Sunday in the park with the Halprins (while Rome burned)
So, while Wall Street Giants shuddered, pivoted and crashed to the ground, Art Scatter was amusing itself at “City Dance,” the celebration of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, specifically Lawrence’s Portland plazas and fountains, Anna’s dances and early ’60s San Francisco art music, which somehow affected both. I will type (or is it keyboard, technically?) as long as I can, until the shock wave takes us off line… oddly it seems appropriate to muse on subjects such as these during times of economic crisis.
We’ve already set up the fountains, and to a lesser extent the dances, in a post below. To summarize, L. Halprin was hired by Ira Keller and the PDC to provide some public spaces for Portland’s first major Urban Renewal project, the demolition of the South Auditorium district and its replacement by a Skidmore, Owings, Merrill office/residential park. Keller was so happy with these, that he later asked L. Halprin to finish off the set with a plaza/fountain in front of what was then Civic Auditorium. It’s now the Keller Auditorium and the fountain is now Keller Fountain, though old-timers will be excused for calling it the Forecourt Fountain.
Fast forward 40 years or so. The fountains and plazas, important icons in the history of urban landscape design, could use a little conservation work, and so architecture writer/magazine editor Randy Gragg, the Halprin Conservancy, Third Angle New Music Ensemble and four Portland choreographers (Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilks, Linda Austin and Linda K. Johnson) banded together to help raise our collective consciousness about the Halprins’ work by staging a moving concert through all four sites (Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, Lovejoy Fountain, Source Fountain).
So on Sunday afternoon, sunny and warm, several hundred Portlanders, unaware perhaps that financial Redwoods were crashing, assembled to watch the show on the last day of the Time-Based Art Festival. Maybe there were more than that, adding the two concerts together. The second concert was so packed that when I arrived right before it began, I couldn’t get close enough to see anything much at the first site, the Keller Fountain, but that’s not going to deter me from my posting. Because there were three more sites to visit.
Because it’s completely inappropriate to our subject, but in the spirit of worthless financial instruments (I have absolutely no idea what a financial instrument is… I imagine a French horn for some reason), I will enumerate my findings.
1. Keller Fountain was thronged. Too thronged for a latecomer. So even though word from the first, 1 p.m., show had already filtered down to me that Tere Mathern and her company’s occupation of the Keller pools and waterfalls was quite beautiful, I was unable to see it, except for a bit at the very top, during which Tere and her dancers got very wet. This is one of the problems with outdoor performance, but really it’s OK, because I determined that if I couldn’t manage an appropriate experience at the Keller, I’d just jump ahead to Pettygrove Park.
2. Second stage goes free-form. Pettygrove is in a little canyon surrounded by tall buildings about a block away from Keller. It features a few hillocks, a large plaza and a fountain with a large Manuel Izquierdo bronze sculpture. When I arrived early, Third Angle was warming up to play a game of musical “Telephone” with the musicians scattered among the trees and mounds each playing a snatch of a song, which was then picked up one way or another by the next musician. Were they practicing or had they already begun? Meanwhile the dancers, led by Wilkes, were practicing, too. Or maybe not. And they were also in the process of invention, because Wilkes had structured the time and place but not created the content of the dance, leaving that to the dancers. Once the crowds arrived, there was quite a bit of tussling on the mounds, some free-form modern dance (in the old style, mostly) and some comic moments, mostly supplied by dancer Mike Barber.
3. Austin dances Riley. I was first to Pettygrove, which meant I was among the last to Lovejoy Fountain where Linda Austin and company danced to Terry Riley pieces of music. This was really effective: the music was louder and more focused and Austin’s investigation of the fountain was amusing and pretty complete, as the dancers clambered about its walls and entered its pools. I especially liked the bit in which one of the dancers dropped cups full of water from one level to the one below, not pouring but sort of “flinging”. Once the music entered its percussive phase (a can with a big metal chain, for example), my attention wandered to a tattoo on the right arm of a young woman — it had an architectural element (a column maybe?) and a manga character. Interesting. Anyway, did I mention that the piano was in the pool of water?
4. We then were led in procession to the small Source Fountain. Along the way we were met by some young women spilling water out of large buckets (not splashing, just spilling) and other young women telling us details about their lives and families and then taking off articles of clothing. Some disrobed more than others. Somehow there was a logic to this. When we arrived at the Source (Halprin designed the series of fountains as a “watershed” which starts at the highest elevation with the Source), we were encouraged to link hands and circle the fountain before exiting. By this time, this made sense, too! Which is a sign that choreographer Linda K. Johnson had understood all that had gone on before. This makes sense: she has been investigating how art meets urban space down at South Waterfront for an entire year!
