The Halprin fountain dance, one week later
I thought I was done with the Halprin fountain “event” or “happening” or “dance” — I still can’t quite name it — that ended the Time-Based Art Festival in Portland last Sunday (that would be Sept. 14). But I keep getting flashbacks of the performance, replaying little bits in my mind, thinking about some of the music I heard. You know what that’s like: Something more than random neurons firing.
I’ve had a couple of aids in this. The first is visual. Art Scatter received a very nice email from writer Brett Campbell, who was also very taken with the Halprin happening and said he was working on an essay of his own. When he completes it, we will link to it. This is right down his alley: He’s working on Lou Harrison book and Harrison was in the middle of the San Francisco milieu of Lawrence and Ana Halprin. But as a memory igniter, Brett’s wife, photographer CaroleZoom, was actually more important, because she sent us some images of the event. Quite beautiful ones, which explain the adulatory comments I heard about the first piece of the performance choreographed by Tere Mathern — which I was unable to see (I was late, it was too crowded). So, I’ve posted those here.
And there was the thread to the original post… Randy Gragg, one of the key organizers, responded a couple of times. Carolyn Altman, who was a Portland dancer/choreographer/writer, wrote in from Georgia, where she now lives, with memories of the fountains. Dance writer Martha Ullman West got things going and left us wanting more of her eye on the dances themselves.
And realizing that I missed Martha’s eye made me understand how inadequate the description of things in the original post was/is. If I could do it over, I would try to tell you how the dancers moved, more than simply saying it was “old-style” modern dance, carving space, attending to changes in topography and water flow, operating at scales tiny and grand, how they rolled and buckled and ran, the qualities in the momentary tableaux, the muscle groups engaged and relaxed, the dancers and the way their dance personalities emerged. The music would be harder for me — help us, Brett! — fleeting, sporadic, in search of original impulses to propel it, guide it, original impulses to communicate to us.
This specificity gets lost easily in the general sweep and chaos of outdoor performance. And I think that’s fine. Our attention wanders; we pick up information from the crowd; we go blank; we return. The course of this performance — from the Keller Fountain to Pettygrove Park to Lovejoy Fountain to the Source Fountain — the traveling of it, was part of the overall design, so even if you were chatting with your friends and neighbors as you walked from site to site, oblivious to everything but your conversation, you were a “performer” in the event. It would have been less if you weren’t there. To the crowd handlers, dressed in white, who directed us, you were the instrument to be played, preferably with minimal verbal communication.
So, anyway. I believe that a “good” performance is too rich to describe once and for all, or even adequately, I suppose. Maybe the best you can do is to compare your description with those of others, re-live the poetry of it through them, re-plot its contours with their help, re-enjoy the whole thing. You don’t even have to be there, as Carolyn Altman reminded me, to participate in this re-play…
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Oh all right, grump grump. A section of Mathern’s piece, in which she put on a pair of boots and waded in the fountain, hopping from slab to slab at its bottom, and joined by Linda K. Johnson looking chic as hell in an orange dress and what looked like go go boots (a theme continued by Cydney Wilkes’ who wore spectacular knee high gold boots in her section) reminded me of the days after the Keller opened when elegant women as I described in another comment, played in the water before going to the ballet at the then Civic Auditorium. There was a lot of joy, as well as style, in the Keller dancing, as well as architectural intelligence in the way the dance was built. I did have a good, if incredibly hard, seat so saw that dance most clearly. I did think the tone of the music for that dance was darker, a lot darker, than the movement it was accompanying. Or not exactly accompanying.
The other three I didn’t see as well; being a woman of a certain age I was distracted by how uncomfortable I was on the hard hard asphalt or the hard hard ground. I thought Mike Barber was nearly as funny playing a rubbery Jack with a soignee Jill in the person of Carla Mann, who we don’t see enough of, as he was in Gregg Bielemeier’s Odd Duck Lake and I very much enjoyed a good deal of the shenanigans at the Lovejoy, the piano in the water, Linda Austin’s solemn clowning as she poured water into the fountain, bringing coals to Newcastle so to speak. And the music was terrific. Also I was standing up.
Good to see these sites being used, drawing people to them, and it was quite a lot of fun to observe the audience members, especially at the Lovejoy some of whom were walking their dogs and became engaged by the activity in the fountain, standing stock still while their dogs pulled at the leash. Is this a metaphor for choreographers? I wonder.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 24, 2008 @ 2:36 pm
Martha, thank you for your account!
Comment by Barry Johnson — September 25, 2008 @ 7:17 am
You’re welcome Barry, and it occurred to me that I forgot to mention in second account that I thought the hula hoops were a wonderful touch at the Keller, hearkening back to the late sixties/early seventies when the fountain was much more in use. That added too to the cruise ship effect: the building behind the fountain looks like the prow of a ship to some degree and when the dancers frolicked, it was clearly an urban fantasy of a holiday.
