Don't Reserve Tickets! Portland Chamber Orchestra's Final Performance Was December 30
All Concerts Cancelled
The e-ticket website is still there, but after 79 years, the Portland Chamber Orchestra has dissolved, and at the final performance no one bothered to tell the audience.
Robert Kingdom, Board President, cited finances and lack of attendance. "We expected to just cover our expenses," he said, but instead of the 350 attendees they needed to break even, there were only 200.
Kingdom could have announced the decision earlier, said The Oregonian, but he did not.
Cancelled shows include "Lion & Lotus," a Lunar New Year concert scheduled for March 3, and "Banner & Burden: Music and Spoken Word," scheduled for May 19, both at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts.
The May 19 engagement was planned as a collaboration with the Oregon Poetry Association.
The chamber orchestra started in 1946, offering audiences a more intimate, close-up performance than the Schnitz (the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall), so called because of its main contributors, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer.
The Schnitz seats 2,776, including orchestra and balcony seating, a 94x32 foot stage with a 54x32 foot proscenium, dressing rooms for 90, and chic delicacies and cocktails.
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Before the big-money renovations, the location was known as the Paramount Theater.
The Paramount in downtown Portland once hosted rock bands and artists including Frank Zappa, The Pretenders, the Tubes, Ozzy Osbourne, Foghat, America, Joan Baez, Blue Öyster Cult, and Arlo Guthrie.
It's another loss for Portland, Oregon, as the city — especially the downtown area — continues its descent from picturesque and quirky to grimy, violent and dangerous. The downtown core was once a shopping district. Then unhoused people decided to break windows, shut down stores, drive away social services, and sit around complaining, buying drugs and whining.
These days walking downtown means tripping over tents and "zombies" — the forward procession of surly drunks who don't want a job. Another day, another riot, another demand for spare change. It's not 1984 or the final nuclear war, it's an everyday culture collapse. I grew up here, and I think "Keep Portland Weird " has gone too far.
you know i really love that since LoT doesn’t have the Beef Index™ of the other CW DCTV shows whenever they have falk on they’re like “WORKOUT PORN!!! SUIT PORN!!!! LITERAL PORN!!!!” not that like, they dont have attractive people on their cast (stupid sexy LoT cast), but i feel like falk is Designated Beef™ and since we don’t get him as often they have to cram in as much as they can in a shorter amount of time
Today I got to see Lar Lubovitch Dance Company! They were performing at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, OR, brought there by White Bird, our local bring-dance-to-Portland organization, I'm not sure what to call them. Before it runs out of my head, I'd like to do a review.
The evening started at 7:30pm, was compCrisis osed of four individual pieces, and ran two hours. The pieces, in order, were "North Star" (1978), "Little Rhapsodies" (2007), "Crisis Variations" (2011), and "The Legend of Ten" (2010). With a pause between the first two pieces--the main rag descended and the house lights came to a quarter, maybe half--and intermissions between the others, it was very clear that each piece was created seperately and intended to be seen separately. I am a bit perplexed as to the choice between a pause and an intermission, especially between "North Star" and "Little Rhapsodies," because these two were the most diverse of all of the four pieces of the evening. "North Star" had five parts--one with the ensemble, two quartets, and two solos--and with the exception of the first solo (performed this evening by Elisa Clark), the entire piece had a dreamy, stifled, underwater feel to it. The curtains opened on the ensemble, and they immediately started running to and fro, creating little groups that fell apart as soon as they were realized. The dancers were like tentacles of seaweed, tangling together in the eddies of the waters only to slip apart again.
The quartets that followed were slightly sharper. In the first one, the most notable repeated motion was a whirling line, all four dancers linked together, and the ones on either end being flipped up, torsos almost horizontal to the floor, in turn. One of these flyers was Nicole Corea, notable on the stage for her long, curly red tresses--though the dancers of the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company are fairly even in gender, only Corea has long hair--which were not restrained until the final piece of the evening.
Another notable motion of this quartet was the flashes of bare arms and feet. With the dark floor, dark backdrop, and dark costumes, the lighter extremities caught the eye like fiery poi when the dancers whirled and leapt.
The next quartet was less flashy and much closer to the soft chaos of the ensemble section. Though the lighting had returned to the blue gobos of the first piece, reminiscent of filtered underwater light, the whirling, curving, circling, and spiraling of the dancers was more clearly organized than the ensemble had been. Even when individuals stopped, it appeared as though they had not--the group continued to move, continued to spin. It was not the desperate spin of a whirling dervish, but rather the softer spiraling of a perpetual motion machine.