5. The spaces are really usable. Previously, Gragg had pointed out that Halprin designed the fountains to be used, to be animated by people entering them, to be thought of as stages of a sort. City Dances accomplished this, beautifully. At Pettygrove, I ran into dancer Joan Findlay with husband artist Phil Sylvester (and a couple of little dogs). She remembered that the first time she ever saw the old Portland Dance Theatre was at an outdoor concert at Lovejoy Fountain, with dances by Bonnie Merrill and Judy Patton. She determined that this must have been around 1977 — three years later she was dancing in another old Portland company, Jann Dryer’s Cirque, that had emerged from Portland Dance Theatre. Outdoor performances were a staple of PDT during the summer — it was a different time, I suppose, aesthetically and economically. But I liked it.
6. No matter what Mr. Gragg says about hindsight, the design around the spaces is atrocious, he must agree. Not just bad. Grotesque. There isn’t a single structure that addresses any of the spaces directly, except for Keller Auditorium. They are surrounded by parking structures, blank tower walls, the back ends of smaller buildings. Maybe Pettygrove works as something like a pocket canyon part, wooded and secret, but that’s not the point of parks — “secret,” I mean.When I mentioned this to a colleague, he said, “That’s ’60s urban renewal for you.” I’m not sure what the implications are for the parks themselves, for their future — in a way, the awful design around them was the reason they had to be “discovered”. They seem superfluous, unused, remote, and therefore marginal. Which is what the conservancy is about, I suppose. Step 1: demolish the surrounding smaller buildings and start over. Step 2: renovate the towers to make them face the parks somehow.
My perfect city has lots of performances like this one, like the old days, when art and music met the people where they lived. Does this make me a victim of nostalgia? I don’t think so…
Art Scatter photographers, have any photos of the event? If so and you want to share them, send them to artscatterpdx@gmail.com — we’ll get them up!
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I’m sorry Barry, very, that you missed most of the Keller fountain opener, which had an elegance and playfulness, as well as a thoughtfulness behind it, that I found lacking in the other three. Mathern well understands that geometry is poetry, which applies not only to her choreography but to the fountain itself. I really loved it, and I think Anna Halprin would have absolutely detested it–it had the kind of theatricality she was thoroughly against, including very thoughtful costuming. But the costuming was a linking theme of the four performances and one of the things that made it work as an integrated concert, particularly the use of color. Victim of nostalgia? Go for it!
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 15, 2008 @ 10:30 am
We LOVE the critic who curates his own personal performance. You could have started at The Source Fountain and floated downstream into the performers’ efforts to swim upstream and metaphorically to the original inspiration of dance/architecture in the Halprin’s personal experience. But that would be my “perfect critic”!
I actually disagree that the spaces are “atrocious.” Too many people today want to overlay New Urbanism fashions of florists and bank machines on every corner. I find the landscape and buildings’ mutual diffidence toward one another to be one of the more charming aspects of the district. The trick would be finding a use or a delicate intervention to animate them with a few more people. But the recent and current owners so far have shown little creativity. I have no idea what kinds of returns they’re seeking, but imagine if their proformae could be served by small creative firms or studio spaces not reliant on traffic. Before bulldozing and surrounding the plazas in townhouses, why not at least TRY to imagine how they could remain pleasant diversions rather than somebody’s front yards.
Comment by randy gragg — September 16, 2008 @ 5:10 pm
It WAS quite pleasant sitting in virtual solitude, surrounded by the dancers and musicians as they warmed up. And then watching the crowd filter into Pettygrove, a few at first and then the hundreds, with the “mime monitors” in their white uniforms trying to keep them out of the performing spaces using as few words as possible. Which gets at the heart of A. and L. Halprin’s thinking about the line between performance and audience, perhaps?
OK. “Atrocious.” I would defend it with one image: The back of the pedestrian stucco condo unit (I suppose they are condos and I use “pedestrian” instead of some firmer and more negative adjective just because I’m making a case for “atrocious” and don’t want to defend something like “butt-ugly”) that faces the upper reaches of Lovejoy, quite close to the fountain, with the first couple of floors of its parking garage, which would be bad enough, except they reach a whole new level of awful by virtue of their metal bars over the windows. So you sit in Lovejoy Park and have the experience of “prison.” Nothing else is quite that bad, though I’d argue that “diffidence” isn’t quite it. The building owners/designers totally disregarded the fountains.
