BRICOLAGE Portland

BRICOLAGE Portland

WHO

Cilla Vee Life Arts – with Cilla Vee, Linda Austin, Caspar Sonnet, Tim DuRoche, Tim Connell, Colin Manning, Megan McKissack, Alex Dang, Jennifer Robin, Mizu Desierto (plus others TBA)

WHAT

Bricolage – multi-disciplinary performance

an eclectic evening of music, dance, poetry, imagery and performance art

WHEN

Wednesday September 26^th – 7.30pm – 10pm (arrive at any time)

WHERE

Performance Works NorthWest

4625 SE 67^th Ave, Portland OR 97206

HOW MUCH

Sliding Scale $5 - $10

Venue Calendar:

https://pwnw-pdx.org/2018-events-fall/

Venue Event Page:

https://pwnw-pdx.org/2018/08/11/sept-26-%E2%95%91-bricolage/

 
Facebook Event:
https://www.facebook.com/events/542772842809525/ 

Cilla Vee Life Arts presents:

BRICOLAGE

Something constructed or created from a diverse range of available things

- an artistic Frankenstein of sorts (but in a good way!)

An evening of multi-disciplinary performance.

Cilla Vee Life Arts pulls together an eclectic mix of Portland's diverse artistic mélange. dancers, musicians, poets, artists come together in various combinations, collaborations and conglomerations.

Expect the unexpected!

This Fall Cilla Vee is touring cross-country and the west coast in order to connect and collaborate with area artists in each location.
See full tour schedule:
http://cillavee-lifeartscalendar.blogspot.com/2018/09/autumn-2018-cross-country-west-coast.html 

 

Cilla Vee Life Arts

CILLA VEE LIFE ARTS is an inter-disciplinary arts organization founded in 2002 in the South Bronx by Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) – now based in Asheville NC.
It serves as an umbrella for multiple projects that focus on collaboration and facilitation. With a mission of blurring boundaries and crossing categories, CVLA draws from a diverse pool of artists with a wide range of artistic backgrounds.
Performances can include anything from dance, movement, music, sound, text, film and video, visual and performance art to installation and beyond.

“When it's summer in the city, people do weird things. Performers especially. ....“Beguiling”
John Rockwell – New York Times

Cilla Vee Life Arts - http://www.cillavee.com/

ARTIST INFORMATION

Cilla Vee - http://cebhomepage.blogspot.com/

Linda Austin - https://pwnw-pdx.org/linda-austin-dance/

Caspar Sonnet - http://casparsonnet.com/

Tim Connell - https://www.timconnellmusic.com/

Tim DuRoche - http://www.timduroche.com/

Colin Manning - http://colinmanning.org/

Megan McKissack - http://phosphors.tumblr.com/

Alex Dang - http://wordsoftakumi.tumblr.com/

Jennifer Robin - https://www.facebook.com/jenniferistheone

Mizu Desierto - https://www.witd.org/

Cilla Vee 

  

Claire Elizabeth Barratt (aka Cilla Vee) is an inter-disciplinary artist with a performing arts background. She is the director of Cilla Vee Life Arts  – an arts organization with a focus on cross-media collaboration.

Her work utilizes artistic disciplines of dance, music, text, media, visual and installation art.

Claire has presented her work in venues as diverse as Jacob’s Pillow, the New York

Botanical Gardens, Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center and Art Basel Miami. She has performed and taught throughout the USA, Canada, Europe, Japan and Pakistan.

Claire received her professional training in London at The Laban Centre For Movement and Dance and at the London Studio Centre For Performing Arts. Her pre-professional training includes the Royal Academy of Dance and the Royal Schools of Music  examinations. She also served an apprenticeship with the Isadora Duncan Dance Foundation in New York and holds an MFA in Creative Practice from the Transart Institute with Plymouth University, UK.

On moving to the USA in 1992, Claire held the positions of Dancer for Unto These Hills drama on the Cherokee Indian Reservation and for Asheville Contemporary Dance Theater in North Carolina, as well as serving as a Co-Founder and Director for Circle Modern Dance and as Choreographer for the Knoxville Opera Company in Tennessee.

Once based in New York in 2002, Claire founded Cilla Vee Life Arts and, with the support of arts advocates such as Chashama, Bronx Council on the Arts and Arts for Art, began to develop and present her signature modes of work – including Motion Sculpture Movement Installations and The Sound Of Movement projects.

She is the creator of the Living Art pedagogy for performance art.

Claire now uses Asheville NC as her home-base.

“My work as an artist blurs boundaries and crosses categories. Re-defining the traditional concepts of a “piece” and challenging the conventions of performance, time, space and audience relationships.”

Linda Austin

photo: Christine dong

Linda Austin, co-founder & director of Performance Works NorthWest in Portland, Oregon, has been making dance and performance since 1983, often with a strong visual element and a commitment to commissioning original music.

