Every Story Contains the World.
Malpaso Dance Company offers the dove to Portland. Cuba, for me, has always been a far away neighbor, some mysterious paradise, and a land of armed revolutionaries. Americans are pretty much informed of Cuban identity from Fidel Castro and Ricky Ricardo: Both are outdated. These notions will evolve into a more honest portrayal of Cuban culture as …
Continue reading “Cuban Dance Marks the White Bird Season Finale with Cultural Integration”
Kyle Abraham brings Black Lives Matter to the center stage in a provocative performance on racial violence. I’m sitting in front of my computer screen, hunched and tired and frustrated. I’m re-watching the brutal video of the death of Eric Garner for the first time since the video came to light and tears are streaming down my face. …
A couple of hours after experiencing Hervé Koubi’s choreographed defiance of neat and sterilized political boundaries, What The Day Owes To The Night continues to spin in my head and ripple throughout my body. This production unfurled from a deeply personal space, exploring cross-cultural intersections between masculinity, identity, and colonialism. The journey began when, …
L-E-V pummels theater walls with fine dance and street music. Political activism has gotten so fracturous — possibly because it is so ignored by politicians — that radicals on the left have turned against their strongest potential allies. It was seen when unofficial Black Lives Matter protesters shut down a Seattle Bernie Sanders rally in …
It was a dance-off last night at the Arlene Schnizter Concert Hall, or a tap-off, to be specific. The show starts with tappers merging from both sides of the stage, five on one side and four on the other, making the nine members of Dorrance Dance, a tap troupe from New York City. The sound mounted …
Continue reading “The Blues Project Tapped the Last of White Bird’s Season”
White Bird Brings The Wonder Of New York To Portland With Dance Theatre Of Harlem Dance Theatre of Harlem has not been back to Portland to perform for thirty years. The excitement for their return last night at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in downtown Portland was palpable. The line before the show outside extended …
Hep Hep Sweet Sweet is the opening piece of three, for the Urban Bush Women, a Brooklyn, New York-based dance company, celebrating its 30th Anniversary at the Newmark Theatre in downtown Portland, presented by White Bird. It begins in a lively mood, “Parker’s Mood” in fact, by Charlie Parker, with everyone costumed in fantastic sequined …
Last night, two performances were paired together for something that White Bird calls, New Israeli Voices in Dance, presented at Portland State University’s Lincoln Hall. It is part of their Uncaged program and runs through Saturday night. Both of these featured works are minimal in their stage and costume design, which I suspect makes the …
The Alonzo King LINES Ballet begins as abruptly as it ends. The stage curtain at the Newmark Theater in downtown Portland lifts and a company of ten dancers is thrust into movement by the opening jolting chords of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto For Two Violins. The show seems to start in the middle of something, …
