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Bright Lights: Christopher Stowell and Chris Coleman talk Portland arts

By Barry Johnson
February 12, 2013
News & Notes
Oregon Ballet Theatre performs Christopher Stowell's "The Rite of Spring"/Blaine Truitt Covert

Oregon Ballet Theatre performs Christopher Stowell’s “The Rite of Spring”/Blaine Truitt Covert

Last night I saw that Chris Coleman and Christopher Stowell were participating in Portland Monthly’s Bright Lights discussion series, so I hustled over to Jimmy Mak’s in time to settle in a bit before the program started.

I had a few things in mind, mostly to do with Stowell, who resigned suddenly from Oregon Ballet Theatre last November (a situation ArtsWatch’s Bob Hicks just returned to this weekend). I thought he might expand on his reasons for leaving the company he’d served as artistic director for nine years, and maybe he’s say something incendiary! Well, he was quite measured about his time at OBT and he simply reiterated what he’d said when he left: 1) he wasn’t interested in going through a radical budget reduction process, which seemed to be in the offing; and 2) he wanted to expand his professional experiences beyond Oregon Ballet Theatre.

He commented on some dance clips that moderator Randy Gragg (the magazine’s editor-in-chief) projected on the screen behind the stage, and frankly, watching Alison Roper and Kathi Martuza is always a treat. Mostly, he talked about his tenure at OBT, and how he attempted to execute the brief under which he was hired: to stick to the classical repertoire, to dance it well, to develop new work, to participate in the conversation with other ballet companies around the country, who were following a similar path.

And how did he do it? “For me the school is the most important part of the institution,” he said. It instilled the basic values of the company, not just the classical steps, but the work ethic and the spirit he wanted for the company, that OBT could work hard and “have a good time doing it.” Nine years later, 16 of the 21 dancers in the company have had at least some training in the school, and the foundation of the company is secure.

He also talked about the constant concern for keeping things under budget and the difficulty ballet companies have in adjusting to sudden budget changes (company size is determined by the largest dance in the season, in OBT’s case, “The Nutcracker”). And then he was joined onstage by Coleman, the artistic director of Portland Center Stage.

Coleman talked about the impact of the passage of Measure 26-146, the tax that will fund the teaching of art in the schools and support the city’s largest arts groups at a higher level than before. The support Center Stage will now get from the City is still small, around five percent of its budget, but Coleman said it would help the company erase an accumulated deficit, develop a rainy day fund and eventually expand education and outreach programs.

And he also talked about the City’s diversity efforts, which tie financial support to the efforts of arts organizations to reach underserved communities. Center Stage has been more active at this than just about any major arts group in town, but I wasn’t sure whether or not he thought the new attention to it by the Regional Arts & Culture Council were too onerous. “They get all of us to be really thoughtful about what the city is becoming,” Coleman said about the guidelines, adding, “We are really late to this conversation in this community.”

He also discussed how crucial the renovation of the Armory Building Annex into modern theaters was to the company as part of its outreach effort. More than 40,000 people come into the building every year who aren’t there for theater per se, and they often become part of the audience later. This was all by way of talking about the ballet and opera’s perennial complaints about Keller Auditorium, and their desire for a new space that would show off their work better.

Stowell said that the ballet has other problems, and venue might not be Number One. And he clearly understands the context in this case: A major new performing arts facility in Portland is going to have to be a community facility, used by lots of different groups for lots of different purposes.

Stowell has been here for nine years now, almost 10, and he’s learned the territory, a lot like Coleman, who arrived in 2000. And maybe that’s what I regret most about his leaving: He gets the city, the little ballet community here, the limitations and the possibilities. Here, he learned how to adjust to budget constraints and the ideas of his collaborators, how to integrate a school into a company and build the foundation for everything that follows, how to protect and develop dancers. Maybe that means he’s ready for the next challenge, sure, but it also means we won’t benefit from what he’s learned going forward.

The evening at Jimmy Mak’s ended on a happier note than that, of course, and we left through the door of the future. Stowell had foreshadowed it in one of his clips. It featured Anne Mueller, who has taken over as interim artistic director at OBT, and she was practically electric onstage. To a question about “The Nutcracker,” Stowell had answered, “It’s not my problem anymore.” It IS Mueller’s, however, and it’s somehow comforting to know she’ll be working on it with some of the tools that Stowell used.

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