12 Minutes Max
On The Boards, February 18th

Since the days when Jimmy Carter resided at the White House, On the Boards has presented its 12 Minutes Max series, “an informal showcase of new works and works in progress curated by different members of the arts community seven times a year.” And since at least the second Reagan administration I have dropped in occasionally to see what the region’s up and coming performers had to offer. Too often, the artists would wallow joylessly in the familiar, tried-and-true epistemological chasms of their avant-garde forbearers -- and those were the good ones.

On Sunday night I checked in on the series after a long absence to see who guest curators Eric Fredericksen and Betsey Brock had deemed viewer-worthy among the current aspirants. Fredericksen and Brock are perhaps the most celebrated husband and wife couple in the city’s vibrant but cozy art scene. In case you’ve never had the pleasure, Fredericksen is the director of Western Bridge, contemporary art collectors Bill and Ruth True’s acclaimed non-profit exhibition space, and Brock is the public relations director at the Henry Art Gallery. Their track records -- behind the scenes, in the public eye, and on the gallery walls -- are impeccable, so I assumed they’d make the most of the occasion, even making lemonade from lemons if the occasion called for it.

What I witnessed was a series of works -- some great, some passable – which together managed to entertain while still exploring the essential stuff of contemporary art. The performance, held in the more intimate downstairs space, took on a festive, party-like mood as the evening progressed. If there was a dominant mode of expression that evening it was recitativo, with pure movement a close runner-up.

Helsinki Syndrome’s Sideshow began with furtive running, the shrill blasts of whistles, and the pomp and circumstance of Finland’s national anthem and flag. Slowly the cacophony settles down into a lucid narrative of childhood, where we hear about getting lost amidst a bucolic setting, encountering fear, and finding your way back home: a German fairy tale with a happier and more probable ending.

Tom Blood’s The Sky Position, a loose and rambling spoken word piece, was the delightful rumination of an enchanted wanderer. Blood, who resembles a young Jim Nabors, recounted with diffident humor scenes of his poet’s life. While he could be mistaken at first for some tired throwback from a 1950’s Greenwich Village coffee house, he quickly demonstrated a grace and comic ease that made his twelve minutes go by too quickly. He was accompanied on piano by fellow Portlander Curtis Knapp of Watery Graves. The trio themselves -- Knapp, bassist Davis Lee Hooker, and drummer Adrian Orange -- performed a wonderfully soulful and disjointed instrumental set after the intermission.

The third piece of the evening, entitled !@ [10 SH1], combined choreography by Pilar Villanueva and a somewhat glib incantation performed by a charming, good-looking guy who walked back and forth diagonally across the stage. Was this “Star Hang Nga Rush,” listed in the program as the writer of the piece? The dancers, revealed suddenly by his parting of a curtain, worked off the surface of the wall but the relationship between their struggle and his words was not clear. Has his enlightenment freed him from their fate? I couldn’t tell. Despite its lack of focus, the piece bopped along agreeably while running down the clock.

The tone became more somber when choreographer/dancer Kristin Von Claret, dressed in a deep-red kimono-like costume, began her solo dance piece, Left Lane. Set to a rather textureless techno score, the work was more firmly rooted in the conventions of an established art medium (modern dance) than anything else on stage, and thus brought a certain element of respectability to the wide-ranging program. Von Claret, a striking woman with plum-hued hair, had another piece of choreography in the show’s second half entitled Iron and Silk set for two dancers to similar music. Both works were competently executed and compositionally sound, but each amounted to fairly unremarkable twelve minutes.

For the intermission, the audience was asked to step outside to witness locust perform a piece called BMX Fascination along the sidewalk. Locust is the made up of composer Zeke Keeble, performer/choreographer Amy O'Neal, and a crew of excellent dancers. Their works, a combination of music, dance, and video, dramatize human and social breakdowns with explosive energy and wry humor. I was pleased to see them this time doing their thing on the street under stage lights. Keeble sat on and played an amplified wooden box while Amy O’Neal and Jessie Smith engaged in a BMX battle reminiscent of the one they waged in last year’s Mockumentary.

The real crowd-pleaser on Sunday night was Vis-à-Vis Society Research: Bad Habits, performed by Rachel Kessler and Sierra Nelson (aka Dr. Owning and Dr. Ink). These two ladies are best known for their work as two-thirds of literary performance group The Typing Explosion. Here they don lab coats to explore the lowly, commonplace nature of our desires in sweet, mock-scientific detachment. As Dr. Ink dances out a series of steps to Paul McCartney’s syrupy “Silly Love Songs” representing human response, Dr. Owning leaves her overhead projector with its bars and graphs to read a litany of bad habits, reading each one off a pad of colored sticky-notes before flinging it into the air. It was the only true ‘concept piece’ in the line-up, and these girls carried it off with their wit and verve.

