Monthly Archives: January 2010

Music

Getting Out of the Romance: The Department of Safety Calls It Quits

the department of safety, courtesy of their flickr

On Saturday, the Department of Safety ends its long run with performances by Phil Elverum, Lake, Karl Blau, and Arrington de Dionyso. Started in Anacortes in 2002 by four ambitious and romantic artists in an abandoned midcentury modern police and fire house with a whimsically pragmatic manifesto (“There once was this theorist named Plato. He had definite notions of a utopian vision of the way his ‘ideal state’ would run. We are–by no means–attempting to create an elitist utopia. We just want to sustain ourselves while creating art in a community.”), the venue aimed to be a place for youth culture in a town known mainly as a home for retirees and a place to pass through on the mad rush to the San Juan Ferries.

Despite non-utopian aims, the quartet did some pretty magical things to the space: jail cells were turned into recording studios, an ammunition locker became a darkroom, the upstairs bunkers made way for living spaces and a tiny hostel, and the garage was outfitted with a stage for a concrete-floored performance space. Over the last eight years, it was a home for artists in residence, gallery shows, live performances, and the What the Heck festival. Sean Nelson’s chronicles of its early days (in the Stranger) capture the inspiration that kept it afloat for nearly a decade; some comments from Phil Elverum in 2007 capture some of the frustration of building such an endeavor in a small town.

While efforts to shift from pseudo-Marxism with a side of capital to a non-profit subsidized by resident worker rents may not have succeeded in providing long term stability, the sustained existence of the space remains an achievement worth commemorating. Kevin Erickson, whose three years at the helm of the Department of Safety inspired his current work as the program director at allages.net tried to put the closure in perspective:

“About 10-20% of venues close every year, so 8 years is a great run, by national standards, especially for a small town. It’ll be important for the next generation of young musicians and organizers in Anacortes to learn from both the mistakes and the incredible successes of the project. But just as the DoS was inspired by venues from the past like the Sugar Refinery in Vancouver, I think the impact of the DoS will have an incredible legacy in the new projects and possibilities it inspired, even for people in far-flung towns who never got to stand inside its boxy concrete walls.”

For me, those concrete walls will remain memorable if only because it is the only recording studio that ever captured my singing voice for “mass” consumption. By “studio,” I mean the makeshift happening that transpired during one of many Mount Eerie shows I attended there during the middle 2000s.

On that night, Phil Elverum took to the small stage, set up some microphones and a tape deck, and turned a garage full of fans on carpet squares into a temporary choir. We had a little practice, cobbled-together lessons, took loose direction, and sang as instructed. It was goofy giddy fun and we didn’t expect anything to come of it, but when the results found their way onto a Mount Eerie album called Singers, everyone who participated ended up with has a Discogs recording credit.

I haven’t been back in years, but this is the sort of magical experience that I like to imagine happening there all the time. After all, I am a complete sucker for that kind of thing: The cold floors and well-worn couches, the cheap concessions and hand-painted posters, the “doing it yourself” and building something new. It’s sad that they’re closing shop, but it’s great that they did it for so long and are able to end on their own upbeat terms.

I’m very sorry that I won’t be able to make the trek to Anacortes to bid the venue farewell, but I encourage you to do so and to stop at the doughnut shop on your way home. The music will be special and the baked goods will probably be fresh. After that, who knows what will become of the building, but I can almost guarantee that the ensuing antique mall or auto repair shop will be much less memorable.

 

  • Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie/the Microphones), Lake, Karl Blau, and Arrington de Dionyso. Department of Safety, 1011 12th St. Anacortes, WA. $5, 7:30 pm.
Politics

Cell Phone Bill Advances in Senate While Study Sees No Impact

Go on. Guess how many are on cellphones.

SB 6345–the Senate bill that would make (non-handsfree) cell phone use while driving a $124 ticket and a primary offense–was placed on second reading by the Rules Committee yesterday. (I have no idea what that means, outside of a sense of progress. There’s no lyric about “second reading by Rules Committee” in Schoolhouse Rock’s “How a Bill Becomes a Law.”) With eleven senators sponsoring, it may have enough momentum to pass.

Its House counterpart, HB 2365, had a public hearing by the House transportation committee on the 18th, with no doings reported since then.

But the Highway Loss Data Institute–an insurer-funded nonprofit organization–has just released a study showing that anti-cell phone laws have had no effect on the number of collisions. As KING TV reports, the study compares “insurance claims for crash damage in four jurisdictions before and after bans were enacted in California, New York, Connecticut, and Washington, DC.”