Her working process exploits and explores the body’s powers and limits, bringing each performer’s vulnerabilities and strengths, accidental awkwardness and elegance, into a web of relationships—intimate, playful, confrontational—with other bodies, objects, environment, sound and media. The resultant improvisational and/or highly choreographed works are non-linear, poetic, often laced with humor, deploying movement that often disrupts what is generally considered “dancerly.”

With a background originally in theatre, Linda Austin began making performance and dance in 1983, when her first piece was presented at the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church. As an active participant in the downtown New York dance and performance community until 1998, Austin presented work at Performance Space 122, the Danspace Project, the Kitchen, and Movement Research at Judson Church. From 1992 to 1994 she lived and made work in Mexico, returning in Mexico City in 1998 for a two-month residency sponsored by Movement Research and funded by the U.S./Mexico Culture Fund.

In 1998, needing a more expansive and stable environment for the creation of work, Austin moved to Portland, Oregon, bought a small church which became her studio and, with lighting designer Jeff Forbes, founded the performing arts non-profit Performance Works Northwest. PWNW serves as parent organization for Linda Austin Dance as well as the catalyst for other projects such as the 2008 Tuning Project, curated by Karen Nelson, which brought Tuning Score innovator Lisa Nelson and Contact Improvisation founder Steve Paxton, to work intensively with a group of talented dancer/improvisors from around the country.

Since her move back to the west coast, Austin’s performance has been presented at PWNW, Conduit, On the Boards’ Northwest New Works, Velocity, and PICA’s TBA Festival, while making occasional forays back to NYC,

Awards include the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award (2017), a Fellowship in Performing Arts from the Regional Arts & Culture Council, as well as Fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Oregon Arts Commission. Her work has been supported by the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, and Movement Research, as well as residencies at Djerassi and Robert Wilson’s Watermill Center. Her writing has appeared in The Movement Research Performance Journal, Tierra Adentro (Mexico), the literary journal FO A RM and a 2003 collection from MIT Press, Women, Art & Technology.

Caspar Sonnet

Caspar Sonnet (b. 1976 Los Angeles, California) is a composer/performer/multi-instrumentalist currently residing in Portland, Oregon. He has been composing and performing experimental/improvisational music since 1996. Sonnet’s multi-instrumentalist abilities include: lap steel dobro, harmonica, percussion & voice. Native American mythology, pre-war blues, world music and minimalist composition are among many of his current interests. Beyond this, his work mainly focuses on natural timbral augmentation/manipulation, physical movement in affection to sound, dynamic juxtapositions and instrumental location. He has collaborated with talented musicians such as Jordan Dykstra, Chris Cogburn, Gabie Strong, Kozue Matsumoto, Jonathan Sielaff and Jean-Paul Jenkins in recording, performing and improvising of music. He has also toured throughout Europe and the US. and has held residencies with MOCA & Redcat. 

As an experimental composer/performer/multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter and composer, I create song structures using prepared acoustic lap-steel guitar, harmonica, voice & percussion. I also employ an array of various extended techniques & just intonation. I derive inspiration from Native American mythology, folklore, pre-war blues, world music, minimalist composition and orchestration. Through recording and performing I allow spontaneous, improvised song structures to develop. These “transmissions” or “incantations” are a collection of idiosyncratic pieces that shift and change over time, guiding and entrapping the listener within each enigmatic structure. Instrumental augmentation (by use of objects or physical movement) and location (various or otherwise) are also utilized within my composed/improvised compositions. 

Tim Connell

 

A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and a virtuoso mandolinist with over twenty-five years professional performing experience, Tim Connell has created a sophisticated and original global style on the mandolin.  Regarded as one of the top North American interpreters of Brazilian choro on the mandolin, Tim has also developed his own unique voice for the instrument, described in a Mandolin Magazine cover story as “fiery and energetic, soulful and evocative.”

Tim regularly tours Europe and North America in the international mandolin supergroup The Ger Mandolin Orchestra.  He has been a featured guest artist at national conventions of the Classical Mandolin Society of America; he is regularly on staff at the prestigious Mandolin Symposium and recently landed a cover story feature in Mandolin Magazine.

Tim has performed alongside top Brazilian musicians Dudu Maia, Choro das Tres, Alessandro Penezzi, Eduardo Neves and Almir Cortes.  He collaborates with jazz clarinet superstar Harvey Wainapel and the Berkeley Choro Ensemble and performed in the premeire of Wainapel’s new piece at the Berkeley Festival of Choro in May 2015.  Tim has performed with a roster of the greatest living mandolinists, including David Grisman, Mike Marshall, Avi Avital, Caterina Lichtenberg, Don Stiernberg, Rich Del Grosso, Chris Acquvella, Brian Oberlin and many others.

