. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Note: don’t forget to read our end of the year letter to you!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

DISTILLED

a Fundraising event for PWNW’s Alembic Series featuring
micro works from over 10 performance and dance artists.

WHAT: Distilled
A Fundraiser for PWNW’s Alembic Series OF GUEST ARTIST CURATED EVENTS. Current and past Alembic Curators join PWNW Board/Staff to perform an evening of 2-5 min. micro works. Performances will be followed by complimentary
wine from Bear Flag Wines, apple cider and eatables, plus raffle & auction items!

THE ALEMBIC SERIES invites guest artists to program and produce a performance installation or other performative event of their choice. PWNW provides Alembic artists with production assistance and a modest honorarium. Please join us for an evening of performance in celebration of ALEMBIC and help PWNW continue this important series of performance experiments.

WHO: (Performers) Linda Austin, Anne Furfey, Lily Gael + Francoise Renaud, Dora Gaskill, Bethany Ides, Kathleen Keogh + Noelle Stiles,  Lois Leveen + Chuck Barnes, Mack McFarland, Meg McHutchison, Mark Owens + Leo Daedalus, Kaj-anne Pepper, Leah Wilmoth, Curtis Walker/Impetus Arts , and Lucy Yim

WHEN: Jan. 9, 2010 @ 8pm

HOW: $15-$50 Sliding scale
Purchase tickets in advance at boxofficetickets.com
Or Reserve at 503-777-1907

WHERE: Performance Works NorthWest (www.performanceworksnw.org)
4625 SE 67th AveNUE Portland, OR

Note: for a full PDF version of our end of the year news, click HERE.

“I consider valuable and timeless as ‘worth spending time in the present with,’ as time is our one truly finite resource; art does not necessarily exist to entertain us, it should fill our time with wonder. “

Dear friends of PWNW|Linda Austin Dance,

Recently reading an essay by Dave Allen (Gang of Four, Pampelmoose, Fight Digital Strategy), I was struck by the passage above (part of Allen’s exhortation to musicians to “Please be brilliant or get out of the way!”).  To me, his language embodies an open-ended approach to experiencing art that makes room for both seriousness and pleasure, offers a way to rethink the timely and the timeless, and also provokes us to consider how we use the finite and precious resource of time.

One of our themes for 2009 here at Performance Works NorthWest was opening ourselves up as a space and a performance generator to a wider group of artists and audience. We wanted more avenues to “fill our time with wonder.” Thus, the retooled Alembic Series:  guest artists program events whose tactics have included installation, dance, performance, video, live and recorded music, an international live internet feed, autobiographical stories, and audience participation, Artists have been from Portland, Seattle and New York.

Producing this series, into which the artists pour their hearts and PWNW’s all-volunteer staff work like mad, has required a leap of faith on our part¾we believe that we will find the support from our community to ensure that the modest artist stipends will be paid.  Small grants from PGE and from the Multnomah County Cultural Coalition have helped. But most of the funds needed to finish the current 10-part series (5 more to go!) come from our stakeholders in the form of ticket sales and donations. Please dig as deep as you can to support this and all our efforts to fill your time with experiences you can’t get elsewhere. Also, the most pleasurable way to support the series is to come to the shows—including our Jan. 9 fundraiser, “Distilled.”

Other ways in which my 2009 was filled with wonder—and hard work!

• Creating and performing Bandage a Knife, a collaboration with artist/composer Seth Nehil plus dancers Anne Furfey, Bonnie Green, Rebecca Harrison, Kaj-anne Pepper, and Lucy Yim.
• Collaborating with NY-based artist Caroline Woolard for a residency at Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center on Long Island,
• Performing in a piece by artist Brody Condon in the TBA Festival in Portland and at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC for Performa 09
• Performing a work-in-progress at the New Dance Alliance Performance Mix Festival in New York, with dancers Kaj-anne Pepper and Stephanie Lanckton
• Working with Ean Eldred and Richard Garfield of rhiza A+D, in a pre-planning process funded by the Portland Development Commission, to come up with a dream for the future! Stay tuned for further developments.

Speaking of the past—and the future—2010 is PWNW’s 10^th Anniversary Year! We formed our organization in 1999, moved into our space in June 2000 and have been rocking your world ever since. To honor us in our anniversary year why not add $10, $100 or even $1000 to your previous years’ already generous gift? If you haven’t given in the past, 2010 seems a good year to start.

Donate online at

or

HERE

or simply send us a check: PWNW  4625 SE 67th  Portland, OR  97206

Don’t forget to make a matching gift to the Oregon Cultural Trust for your Oregon Tax credit!

