Here are some scattered (no pun intended) thoughts about what I’ve been seeing in the world of performance, mostly dance, since I departed on February 1st for a glorious Metropolitan Museum of Art tour of Egypt with a postlude in Jordan, followed by 10 days in New York, where I ploughed through many clipping files in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, at Lincoln Center.

These endeavors were interrupted by snow and a day trip to Philadelphia to interview Yvonne Patterson. She is a former dancer in Balanchine’s first companies, now a whisker away from turning 100, still swimming every day and teaching the occasional master class in ballet, no kidding. There was also a fair amount of hobnobbing with my New York colleagues, during which the state of dance and dance writing was discussed with a certain amount of hand-wringing on both counts.

The worst performance shall come first: an unspeakably godawful belly dance demonstration on board the Nile River boat on which I spent four otherwise glorious nights.

I’ve seen better at various restaurants in Portland, although the effects of her lackluster undulations, which bored even the men in the audience, were somewhat mitigated by the sufi dancer who followed, a very young man who was completely committed to spinning himself into a trance, and therefore pretty compelling.

In New York, I was taken to see a play called Mr. and Mrs. Fitch, oh so cleverly written by Douglas Carter Beane, at Second Stage Theatre, starring the suave John Lithgow as a gossip columnist running out of copy and Jennifer Ehle as his equally ambitious and rather more unethical wife. They invent a celebrity to write about, and despite such wonderful lines as “I swear on a stack of Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation” and the cast’s finely tuned delivery of the lines, the ethics practiced by the real-life press these days made it all rather less than funny for someone who still thinks journalism is an honorable profession, or at the very least that it should be.

A matinee performance of an all-Jerome Robbins program by New York City Ballet gave me far more pleasure; especially Dances at a Gathering, Robbins’ masterpiece of a Chopin ballet, with former San Francisco Ballet dancer Gonzalo Garcia in the pivotal role of the man in brown. The piece is slightly more than an hour long, but so deftly choreographed, with references to Eastern European folk dance as a part of seemingly endlessly innovative use of the classical vocabulary that you want more. Cameron Grant, who played the music, is a terrific musician and highly skilled at performing concert music as dance accompaniment, no mean trick. Maria Kowroski as the girl in green and Jenifer Ringer in pink combined impeccable technique with a spontaneity that seems to elude many City Ballet dancers these days, a crying pity in Balanchine and Robbins’ house.

West Side Story Suite completed the program. I don’t think this works very well as a ballet, and the men in particular were extremely unconvincing as Jets and Sharks, with the exception of Benjamin Millepied (whose choreography we saw performed here by Baryshnikov last fall) as Tony. Georgina Pazcoguin, however, was a truly fiery Anita, which was fun to see. Robbins did this arrangement of dances himself; nevertheless, taken out of the context of the entire show, I thought it looked cobbled together and randomly so.

Speaking of random, I got back into the swim, so to speak, of Portland’s remarkably active dance pond with opening night of Wayne McGregor’s Random Dance last Thursday at the Newmark Theatre. And frankly I loathed Entity, like Dances at a Gathering an hour-long piece. It is extremely well-crafted, but about as coldly clinical a treatment of the dancers (who are wonderful) as I’ve seen in more than half a century of watching dance of all kinds.

Admittedly it was amusing from time to time to spot the references to classical ballet that McGregor, (who is resident choreographer at London’s Royal Ballet) was busily rendering spastic. One example was a supported pirouette that finishes with a tilt of the head that’s straight out of Frederick Ashton’s Sleeping Beauty, which I suppose was meant to be funny. For me, however, movement that skews the dancers’ bodies to make many of them look as if they were battling scoliosis, even if McGregor is vividly rebelling against balletic spinal placement, is extremely unpleasant to watch.

Certainly McGregor knows how to move dancers around a stage, in solos, duets, trios and ensemble dances. And the high-tech set, commissioned score and superb lighting design made it a very well-integrated work, but with not a shred of emotional affect. It was billed as sensual and sexy. I was reminded of what Dorothy Parker once said about Beat writers: “They turn sex into the dreariest calisthenic imaginable.”

McGregor is a hot ticket in England for his use of technology, among other things. He’s not, in fact, doing anything new to Portland audiences, not those of us who have been watching Tere Mathern and Mary Oslund’s work for lo these many years. Both are technically and visually sophisticated choreographers who manage nevertheless to convey the human qualities of the dancers, and tell us something about ourselves as people. Oslund’s work will be on White Bird’s next season, when Uncaged returns to Portland State ’s Lincoln Hall. I’m looking forward to it.

Finally, on Saturday night, I saw for the first time Christopher Stowell’s one-act version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, its sophisticated opening wedding scene a soignee contrast to the forest action, Shakespeare’s mechanicals transformed into waiters and a bartender, Puck a Master of Ceremonies as well, reminding us that dreams are rooted in reality. Mr. Scatter is dead right: The return of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s orchestra to play Mendelssohn’s sublime music, which they played brilliantly under the passionate directorship of Niel DePonte, contributed mightily to the delight of the performance.

