Simple Machines Theatre (with Theory 1:Dance) present
bugged. and light that lingers
by Rollin Carlson & Tony Fuemmeler; Meshi Chavez

Festival Performance dates: Jan 23, 26 and 27 at 8:00 pm; Jan 30 at 8:00 & 10:00 pm

Venue: Blackfish Gallery (420 NW 9th Ave)

Single Tickets: $12, Call 800-494-TIXS or online at http://www.fertilegroundpdx.org/Calendar.html

Flash Your Fertile Ground Button and Save: $2 per ticket

bugged. Big things come in small packages. An overhead projector, recycled cardboard and two puppeteers conjure up dreams of hungry cities, giant bugs and the creepy crawlies of electronic culture in this shadow puppet triptych set to a live soundtrack. bugged. is a wordless journey through a metamorphic micro-universe that allows the audience to creep into the spaces between nature and technology, between big and small, between fear and love. 

Drawing on a range of influences from science fiction and graphic novels to silent movies and film animation, Simple Machines Theatre uses simple objects to create a layered dream-world of insects and humankind embroiled in struggles for survival.

light that lingers It begins in Nothing, the spring board from which all things are created.  This is a time-less, space-less place.  Then something exists, light or spirit, churning discovering, becoming.  This existence begins to want.  Want turns to endless expansion, expansion to implosion.  The awareness of another, something is here.  The search continues towards connection, union.  Fusion occurs.  Nothing returns.

Whitebird Dance presents
Tere Mathern Dance
and Minh Tran and Company

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 23 and 24 at 8:00 pm

Full Extended Run: January 20 – January 24, 2010
Venue: Miller Hall, World Forestry Center (4033 SW Canyon Rd)
Single Tickets: $16 - $26. Tickets at www.whitebird.org and Ticketmaster

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $4

Tere Mathern and Minh Tran are two of the Pacific Northwest’s finest choreographers. Mathern creates acclaimed work that is distinctive for its elegant marriage of razor-sharp, spare abstraction with fluid, spatial form. Minh Tran has been celebrated for his fusion of traditional Asian and contemporary western techniques. Tere Mathern Dance and Minh Tran & Company will perform two new works in the round. With a live score by Tim DuRoche and a set by visual artist David Eckard, Mathern’s “PIVOT” explores the instance of transfer - the fulcrum between balance and risk.  With composer Heather Perkins and and visual film designer David Bryant, Minh Tran’s “KISS” is based on the personal and emotional history of Tran’s coming-out experience. Together Mathern and Tran, who have long danced for and with each other, have created a special duet “Twine” that they will perform.

Many Hats Collaborations presents

Truth and Beauty
adapted by Elizabeth Klinger; created in collaboration with Betsy Cross and Jessica Wallenfels

Festival Performance Dates: Jan 22, 23, 28, 29 and 30 at 8:30 pm

Venue: Shaking the Tree (1407 SE Stark St. Portland, OR 97214)

Single Tickets: $15. Call 800-494-TIXS or online at http://www.fertilegroundpdx.org/Calendar.html

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $3 per ticket

Based on the memoir of the same name by Ann Patchett, Truth and Beauty spans the fifteen-year friendship of two prominent female writers through gripping physical theater and imagery. When levelheaded, hardworking Ann is thrown together with gregarious and eccentric cancer survivor Lucy Grealy in graduate school at the Iowa Writers Workshop, their connection is instant and bottomless. Lucy’s young life has been full of hospitals, peer abuse and familial neglect; Ann was raised within the security of a loving family and austere Catholic school. But somehow, the women find in one another a missing piece of themselves. As artists, roommates and friends, Ann and Lucy see the world in one another, rendering a relationship more intimate than lovers.

Depicting a partnership by turns enchanting, suffocating, competitive and destructive, Ann’s deft portrait of her true other half manifests in movement and dialogue in this three-person adaptation. Multiple characters test Ann and Lucy as they struggle to balance personal and professional pursuits while rising to fame in the new American literature scene of the 1980s. Together they weather multiple operations to outmaneuver eradiated tissue in Lucy’s jaw, as her never-ending quest for beauty shapes her ever-changing face. But when repeat disappointments turn Lucy’s desire to obsession, even Ann cannot save her from herself.

Physical theater artists Betsy Cross and Jessica Wallenfels are joined by Joe Spencer in this 90 minute piece adapted and directed by Elizabeth Klinger. “Truth and Beauty” continues Many Hats Collaboration’s commitment to creating challenging new work.

