OR, THE WHALE BREATHES NEW AIR INTO THE SAILS OF A SINKING SHIP Coinciding the end of its run with the Fertile Ground Festival, Portland Experimental Theater Ensemble (PETE) adapts Juli Crockett’s meditation on the famous legless sea captain, Ahab, with style, humor, and controlled chaos. The piece functions as both a fictional mission to …
Tag Archives: Fertile Ground Festival
Undress The Monster
Frankenstein: A Cabaret is a modern-day folk-opera about female sexuality, desire and creativity. Much grabs the attention in The Broken Planetarium’s presentation of Frankenstein: A Cabaret even before the show starts. On Thursday night, as I sat waiting for the performance to begin, my eyes darted to and from the bouncing, fleshy, stage-lit cleavage of co-producer and performer …
Her Desperate Prayer
Source Material offers Nini Julia Bang upon migration to Portland The Headwaters Theatre is not a large venue, but when you remove the seats it is obviously smaller. For A Thousand Tongues, just two and a half rows of chairs are set right onto the stage, angled to face the opposite corner. At most, twenty-five …
A Home For the Night
There is one scene in Saturday night’s Maybe it’s Because…(I’m So Versatile) workshop performance that made me remember something I hadn’t recalled in a while. It’s not one specific, singular memory, because the occurrence happened often, so I didn’t revisit a distinct moment, but the details came to me distinctly. In the show’s scene, a homeless girl …
The Tracks of Truth and Lies
at a crossing, past and present collide in Nancy Moss’s Deception. The opening scene of Nancy Moss’s new play, Deception, introduces us to Anne Winter just as she is receiving a surprise visit at the bonnet shop she owns in Portland, OR. Hailing from an unknown place back east, Ms. Winter, portrayed by Damaris Webb, …
A World of Dance and Rhythm
Before the dancers came onto the floor at Polaris Dance Theater, this Saturday night for the Groovin Greenhouse performance, as part of Fertile Ground Festival, the floor shone an aquamarine blue in the dark theater, like an illusory pool under spotlight. From a corner speaker, M’Liss Quinnly’s voice broke the soft blue silence of the floor and hushed …
down: The Rabbit Hole
“I feel like I’m dissolving.” Clarity is a residence that we can’t always make out from a distance. It assembles itself sometimes only when we’ve exhausted the trail leading up to it. We know it’s there. We can see the outline and imagine what’s inside but sometimes it takes driving there and kicking open the door to truly get the …