Stowell’s one-act version of Dream is intensely musical, far more in tune with Mendelssohn’s score than with Shakespeare’s language, which my companion thought was a flaw. I don’t agree. Packed with humor that isn’t cute, romantic passion, a pas de deux of marital rage worthy of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and an innovative use of the classical vocabulary, this Dream should become a staple of OBT’s repertory. And it’s clear from their performances that OBT’s dancers enjoy themselves just as much as the roaring audience does.

The program opener, Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, to Paul Hindemith’s difficult score (alas, not played live) was met with almost as much audience approval on Saturday night as Dream, for which I congratulate the dancers themselves — particularly Yuka Iino and Chauncey Parsons in the second variation, known as “Sanguinic”; Gavin Larsen and Adrian Fry in the opening and closing “Theme”; Artur Sultanov’s “Phlegmatic,” and Kathi Martuza’s furious “Choleric,” the fourth variation. To Francia Russell’s staging, I think I owe this performance’s vitality and immediacy. It took me back to my youth, when I was a dedicated second \-balcony audience member at the time that City Ballet was still performing at City Center and the dancers still looked human, their individuality coming into play — no longer the case much of the time since the company became institutionalized at Lincoln Center.

It was a wonderful welcome home from New York, which will always be home to me as well.

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– Adrian Fry and Gavin Larsen in The Four Temperaments at OBT. Photo: ©Blaine Truitt Covert

One of this week’s most interesting reads is by Associated Press writer David Runk, published in the Detroit News under the headline Detroit Wants to Save Itself by Shrinking.

The crux: Much of the city has become so bleak and uninhabitable that Mayor Dave Bing and other city leaders want to bulldoze huge sections and start over with something else. What that “something else” might be isn’t fully imagined, but a lot of people are saying: Farms. Gardens. Nature. Imagine: A city, having conquered the land, agreeing to a unilateral withdrawal in order to save itself.

What does this have to do with Portland and Oregon, which pride themselves on their planning and rural-to-urban connections, even if both have flashpoints of read-guard insurgency?

For one thing, looking at places like Detroit and the Bronx and declining Rust Belt cities is a healthy reminder of how comparatively easy Oregon has it in this area: We simply don’t have to contend with the issues of massive urban deterioration that plague other parts of the country. (Our own, much smaller, issue is the spread of large suburban nowheres without centers, with little to define them but car culture and small-scale speculation.) It’s easy to be smug about our “greenness.” How green would we be if we faced the problems that so many other places face?

Second, though: Can ideas pioneered here be adapted to the catastrophic conditions that Detroit and other cities face? Can an American urban-sprawl landscape be transformed into something like a 21st century medieval landscape, with tight urban gatherings fed (perhaps literally) by closely surrounding farm and rural areas? And can such projects be undertaken without the kind of massive governmental direction and support that is already under relentless attack nationally in the battles to reform health care and counter the effects of the Great Recession?

Hurt by white flight and the lingering effects of the 1967 Detroit riots, and hung out to dry by the near-collapse of the American automobile industry, Detroit has shrunk from a city of about 2 million in its heyday to one of a little more than 900,000 today, including the poorest of the poor. The six-county Detroit Metro area is closing in on 4.5 million people, but most of the wealth has fled to the outlying suburbs and cities, with a stubborn pocket of money and influence downtown.

Just one of the many tangles in the path of accomplishing anything is suggested in today’s Detroit News piece Detroit’s Desolate Middle Makes Downsizing Tough, by Christine MacDonald and Darren A. Nichols. Some of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods are at its fringes, cut off from the city center by a broad swath of desolate zone. How can the parts of the city that work be connected?

The city’s challenges in its effort to reinvent itself are practical, philosophical and ethical. Who owns the land, how will the city pay for it, who will own it once it’s been cleared, and what control will the city have over what is done with it by its new owners? Is government the proper instigator of change, or should market forces determine the city’s future? (In Detroit, the answer might be that the marketplace is broken, and if the public in the form of its government doesn’t step in, the rot will simply continue to spread.) Should you tear down without a clear idea of what you’re going to replace with? For this to work, people will inevitably have to be moved, as they were in the massive and disruptive urban renewal projects of the 1960s. What are their rights, and how are their rights weighed in the balance of the public good? Can Detroit afford not to make radical decisions?

And what if this reinvention works? What if Detroit becomes the model for how America can reemerge from the global economic and environmental disruptions that may at last be shattering our illusion of eternal expansion? What if smaller really is better? What if one aspect of paying attention to infrastructure is simply removing part of it? Can a place be small and dynamic at the same time? If that’s not an Oregon question, I don’t know what is.

For perspective, a good place to start is Alex Altman’s report Detroit Tries to Get on a Road to Renewal, from the March 26, 2009 issue of Time:

Detroit has become an icon of the failed American city, but vast swaths of it don’t look like city at all. Turn your Chevy away from downtown and the postcard skyline gives way first to seedy dollar stores and then to desolation. The collapse of the Big Three automakers has accelerated Detroit’s decline, but residents have been steadily fleeing since the 1950s. In that time, the population has dwindled from about 2 million to less than half that. Bustling neighborhoods have vanished, leaving behind lonely houses with crumbling porches and jack-o’-lantern windows. On these sprawling urban prairies, feral dogs and pheasants stalk streets with debris strewn like driftwood: an empty mail crate, a discarded winter jacket, a bunny-eared TV in tall grass. Asked recently about a dip in the city’s murder rate, a mayoral candidate deadpanned, “I don’t mean to be sarcastic, but there just isn’t anyone left to kill.”

