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News & Notes dips into its Aristotle

By Barry Johnson
February 20, 2014
News & Notes
Michael Elich and Bhama Roget in Artist's Repertory Theater's production of "The-Monster Builder." Photo: Owen Carey

Michael Elich and Bhama Roget in Artist’s Repertory Theater’s production of “The-Monster Builder.” Photo: Owen Carey

Right, art is always meeting “life.” Aristotle tells us that art intends “to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” Now, I’m not prepared to defend that proposition against a determined attack, but accepting it just for the moment and speaking from experience, unless those outward appearances make sense to us, we have a hard time digging into those explorations of inner meaning. That means asking an artist for a report about the world she encounters is entirely plausible as a line of inquiry. And it’s also why the biography of an artist can be pertinent to the understanding of his work: The world he lived in is important.

So maybe that’s just stating the obvious! But the obvious in this case happens to pertain to today’s edition of News & Notes…

ArtsWatch pal Brian Libby engaged in a tête-à-tête with Brett Campbell about Amy Freed’s new play “The Monster-Builder” at Artists Repertory Theatre, and now he’s posted Part One of an interview with Freed on his PORTLAND ARCHITECTURE blog. You can probably guess that they didn’t talk about theater and playwriting; they talked architecture and city planning. For example, at the start Freed defends the Portland Building, which may be slated for demolition, at length: “It’s crazy but it’s not uninteresting. I hope it’s preserved. You can read the past in it and it’s meaningful in its way. Whatever goes up instead of it would be a crapshoot.”

Some other greatest hits:

  • “My hope for the play is to generate more interest in the non-architectural community about speaking up and talking back. Because the cities are such a mess, and we’re leaving a legacy of such ugliness, and such harshness, and such social dysfunction, and such class division. And it’s happening so fast and it’s happening everywhere.”
  • “San Francisco’s per square foot real estate cost doubled within a year a couple years ago. The arts are fleeing, once more. So Portland’s very attractive to serious creative types. That draws life to a city, makes it trendy, makes it attractive, and the development follows.”
  • “Have you seen these ruin-porn pictures that are coming out of Detroit? They’re not without majesty. To rebuild a city with some vision and poetry and skill as an artist, as people in architecture often aspire to be, would be to maintain these records of things that have happened: to not necessarily restore them but to allow the destruction to show. If everything turns into facelessness, that’s really where are spirits shut down and die.”

But really, the whole interview is well worth the trip. And you can take a peek at the Bob Hicks review of the play, just for a little background.

Speaking of the indefatigable Mr. Hicks, we recommend that you visit his review of Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom before or after seeing defunkt’s production of David Zellnik’s “unlikely and charming post-AIDS romantic comedy.”

“Zellnik wrote A Hundred Flowers in 2001, and even now its setup seems a little daring, a little dancing-on-skeletons, with a smart sense of the complicating fear and pain underlying the liberation. It’s a warm play, ultimately, a feel-good sort of story, but with enough nuance and emotional shadings to give it real impact.”

Leela Janelle did an excellent preview of the show for PQ Monthly.
And while we’re linking you to ourselves, take a look at Martha Ullman West’s review of the latest Eugene Ballet concert, which features Dennis Spaight’s Scheherazade and Toni Pimble’s Bolero. West’s understanding of the work of Spaight (who died of AIDS) is deep, and she’s followed Pimble and the Eugene Ballet almost from the start (the ballet started in 1978 and Martha picked up the chase at their Nutcracker in 1981). There is NO substitute for this kind of context!

In this ballet, Spaight, who was dying and knew it, packed much of his autobiography as a dancer. It has the dramatic punch and stylistic eclecticism of Maurice Béjart, in whose Ballet of the 20thCentury Spaight performed when he was young. If you look closely, you can spot steps from the classical canon, such as the battu, the fluttering beat of one bent leg against the other that symbolizes captivity in Swan Lake, to which, as a dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, he had received thorough exposure.

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