photo: Alicia J. Rose

Ten Tiny Dances @ South Waterfront, Portland, OR
Saturday, August 2, 2008

Choreographer Tere Mathern teams up again with composer Tim DuRoche to create new work for Ten Tiny Dances. Joined by saxaphonists Reed Wallsmith and Joe Cunningham interpreting DuRoche's new score "Erector Set," the trio be performing 10 times in a row, starting every 15 minutes in Portland's newest neighborhood, South Waterfront. Curated by Linda K Johnson and Mike Barber.



Frozen Music II: The City Dance of Lawrence & Anna Halprin
Sunday, September 14, 2008, performances at 1:00 & 4:00
Third Angle New Music Ensemble with choreographers Linda Austin, Linda K Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes
Keller Fountain, Downtown Portland
Curated by Ron Blessinger, Randy Gragg and Linda K Johnson
* This event is free and open to the public and is the final event of PICA's 2008 TBA Festival


In 1971, Portland christened a new urban park that New York Times architectural critic Ada Louise Huxtable heralded as "the most important urban space since the Renaissance." Called Forecourt Fountain (later renamed Keller Fountain), it was part of a sequence of Portland plazas that combined water, sculptural form, and public space in ways never before tried in a city—or in the field of landscape architecture. Yet the plazas were merely one outgrowth of the daring experiments in movement, sound, and space being conducted by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; his wife, the legendary choreographer Anna Halprin; and radical musical composers such as Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and Morton Subotnick.

Third Angle New Music Ensemble along with a quartet of Portland's most accomplished choreographers, will celebrate the plazas and the artistic milieu from which they emerged. As the second in its series of "Frozen Music" performances sited in landmark works of architecture, Third Angle will play some of the early forms of Minimalist music pioneered by the composers in the Halprins' circle. In consort, the choreographers will explore Anna Halprin’s philosophy and her intense blend of movement with social and personal consciousness often cited as the beginning of postmodernism in dance.

"We were trying to invent new languages of dance, music, and architecture," Lawrence Halprin recalls of the time. So, too, will City Dance attempt a new kind of celebration of architectural and creative heritage.

City Dance is Oregon's 2008 American Masterpieces project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, and the Oregon Arts Commission, along with the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Portland Development Commission, Regional Arts & Culture Council, Czopek & Erdenberger, TVA Architects, the Architecture Foundation of Oregon and other partners.