Gottshall

“This is food whose texture screams to be rejected,” guest essayist Trisha Pancio Mead declares as she neatly slices and dices kale’s sudden rise to superstardom. That pale green mess on your plate just might be the medicine of bitter times. Or it might be an astringent garden genius, the Stravinsky or Picasso of the dining room. Either way, it’s kale and hearty – and it’s everywhere.

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By Trisha Pancio Mead

Remember the eighties, when no power lunch was complete without thin half-moons of avocado and a sprinkling of sprouts and mangoes to elevate it from humdrum to haute?

Or the nineties, where we rebelled against all that California spa fusion and instead  established a dish’s pedigree by name-dropping the obscure Southern roadside barbecue shack whose proprietor slipped us the recipe on a sweet-tea-stained napkin … but only after we swore on our meemaw’s grave not to reveal the secret of those melty, smoky collard greens? (The secret was, and still is, pork fat. Lots of it.)

At the turn of the millennium we became schizophrenics, giving lip service to the foams and mousses and architectural confections of the molecular gastronomy movement while actually spending all our money on increasingly elaborate macs, casseroles and turkey tetrazzini loaves in a Rachel Ray-inspired dash to the comfort-food-stuffed American middle.

But now.

Now we’ve turned a corner, very like Picasso when he stopped painting pleasingly forgettable realist and impressionistic portraits and started arresting people with the shattered ugliness of his canvases. Or like Stravinsky, who in 1913, with his jangling score for the ballet Le Sacre du Printemps, made music that sent people rioting out of the theater. I love Stravinsky. And Picasso. But the art they created was not pretty. It was ugly, and it was only their genius for balance and composition that made the bitter dissonances and mineral sharp planes and angles resolve into a truly satisfying artistic experience.

Bitter …  mineral … ugly … beloved by bohemians. … What is the current foodie version of Stravinsky? I think you know where I’m headed here.

Kale.

KALE is the new avocado/bacon/mac. It is EVERYWHERE. In food cart muffins. In my brunch brunch at C Bar. In the Lyonaisse Onion Tart at St. Jack. In the Mussel Capellini at Nostrana. In the vegan entree at the last fundraiser I attended. Even Trader Joe’s has replaced its spinach dip with kale dip! At this point I fully expect my next cake order from Pastrygirl to include a kale filling.

So WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

Yes, it’s seasonal, and current foodie values require that a serious restaurant feature produce that is locally sourced and having its appropriate moment on the Northwest garden calendar. But I don’t think that quite explains the recent ubiquity of this ugly, bitter, mineral-flavored vegetable. After all, pea shoots, fava beans, Swiss chard and collard greens are also of the moment, and certainly are milder and more accessible, even to people who pride themselves on their vegetable sophistication and appreciation for umami plant flavors.

But … I think that’s it. It is kale’s very difficulty that is making it the darling of the moment.

Kale is the offal of the vegetable world. Chefs’ ability to make something edible with it is a mark of their distinction … and diners’ willingness to attempt it is the new measure of their sophistication.

Kale can be incandescent, used intelligently. It can also be embarrassing, or even frightening, when handled ham-fistedly. It’s nearly impossible to do something with kale that doesn’t make it look like a puddle of green/black mush on the plate. To ameliorate its bitterness you must go either tangy and sharp (a la Picasso) or uncomfortably unctuous (a la Salvador Dali) or just let it all hang out, bravely shredding some raw leaves on a plate with some artfully arranged seeds and oils and DARING the diner to understand what you are doing (a la Stravinsky).

The current moment’s perfect dish would probably be some kind of seared pork innards on a bed of wilted kale, garnished with fresh oysters, and some searingly hot pepper vinegar. This is food whose texture screams to be rejected (slimy, fibrous, fiery, spongy). It lies on the plate like a fat uncle soaking up beer on a Barcalounger. Yeah, it says. That’s my underbelly. What of it?

And like that fat uncle, these ingredients are anything but haute. Historically, bitter greens and animal innards have been cheap workingman’s food. What your peanut-picking great-grandfather would have eaten after a long day in the fields. What your Italian grandmother served during the Depression.

Hmm. Dali, Stravinsky and Picasso were riding high in the midst of the Depression too. The golden bubble of the Jazz Age had burst, leaving them with a world that felt like it would never be made whole again. Sound familiar?

So perhaps that’s the explanation. The current impulse isn’t to consume conspicuously in Baroque displays of expensive ingredients and exotic fusions. It can’t be. We’re all too exhausted and debt-soaked to believe in that sort of foie-gras festivity any more.

We are making do with what we have, with what is near to hand. We are elevating the scraps and humble necessities of our lives into expressions of artistic and culinary rebellion, rough edges and difficult textures and all. We are asking ourselves to grow comfortable with discomfort and uncertainty. Because we must.

We tell ourselves: This dinner is bitter, cheap and ugly. And I shall make it transcendent.

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ILLUSTRATIONS, from top:

• Kale bundle. Photo: Evan-Amos, Wikimedia Commons
• Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “Winter,” 1573. Louvre Museum/Wikimedia Commons
• Igor Stravinsky, as drawn by Pablo Picasso, 31 December 1920. Wikimedia Commons