The show closed with Yuron Top, a short, cryptic film by some person or group calling itself Eagle Quest, followed by You Got It Going On, a lively spoken word anthem performed by a guy named South Pa. Yuron Top follows a young man in a suit and tie as he undergoes a profound crisis of identity during his daily commute. Rather than head where he was going, he begins to search for something he cannot seem to recognize or understand. You Got It Going On, by contrast, was a loud Whitmanesque exhaltation of self. Somehow these last two segments captured the dual nature of the performances that evening, with heady self-reflextion giving way to unbridled exhilaration. Isn’t this how we want all of our contemporary art adventures to end?

Mary Henry at Wright Exhibition Space
Through March 30
Mary Henry at Howard House
Through March 15

A quick tour of Pioneer Square this month includes a number of shows in which artists grapple with serious and troubling contemporary issues: photographs of incarcerated youth at James Harris; explorations of racial politics at Pacini Lubel; and exhibits exploring death and struggle in the animal world at Punch and Shift Galleries – “Nature, red in tooth and claw”.

Strolling through these worthy but disturbing shows is the perfect run-up to a visit to Howard House and the exhibition of the paintings of Mary Henry. Her paintings are a bracing immersion in an alternate artistic reality, in which order replaces chaos, rationality overcomes conflict, and art offers the possibility of healing what ails us. I always feel somehow cleansed when I spend time with her work, like a quick sauna followed by a cold shower.

Mary Henry is a Northwest Georgia O’Keefe, a determined woman living alone in a remote and scenic setting, creating a distinguished body of work quite independent of popular trends. Her geometric abstractions are a celebration of an art moment whose last high point was nearly half a century past. Henry is unafraid to do work which brings to mind iconic painters like Mondrian and Moholy-Nagy (her teacher), as well as Joseph Albers, Agnes Martin, Frank Stella, and the Op Artists.

And yet few would describe her art as derivative, owing to both its utter sincerity, and the way in which she has made the crisp language of geometic abstraction something peculiarly her own. Her art can range from the playful (something rare in the work of her geometric predecessors), to a level of austerity that flirts with the sterile. This is particularly true of the large diptychs at the Wright Exhibition Space inspired by a mid-70s visit to Alaska’s North Slope, which is unlike the work of her erstwhile predecessors in its stripped bare imagery and palette – huge monochromatic rectangles and stripes with only a slight visual pulse, work that is perhaps a bit too literal a transcription of her response to the vastness and emptiness of the tundra. The enormous 4’ X 12’ diptych North Slope #9, for example, two cool gray rectangles flanked by two warm gray squares, is too neutral as a composition to move us with either its static geometry or its nearly monochromatic color.

After the Alaska series, and Henry’s move to Whidbey Island, her work decisively changes direction. Linear compositions, simple block grids, and monochrome are replaced by increasingly lush color, and an increasingly vibrant palette. It’s fascinating to watch an artist in their seventies hit their stride, and the titles of these rich works – “After Scarlatti”, “The Sun in Scorpio”, “Giverny” – reveal Henry’s new focus. “Both Sides Now”, done in the late 80s, is a modified Mondrian, the canvas crowded with interlocking rectangular strips and blocks in simple solid, nearly primary colors. There’s a musical rhythm here that’s energetic, determined, and precise.

It’s at Howard House where one can best appreciate the transformation Henry has achieved in making early modernist painting something alive and individual. The show, almost all works of the last 15 years, is neatly divided into more Mondrian-inspired grid works in the rear room, and more offbeat neo-Constructivism in the front. Both groups of work are visually engaging, inventively varied, and instantly likable. We’re constantly reminded of the utopian roots of the Constructivist experiment, whose original adherents, like Henry, believed utterly in the ability of art to elevate the viewer’s own spiritual state. But there’s a lightness to Henry’s art, and a sweetness, which her deadly serious Communist forbearers, for whom art was a revolutionary tool, would have found alien indeed.

Take a work like the delicious “Ilya On My Mind” (I do mean delicious – I’m reminded of creamsicles). A great deal of the canvas is simply unpainted white ground, weightless but active, like the air whistling through a garden trellis. The rest are playful, geometrical shapes in the colors of summer - aster red, sunflower gold, dry season sky blue – and two circles in jet black, for ballast. The tight grid of “Both Sides Now” has been cut up with scissors, enlivened with curves, and pasted back together in fragments. There’s openness and an almost childlike optimism – the black hole is the smallest form in the composition. There’s also an appealing hand-made quality to the painting, partly due to the artist’s decision to create her precision shapes by hand, without the use of tape or masks, and partly due to the slightly uneven texture of the painted surface itself.