It’s a puzzling result because the amount of risk–you’re four times more likely to crash while using a cell phone and driving–has been established by more than one study. The researchers claim that they can estimate a significant reduction in cell phone use after the laws were passed–which, completely anecdotally, I would be hard-pressed to believe. But at a four-fold risk, even a slight decrease in usage should have a multiplying effect that has not shown up in the data.

The answer to this puzzle has been documented since at least 2005, with studies that demonstrated that handsfree or not, cell phone use while driving is dangerous. An NHTSA report noted that even if handsfree devices did help, that benefit was outweighed by the fact that people made more calls, and stayed on them longer, while driving. Very much like how people on diets eat more of low-calorie foods.

That is, there’s no mystery at all. Any kind of mobile phone use while driving makes the roads less safe. Giving people a handsfree out just served the pleasing fiction that government was looking out for citizens.

News

Glimpses: “Take me to your leader”

Take me to your leader

Blue sky reminder, courtesy of preparsed.

News

Portland’s Hand2Mouth on Undine and Creating New Work in the Northwest

Faith Helma in Hand2Mouth Theatre’s “Undine,” photo by Tim Summers.

“What I’ve always loved about his telling of it was that it was very ambiguous,” said Faith Helma of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 fairy tale novella Undine. “Like, ‘The Little Mermaid,’ you read the original version of it, it’s a pretty dark story. But this one was even more so. All of the characters are very ambiguous, and none of the characters are all bad or all good. Even the most creepy, scary character, you can kind of see his point of view. He’s not a villain. And then there’s the spirit world, which is frightening but also beautiful. And she’s presented as this character you can identify with, but who’s not to be trusted. There’s something a little unsettling about it. That was my experience of reading the story—you can’t really decide if you’re on her side.”

This was last Saturday, and I was sitting in Fresh Pot Cafe in Portland, Oregon’s Mississippi district, with Helma and her husband Jonathan Walters. The two are long-time members of Portland’s well respected experimental theatre company Hand2Mouth, which Walters founded in 2000. This Friday and Saturday, Jan. 29 and 30, they’re bringing Helma’s first solo work, Undine, back to Seattle, where it debuted in 2008 as part of the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. The performances are at Theatre off Jackson, in a co-presentation with Seattle’s Satori Group (tickets $10-$12), with a panel discussion about creating new work in the Northwest after each performance, moderated by The Stranger‘s Brendan Kiley.

While nominally inspired by Fouqué’s novella, elements of which Helma admits trying to incorporate into Hand2Mouth’s previous shows to little or no success, the piece is not so much an adaptation of the narrative. “I’m obsessed with the fairy tale, so I wind up talking about that, but I feel like it leaves this image in people’s minds of, ‘Okay, solo performance, fairy tale…'” She trailed off, eyes rolling and chuckling at the image that description must put in people’s minds.

“I mean, if you didn’t know it was based on a fairy tale, I don’t know what you’d think,” she said.

Far from being a series of monologues or characters, what Helma and her collaborators have done is to create a song cycle, which she performs live (with potentially some pre-recordings), using a pair of digital looping effects pedals. Thematically, the story of Undine, a water spirit who marries a knight in order to get a soul, has been processed into a sort of meta-narrative by Helma, who sees parallels between Fouqué’s version and her own experience as a performer.

“My experience reading that fairy tale when I was younger was that there’s this character that you can identify with, and are kind of scared to identify with” at the same time, she explained. “You know, I don’t know if I want to identify with her. And that feeling got linked in me with performing over the last ten years, where you’re watching someone and you’re not sure if they’re in control.”

While Undine is the first solo work by a company member (otherwise Hand2Mouth operates as a collaborative ensemble), in this aspect it links back strongly to the company’s other work.

Faith Helma from “Undine.” Photo by Tim Summers

“When I’m directing, I often think of the experiential,” Walters explained. “Like, in the new show [Hand2Mouth’s ensemble piece, Everyone Who Looks Like You, which debuted a few months ago in Portland, and was performed at New York’s LaMama Experimental Theatre Club just a couple weeks ago], we wanted to have one of the culminating moments be a family fight. But I kept saying that I want it to be not like you’re watching a family fight, but that you’re in the middle of the worst family fight, and your stomach’s in your gut and you’re saying, ‘I need to get the fuck out the door,’ but there’s no leaving. So the challenge was, can we stage a family fight that the audience is inside of. So with this [Undine], I think that was the challenge—when you hear about this character that appears that has the power to control the forces of nature, and it’s truly frightening, and a presence enters the room that’s larger than the room, and it’s outside the walls and the room is shaking… Could we create that effect for the audience? Could we actually make them frightened? Could we frighten them?”