Then, Altman looks at the hopes for something different:

What would a new Detroit look like? Many say it will have to be smaller, greener and denser. The city can start with the chunks of town that have withered into wasteland. The exodus from Detroit–triggered by suburbanization and the 1967 race riots–dovetailed with the national foreclosure crisis, which has battered few cities as badly as this one. According to a regional listings service, the median home-sale price has plunged to a paltry $5,737–yet tens of thousands of dwellings stand vacant. But the “long-term perspective,” says Heidi Mucherie, director of the organization leading the Detroit Vacant Property Campaign, “is that these are opportunities.” It’s the hopeful note sounded by Detroit’s optimists: The approximately one-third of the city lying empty or unused–an area about the size of San Francisco–is not just an emblem of its corrosion but also the blank slate on which to chart a path to renewal.

You can get a good look at what’s happened to this city from the Web site The Fabulous Ruins of Detroit, maintained by artist and activist Lowell Boileau. And this page from Detroitblog reveals how the country has already begun to reclaim parts of the city. Meanwhile, here’s a link to The City Rises, a subsection of the “Fabulous Ruins” site that shows some of the rebirth that’s been going on amid the death throes. Things rise, things fall, always at the same time.

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PHOTO: Once, Detroit was one of America’s most bustling cities. This 1920 photo shows the corner of Michigan and Griswold downtown. While the 21st century downtown has shown signs of revival, much of the city is an urban wreckage straight from the pages of dystopian futurist novels. Photographer unknown; Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

This should be interesting. I sat in on a rehearsal a few days ago and afterwards talked with Veggetti for about 20 minutes. He’s smart and eloquent (he speaks five languages, fortunately including English), with a lot to say about his own background and the state of dance in general. He also has strong background in experimental theater and opera (”I was raised at La Scala,” he says) so his outlook is broad.

The format is the same as last Sunday, when I had a good talk with Maurice Causey, a freelance choreographer associated closely with Nederlands Dans Theater. Show up at 3 p.m., have some wine and cheese, watch a brisk rehearsal, then get ready for the interview. Last week a lot of people in the crowd asked questions, and I expect the same today. Address: 833 N. Shaver Street, just off of Mississippi Avenue. Suggested donation is $20 ($10 students), which helps pay for the event.

Veggetti and Causey will each have a piece in Northwest Dance Project’s spring performances, which will also include two dances by artistic director Sarah Slipper, March 12-13 at the Newmark Theatre.

What’s it all about, Alfie?

After a Friday evening of loosely organized chance in the company of Third Angle New Music Ensemble (the program included Terry Riley’s endlessly mutable In C; California composer Mark Applebaum’s similarly open-ended exploration of alternative musical “reading,” The Metaphysics of Notation; and Portland composer David Schiff’s exhilaratingly jazz-charged Mountains/ Rivers, which takes inspiration from In C) we’re feeling a bit unmoored.

Since we’re in free-float anyway, this seems like a good time to check in on Imago.

One of the terrific side benefits when Jerry Mouawad develops a new show is that he thinks long and hard about what he’s doing, and then he writes about it online. Anyone who wants to take a peek can get an inside look into one of Portland’s most fertile creative minds. Mouawad, Imago’s co-founder with Carol Triffle, spills his thoughts on the company blog. The spilling isn’t always easy, because, ever aware of the virtues of theatrical suspense, Mouawad really wants to hold onto the beans.

“I assume this blog is vague since I am not divulging any of the action,” he writes about his new show, Tick Tack Type. “I apologize for this, but I am doing this for your sake (that is if you plan to see the work.) By discussing the action I am robbing you of the experience of it. What I see in an action may not be what you see. I can say this about Tick Tack Type: in many ways it’s about “seeing” or “not seeing.”

On Friday, in a post titled Finding Logic in the Non-logical, he had some intriguing things to say about the continuing evolution of Tick Tack Type:

Yesterday I blogged that I tried to dismantle any meaning when meaning began to arise in a scene in “Tick Tack Type.” I wrote that doing this was to free the play and not have it land in a didactic world. Today I will contradict my thinking saying that for every action in the play (or for most) I tried to find meaning in it.

Is this a contradiction? Yes and no. I think it’s a fine balance between an abstract work that has no means of a handle and an abstract work that resonates for audiences. I am not interested in pure abstraction; if I (were), I would imbed the work in pure movement and dance and not try to create theatre of it.

… (F)or every action I tried to find meaning yet at the same time dismantle it. … In its simplest terms, when I had a character execute an action I tried to find one level or several of dramaturgical importance.

