Questions and Answers

As the crow flies or maybe the American Eagle, it is 953 miles or  1,582 kilometers from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada to Portland, Oregon, USA and GertrudeandAlice are about to embark on this journey just in time for Alice’s 134th birthday on April 30th, as the stage is set for another Stein production.

This production, Now Repeat in Steinese , originated in New York and was written about on this blog in May of last year,  Stein ‘n Wine, a Night of Steinese. What better tribute to the Mistress of Repetition than to repeat  Now Repeat in Steinese! And what better birthday gift could Alice ask for, other than maybe a well-ostrich-feathered chapeau!

ALEMBIC #13  NOW REPEAT IN STEINESE

THE DETAILS :

WHAT:

Drawing upon Gertrude Stein’s reputation for repetition, Now Repeat in Steinese is four back-to-back stagings of her early enigmatic one-act “White Wines” paired with four different white wines. Fruity? Dry? Acidic? Sweet?

Now Repeat in Steinese will be all this and more. By highlighting the role of the director, Now Repeat in Steinese uses one of Stein’s most unstageable works — no plot, no characters, no setting — to reveal the myriad ways such material can in fact be interpreted.

Under performance artist Drew Pisarra’s guidance, this concept was initially executed in New York in 2010 where it was hailed as an “entertaining collation of pure theater” (nytheater.com) and played for a month to sold-out houses. Instead of remounting that original show, however, this production reinvents the idea by having four West Coast theater artists/choreographers/filmmakers interpret the play anew, thereby revealing a completely new set of artistic sensibilities. Pisarra, a fixture in Portland’s dance-theater landscape in the ’90s, returns from NYC to host this one-of-a-kind evening with his longtime collaborator Katherine Gray.

Alembic is an ongoing series of performances curated by guest artists from the worlds of dance, theater, visual and media arts invited to program and produce an event at Performance Works NorthWest.

WHO:

Drew Pisarra, curator

Katherine Petersen, co-host

The SteinWays, musical collective

Kyle Delamarter and Starr Ahrens, theater artists

TouchMonkey: Carolyn Stuart and Patrick Gracewood, dancers

Austin Newsom, filmmaker

WHEN: April 29 and 30. Friday and Saturday. 8pm.

HOW:Tickets $12-$15 (discounts for Boris & Natasha Fan Club)at the door or at hulahub.com

WHERE: Performance Works NorthWest  (www.performanceworksnw.org)

4625 SE 67th Ave., Portland, OR 97206

503.777.1907

 

The PLAYERS:

The SteinWays are a collection of musicians from Portland and Seattle. Over the past 15 years, they have performed together in a variety of plays and musical cabarets in Portland. Lynn Ann Kister is a poet, a piano player, and a singer; Iven M. is coming out of her self-imposed exile from the Portland music scene to be a part of this most provocative production; LizM’s brings great devotion to low brass and voice and great cleavage; Jackie Sauriol is all about trombones and flugelhorns, trumpets and flutes and guitars; and Susie Schmitt is a fledgling accordionist with the experience of playing the roles of wild women in the works of such greats as Jean Genet, Holly Hughes, and Anton Chekov.

Kyle Delamarter is from Sandpoint, Idaho.  From 2000-2001, he worked as an animator, music contributor, and voice actor at Flying Rhinoceros.  In 2002, he was cast in Imago Theatre’s Biglittlethings where he regularly performs to the present.  He toured internationally with Imago’s productions FROGZ and Biglittlethings, and hasperformed in a number of Carol Triffle’s original plays, including Hit Me in the Stomach and Backs Like That.  While raising his two daughters, Kyle has developed a fascination for women characters in children’s stories.  Baba Yaga (the crone) relate to a facet of older women past their child-bearing years, who impart wisdom to girls uninitiated into womanhood.  Through the filter of time and changing social mores, Baba Yaga has been portrayed as a villain.

Nathan H. G. lurks about Imago Theatre on a regular bases, appearing in past productions of Uncle Vanya, Not Not Not Not Enough Oxygen, The Cuban Missile Tango,Tick Tack Type, Stage Left Lost, and PSU’s Kabuki and Butoh performances. At one time in his life a professional ballet dancer, he now studies Butoh and is in the process of fusing the two dance forms together to create a new ballet noir the first of which was performed last weekend in the Under the Influence benefit for Japan, at Headwaters Theatre. Nathan has also preformed with Wobbly, The Wonderlust Circus, Bogville, Socitas Insomnia, and Mizu Desierto Butoh Theatre.

Starr Ahrens was raised in the unincorporated village of Rockdale, Wisconsin. She moved west to Portland where she studied theatre and gender studies at Lewis & Clark College before moving to Los Angeles where she enjoyed Southern California’s “no winter” policy. While in LA, Starr completed Second City’s writing and conservatory programs. She improvised, wrote and performed comedy in and around Los Angeles, notably at Second City, The Upright Citizen’s Brigade Theatre and Improv Olympic. Her work was featured on Wisecrack! on MTV’s LOGO network. She’s taken her solo show and sketch shows to festivals nationwide. Happy to be back in the City of Roses, Starr can be found teaching long form improv at Comedy Sportz Portland.

TouchMonkey, Carolyn Stuart and Patrick Gracewood, have been investigating, teaching and performing Contact Improvisation for over 20 years. They currently offer classes, jams and retreats at Gracewood Studio in Portland, OR.

Austin H. Newsom Is a San Francisco based artist, working primarily in Film and Mixed Media. He is currently a member of the Tart House Gallery Collective, an avant-garde group of artists and craftsman displaying regularly at a flat in the Mission District of San Francisco and annually at the Burning Man festival. His work is perception-driven as he plays with the different lenses that people put on to see the world from unique perspectives.

Before turning to writing plays (Misery and Good Fortune, Burst, and Serves Three), Host/Curator Drew Pisarra toured his monologues (Singularly Grotesque, The Gospel According to Saint Genet, Fickle, and Queer Notions) to West Coast spaces. He also collaborated with theater artists Kristy Edmunds, and Jerry Mouawad & Carol Triffle of IMAGO Theater  and choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Katherine Petersen and Jennifer Allen.

His own experimental theater works have been seen at such NYC spaces as P.S. 122, Judson Church,Dixon Place, HERE Arts Center, Richard Foreman’s Ontological and the Vineyard. He is especially obsessed with bringing Gertrude Stein’s work to the stage and has directed six of her works to date: Three Sisters Who Are Not Sisters (Lewis & Clark College), Ladies’ Voices (Danspace), The World Is Round (Manhattan Theater Source), Yes is for a very young man (Brooklyn Arts Exchange), Curtain Raiser (The Red Room) and White Wines (Under St. Marks). His book of short stories, Publick Spanking, was published by Portland small press Future Tense.

Co-Host Katherine Petersen is a mother of one and has been practicing passive solar architecture for the past seven years. Her interests in performance has led her to dance, speak and sometimes play musical instruments on the stage in work that she has created or was created by others including Drew Pisarra (They Eat Their Young, The Potato Story, How to Survive a Disaster, and Partitio – this last piece also with Kristy Edmunds, Linda K. Johnson and others.)

C H E E R S !

Tagged Alembic, Alice B. Toklas, Austin newsom, Drew Pisarra, Gertrude Stein, Katherine Petersen, Kyle Delamarter, Nathan H.G., Now Repeat in Steinese, Performance Works North West, Starr Ahrens, The SteinWays, TouchMonkey