I plead not guilty to the sin of New Urbanism (I’ve criticized Leon Krier on the blog before, for example, specifically the post after your interview with Fregonese), though the movement has done one important thing: encouraged human scale. In the case of South Auditorium, I would have been just fine with 6 towers arranged just so in the superblocks around the fountains. That WOULD have been diffident, each giving the other space, and it might have been possible to encourage more interaction with the parks from the rest of the city. Surrounding them with townhouses, I agree, creates exactly the same problem that we have now — limited access/visibility. So I suppose I’m coming down on the side of the SOM/Le Corbusier vision after all, minus the all clutter. In your presentation, you (or maybe Professor Abbott) projected a photograph of the original plan, and though I have serious reservations about it (”sterile”), as just one piece in the multifarious city, it would have been interesting and the fountains/parks/plazas would have had room to breathe and invite more performance.
But, before we get lost in argument, let me get a little more personal: your Halprin journey has been an incredibly interesting one to watch for me, from your first stories int he paper to this event, and it’s opened my eyes to so many facets of Portland history, American culture, urban and landscape design, and much more. So any differences of interpretation we may have for me are cushioned by gratitude for the ride.
Comment by Barry — September 17, 2008 @ 6:36 am
Sorry, I’m all choked up. Witnessing you two sparring is just like old times! Brings a tear to the eye.
Comment by Kristi! — September 18, 2008 @ 2:49 pm
Just for the record, Randy and I worked together in the arts department for most of his 17 years or so at The Oregonian; the last half-dozen I served as his editor. So, Kristi may be referring to our oh-so-occasional moments of disagreement!
Comment by Barry Johnson — September 18, 2008 @ 3:53 pm
[...] and this from Barry Johnson’s artscatter blog. SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “third angle and tba - ‘brilliant achievement’”, [...]
Pingback by daily observations » third angle and tba - ‘brilliant achievement’ — September 18, 2008 @ 4:03 pm
Oh, the old days and the future flowing simultaneously! It’s good to see y’all (that’s what we say here in Georgia) swinging away so articulately. Wish I could have seen the invention, beauty and fluidity of all those talented performers. I fondly remember swimming in the Pettygrove fountain after late night rehearsals at Shattuck Hall, and leading bands of small children, including my son who is now 6′2”, from one fountain to another during afternoons of splashing. Many cities have fountains such the one at the end of Salmon Street (Atlanta and Augusta come to mind), but none that I’ve visited let you flow through space in the way the configuration does in this district. They are more tourist targets than places people in the know could go for some decent hanging out. We often saw skateboarders rolling from one end to the other. Oh, the dance. The buildings are diffident, maybe. Butt ugly, some, and I do remember some of that bars-on-the windows feeling Barry describes. But I always the green and quiet in the district interesting in relation to the rest of the city, and the lack of people shopping made us feel like adventurers in secret territory- we were relating to the space the buildings created more than the buildings themselves. The space was less the Pioneer Square living room megagathering and more about intimate tucked away hollows - an urban Secret Garden. There were people there - real people busy working and living quiet lives. It’s nice to have different textures and energies in a city, something different from ground floor commerce - florists and bank machines, as someone said. I mean, how much shopping can we do? I’m with Barry: more performance!
Comment by Carolyn Altman — September 21, 2008 @ 9:48 am
To briefly pick up Barry’s string, the lovely mutual diffidence between buildings and the plazas I spoke of involved the ORIGINAL buildings. The stucco (actually a plasticized version of stucco) wonder you speak of was added in the ’90s, complete with the car jail that faces Lovejoy. I fought it in an article for the O, but to no avail. (It was before I knew how to be more effective with the ol’ newspaper column).
What I would suggest is walking through the plazas and IMAGINING what those old empty Modernist buildings might be filled with that would animate these spaces. The transparencies, proportions, elevations, etc are really quite lovely. For instance, wouldn’t it be amazing to fill them with Jordan Schnitzer’s print collection? I simply feel there has been an absence of imagination — indeed, absence of any effort at all — to reinvision them. But woe is the space that does not conform to stock pro formae!
Comment by randy gragg — September 21, 2008 @ 10:45 pm
[...] there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was [...]
Pingback by Art Scatter » The Halprin fountain dance, one week later — September 22, 2008 @ 8:57 am
OK, then, I have posted above on this thread… I really like Carolyn’s memory of Pettygrove and her experience of the place, its Secret Garden quality. And I think Randy and I have reached an agreement of a sort, which really, we always have! I will risk a metaphor here, taking off from Randy’s re-envisioning comment… The Halprin set of fountains remind us of the importance of urban re-design/re-animation in other parts of the city, too. They encourage our participation, however brief, in the life of the city; more than that, they assert that our participation is the MOST IMPORTANT THING. Even more than the fountains themselves or the buildings around them. But the “soft space” of the parks is an excellent place to start the process because they are so inviting… Which may have been what attracted Randy to them in the first place?
Comment by Barry Johnson — September 22, 2008 @ 9:10 am