And here, from Imago’s Web site, is what Tick Tack Type is “about”:

Five men and four women are dropped from a chute into a stark empty room to discover themselves as participants in a strange typing academy. … Mouawad’s characters search for ways to compete and survive under the rule of a tyrannical typing instructor played by artistic co-director Carol Triffle. … Mouawad has fashioned theatre without words to explore comedic and tragic drama.

Sounds logical, no? Tick Tack Type plays March 11-14 only, and tickets are free. Go to Imago’s Web site for information.

Newport, Oregon, has two lighthouses. The original, on the south side of town and  decommissioned for most of its 138 years, has been turned into an agreeably nostalgic tourist lure complete with resident ghost story. The larger and younger lighthouse (by two years) has been working continuously since the day it was completed. This light, its beacon visible for miles out to sea, stands 93 feet tall on a narrow peninsula at the city’s northern edge.

While it’s not precisely true that once you’ve seen one lovelorn ghost you’ve see ‘em all — the tales of tragic circumstance and details of costume have their specificities — it IS true that once you’ve toured a particular location of purported ectoplasmic activity you can go a good long time before repeating the experience. (I make an exception for re-readings of James Thurber’s story The Night the Ghost Got In, which should be frequent and preferably aloud, to an intimate audience.)

So while I enjoy outside glimpses of the southside Yaquina Bay Lighthouse (active from 1871 to 1874, brought to light again in 1996, haunted since the city’s promoters realized the commercial possibilities) I haven’t taken the tour in several years.

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the north side lighthouse, too (although I can see it as I’m writing this from the sands of Nye Beach), but for different reasons.

I’ve always liked this lighthouse — it’s called simply the Yaquina Head Lighthouse, for the rock on which it stands — and for many years I made a point of calling on it whenever I was in the vicinity. A twisty, usually lonely drive west from U.S. 101, past the concave of an old rock quarry, to the spare grounds around the tower. Not too many tourists. Not much of anybody; the few besides me mostly people who had actual work to do. On almost any day the wind was stiff, and on stormy days it was enough to almost knock you down. I like standing against that kind of force, feeling the swift air push against my chest and ripple in unseen waves around me. It’s challenging yet also somehow calming. It re-sets my rhythm to the rhythm around me.

Somewhere along the line I stopped visiting.

Partly it was because Mrs. Scatter, who can stay happily on a lonely beach for hours, investigating the tidepools and gathering flotsam and jetsam, is not so much a fan of shivering in the wind. Partly it was because the experience, once casual, became regulated. The lighthouse is now the core attraction of the Yaquina Head Natural Area, operated by the U.S.Bureau of Land Management, with posted hours and a wooden booth near the foot of the road where you pay to enter the domain. One year I bought an annual pass, for twenty or twenty-five dollars; a little steep but I was willing to chip in for the upkeep of a place I enjoyed. The next time I showed up, in a different car, I was told my pass was no good: My license plate was different, and the pass was assigned to a specific vehicle, not to the person who bought the pass. So the lighthouse drifted out of my routine.

Today, though, I decided I wanted to share the experience with my 11-year-old son. I pulled off the highway and drove toward the wooden booth, figuring the visit might cost $3.50 or four dollars. I looked at the sign: Single vehicle, seven dollars. By this point I was almost to the window, where a tousled,  pleasant-looking young man in BLM uniform was waiting to take my toll.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t realize it was seven dollars to go in. I can’t pay that. I’m going to turn around.”

He didn’t act surprised or offended; he was friendly and polite. I had the sense he was used to hearing it.

In fact, I could have paid the seven dollars. My son and I had just paid that much, including tip, for a fruit smoothie and a cup of coffee. And, no, we probably wouldn’t have stayed more than 20 minutes, which makes for a pretty stiff hourly rate, but that wasn’t the point.

Because I was thinking about driving through the Willamette Valley town of McMinnville a few days earlier and stumbling across a mass of protesters gathered to bully a town hall meeting scheduled for that evening to hear talk about President Obama’s proposed national health care system. Astroturfers, these people are being called, and it’s a good name — fake grassroots, bused in from God’s Little Acre of Ideological Hysteria and spreading like weeds. This was about the time the astonishing Sarah Palin was whipping up mass frenzy against a rational and innocuous detail added to the health bill by U.S. Rep. Earl Blumenauer to allow older people periodic voluntary consultations with their doctors to talk about end-of-life care and decisions.

“Death Panel!” Palin roared to Fox News and the New York Times alike, which duly passed her rantings along. The Evil Socialists will force helpless old people into a Democratic version of the gas chamber! She got what she wanted: more mud smeared over the Obama plan, more fears spread among the frightened masses, and the bonus that a typically cynical or invertebrate Senate effectively pulled the plug on the Blumenauer proposal.

It was lies, of course. Damned lies, if not statistics — but lies in the long and inglorious pattern of the departed-but-not-gone Bush Administration, which lied the nation into a disastrous war, robbed us into a near economic depression, and spirited away a frightening amount of citizen privacy and civil rights, mostly with the acquiescence of a meek and cowed Democratic Party, which pretended that it didn’t know what was going on. (And, I regret to add, with the complicity of a complaisant mainstream press that dared not speak a discouraging or even questioning word for fear of landing in the path of the pseudo-patriotic juggernaut that rolled over the land following the attacks of September 11, 2001.)

