Sitting on the cement ledge of world-renowned Lawrence Halprin’s Keller Fountain, looking across and down as the dancers dressed in white and blue slowly invade the platform planks and submerge their bodies in the fluid stage below, whets the appetite for the two-hour-long adventure to come. Dancers cannonball underwater 30 feet above the miked string-quartet avidly bouncing their bows and flittering there fingers to Morton Subtonik’s “A Fluttering of Wings” creating an icy eerie texture on this hot sunny day. The mixture of live sound-recorded pieces repeated over the ambient noise-rhythms of “Five Legged Stool” and “A Sky of Cloudless Sulpher,” Anna Halprin’s choreography matches this strange music with guided interpreted dance. At the end of the piece, a gold bell rings at the top of the applause and the crowd stands up and follows-the brightly dressed TBA volunteers to the next segment of the performance.
The beauty of this event is its placement in the city. Outside of business buildings, in Pettygrove Park, where people usually keep to themselves or gather in small groups during lunch hour, the collective audience of two-or-three-hundred floods the cement center and takes a seat off of the park benches. Older folks hand over their canes and plop down on their small area of cement squeezed next to mothers with infants and people with digital cameras. The performers surround the central audience raised up on grassy knolls for a humorous game of musical Telephone. Each raised hill houses two dancers and an instrumentalist. The violinist standing on a chair in the middle of the crowd guides the French horn player, flautist, cellist, and others transforming Pauline Oliveros’s “Tree/Peace,” meant for a piano trio, into an interpretive responsive octet and dance crew.
The Lovejoy Fountain, complete with a grand piano placed in the base of the fountain proved that even the musicians were going to get their feet wet that day. Terry Riley’s “In C” begins with the metronome-like octaves of C played on the piano as xylophones, bassoons, trumpets, and keyboards and an array of percussive instruments sound from all different angles of the outer edges of the audience. Dancers take to the fountain placing wet handprints on the dry cement wall, and climbing above the ledge flipping cups upside-down over partially opened hands letting the water drip out like sand through a glass timer. One dancer repeatedly throws a cup full of water over the ledge of the fountain and lets the water disperse magically into droplets as it falls 25 feet into the pool of water below. Terry Riley’s piece gets slowly replaced by percussionists, including Lewis & Clark’s own Brett Pascal (slightly disguised in a sunhat), banging on metal buckets with chains, entering the fountain, and clanking the inside strings of the piano reaping playful havoc. Just as Terry Riley’s piece changes each time it is played depending on how long each of the instrumentalists plays one musical rhythmic and simple melodic idea, the open-to-the-public closing event of the Time-Based Art Festival acted as a guide to an experience that an artist takes with his or her art, and the audience takes with the performance.
The audience ends the ceremony by joining hands in a circle with women dressing and undressing in the middle of the circle. As you leave and unlink hands with the stranger next to you, one of the event staff looks you strangely in the eye placing a pin on your hand that reads “PLAY” and sternly says, “Please, go play.” Retracing steps through the city parks and fountains gave those spaces all new meanings, and invited the people of Portland to play together in our communal spaces.
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