Artists Repertory Theatre presents
The Hillsboro Story
created by Susan Banyas

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 22, 23 at 7:30 and 24 at 2:00 pm
Venue: Artists Repertory Theatre’s Alder Stage (1515 SW Morrison)
Single Tickets: $8 - $10 Reserve seats at 503-241-1278 or online at www.artistsrep.org
Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $2

The Hillsboro Story opens in Hillsboro, Ohio on July 5, 1954 when the "colored" elementary school went up in flames. The fire sparked a "school fight" led by five African American mothers that became the first test case for the Brown v. Board of Education decision (May, 1954) in the North. Ms. Banyas was in the third grade, and the memory of those times sparked this cultural detective story -- a performance weaving spoken word, movement, monologues, and visual images, backed by an evocative original music score by jazz composer, David Ornette Cherry.

Theater/Dance: Late Night at the Hothouse
Oregon Ballet Theatre and the Attic Writer’s Workshop presents
Incorporamento
by Gavin Larsen and David Biespiel

Festival Performance dates: Jan 24 and 31 at 10:30 pm
Venue: Hothouse on the Mezzanine, Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW 11th)
Single Tickets: $15

If language could move and the body could sing, then the result would Incorporamento, the unique collaboration between a poet and a dancer. In 2008, award-winning poet David Biespiel began writing a series of epistles—poems in the form of letters—to fellow poets, friends, and spirits from the past. Incorporamento is the fabulously choreographed sequence of dances in response to some of those letters designed by OBT principal dancer Gavin Larsen. The performance answers a profound question: Can two arts, one spoken and one silent, marry? The answer is, yes! This one-of-a-kind collaboration—between poet and dancer—will also include a post-show Q&A with the audience, moderated by Portland writer Dave Jarecki about how Biespiel and Larsen created the performance and muse on the relationship between the body of poetry and the poetry of the body.

Special Festival Event
Polaris presents xCHANGE3
created by Polaris Dance Theatre, No Go Know, Vorcan

Event Date:  Jan 29 at 8:00 pm
Venue: Polaris Contemporary Dance Center (1501 SW Taylor)
Cost: $12 Call 503-929-0738 or online at www.polarisdance.org

Polaris Dance Theatre collaborates with local band No Go Know and live painting duo Vorcan for an of-the-moment performance combining three artistic mediums. xCHANGE3 traverses genres to create a new form of innovative expression.  Led by Artistic Director Robert Guitron, Polaris creates emotionally resonant contemporary danceworks designed for maximum impact. A hallmark of Guitron’s work is delving into, and dissecting, the human psyche. The choreography for xCHANGE3 examines the transformative effects, both nurturing and destructive, of human relationships. Working closely with Guitron to create the musical accompaniment for xCHANGE3, No Go Know brings their brand of fuzzed-out indie psychedelia to the dance studio floor. Hailed has having “an intuitive understanding of dynamics” by Performer Magazine, No Go Know merges their instinctual musical acumen with the professional dance world. Capturing it all on canvas before the audience will be Vorcan. Though calling Portland home, Vorcan is constantly traveling the U.S. and Europe in search of artistic inspiration. Using the fine art of collaborative imagery, the duo often paint live performances, but xCHANGE3 marks their first time working with a professional dance company.

Become a part of xCHANGE3 and experience the possibilities.

Shaking the Tree presents
Memory Water: A Tale of Love, Loss and Liquid
created by Andrea Stolowitz. Inspired by the many sightings of La Llorna (The Weeping Woman) from 1502-2010

Festival Performance Date(s): Jan 22, 23, 28, 29 and 30 at 7:00 pm
Venue: Shaking The Tree Studio (1407 SE Stark St)

Single Tickets: $15. Call 800-494-TIXS or online at http://www.fertilegroundpdx.org/Calendar.html

Flash Your GrOw Button and Save: $5

Memory Water is a collaboration between Drammy award winning director Samantha Van Der Merwe, dancer & choreographer Chisao Hata and playwright Andrea Stolowitz (JAW 2009). The play explores the tragic tale of La Llorona, a beautiful but poor woman, who throws her two illegitimate children into the river after being spurned by her wealthy lover, a rich Hidalgo who must return to Spain to marry a noblewoman. Drawing strong references to the Medea tale from ancient Greece, we wonder what it must take to do something like that. What state of mind one must be in and how can one find redemption after such an act? Using the river as a witness, we begin to wade through the polluted water and dredge the river for answers, just like the ghostly apparition of La Llorona who drags the river for the souls of her lost children with her long fingernails and wailing cry. Here’s a question for everyone? What is the one thing, the one regret that you cannot let go of, the thing you are always dragging the river for? Is it possible to turn a river of life into a river of death and most importantly, can it be turned back into a vital flowing river again? Come and find out.