“It’s deliberate at this point,” Blumenauer said of Palin’s politically hyperventilated mendacities. “If she wasn’t deliberately lying at the beginning, she is deliberately allowing a terrible falsehood to be spread with her name.”

Well, yes. It was, and she did. And why should Blumenauer or anyone else be surprised? This is the way of the reckless right wing. Lie long, lie loud, recruit a distortion of God to your side, rob Peter and Paul to pay the plutocrats, and scare the hell out of people so they’ll vote against common sense and their own best interests.

Oh: And rip up the social compact, that outmoded and unAmerican idea that there is a public good that might in certain circumstances outweigh the God-given right of private business to own, develop, mark up and sell at a high profit any and everything up to and including, if possible, the thoughts you think. There is no common good. There is no commons. You want to see a lighthouse? Pay up, Mrs. Woolf.

Which is why I turned my car around. I don’t blame the Bureau of Land Management for putting a fee on visits to public property it administers. What else can it do, given its budget and the country’s unwillingness to pay for upkeep of its public infrastructure? After all, it is charged with maintaining, for the public good, a working lighthouse, a sentinel against disaster, a beacon of warning and comfort to ships at sea.

I certainly don’t blame the Friends of Yaquina Lighthouses, a praiseworthy private group devoted to restoring and maintaining the two Newport lights.

Yet I wonder, from somewhere beneath the din of our self-serving political posturing: Do any of our decision-makers know the difference anymore between a light that performs a vital service and a light that simply perpetuates an attractive, ghostly myth? As we struggle through this tunnel of relentless erosion and fear-mongering in our public life: Is there no lighthouse at the end?

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PICTURED: Yaquina Head Lighthouse, Newport, Oregon. Photo: Rebecca Kennison, 2005. Wikimedia Commons

Mr. Scatter is not a dancer. This may seem odd, considering the number of dance posts that have been on this site of late (or maybe, once you’ve read them, it seems painfully obvious), but that is partly a matter of coincidence. There’s been a lot of dance in town lately, and more is on the way.

We’re talking, of course, about presentational dance, art dance, dance as performance — not the social dance that Mr. Scatter did not learn in the 1950s and 1960s, when he suffered from a not uncommon affliction known as Two Left Feet, complicated by a textbook case of shyaroundgirlitis. Yes, he did go to his senior prom. He was in the band. The perfect end-run.

Watching dance, on the other hand, is a longtime pleasure, one that slides from tap to tango, classic to contemporary, Broadway to ballet. And it strikes Mr. Scatter that, while a lot of people weren’t looking, Portland’s become a heck of a dance town.

Oregon Ballet Theatre is somewhere near the middle of it all, continuing its lovely performances of Christopher Stowell’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments through Saturday at Keller Auditorium.

And surely much of this renaissance can be laid at the feet of White Bird, which has routinely brought the un-routine to Portland audiences, exposing the city to worldwide dance ideas. Fresh from Hubbard Street, which has barely had a chance to skip back to Chicago, here White Bird comes again, this time presenting England’s Random Dance (that’s them in the photo above) Thursday through Saturday in the Newmark Theatre. The piece, Entity, by company leader Wayne McGregor, runs an hour and is reputed to be fast and furious. It also marks the end of White Bird’s two-year Uncaged series, which has spotted dance in adventurous spaces around town while it’s waited for its regular second-season home, Lincoln Performance Hall, to be refurbished. That’ll be done by the start of next season.

But as important as they are, the scene is far from just OBT and White Bird. Keep an eye out for these upcoming events, too. (The dance action’s so hot and heavy that we’re sure we’re missing something; we apologize in advance.):

– POV Dance. This intriguing site-specific dance troupe guides its audience through the nooks and crannies of an old east side industrial building at 2505 S.E. 11th Avenue in The Ford Building Project, opening Thursday, March 11, and continuing through March 21. Mr. Scatter recalls seeing the POVers leaning over the railings of the four-story stairwell of downtown’s Pythian Building during last summer’s Conduit benefit performances, and it was a vertiginous experience of gut-wrenching exactitude.

– Northwest Dance Project. Sarah Slipper’s adventurous young company specializes in new contemporary work by international choreographers. Its spring concerts are March 12-13 at the Newmark Theatre and will feature works by Slipper, Maurice Causey (Ballet Frankfurt, Nederlands Dans Theater) and Luca Veggetti (La Scala, Kirov, New York City Ballet). This morning in the New York Times, Gia Kourlas reviewed Veggetti’s latest piece, which opened over the weekend at Manhattan’s Judson Memorial Church.

– Katherine Longstreth. A Portland newcomer who’s been making dance in New York since 1994, Longstreth presents Solos and Duets March 12-13 at Conduit, along with Kelly Bartnik, Nancy Ellis and Jeff George. She describes her choreography as “subtly narrative — weaving pedestrian movement with fully articulated physicality to create strange and poignant imagery.” We like the hoop skirt in the photo.

