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?
