Day 1 at Portland’s TBA Festival: Dayna Hanson’s Americana & Jérôme Bel’s Dance Lecture

I was pleasantly surprised by how efficient Portland’s MAX Light Rail was. After flying in from New York Friday night, arriving at PDX just past eleven o’clock, I was still exhausted Saturday morning when I began the long trek from the far west side suburbs where I was staying with my family, to southeast Portland where PICA has set up the headquarters for the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival in Washington High School. Once upon a time, in the era before light rail, it took less than a half an hour by express bus to get from my house to downtown Portland. These days it takes a bit longer, but in the end, just over an hour after I first boarded the MAX and one transfer later, I was standing in front of TBA’s ticket office in a converted shipping crate, press pass in hand. It was noon.

Now in its eighth year, TBA unfolds over ten days (September 9 through 19), featuring a huge line-up of live performance as well as workshops, lectures, film and video, and gallery installations, more or less separated into two line-ups anchored to the two weekends. I’d already missed two days (including the opening performance by Rufus Wainwright with the Portland Symphony Orchestra), and was preparing to make up for lost time.

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The first performance of the day was several hours later, when I ventured over to the Winningstad Theatre in downtown for Dayna Hanson‘s new dance theatre work, Gloria’s Cause. Strictly speaking, this was a workshop performance–originally Hanson and some of her main collaborators were intending just to perform some of the music from the show, which has its official debut in Seattle at On the Boards in December. But one thing led to another, and by the time the festival brochures were being printed, Hanson’s piece was out of the club and onto the stage for a full-dress work-in-progress performance. In critic-speak, what this means is that I’m not supposed to review it, because it’s not a finished work. So, um, this isn’t a review, okay?

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That said, it’s pretty damn good. Rough or not, with Gloria’s Cause, Hanson tackles a big, timely subject, namely, what it means to be American.

Dave Proscia and Dayna Hanson in “Gloria’s Cause”

As she explained to me in an interview this morning (to be published at a later date), she was inspired in creating the show by what she described as the “cognitive dissonance” in the contemporary American psyche. In other words, we all know shit’s fucked up right now (war, recession, massive debt, reactionary fringe politics, etc., etc.), yet we go on living as though it’s not. So with Gloria’s Cause, Hanson set out to explore the gap between the promise and the reality of American life, and why we live in the illusion of the one, ignoring the harsh reality of the other.

The mythology and iconography of the Founding Fathers, the American Revolution, and the entire concept of American Exceptionalism are contrasted with the stories of the historically marginalized and the victims of the American project. If the result onstage is messy and hard to digest, that’s because Hanson isn’t just drafting a Howard Zinn-esque counternarrative, she’s putting A People’s History in a blender along with your high school civics book and dumping the shredded remains of both onstage, plucking an image here, a text there, collaging them together and asking the audience to consider the complicated whole. But even that doesn’t quite get it right, because undergirding Gloria’s Cause is a deep compassion for the victims of the American beast, and for the false promise of liberty.

And anyway, the company Hanson’s put together is phenomenal. Frankly, I could watch Jessie Smith dance for hours.

The follow-up to Gloria’s Cause, though, was a completely different animal. I went into Jérôme Bel‘s Cédric Andrieux a bit uninformed, assuming it was a dance piece by Bel. In fact, in this case, Bel serves not as choreographer but as director: for 90 minutes, thirtysomething French-born dancer Cédric Andrieux simply tells the audience his life-story as a dancer, with demonstrations. From his first exposure to modern dance via his mother, who saw in the work of Seventies French choreographers the promise of May ’68 democratization, through his first dance classes, his improbable success at the National Conservatory, and mainly his eight years with the Merce Cunningham Company, Bel has pushed Andrieux to reveal his feelings, hopes, fears, and occasional ambivalence. In fact, Cédric Andrieux is really neither theatre nor dance: it’s a biographical lecture.

Cedric Andrieux

My response to the piece is mixed. On the one hand, as I’ve argued before, the biggest problem contemporary dance faces is one of literacy. Most people just aren’t accustomed to dance, the way it communicates or tells stories, which makes it hard for dance to find new audiences. From this perspective, Cédric Andrieux is brilliant. From the first demonstration of a simple pointing exercise Andrieux learned as a child, you couldn’t ask for a better introduction to watching dance. The complete novice can go in, get a first hand account of what it was like working with Cunningham, see how he choreographer a body, be told how the dancer himself communicated via the choreography, and ultimately feel okay if it he or she doesn’t like it, because the dancer himself evinces ambivalence to the work on occasion.

On the other hand, that’s all pretty pedagogical, and as interesting as it was to get to hear and see Andrieux’s account of working with Cunningham (as well as a solo from a Trisha Brown work and finally part of one of Bel’s own dances), in the end I left feeling a bit unchallenged, as though I’d just sat through a freshman survey course taught by an admittedly animated and charming professor. 

After that it was off to The Works, as PICA has labeled the festival center at WHS. At night, the building turns into a 21-and-over art party, complete with multiple bars, some pretty good food truck concessions, art installations, and performances. Last night, the main event was the 22nd episode of Ten Tiny Dances, in which ten artists and companies are selected to perform on a small, I believe four-foot by four-foot stage. It’s a cool concept, but with several hundred people packed into the auditorium to watch it, I made do with the live video-feed projected outdoors in the beer garden. Chatting with a variety of visiting artists, including Maria Hassabi (more on her in a couple days), I watched performances by Dayna Hanson’s company, a lovely duet by Seattle dancers Monica Mata Gilliam and Michael Rioux (who I recently profiled), and, in a final great twist, monologist and playwright Mike Daisey.