– Alembic #8: Over_here: now. Performance Works Northwest’s series of interdisciplinary collaborations matches movement guy Richard Decker with photographer Chelsea Petrakis and lighting designer Dora Nicole Gaskill to create “a transformative, ritual space with latex tubing and intense physicality, blurring the lines between dance and installation art.” March 12-13, Performance Works NW, 4625 NE 67th Avenue.

– BodyVox. Fresh from the first public performances by its second company, BodyVox-2, Portland’s touring popular dance/aerial/theatrical movement troupe is set to unveil a brand-new show, Smoke Soup, March 25-April 10 at its home space, 1201 N.W. 17th Avenue. We anticipate fresh moments and serious fun.

Fellow scatterers, get your dancing shoes on. Just don’t ask Mr. Scatter to take a spin around the floor.

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PHOTOS, from top:

– Katherine Longstreth, performing March 12-13 at Conduit.

It’s been a busy few days around Scattertown.

First, on Thursday night, Mr. and Mrs. Scatter took a break from the gala festivities of Science Night at Irvington Elementary School to scoot up the hill to Talisman Gallery on Alberta, where their friend Cibyl Shinju Kavan was having an opening of new assemblages. Scrolls, bamboo, feathers and rocks figure into the work, which is quite pleasing.

Then, at midday Friday, the Scatter duo showed up at the Gerding Theater in the Armory to see dancer Linda Austin and her cohort J.P. Jenkins tear up the joint with a fascinating visual, musical and movement response to Mark Applebaum’s elegant series of notational panels, The Metaphysics of Notation, which has been ringing the mezzanine railings above the Gerding lobby for the past month. Every Friday at noon someone has been interpreting this extremely open-ended score, and this was the final exploration. California composer Applebaum will be one of the featured artists this Friday at the Hollywood Theatre in the latest concert by Third Angle New Music Ensemble, the band of contemporary-music upstarts for whom Mrs. Scatter toils ceaselessly.

Austin and Jenkins began by racing around the mezzanine and literally playing the hollow-steel guard rail, which was quite fun. They moved from pre-plotted base to pre-plotted base, always coming up with surprises, as the small crowd followed like Hamelin rats mesmerized by a piper’s tune. Mr. Scatter enjoyed the red fuzzy bargain-store microphone and the Sneezing Chorus and especially the shower of discarded clothing items floating down from the mezzanine into the path of the startled flower-delivery guy in the lobby below. Mr. Scatter took no photos, partly because the little camera doohickey on his cellular telephone is pretty much useless for anything more complicated than an extreme closeup snapshot of an extremely still object, and partly because he was just having too much fun to bother. But Lisa Radon of ultra was more disciplined and took some fine shots which you can ogle on her site.

On Friday evening it was back to the Gerding for opening night of Portland Center Stage’s comedy Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘The 39 Steps,’ which takes the 1935 movie thriller and blows it to preposterous proportions.

A droll project, fit for our times: It’s chock-full of paranoia, delivered with a knowing wink. And very theatrical: Four actors zip through about 130 roles, often at breakneck speed.

Ebbe Roe Smith and Darius Pierce do most of the zipping, and Christine Calfas plays all of the women, including one with a knife stuck in her back. That slacker Leif Norby plays only one role — Richard Hannay, the story’s hero, who is square of jaw and lively of step.

All told, bravo. Scatter friend Michael McGregor, reviewing for The Oregonian, wraps it up superbly here.

Speaking of mysteries: Somehow, back at the Scatter Ranch, some cheeses and crackers and a bottle of Eyrie pinot gris disappeared after the show.

Saturday began slowly but picked up speed. In the afternoon Mr. Scatter dropped off the Large Large Smelly Boy at ComedySportz, where he learns how to be improvisational and funny, and then dropped in for a spell at Pearl Bakery, where Mr. Scatter drank coffee and munched on something pastryish and picked up a loaf of challah bread to take home.

Then, in the evening, Mr. Scatter accompanied the Small Large Smelly Boy to Keller Auditorium for opening night of Oregon Ballet Theatre’s current show, a twin bill of George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments and Christopher Stowell’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Mr. Scatter was on assignment to cover the event for The Oregonian, and you can read his resulting review here. The big, welcome news was the return of the ballet orchestra for Midsummer from a budget-mandated layoff. After watching Temperaments, SLSB made the wise observation that the dancers had moved everything except their faces: “They did their expressions with their bodies.”

(On Sunday afternoon, while the Scatters were otherwise engaged, a power outage hit downtown as OBT’s dancers were performing Midsummer, necessitating a cancellation. Audience members left in the dark have been offered free tickets to a later performance.)

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, Mr. Scatter scurried over to Northwest Dance Project in North Portland to watch choreographer Maurice Causey work on a new piece with the company dancers. Then, while a small and congenial crowd munched on cheese and sipped wine at an event called Dance Flights, Mr. Scatter conducted an onstage interview with Causey, who did most of the talking because that’s the way it was planned.

And he talked quite well. About his career (he danced with, among others, Pennsylvania Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, and several years for William Forsythe at Ballet Frankfurt, and was ballet master for the Royal Swedish Ballet and Nederlands Dans Theatre). About being an American working mostly in Europe for the past 20 years.

