Get it while it's hot

T:BA:2009 opened this week to avid pandemonium. As always, the venerable time-based art festival offers an overwhelming international slate of performances. But naturally, you care only about what I’m getting to, don’t you. So here’s my itinerary so far, if you'd like to stalk me:

Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company (which is the actual name – how’s that for honesty in architecture) performs her play The Shipment this weekend at the Gerding, so hurry up before you miss it. YJL, who is indeed young as all get-out, has been the controversial darling of progressive playwriting in Nueva York of late; now you can see what the fuss is all about.

Thanks to the Festival, we now have a chance to see Spike Lee’s filming of Passing Strange, the smash hit rock coming-of-age story of Stew, he of The Negro Problem. Look carefully during the promo below and you'll spot the radiant Eisa Davis, last seen in Portland during JAW ... 2003, I think? That's when she brought her play Bulrusher, which was later nominated for a Pulitzer.



Coming up fast: the Winningstad Theatre (Portland’s cozy answer to London’s famed Cottesloe) hosts Pan Pan Theatre’s The Crumb Trail, a pomo retelling of the Hansel and Gretel story that encompasses such interrelated ideations as identity construction and internet predators. Not for kids, I’m guessing.

Dance and its descendants is especially strong at this year’s edition of T:BA, and among many thrilling offerings. my own personal cultural guru Tim DuRoche recommends catching Miguel Gutierrez’s Death Electric Eno Protest Aerobics aka DEEP Aerobics. Reportedly this combines “vigorous bouncing” with existential absurdity, so … what’s not to like?

Happy Birthday Futurism

Leave it to the indefatigable and omnipresent Tim DuRoche to pay homage to the 100th anniversary of The Futurist Manifesto – on the actual day, mind you, which was February 20.

My belated observance is surprising considering I owe so much to the scattershot movement founded to celebrate all things moderne. (Well, so do you, but back to ME.) Back when I fancied myself a cool and trendy performance artist in San Francisco’s fecund but brief New Wave era, I kept bumping into an unsettling phenomenon. If I banged around on found objects and called it a concert, the Futurists had already been there. If I “invented” a noise poem, what did I find but that the Futurists had bested me again. And if you thought the 1960s invented the Happening, think again. The Futurists’ gleeful public stunts lacked method, but they had madness aplenty.

As a group, the original Futurists were willfully obnoxious in the extreme – think Animal House with bowler hats instead of togas – and had I lived in the Italy of 1909, I am sure their antics would have worn out their welcome fast. Click on one such manifestation below, if you like, which dates back to 1968.



But 100 years later, their influence is everywhere in ways both wondrous and pernicious. Then fast forward mentally to right now. Where would Facebook and Twitter be without the ethos that a single sentence fragment can be poetry?

Celebrate Futurism’s dubious nativity by re-reading the Marinetti’s famous manifesto, which nowadays, for me, is equal parts felicity and despair. In any case, you can trace the course of much of 20th-century European theater from this moment. As Marinetti said,

Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!