The newest of the works on view at Howard House is also the largest, a 17-foot tall wall mural designed by the artist and executed by assistants. It shows the artist entirely undaunted and undiminished by age, or self-doubt. In its bold, assertive shapes and colors, it states as clearly as any manifesto the artist’s conviction that pure form, intelligently extracted and arranged, is a more direct connection to what really matters than the complaints of the flesh, the vagaries of daily life, or the march of so-called progress. Who am I to doubt?

Swan Lake
Pacific Northwest Ballet
February 1 & 3

Swan Lake is not only the original and greatest story-length ballet, it has, since its 1895 revival, defined the art of narrative movement in dance. Central to the work is the power of romantic love and the inherent self-deception that accompanies it. The most powerful ballets are those deeply-rooted in myth, where they can absorb human history and consciousness. Swan Lake is among the most famous male coming-of-age stories in our culture. In a world where swans are either white or black, Prince Siegfried’s idealized vision of Odette sees its dark reflection in the Baron von Rothbart’s love-dooming spell.

Former Artistic Director Kent Stowell’s 2003 version of the classic ballet, with its spare, haunting sets by Ming Cho Lee, takes full advantage of the story’s mythic/sexual subtext. From the moment we set eyes on the merry courtyard gathering framed by a tilted proscenium thrust upwards by the canopies of barren, slanted trees, we sense the collision of culture and nature, of idealized beauty and human desire. As the narrative unfolds, Siegfried’s notions of feminine perfection and true love, which manifest themselves as the vision of Odette, are shattered, ultimately giving way to the sober realities of adulthood.

On opening night, Jeffrey Stanton and Louise Nadeau were cast in the lead roles. Nadeau, with her combination of dramatic range and technical brilliance, delivered a rich, complex performance that unleashed the power that lies within this bitter, familiar story. Stanton was a solid Siegfried but exuded his customary diffidence. Saturday night was the first of Patricia Barker’s final two performances as Odette/Odile and she was paired with the flamboyant Stanko Milov. While Barker lacked the alluring coquettishness of Nadeau in Act Three, her Odette embodied a transcendent melancholy that was no doubt heightened by the knowledge that her retirement is imminent. As she floated off the stage for the last time in Act Four, many of the Saturday night subscribers I have grown accustomed to seeing over the years seemed visibly distraught.

Act One establishes the idyllic life of the young prince, which is soon interrupted by the arrival of his mother the queen. She presents her son with the hunting bow that will lead him to the lake of the swans in Act Two. Here Stanton seemed to casually stumble across his destiny while Jonathan Porretta, as the Jester, dazzled the crowd. Milov, on the other hand, appears hell-bent on fulfilling his yet-unseen crash and burn passion. In Act Two, Siegfried encounters Odette, imprisoned within the form of a beautiful swan. He falls in love with her, an act which summons von Rothbart, the sorcerer who holds her captive there. Has he fallen for the woman or for the vision he has created of her? Is this vision what confines her to the body of an elegant bird? Does von Rothbart represent the ancient and ongoing tradition of Siegfried’s abstract and life-denying vision of love?

It depends on which night you went. On Saturday, Milov’s earthiness and immediacy provided a perfect counterpoint to the ethereal grace of Patricia Barker, and the story’s structure and significance were evident throughout. On Thursday, Stanton failed to provide enough emotional ballast for Nadeau’s on-stage intensity, especially in Act Three, when she miraculously shifted from a sorrowful, restrained Odette into a haughty and sensual Odile. While the entire performance was enjoyable enough, its deeper undertow could never quite be felt. On both evenings, Christophe Maraval was relegated to playing the evil baron and had to strut across the stage in a costume that made him look like an aging British rock star.

It is not enough these days to exclaim that the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s dancers are uniformly excellent: there is, increasingly, a broader range of styles and self-expression within the company. Among the men, Batkhurel Bold stood out on Thursday in Act One’s Pas de trios. His precision, athleticism, and self-confidence completely captivated the audience. On Saturday, Karel Cruz dominated the stage in the same role with gravity-defying leaps that combined articulation with breathless ease.

This production of Swan Lake, in spite of the different qualities of its nightly casts, successfully brings together Stowell’s affinity for myth-based story ballet and Artistic Director Peter Boal’s more dramatic, expressive dance company.