Thoughts about the TBA Festival opening weekend

Last Thursday, I hitched a ride to Portland for PICA’s annual TBA (Time-Based Art) Festival. Close to midnight, I wandered through the free opening night party at Washington High School (built in 1909/closed in 1981). The ominous brick venue was renamed THE WORKS (yes, all caps, dunno why). TBA Fest volunteers were a harried bunch like chaperones at a party where they’d rather be drinking.

Some volunteers abused their black PICA t-shirts telling visitors to clear out of art installation rooms. Other folks were too polite, leading me down hallways searching for a coat check that didn’t exist. Eventually, I found myself outside the main auditorium where punksters Japanther and Nightshade shadow puppeteers tried to out-rock the crowd.

The audience won. Halfway through Japanther’s set, auditorium lights went on and the crowd stormed the stage and tore the shadow puppet sheet down. The flimsy separation between art and life was revealed.

I was in the beer garden where the concert was projected through a cyclone fence. Watching from this vantage point with the ambient audio of drunken conversations plus aroma of the nearby taco truck was an auspicious start to this year’s festival.

I didn’t intend to write so much about the opening, yet this encapsulated the first weekend of performances for me. With an empty high school as festival headquarters, an adolescent awkwardness and curiosity whetted my apetite for what was to come.

Artistic director Cathy Edwards describes the theme of TBA 2010 as “storytelling.” This is an apt description. (Read more in Portland Monthly, where writers Claudia La Rocco and Anne Adams have been posting insightful entries about the festival.)

Performances I attended ranged from the highly-saturated, multiple narrative threads of The Wooster Group’s interactive 360-degree film collage There is Still Time… Brother and Dana Hanson’s work-in-progress absurdist-rock-dance-theater-elegy Gloria’s Cause to the singular narratives of Jérôme Bel’s direction of dancer Cédric Andrieux in a work about Cédric Andrieux dancing and Mike Daisey’s heart-opening tirade The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

Daisey and Bel’s work touched me with their no-nonsense staging and direct deliveries. Andrieux performed on a bare stage with a bottle of water and gym bag, Daisey performed seated at a table with a few sheets of paper.

One more note from my experience last weekend – for those of you at Mike Barber’s Ten Tiny Dances 22, you’ll remember the orange. For those of you not there, Ten Tiny ended with Daisey spitting an orange into the sold-out crowd. Need I say more? GO. The TBA Festival runs through September 19th in Portland.

 

Walking with ears open on World Listening Day

The first World Listening Day is Sunday, July 18th. There are listening events in cities such as Colorado Springs, Hong Kong, Rijeka, Perth, Cumbria, Chicago, and Seattle. Seattle’s event includes a Greenlake soundwalk hosted by the Seattle Phonographers Union. One of their members is sound artist/audio engineer Doug Haire. Haire worked with me on the recording Walking released in 2001. Here’s an excerpt:

As inspiration for the music, I walked around Greenlake at different hours and listened creating an aural sketchbook similar to Claude Monet’s series of haystacks painted at different times of the day. My favorite time at the lake was around 5AM, when the morning was wrapped in fog, people quietly fished, and ducks slowly awoke. On weekdays from 7AM to 9AM, the power walkers and joggers took over with individual Walkman headphones plugged into their ears. This shifted Greenlake from a place of being to one of doing.

With listening, it is possible to merge both being and doing. Thanks Seattle Phonographers Union for hosting a listening event around Greenlake. The free guided soundwalk happens this Sunday from 10AM to 4PM. Participants will be briefed on acoustic ecology and intentional listening inspired by the World Soundscape Project, World Listening Project, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and phonographers around the world.

 

FAREWELL Video

Check out Preview Video No. 1 of FAREWELL: A Fantastical Contemplation on America’s Relationship with China by ZebraVisual and Spectrum Dance Theatre.

Videographer Gabriel Bienczycki includes footage of the inspiring location of the Madrona Dance Studio and Lake Washington.

In addition, Donald Byrd and I speak about the project and there are excerpts from rehearsals.

 

Finalist

Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas was a 2009 Richard Rodgers Award Finalist.

Amazing knowing that the Bottled Operas are a set of 64 musical miniatures for any number of performers to be performed in any order, outdoors in water – a far cry from The Sound of Music.

Thanks to the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the encouraging nod of approval.

 

First run-out for Kidnapping Water

Today is the first run-out for Kidnapping Water: Bottled Operas. We start at Bothell Landing where the Sammamish River winds past mobile homes, under a foot bridge and through a park. When videographer Eric Rockey, percussionist James Whetzel and I arrive, we meet UW Bothell staff and faculty Lisa, Michelle and Bruce as well as researcher/writer Erica Howard.

Press play to hear Hello Helicopter (duration 2:06)

For the first Bottled Opera, No. 46 : Growing, David starts under the bridge and James plays a wood bowl he picked up at Value Village for $2. Nearly half the world’s population (2.1 billion people) live on less than $2 a day. This bowl is one of James’ prized instruments for the way it resounds in the water and beyond.

My impressions of the morning in Bothell Landing include a parade of mom’s with baby strollers, the geese that line up when David sang No. 15 : Line Up and a jackhammer that breaks through earth a few blocks away with a flute that plays in the distance.

David and James also perform No. 2 : I Am Felled at Bothell Landing.

The UW Bothell wetlands are summer dry underneath the boardwalk, so UW Bothell facility staff gather water from the wetlands and put it in a trough for James and David to perform No. 36 : Plish. This work, with libretto by Bret Fetzer, is about a murderous man deranged by his neighbor’s sprinkler. The audience of Professor Amy Lambert’s class Engaging Visual Arts: Social and Political Issues in Contemporary Art, faculty and staff politely listen.

Writer Loreen Lee also meets us in Bothell. After UW Bothell, we perform Bottled Opera No. 24 : Coming Home, libretto by Eugenie Chan, in the water under a willow tree. Afterwards, we go to Lake Forest Park Town Center for lunch.

I am excited that there is a King County Library branch in the same building as Third Place Books and a food court.

After lunch Eric, David, James, and I go to north Lake Washington where David and James perform No. 07 : Hello Helicopter. Rather than run away, three teenage girls are intrigued and ask us about the singing and playing water.

The audiences today are all appreciative. After Lake Forest Park we go to Echo Lake in Shoreline and performed No. 19 : Bottle Upon Bottle in a lake filled with swimming children. When David sings “laughter of children,” on cue the children splash and giggle. David also performed an encore of Hello Helicopter here. as we walk away one boy sadly yells, “They’re leaving.”

The final Bottled Opera of today is No. 11 : Heaven, with libretto by Caroline Murphy.

David and James perform at Richmond Beach on Puget Sound. Heaven is about a man justifying his drug addiction in the bathroom of an empty bar.

The juxtaposition of the beautiful exhausting day and the deluded man is a fitting end to this first set of Bottled Operas. I realize that I often wrap myself in so many contradictions that I forget the beauty that surrounds me.

For an encore to the magnificant Olympic Mountains and Puget Sound, David and James perform Growing one more time; two monks walking on the shoreline.

Read David’s thoughts on the project posted the night before the premiere.