“We’ve worked with a number of sound designers over the course of the production,” he continued, “and the person we started the process with, his name was John Berendzen, and he was the sound artist and brilliant mind behind Liminal Performance Group. And so we worked with him to create this effect in the audience’s mind that there’s this personality, which is out of touch with humanity, but at the same time is subtly and not-so-subtly conjuring these other characters. And I always look forward to the show, because from the moment you enter it, it sort of kicks you into an alternate sound world, and then you journey through that, and all these things appear.”

He paused. “I still remember our company being shocked the first time they saw it, because they only knew the source material, and they experience this, at times, incredibly loud, roaring, rocking, kind of earth-shatteringly loud thing emanating from this small woman on stage who becomes all these different sonic elements.”

Undine also represents a turning point in Hand2Mouth’s history. When the company started out in 2000, there were several other companies in Portland making work in a similar, generative process—performance pieces, in other words, rather than simple performed texts, in which the movement, setting, even the performers are integral to the work. But today, Hand2Mouth is essentially the only company left, and has even moved on to playing a more active role in trying to support contemporary performance in the city, even producing their own festival, Risk/Reward, every summer.

So when Helma decided a few years ago to pursue her own solo performance work, outside the company’s otherwise collaborative process, there was a fear that the members moving in different directions on their own endangered the company’s long-term stability.

“I’d started the company after I’d been in Poland for a year, working with this pretty famous theatre company, Teatr Biuro Podróży,” said Jonathan Walters. “They’ve come to America a few times. They make these huge spectacles, usually based on classical themes. Their most recent piece is Macbeth—it’s toured all over the world but it hasn’t come here. But the year I was there, they had some strong voices in the company, who wanted to have their own voice, make their own work. For ten years they’d labored together, but they’d always made this greater vision. And the artistic director was really threatened by that, and clamped down on it and created this schism in the company and created a split. Some of their founding members all broke the year that I was there. He was basically saying, ‘Choose one or the other.’ And so they said, ‘Okay, we choose the other.'”

Faith Helma in “Undine.” Photo by Tim Summers.

So the company’s ability to support Helma with Undine (their site even credits it as a Hand2Mouth production), signaled that they had reached a point where they could continue to operate as a group, while giving members room to continue developing as individual artists.

“It’s just sort of this dream of ours, that our small company in its poor way can be this place where lots of voices can be heard and also can be supported,” Walters said. “And that our company members can blow off steam with this idea you’ve been holding for six years, instead of that turning to frustration.”

That tradition continues this year, when a second company member—Erin Leddy—will debut a solo work, again at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival. That’s the third show by Hand2Mouth or their company’s members to appear there since 2007, when the company brought a shorter version of the ensemble piece Repeat After Me to NWNW.

“When we went up to Northwest New Works, it just struck us right away that there just seemed to be more” support for creating new work in Seattle, said Walters, “And we came back feeling like we wanted to do what we could to foster that sense here.”

The result of their efforts has been not only the Risk/Reward Festival, but attempts to develop closer collaboration between performance groups in Portland. “We’ve been trying really hard to make a network for people who are here, like dance companies,” Helma said. “And I feel like a lot times, that’s who we’ve related to most here—dance companies.” As a model, Walters mentioned Vancouver’s SeeSeven program, in which eleven groups banded together to sell cross-company subscriptions. And then last year, several members of the Satori Group ventured down to Portland to see Hand2Mouth’s work, as well as to discuss creating new performance in the Northwest.

One of the ideas that kept coming up was a “fifth week” of a run. Essentially the idea is that when a company like Satori or Hand2Mouth debuts a work, it runs for four weeks. But generative companies also intend to take shows on tour. Undine showed at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysterical Incubator in NYC over the summer on a double-bill with Seattle’s Helsinki Syndrome, and the company took Everyone Who Looks Like You back to New York for the insanity of January’s performance scene, in which several festivals—including Under the Radar—take place opposite the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ annual conference, giving the various companies a shot of being seen by producers from all over the world and even more opportunities for touring.

The idea of the “fifth week,” then, is to develop a smaller touring circuit that doesn’t require waiting around, during which time actors find other jobs, adding more rehearsal time to bring new people in. Immediately after a show closed in Portland, it could move to Seattle for a limited run, and vice-versa. This weekend’s production of Undine sponsored by Satori Group is the first attempt at that (with the caveat that Undine‘s initial run was in ’08-’09).