When the music changed to ominous and lights came up on the first soloist, then, her quick, jerky movement was all the more startling. Clark moved as though in a strobe light, terrifyingly sharp and twisted. Pain emanated from her every movement, making this solo the only performance so far with strife, the only performance that was gripping rather than aesthetic. However, when the music changed to a gentler score, so did Clark. In general, I felt Lar Lubovitch choreographedtothe music far too much--dancers throughout the entire evening would hit notes with their extremities, and I felt as though Lubovitch had bound--chained--his dances to this music, instead of letting them finish as they might.
The next solo, Clifton Brown, marched on stage when Clark had exited. His movement screamed, "Look at me, I'm so classically manly." With his strong shoulders, wide stance, and an emphasis on entire limbs rather than twirling extremities, Brown was reminiscent of Ted Shawn and his Men Dancers. The movement softened and began to curve somewhat, though, when the ensemble entered to follow Brown's lead. The undulating motion remarked on the first section in "North Star," especially as the audience's gaze was gradually shifted away from Brown and onto the ensemble as a whole.
After this piece, the bows, and the pause, "Little Rhapsodies" was performed. Danced by three men in almost-pedestrian clothes (the pants, though muted in color and not quite form-fitting, had no pockets and were too stretchy to be pedestrian), "Little Rhapsodies" seemed to be about a family, almost. A group of men, interacting, performing solos, duets, and trios. The first section was performed by two of the men, with the third watching on. All three dancers had very tight, engaged shoulders, with the arms held slightly out to the side and behind the torso. It proclaimed strength and masculinity in the static onlooker and in the two dancing men, who moved only their feet in leaps and kicks that reminded me of the sailor's dance in Mark Morris'sDido and Aeneid, or of folk jigs. These leg movements were so precise and socrispthat I could almost feel them like potato chips, crunching in my mouth. When those two dancers exited and the third began his section, the precise remained but the crunch had left. His torso twisted and his arms and wrists were mobile. The curve of his movement and the occasional motion where he dragged his hands across his face spoke of loss, bereavement, a sensitivity not seen in the previous bit. As "Little Rhapsodies" continued, I was able to note particular dancing styles in each of the three performers. One man always moved in the crisp, sharp jumps of the first piece. Another, the third man, always moved with a bit more twist, more curve. The other performer was somewhere in between these two, the link for the trios.
An intermission occurred. Following this was "Crisis Variations," a decidedly ominous, aptly-named piece. After the house lights had gone down, ominous music began to play. It wasn't as sharp as the music for Clark's solo, but instead was creepier, slithering up to me as I sat there, shivering, waiting for the main rag to raise.
When it did, my nerves weren't settled. Faint light was streaming down from one corner of the stage, muted in a way that suggests it was behind a scrim. The centralized light source as well as the bodies of the dancers, lying on the floor, not moving, put me in mind of a deep, dank, dungeon. The on stage lights dimmed, and only then did the dancers move. This repeated--lights down, dancers move, lights up, dancers frozen in a grotesque tableau--until all of the performers had come from the corners of the stage, lying down, to center stage, standing. With every change the dancers had become more upright and more twisted. The dance that followed was sweeping, sticky, and contorted. It alternated between ensemble pieces and duets between Katarzyna Skarpetowska and Brian McGinnis--these duets were chock-full of weight sharing movement, with Skarpetowska always the flyer and McGinnis always the base. The storyline I picked up from the duets was a crisis on Skarpetowska's part, rending her helpless, and McGinnis needing to support her. This morphed into McGinnis confining her, pulling her back when Skarpetowska tried to fly free. The ensemble treated Skarpetowska as their queen and McGinnis as their king--they were always fawning, servile, and sneaky when the soloists were around.
Needless to say "Crisis Variations" wasn't a particularly uplifting piece. It was followed by an intermission, and then "The Legend of Ten." All of the dancers in this piece were costumed in dark blue leggings, slightly lighter blue socks/booties, dark blue gauzy tops, and black under-bust corset-like devices. This piece harkened back to the underwater mood of "North Star" slightly, with whirling dancers and the motif of a sea of waving arms. In fact, with the focus on the arms and the group movement, "The Legend of Ten" reminded me of "D-Man in the Waters," a dance choreographed by Bill T. Jones.
What stood out to me most about "The Legend of Ten" was the little differences that set it apart from the others. The shod feet. The fact that Corea's hair was pulled back into a low ponytail. The sense that the duet between Clark and Brown was decidedly sexual, the first to be so that obviously. Anyway, as the piece went on, the energy of the music and the dancers rose, and the evening ended with a well-synchronized leap by the entire ensemble and their soft fall to the floor.
