TBA:09

A giant beaver, dancers in drag, images of 9/11 and a vegan burrito truck flashed by me during the opening weekend of this year’s Time-based Art Festival (TBA) organized by the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art in northwest Oregon. Founded in 2003, the annual two-week multimedia festival – this year guest-directed by Cathy Edwards of New York’s Dance Theater Workshop – is dispersed at venues and outdoor spaces throughout the handsome city that’s famed for fir trees, microbreweries and indie rock. This year’s festival featured more than 60 events, including theatre, dance, film, a slow-food picnic, ‘Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics’ and a pancake breakfast. While I would have loved to gear up in a unitard and sweat out my existential doubts, you can never do it all.

Ethan Rose, Movements (2008)

Newly added this year was a central venue called the WORKS, a disused high school that hosted many performances as well as two floors of visual art. The latter included a jive-talking animation by Kalup Linzy, instructional aura tracings by Peter Coffin, Fawn Krieger’s soft sculptural park, as well as somewhat puerile internet-based video projections by Brody Condon, Johanna Ketola and Antoine Catala, each of which was housed in its own dark classroom. Following the sound of chimes, I discovered local artist/composer Ethan Rose’s lovely installation Movements (2008), which comprised more 100 altered music boxes fastened to the white walls of a room, plinking out plaintive minimal music with tiny metal teeth.

In a talk that morning at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, the curators discussed themes running loosely through the festival such as the American landscape, Sol LeWitt-style ‘instruction pieces’ and the deep anxiety replacing our post-election elation. Angst was certainly the root of the world premiere of Last Meadow, a dance by Brooklyn-based Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People. Knitting together James Dean movies, brain injuries and the sham of the American Dream, three performers crafted a deeply depraved phantasm that felt akin to screening East of Eden (1955) backwards and discovering satanic messages. The petite woman playing Dean uncannily captured his hunted, lost-boy look, but the performance occasionally slid into apocalyptic heavy-handedness, with a recorded voice dramatically whispering ‘America… is… a disaster’ (really?) and a lot of lascivious pelvic-thrusting that took the deliciously sublimated sex and dread coursing through Dean’s films and yanked them under stadium lights. An even higher anxiety was the subject of Robert Boyd’s two-channel video, Conspiracy Theory (2008), which spliced together scenes from sci-fi films, television news, docudramas and various loons ranting about the ‘inside-job’ of 9/11, HIV conspiracies and aliens, all to the driving beat of Kylie Minogue singing ‘I believe, I believe!’ Mesmerizing stuff, which – somewhat scarily – conjured some of the furious extremism seen in the US since the presidential election.

Hitoshi Toyoda, NAZUNA (2003-4)

Downshifting from panic to deep Zen was Hitoshi Toyoda’s haiku-like slideshow NAZUNA (2003-4). Dozens of people gathered on the dark lawn of the WORKS to watch the silent 90-minute sequence of colour photographs. A typical segment might include a sequence such as: a dog; a gingko leaf; George W. Bush on Japanese TV; trees covered in snow; the hospital where his mother laid dying; a bowl of tofu; the sky. The silence of the rapt audience – you could actually hear crickets – added to the astonishing tenderness and reverence of Toyoda’s images; their potency also evoked the gripping power of Chris Marker’s similarly conceived film La Jetée (The Pier, 1962). Did I mention that we sat in a light rain while wood-smoke drifted over from a nearby house? It was almost too sublime.

One of the best things about a festival like TBA is its location in a city that, while boasting plenty of art, isn’t completely sodden with it, adding a sense of camaraderie and unguarded excitement to such events. I ended my visit with the jubilantly regional Oregon, Oregon!, a musical written by Stan Freberg in 1959 and updated for the state’s sesquicentennial, with music by local stars Pink Martini. It was campy, silly and sweet: Americana by way of Waiting for Guffman (1996) and Garrison Keillor. This was where the giant talking beaver entered from stage right – just the right dose of élan every serious performance festival should strive for.