Each of the ghosts of A Christmas Carol has a rather heady message to impart to Scrooge on Christmas eve.  Looking back at your past brings up painful regret. Looking ahead to a lonely, miserable future is so very grim. But it is the ghost of Christmas Present always resonates the most with me.  The call to look around and see the people that are vulnerable to ignorance, want and hunger is a powerful message.  Even Scrooge can’t come with a reasonable excuse not to help the vulnerable in his community.

So this holiday season, Portland Center Stage is partnering with p;ear. p:ear builds positive relationships with homeless and transitional youth, ages 15 to 24, through education, art and recreation to affirm personal worth and create more meaningful and healthier lives.

Beginning opening night of A Christmas Carol, the Christmas tree in the lobby of the Armory will be decorated with ornaments hand made by the youth of p;ear. Each ornament contains the Christmas wish of a homeless youth.  We are encouraging our entire PCS community to take an ornament from our tree and hang it on their own family’s tree. Then purchase the gift requested and “wrap” it in a new backpack with a pair of new socks.  Gifts need to be delivered to p;ear by December 20.

Find more info about how p;ear services our community’s homeless and transitional youth here

Join us THIS Sunday, following the 2 p.m. matinee of Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged for Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind, copresented with The Oregon Psychoanalytic Center.

For this installment, Dr. Nancy Winters will delve into issues of independence, family and parental disappointment, and self-reliance in Kornbluth’s play. Winters quipped that Kornbluth’s play is “a great example of psychotherapy in action,”  encouraging, as it does, Josh’s journey to find his own inner Ben Franklin.

One-part cocktail conversation/one-part talk-back session, the lively series, now in its third year, puts theater on the couch and the audience in the conversational driver’s seat for post-show discussions that reveal that the world on the stage is truly a glorious microcosm of life. Join us for this field trip into the nooks and crannies that theater inhabits—from humor and mannered whimsy to the insatiable lust for life to the menage-a-trois between power, justice and truth, to idiosyncratic family dynamics and taboo.

Formative Stages: Theater and the Life of the Mind
Nancy Winters, MD on Josh Kornbluth’s Ben Franklin Unplugged
When: November 8, 2009 (following the 2 pm matinee)
Where: Ellyn Bye Studio , Gerding Theater at the Armory

Discussions take place in the theater directly following the 2 pm matinees. Free with theater admission

Another exciting  IDEAS IN PLAY program
IDEAS in PLAY are free public programs offered by Portland Center Stage that bridge conversations around theater and the arts, sustainability, history, and community. How can we use the lens of the theater to talk about who we are, what we believe and how we connect to one another? IDEAS in PLAY inspires stories to come to life in unexpected ways through conversation-based programs that ask: what’s the big idea here?

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

Ben Franklin may be most famous for his role in a certain hand-signed Founding Document, but he actually made his living for many years as a printer and author of the Poor Richard’s Almanack. In celebration of that fact we have invited Portland-Area letterpress artists to create a series of special art-quality prints in honor of the man and inspired by the aphorisms of the Almanack.

They’ve been arriving into the building all week and the results have been beautiful, thought provoking, and so tactile…in each case the direct interaction of plate with paper is clearly visible. Today’s digital printing may be speedy, high resolution and efficient, but it sure doesn’t have the sheer tactile pleasures of a letterpress.

This cell phone photo does not even remotely do it justice, but just to give you a sense of the creativity being brought to the project:

The exhibit will be up in the Armory’s lower lobbies throughout November and December, but this week we are hosting two very special events to kick things off on a celebratory note.

Join us Thursday, November 5th from 5 pm to 7 pm for a First Thursday reception where you can browse the work and then head off on further Pearl District gallery adventures (or stay and see the show that inspired the exhibit, Ben Franklin: Unplugged, at 7:30 pm).

Or bring the kids on Saturday, November 7th from 10 am to 1 pm for a Letterpress Fair and Demonstration in the Armory Lobby. In addition to browsing the exhibit, you’ll get to see a demonstration of a working letterpress, a short film about the last letterpress edition of the NY Times, and meet many of the PDX letterpress printers at work here in Portland. Afterwards, stay for the 2:00 pm matinee performance of Ben Franklin: Unplugged.

more posts about Ben Franklin: Unplugged || Get the Details on the Show || Buy Tickets

Portland Center Stage is very happy to be hosting three vital conversations that touch upon three vital threads of Portland DNA:  Education/Youth Activism;  Bike Culture/DIY enterprise; The Arts & Evolving Audience.

The conversations are  part of The New Communicators, a three-day festival of events, being held October 28-30 throughout Portland. The festival is intended to inspire,  educate, and invite questions on the evolving nature of conversation in a rapidly changing public realm.

Conversation is the thing. The sociologist Richard Sennett gives us a high-five on that: “rethinking the practices of urbanism is involved in creating a place in which people can talk to each other, and this is huge issue. You can’t have a public realm. . .if people don’t exchange with another and the element of exchange is talk.”

The New Communicators is a series of events created to share experiences and inspire discussion about how we communicate with others using both online and offline media. It is for anyone interested in exploring new ways of creating conversations in our personal lives, within our communities or in business. It is a chance to share ideas, experiences and lessons learned.