About being a classically trained dancer who these days is much more interested in creating new work to new music. About public and private support for dance, and his exploratory, let’s-see-what-happens approach to creating new work, and in general about how he loves the openness of young dancers in companies like NDP.

Causey, too, is open, friendly, generous: despite his impressive resume, no airs in the studio, just a joy in the process.

His new dance will be part of Northwest Dance Project’s March 12-13 program in the Newmark Theatre. And this coming Sunday, Mr. Scatter will be back at NDP’s studio at 3 p.m. for another Dance Flights interview with another big-name choreographer setting a piece for this program, Italian dancemaker Luca Veggetti.

But first, he believes he’ll have a day of rest.

*

PHOTOS, from top:

Yuka Iino and Chauncey Parsons in the Sanguinic variation of “The Four Temperaments” at Oregon Ballet Theatre. Photo: BLAINE TRUITT COVERT

You might recall his recent pre-game patter at White Bird’s presentation of Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, or his stint of instant analysis from the broadcasting booth of Portland Opera’s Orphee.

For the next two Sunday afternoons he’ll be ambling over to the Northwest Dance Project studio just off North Mississippi Street (not all that far, as it happens, from the Scatter cave) to moderate talks with a couple of very interesting guest choreographers who are setting new work on the company for its spring performances.

The afternoons are called Dance Flights, and they’ll be casual, intimate affairs, a nice place to duck into and out of the rain. This Sunday’s chat will be with Maurice Causey (inset photo above), an independent choreographer identified closely with Nederlands Dans Theater (he’s been ballet master there, and also at the Royal Swedish Ballet) and with Ballet Frankfurt, where he was a principal dancer for William Forsythe for several years. On Tuesday I watched a couple of hours of Causey’s early rehearsal with the NDP dancers, and I’m eager to see what’s happened in the ensuing days.

Next Sunday, March 7, the guest will be the Paris-based Italian choreographer Luca Veggetti (photo at right), whose career has roamed from La Scala Milan to London, Pennsylvania, Chicago, New York City Ballet and beyond. In 2000 he was the first Italian choreographer in the 20th century to set a piece on the dancers of the legendary Mariinsky (Kirov) Ballet in St. Petersburg.

The format is this: Drop in, have a little nibble and a glass of wine, watch the dancers perform the pieces, then settle in for the talks. I’ll mainly ask the choreographers to talk about their backgrounds and their approach to dance, and I’ll encourage people in the audience to toss in their own questions. Very informal.

Each Dance Flight begins at 3 p.m. at the Northwest Dance Project studio, a pleasant, big-windowed space at 833 N. Shaver Street, just off of Mississippi Avenue. Suggested donation is $20 ($10 students), which helps pay for the events.

Northwest Dance Project’s spring performances, which will include the new works by Causey and Veggetti plus two pieces by artistic director Sarah Slipper, will be March 12-13 at the Newmark Theatre.

I’ve waited to write this because even now I don’t know all of the names of the people who’ve been laid off. Lips have been tight, although The Mercury’s Matt Davis has ferreted out most of the hit list here. Predictably, a lot of online smart-alecks have been snickering about this. Don’t know what to tell them except they’re insanely stupid, and callous to the extreme. These are good, talented people, most of them extraordinarily dedicated to the public good, who are now out of work.

The possibly mortal weakening of the mainstream American press is nothing but bad news for our fragile democracy (or republic). Without the newspapers’ checks and proddings, who will speak authoritatively to power? In October of 2008 I wrote about the problems facing the news industry, and although that post offers no solid solutions (I’m no wizard), I think it lays out the difficulties pretty well.

Up until now, The Oregonian has managed the illness of its industry with remarkable grace. Maybe it hasn’t come up with answers (and maybe I’ve been frustrated by what’s sometimes seemed like a paralysis of will), but it has treated its people well, offering several generous buyout packages to its workers instead of just dumping them by the wayside, as so many other papers have. I took a buyout two years ago. My wife took one last May.

Pretty much everyone who was going to leave voluntarily has left. Now, the O has no real choice but to make the tough cuts by layoff. They’ve begun, and there could be more. I don’t pretend to understand how the decisions were made on who went and who stayed. Faced with the extraordinary difficulties of having to make these decisions about people’s lives and livelihoods, my own list would have been different in several particulars. But there’s no good way to do this thing.

This is only the start of what promises to be a massive upheaval, and my hope is that those who are left, after shaking off the shock, will reinvent the newspaper to make it more appealing, more topical, and more pertinent to people’s lives. Right now it’s a football interior lineman’s uniform hanging on what’s become a jockey’s body. Time to recognize the advantages of being a jockey and get on with the race.

The reinvention could be — should be — exciting. Let’s all hope. And I hope that arts and cultural writing will be a vigorous part of the new Oregonian that emerges from all of this, because culture is a crucial aspect of how a city thinks of itself. In the broader sense, a city is a culture.