Comment by Martha Ullman West — September 25, 2008 @ 11:16 am
Very sneaky, Barry, trying to embarrass me into writing up an essay on City Dance by calling me out publicly. Well, it ain’t gonna work! As a full time non blockhead freelancer, I make it a point never to write except for money. Except this. Sadly, I couldn’t interest my primary national market in a story about City Dance (or another Portland phenomenon I consider equally newsworthy, Linda Johnson’s amazing South Waterfront Artists in Residence program), so I guess I won’t be writing that City Dance piece after all. But I do consider it an important and perhaps historic event in the city’s art history. The comment I overheard over and over was “I’ve lived in Portland xx years, and I’ve never been to Lovejoy Fountain / Pettygrove Park / Keller Fountain.” So in that respect, the event accomplished what Ron and Third Angle wanted: drawing Portlanders to these wonderful yet neglected public spaces. (Confession: I’ve lived a few blocks from Lovejoy Fountain for more than two years and had never been there.)
But I think it went beyond just re-energizing these spaces. Randy Gragg’s associated events (talks and lectures) used art to connect people to their city’s history. The proximity and connection to Sojourn Theater’s Built, Linda Wysong’s Backyard Conversations and the AIR project forged fascinating connections between Portland urban renewal of the 1960s and Portland urban renewal of the 2000s. I wasn’t able to attend the panel discussions, dammit — I asked Randy to consider posting a podcast or audio file — but certainly plenty of people learned a lot about the connections between architecture, dance and music as embodied in the Halprins’ relationship. Portlanders were also exposed to a vital element of our West Coast heritage: the pioneering music that emerged from the Bay Area in the 1960s. I bet plenty of listeners — 40 years ago and maybe even now — would have considered the music played at the fountains to be intolerably avant garde, but performed in that context (and brilliantly by Third Angle), it all seemed to fit. In particular, seeing Susan Smith wade into the fountain and strike the repeated chords to to Terry Riley’s landmark work In C (a piece as important to this century’s music, in its way, as the Rite of Spring or West End Blues or the Sun Sessions) while the dancers emerged and high school students played this once avant garde work and thousands looked on just brought tears to my eyes. (It still does, just remembering it, a sure sign of great art.) It felt like such a perfect climax of beautiful movement and adventurous music and a magical environment, and followed by the ideal denouement at the Source Fountain, which could have been a massive anticlimax (for practical reasons, the program worked “upstream” from the Keller)… well, it just made me very, very proud of my city and its artists.
I’m going to resist your call for help with the music; it either works for you or it doesn’t. For me, the music of Riley and Steve Reich and the other American minimalists is very meaningful both personally and culturally and I’ve found that it transcends genre boundaries. I also like Oliveros and to a lesser extent Subotnick, but the composers were chosen less for musical than historical reasons (they were essentially the house composers for Anna Halprin’s studio), and I thought Third Angle made astute choices for what music was played where. All of the music (and much of the dance, too) had that quality of accessible strangeness to it that made me feel like I was temporarily in another world, a world I really wanted to explore. So in that sense, it all worked for me.
I’m no dance critic, but all the dances struck me as superbly appropriate to their venues and to the music, and exuded a feeling of generosity and welcoming, rather than the snooty, condescending attitude you get from some avant gardistes. I attribute a lot of this to the engaging personality of the artists involved — Linda Johnson, Third Angle, the other choreographers (whose work I’ve seen often) all have that good humored yet serious commitment to art and audiences, and it showed. I also credit Randy Gragg’s longstanding commitment to the city and its urban spaces. He obviously poured enormous effort into making this a much bigger deal than just another pretty art event. I admit I’m sort of in love with Portland as a community and particularly its modest yet developing urban spaces, and it was really gratifying to see the city and its artists showcased so beautifully.
I’d like to say it’s a very Portland thing, except that so much Portland art is plagued by the undeserved arrogance that often accompanies mediocrity, and neither quality tarnished this amazing performance.
Sometimes it feels like we progressive arts lovers and artists are laboring in an irrelevant little corner of a much bigger world that doesn’t know or care much about what we love so much. For me, City Dance took this wonderfully moving music and dance and architecture and brought it out of the shadows and into the big world. I saw thousands of people who would otherwise never have heard Terry Riley or Pauline Oliveros or seen Sydney Wilkes’s and Linda Austin’s work, or even experienced the serene beauty of Halprin’s urban spaces, all of them smiling, most of them genuinely moved or at least happily diverted for a couple of hours, and maybe some of them learned something about their city’s history and its present and future, particularly these terrific artists who’ve created so much beauty here for so many years. Reaching beyond the concert halls and dance studios and ivory towers to engage the city as a community — that’s what ambitious art at its best should do, and I think City Dance succeeded.
Too bad I won’t get to write about it.
Comment by brett — September 25, 2008 @ 4:22 pm