Tim is a restless and prolific bandleader and arranger, sideman and studio musician, currently touring with his Brazilian choro duo Rio Con Brio, 1930’s-era swing quartet Stumptown Swing, world mandolin duo Mando Planet and with guitar wizard Eric Skye.  In addition, Tim is an integral member of Americana songsters The Old Yellers, currently riding high on their new release “Ten From Town”.  In his solo act, Tim shares his career-long exploration of the world's many musical styles as realized on the mandolin and voice.

As a veteran teacher and workshop presenter, Tim has taught at the Alaska Folk Arts Camp and the Wintergrass Festival School among many other music camps.  He is currently an an Adjunct Professor of Music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR.  Additionally, Tim was a contributor to the number-one selling mandolin instructional book, "Mandolin for Dummies".  He is also in-demand as an ensemble coach for both professional and amateur groups of all styles and instruments, helping bands improve their sound and overall vision and cleaning up arrangements as they head into the recording studio.

Tim DuRoche

 

Tim DuRoche is a Portland-based jazz drummer, cultural writer, radio host, and artist-civic ecologist. 

My work over the last 25 years (live performance, community engagement and conversation, curating, public art and journalism/creative nonfiction) has been part of an evolving fascination with the improvisational weft and warp that occurs between art, entertainment, history, culture, and the public realm.

Some projects I’ve done in recent years include: Performing jazz and improvisation-based music with local, national and international jazz innovators, dance companies, and at festivals far and wide.

Turning a bridge over the Willamette River into a beautiful singing structure, as part of a large-scale temporary public art project.

Hosting a weekly-radio show spotlighting the evolution and revolutions of jazz since 1959.

Facilitating community conversation in libraries, community centers, churches, performing arts centers, colleges, and artists studios across Oregon

Publishing a book on jazz and culture

Writing extensively on visual culture, jazz and performance, planning, urban history, and cultural policy.

Guiding public conversations around arts and culture, education, civic engagement and democracy, sustainability, and local history.

Since moving to Portland in 2000, I’ve also worked as a freelance journalist and with a number of creative, cultural, and civic organizations and logged in considerable time in grants administration and in investments and advocacy for culture, serving as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts, Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, and Multnomah County Cultural Coalition, among others. Currently I am the Director of Programs for the World Affairs Council of Oregon.

Colin Manning 

Colin Manning received his BFA in Painting and his MFA in Filmmaking, both from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1998 and 2000. Through a technique of collage and painting applied "backwards" to glass and plexiglas Manning conjures up a dynamic confluence of the the transcendent and mundane. Some of these works appear as fossilized slices of the insanity of our society.  While other pieces give view to a complex yet graceful subtlety laying just below surface of gross appearances. 

Manning is also know for his projection performances, utilizing multiple film, slide and overhead projectors loaded with handmade and hand-altered transparent materials, coordinated into an engulfing spectacle.

Alex Dang

Alex Dang is a member of the 2013, 2014, and 2015 Portland Poetry Slam Team competing at the National Poetry Slam and the youngest representative from Portland in the slam's history. Alex is currently the Portland Grand Slam Champion 2015 and the Eugene Grand Slam Champion of 2014 and 2015. Videos of his performances have amassed over 1.5 million views on YouTube. He has been a speaker at two TEDx events: TEDxReno and TEDxUOregon. A nationally touring poet, Alex has performed in over 35 cities, 20 states, and is a world renowned burger expert.

Jennifer Robin

Jennifer Robin booked and hosted a live avant-garde variety show on Portland’s KBOO 90.7 FM from 1999-2008. She’s toured the country with a mix of spoken word and music, with appearances at Bumbershoot, the Olympia Experimental Music Festival, and Portland’s Nofest. Her work has featured in Plazm, Five2One, Gobshite Quarterly, HorrorSleazeTrash, and Ladybox Books. Her book of non-fiction vignettes, Death Confetti, was released by Feral House in 2016. In 2018, she had a story appear in the King Shot Press Nasty! anthology and performed on the Nasty! East Coast Tour. In late 2018, her book Earthquakes In Candyland will be released on Fungasm Press.

Mizu Desierto 

  

Mizu Desierto is a post-butoh dance-theatre artist, curator, educator and farmer whose life=art explores themes of gender, cultural identity, feminism, queerness, playful social deviance and regeneration. She is the founder and director of Portland’s Water in the Desert, a hub of numerous projects, including: The Headwaters Theatre, Prior Day Farm & the annual festival that is Butoh College.  Mizu’s artistic works have been commissioned by The City of Portland and Portland Center Stage and her projects have received funding from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, Oregon’s Regional Arts & Culture Council, Portland Development Commission, Oregon Arts Commission, The Multnomah County Cultural Coalition & The Oregon Cultural Trust. As an educator, she has worked as adjunct faculty in dance at Prescott College and Portland State University. Recently she was awarded her second fellowship residency at PLAYA for continued work with ÆVIUM, a multi-generational, multi-regional women’s dance project with a 24-year history of collaboration.