Finally, a huge Thank You for your past and future support in all its manifold forms. May we all in 2010 make the most wondrous use of our time.

Rebecca & Lucy in Bandage a Knife

THE FOLLOWING EVENTS take place at
Performance Works NW | 4625 SE 67th Ave. | Portland, OR 97206
Tri Met #14 & #17 [map it!]

For PHONE RESERVATIONS call 503 777 1907
For ADVANCE TICKETS click here
To DONATE TO PWNW click here

======================================================

ALEMBIC SERIES OF GUEST CURATED EVENTS

Dec. 4-5 @ 8pm
Alembic #5: The Third Side
Guest Curator: Bethany Ides
Tickets $10-15 sliding scale

THE THIRD SIDE
~ studies in radical nostalgia ~

Rebecca Davis (dance)
*premiere: solo adaptation of Deborah Hay’s “I’ll Crane For You”
(see below for information on Rebecca’s Feldenkreis workshop: Dynamic Posture)

Sreshta Rit Premnath (sound)
Ben Asriel (movement)
Jaime Lee Christiana (voice)
Emma Lipp (dissimulation)
Alicia McDaid (memorization)
Kaya Oneida (constellation, unearthed)

THE THIRD SIDE of the tape occurs when the magnetic tape is twisted from exhaustion and outstrips its memory.

This program collects interpretations in dance, theater and sound — each internalized and processed before reemerging and taking new form. Rebecca Davis, a choreographer and installation artist based in New York, will premier “I’ll Crane for You,” the result of her participation in Deborah Hay’s 2008 Solo Commissioning Project. Interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher, Sreshta Rit Premnath (NYC) spearheads an assembly of local performers in dynamically rehashing a playlist of sappy 70’s folk songs that once filled the halls of his now-demolished art school.

If you’ve ever wondered what to call the place between recalling and foretelling, imagined yourself and your cohorts starring in a “flashback” episode from the sitcom of your lives, or pressed “play” in order to reconceive an emotional terrain now in ruins, you’ve been dialing The Third Side. The phone is ringing again. It’s for you.

Rebecca Davis makes movement and objects. Her work has been presented at Danspace Project, The Chocolate Factory, Linfield Art Gallery, The Old American Can Factory, and PS 122. She has performed in the work of Ursula Eagly, Juliette Mapp, RoseAnne Spradlin, Ansley Vandenbroucke, and Christopher Williams. She founded and curated the Dance Forum series at the Brooklyn Museum from 2001-2006. Davis is the Director of Education and Outreach at Trisha Brown Dance Company, where she has worked since 2002. She currently dances with Kathy Westwater and will be performing at MOMA in Spring 2010 in the Marina Abramovič retrospective.

Sreshta Rit Premnath lives and works in New York City. He is the founder and editor of the magazine Shifter. He received his BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art, his MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of Fine Art at Bard College, was a 2008 studio fellow at The Whitney Independent Study Program and attended Skowhegan in 2009.

His work has been shown at Gallery SKE, in Bangalore (India), Rotunda Gallery, Art in General, Bose Pacia Gallery and Thomas Erben Gallery in New York City.

He is engaged with forms of interrogation and representation. Often using strategies of negation, erasure, fracture, displacement and disembodiment, his work explores spaces of subjectivity and slippage – those liminal spaces of language where meaning and representation, memory and history, split. Installations, writings, and a topical magazine, Shifter, amongst other things have emerged from this practice.

================================================================
Dec. 5 – DYNAMIC POSTURE: a Feldenkrais Workshop
led by visiting artist Rebecca Davis
11 am-12:30 pm @ PWNW
$20 — CLICK HERE to register by email.

In this one-day workshop, Rebecca Davis will share a Feldenkrais Method Awareness Through Movement® lesson designed to help students find more mobility and length in the spine.

Rebecca Davis is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner^CM and a Choreographer/Performer based in New York City. (see bio above).

The Feldenkrais Method is a physical practice that offers a direct and effective means for healing pain, while also improving posture, flexibility and coordination. Over time, we each adopt physical and psychological habits, often constraining us to a small portion of our movement potential, and creating unnecessary physical limitations, injury, or chronic pain. The Feldenkrais Method is practiced in two complimentary and versatile formats: Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®.

Awareness Through Movement® is typically done in a group class and combines verbal instruction and gentle, purposeful movement to clarify the relationship between parts of the body and the whole. Students learn efficient use of the skeleton and how to reduce unnecessary tension and muscular effort. Classes are non-competitive and students move according to their own comfort level and progress at their own rate. The emphasis is on sensory learning. The lessons are of benefit to everyone wishing to move with greater comfort and ease.