Overall, it’s an attempt by artists to create an infrastructure for themselves where one comprised of actual presenters and producers doesn’t yet exist. Hence the post-show discussion, moderated by Kiley and featuring, among others, Seattle playwright Paul Mullin, who’s been writing a series of strategizing essays on how to improve conditions in Seattle for creating new work.

Theatre

Portland’s Hand2Mouth on Undine and Creating New Work in the Northwest

Faith Helma in Hand2Mouth Theatre’s “Undine,” photo by Tim Summers.

“What I’ve always loved about his telling of it was that it was very ambiguous,” said Faith Helma of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 fairy tale novella Undine. “Like, ‘The Little Mermaid,’ you read the original version of it, it’s a pretty dark story. But this one was even more so. All of the characters are very ambiguous, and none of the characters are all bad or all good. Even the most creepy, scary character, you can kind of see his point of view. He’s not a villain. And then there’s the spirit world, which is frightening but also beautiful. And she’s presented as this character you can identify with, but who’s not to be trusted. There’s something a little unsettling about it. That was my experience of reading the story—you can’t really decide if you’re on her side.”

This was last Saturday, and I was sitting in Fresh Pot Cafe in Portland, Oregon’s Mississippi district, with Helma and her husband Jonathan Walters. The two are long-time members of Portland’s well respected experimental theatre company Hand2Mouth, which Walters founded in 2000. This Friday and Saturday, Jan. 29 and 30, they’re bringing Helma’s first solo work, Undine, back to Seattle, where it debuted in 2008 as part of the Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards. The performances are at Theatre off Jackson, in a co-presentation with Seattle’s Satori Group (tickets $10-$12), with a panel discussion about creating new work in the Northwest after each performance, moderated by The Stranger‘s Brendan Kiley.

While nominally inspired by Fouqué’s novella, elements of which Helma admits trying to incorporate into Hand2Mouth’s previous shows to little or no success, the piece is not so much an adaptation of the narrative. “I’m obsessed with the fairy tale, so I wind up talking about that, but I feel like it leaves this image in people’s minds of, ‘Okay, solo performance, fairy tale…'” She trailed off, eyes rolling and chuckling at the image that description must put in people’s minds.

“I mean, if you didn’t know it was based on a fairy tale, I don’t know what you’d think,” she said.

Far from being a series of monologues or characters, what Helma and her collaborators have done is to create a song cycle, which she performs live (with potentially some pre-recordings), using a pair of digital looping effects pedals. Thematically, the story of Undine, a water spirit who marries a knight in order to get a soul, has been processed into a sort of meta-narrative by Helma, who sees parallels between Fouqué’s version and her own experience as a performer.

“My experience reading that fairy tale when I was younger was that there’s this character that you can identify with, and are kind of scared to identify with” at the same time, she explained. “You know, I don’t know if I want to identify with her. And that feeling got linked in me with performing over the last ten years, where you’re watching someone and you’re not sure if they’re in control.”

While Undine is the first solo work by a company member (otherwise Hand2Mouth operates as a collaborative ensemble), in this aspect it links back strongly to the company’s other work.

Faith Helma from “Undine.” Photo by Tim Summers

“When I’m directing, I often think of the experiential,” Walters explained. “Like, in the new show [Hand2Mouth’s ensemble piece, Everyone Who Looks Like You, which debuted a few months ago in Portland, and was performed at New York’s LaMama Experimental Theatre Club just a couple weeks ago], we wanted to have one of the culminating moments be a family fight. But I kept saying that I want it to be not like you’re watching a family fight, but that you’re in the middle of the worst family fight, and your stomach’s in your gut and you’re saying, ‘I need to get the fuck out the door,’ but there’s no leaving. So the challenge was, can we stage a family fight that the audience is inside of. So with this [Undine], I think that was the challenge—when you hear about this character that appears that has the power to control the forces of nature, and it’s truly frightening, and a presence enters the room that’s larger than the room, and it’s outside the walls and the room is shaking… Could we create that effect for the audience? Could we actually make them frightened? Could we frighten them?”

“We’ve worked with a number of sound designers over the course of the production,” he continued, “and the person we started the process with, his name was John Berendzen, and he was the sound artist and brilliant mind behind Liminal Performance Group. And so we worked with him to create this effect in the audience’s mind that there’s this personality, which is out of touch with humanity, but at the same time is subtly and not-so-subtly conjuring these other characters. And I always look forward to the show, because from the moment you enter it, it sort of kicks you into an alternate sound world, and then you journey through that, and all these things appear.”