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#1:
Youth Power: Speaking for the Future
Wednesday, October 28, 8 – 10 am
Gerding Theater at the Armory
FREE

Youth are an often overlooked, sometimes hard to reach constituency, but one that (as the “youthquake” of the presidential election proved) has the ability to activate great social change.  Not only do they represent a whole new generation of makers, doers and thinkers, they are a critical mass of highly savvy renaissance-thinkers who can offer new perspectives, innovations, flexibility and passion for the future.

Evolving social media technology is a powerful tool that offers incredible possibilities in the realm of engaging youth in social causes and empowering them to become a generation of leaders for change, as well as for leveraging new approaches to education and participatory democracy. Today’s youth has moved far beyond the traditional “old-growth media” of newspapers to a more open-source, thriving omniverse, rich in digital-connectivity and grassroots creativity.

Discover ways to leverage youth engagement and how youth can contribute not only to your success, but to building the future we want for the region.

Voicebox Media (part of the Multnomah Youth Commission) is a media production company operated by and for youth, whose recent projects include the Regional innovation Forum and Activate Oregon, events fostering youth voice and social activism–from grassroots to public policy.

A CONVERSATION featuring:
Travis Huntington is a strategic communications and grassroots social marketing consultant, as well as a commercial multimedia producer and the founder/leader of Voicebox Media: www.ourcommission.org/youthvoice

Catherine Leedy is a nonprofit and leadership development consultant, was on the design team of the Regional Innovation Forum, and led the Activate Oregon Youth Summit

Liz Grover is an expert in new media communications and engaging the youth audience for social causes

Martin Tull is a leader and activist for Climate Change and serves on the Governor’s Global Warming Commission.

Moderated by  Tim DuRoche, cultural advocate and Community Programs Manager, Portland Center Stage.

RSVP and see you there!

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#2:
Creating Conversations Through the Love of Bicycles
Thursday, October 29th, 8am – 10am
Gerding Theater
FREE

There are many people who love bicycles. But how many can take this love and turn it into a business? And once they’ve started their cycling-related business, how do they engage their audience, market and brand their company?

Join us for a conversation with a group of cyclists who are creating conversations through their love of bicycles… a panel of four cycling and communication experts will talk about why they’re doing what they’re doing, how they’re doing it, and what’s next for cycling as communication.

The panel consists of:
Jonathan Maus, Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BikePortland
Slate Olson, General Manager of Rapha, North America
Natalie Ramsland, Founder and Framebuilder of Sweetpea Bicycles
Heidi Swift, Newspaper Columnist, Freelance Writer, Photographer and Bike Racer
David Lowe-Rogstad, Co-Founder of Substance and former road racer (he’s back on the bike for Cross Crusade this year), will be moderating the panel.

Coinciding with Oregon Manifest , this panel is an opportunity for framebuilders, cycling enthusiasts, and business owners of all sorts to learn how different companies are utilizing events, technology and stories to create conversations.

RSVP and we’ll see you there.

NEW COMMUNICATORS day#3:
10,000 Invitations:
A roundtable on arts institutions and new/social media
Friday, October 30, 4 to 6 pm
The Gerding Theater at the Armory

Hosted by Lisa Radon, Portland Monthly’s Culturephile.

Good minds from Portland arts institutions share the ways they’re using new and social media to engage audiences.

The Portland Art Museum creates conversational videos about works in the collection, creates a community website for its China Design Now exhibition, and tweets as M.C. Escher. Portland Center Stage creates show preview videos that go viral and uses Twitter in innovative ways. The Museum of Contemporary Craft creates video and podcast and invites audience response. PICA integrates Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube into its TBA Festival blog.

In education, programming, and marketing, we’ll talk about what’s worked and what’s on the horizon as the landscape continues to change with new tools and new challenges all the time.

Participants include:
Christina Olsen, PhD – Director of Education & Public Programs, Portland Art Museum
Beth Heinrich – Director of Marketing & Public Relations, Portland Art Museum
Cynthia Fuhrman – Marketing and Communications Director, Portland Center Stage
Patrick Leonard -Public Relations, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art
Rebecca Burrell-Public Relations and Marketing Specialist, Museum of Contemporary Craft
Namita Gupta-Wiggers -Curator, Museum of Contemporary Craft

RSVP and we’ll see you there!

As the brain-trust behind New Communicators writes: “This is not a traditional sort of conference. ..Anyone can attend and anyone can organize an event. Whether you are a individual, an existing organization who already holds regular events or a business, you can organize a New Communicators event. …If you have an event idea, are willing to organize it and can find a venue to house it, you are welcome to.”

The only limit is your imagination, after all as Benjy Barber tells us, “Imagination is the link to civil society that art and democracy share. . . . It is the faculty by which we stretch ourselves to include others, expand the compass of our interests, and overcome the limits of our parochial selves. Only then do we become fit subjects to live in democratic communities.”

Hope to see you here, contributing to conversation and communication’s evolution!

The spectacular Mary Flower, one of the country’s premier finger-style acoustic blues/ragtime  guitarists and the ineluctable  Peter “Spud” Siegel, pianist/accordianist, trumpeter and vocalist nonpareil fill the Gerding with song this Saturday following the Ragtime matinee.

LIVE MUSIC EVERY SATURDAY!
Music Millennium, the place where people and music still matter, joins forces with PCS to present SOUNDS. LIKE. PORTLAND—an early evening showcase of the best in local music, every Saturday from 5-7 pm.