In the meantime, many of those out of work today are people I’ve spent years, even decades, working with. Some of them are friends. Some of them are in shock. All of them wonder what they’re going to do. What I want to do now is to honor a few of them, the ones I’ve worked with a little more closely than the others, the ones I’m especially thinking of:

Karen Brooks. Karen is the reason you see that Diner photo above. For a quarter-century, beginning at Willamette Week before she joined the O, Karen was the leading voice of food writing and restaurant criticism in Portland. Her style could be bubbly, over the top, unrestrained in its enthusiasm, but nobody could make the tough calls or spot the trends like Karen could. She made people sit up and notice the world of food, and like other pioneers such as her friend Matt Kramer she’s been doing it since long before Portland became a foodie town. Love her or hate her, people responded to Karen’s food writing. She stirred things up. She was also for many years the paper’s arts editor, and I worked with her both as a writer and an editor. Few people understand how much she put on the line and how hard she fought the internal political battles to protect and expand the paper’s cultural turf. That passion is a rare commodity, and attention must be paid. In the relatively straitlaced culture of the newspaper world Karen was an exotic bird, and she didn’t quite fit. Over the years that hurt her and helped the paper. Good luck, Karen. Now’s your chance to write that next cookbook.

Kevin Murphy. A steady presence, a Vietnam vet, an Irish American who was extraordinarily well-read and intensely curious about culture in many forms, from theater to dance and beyond. He put in stints in the old Northwest magazine and as an assistant arts editor, and was excellent to have on the features copy desk because he took an active interest in cultural matters and knew some of the questions to ask that others sometimes didn’t. A cultured man, the kind that every newspaper needs.

Shawn Vitt. For the past several years Shawn’s been editor of A&E, the paper’s Friday arts and entertainment guide. It’s a beast of many pieces that must be controlled. When I left the paper and began freelancing, he was always generous and welcoming. Even when I wrote too long, he’d try to find a way to make it fit. Sorry, Shawn, and thanks.

Cynthia Davis. A designer with a delicate approach, Cynthia worked on the templates for a lot of sections. She thought things through, trying to understand the essence of a story so she could figure out the best way to make it work visually. And she was a quiet, effective administrator, working well with people from other sections and handling the difficult duties of organizing a department of individualists. In many ways, a walking, talking definition of professionalism.

Fred Joe. Freddy’s a renegade, in a good way. A guy who goes after life hard (think motorcycle crashes) but also has the subtle touch that so many good news photographers have: He can relax his subjects on a photo shoot, “disappear” so they hardly notice he’s there, and make things vastly easier for the writer he’s working with. And he knows a good shot when he sees one. Always a pleasure to work with, always adding something mere writers didn’t think of.

Becki Lincks. Becki understands computers. And she understands people who don’t understand computers. And with patience, wit and a great sense of humor she helps luddites overcome their fears and get with the program. Many and many a time she intervened between me and my evil machine, and left me laughing over the encounter — an extraordinary skill. How the newsroom will survive without her, I’m sure I don’t know.

Alan Borrud. Always in the background, always unflappably helpful, always in good humor and interesting to talk with. Alan, a good photographer himself, was a photo lab guy, and good at it. If I needed something in the photo department, which is a semi-autonomous country with its own border patrols, Alan was the cheerful, helpful diplomat who’d help me cut through the red tape. Thanks, man.

Margie Boule. From being a television personality and a musical-comedy star, Margie made the difficult transition to being a newspaper columnist, specializing in telling small stories that sometimes had very large impacts. Her style divided readers and journalists alike: some followed her closely and trusted her implicitly, some dismissed her as a sob sister. But if she cried, she cried from her heart. And to many readers she was the face of The Oregonian, its ambassador to the community, the person who brought color to the black and white print. You don’t, or shouldn’t, sacrifice that lightly.

Joe Brugger. A copy editor for many, many years; a smart quiet guy with a wry outlook, one of the steady hands who didn’t get his name in the paper but helped keep the boat afloat. People with bylines desperately need the Joe Bruggers of the business.

Rebecca Lacy. Also a copy editor, quiet but intense, with a terrier’s focus when she smelled a rat in a piece of copy. If you couldn’t explain it so she could understand, you were in trouble.

Thanks for the memories, all of you. Go with grace. Hold your heads high. And remember, life can be good after the storm.

Dick Bogle was a Portland cop, and a television newscaster, and a newspaper reporter, and a city councilman, and he distinguished himself in all four fields, partly by being a pioneer African American locally in each.

But I like to think of him as one of Portland’s most devoted jazz aficionados, a man who loved the music, had strong opinions about it, and spread the good word about it whenever and however he could. He took wonderful black-and-white photographs of jazz greats and local luminaries in the clubs. He was Oregon correspondent for Downbeat. And he reviewed new releases on his own jazz blog.

Bogle died this morning at age 79. Willamette Week’s Hank Stern has the story here, complete with excerpts from a short profile WW published in 2007. Bogle’s wife, the singer Nola Bogle, said the cause of death was congestive heart failure.

Dick Bogle was one of those people of whom you can honestly say, this city is a better place because he lived here. I didn’t really know him, although I talked with him a few times. But I’ll miss knowing he’s around. I wish I knew where to find some of those jazz photos, so I could show you how he saw his city.