He paused. “I still remember our company being shocked the first time they saw it, because they only knew the source material, and they experience this, at times, incredibly loud, roaring, rocking, kind of earth-shatteringly loud thing emanating from this small woman on stage who becomes all these different sonic elements.”

Undine also represents a turning point in Hand2Mouth’s history. When the company started out in 2000, there were several other companies in Portland making work in a similar, generative process—performance pieces, in other words, rather than simple performed texts, in which the movement, setting, even the performers are integral to the work. But today, Hand2Mouth is essentially the only company left, and has even moved on to playing a more active role in trying to support contemporary performance in the city, even producing their own festival, Risk/Reward, every summer.

So when Helma decided a few years ago to pursue her own solo performance work, outside the company’s otherwise collaborative process, there was a fear that the members moving in different directions on their own endangered the company’s long-term stability.

“I’d started the company after I’d been in Poland for a year, working with this pretty famous theatre company, Teatr Biuro Podróży,” said Jonathan Walters. “They’ve come to America a few times. They make these huge spectacles, usually based on classical themes. Their most recent piece is Macbeth—it’s toured all over the world but it hasn’t come here. But the year I was there, they had some strong voices in the company, who wanted to have their own voice, make their own work. For ten years they’d labored together, but they’d always made this greater vision. And the artistic director was really threatened by that, and clamped down on it and created this schism in the company and created a split. Some of their founding members all broke the year that I was there. He was basically saying, ‘Choose one or the other.’ And so they said, ‘Okay, we choose the other.'”

Faith Helma in “Undine.” Photo by Tim Summers.

So the company’s ability to support Helma with Undine (their site even credits it as a Hand2Mouth production), signaled that they had reached a point where they could continue to operate as a group, while giving members room to continue developing as individual artists.

“It’s just sort of this dream of ours, that our small company in its poor way can be this place where lots of voices can be heard and also can be supported,” Walters said. “And that our company members can blow off steam with this idea you’ve been holding for six years, instead of that turning to frustration.”

That tradition continues this year, when a second company member—Erin Leddy—will debut a solo work, again at On the Boards’ Northwest New Works Festival. That’s the third show by Hand2Mouth or their company’s members to appear there since 2007, when the company brought a shorter version of the ensemble piece Repeat After Me to NWNW.

“When we went up to Northwest New Works, it just struck us right away that there just seemed to be more” support for creating new work in Seattle, said Walters, “And we came back feeling like we wanted to do what we could to foster that sense here.”

The result of their efforts has been not only the Risk/Reward Festival, but attempts to develop closer collaboration between performance groups in Portland. “We’ve been trying really hard to make a network for people who are here, like dance companies,” Helma said. “And I feel like a lot times, that’s who we’ve related to most here—dance companies.” As a model, Walters mentioned Vancouver’s SeeSeven program, in which eleven groups banded together to sell cross-company subscriptions. And then last year, several members of the Satori Group ventured down to Portland to see Hand2Mouth’s work, as well as to discuss creating new performance in the Northwest.

One of the ideas that kept coming up was a “fifth week” of a run. Essentially the idea is that when a company like Satori or Hand2Mouth debuts a work, it runs for four weeks. But generative companies also intend to take shows on tour. Undine showed at Richard Foreman’s Ontological-Hysterical Incubator in NYC over the summer on a double-bill with Seattle’s Helsinki Syndrome, and the company took Everyone Who Looks Like You back to New York for the insanity of January’s performance scene, in which several festivals—including Under the Radar—take place opposite the Association of Performing Arts Presenters’ annual conference, giving the various companies a shot of being seen by producers from all over the world and even more opportunities for touring.

The idea of the “fifth week,” then, is to develop a smaller touring circuit that doesn’t require waiting around, during which time actors find other jobs, adding more rehearsal time to bring new people in. Immediately after a show closed in Portland, it could move to Seattle for a limited run, and vice-versa. This weekend’s production of Undine sponsored by Satori Group is the first attempt at that (with the caveat that Undine‘s initial run was in ’08-’09).

Overall, it’s an attempt by artists to create an infrastructure for themselves where one comprised of actual presenters and producers doesn’t yet exist. Hence the post-show discussion, moderated by Kiley and featuring, among others, Seattle playwright Paul Mullin, who’s been writing a series of strategizing essays on how to improve conditions in Seattle for creating new work.