First up, for First Thursday we’ve got two things you won’t want to miss.

The Company We Keep
In the PGE Gallery & Ellyn Bye Studio Lobbies, we will have a champagne & chocolate reception (from 5-7 pm) in honor of the exhibition The Company We Keep, a masterful array of paintings, prints, photography, fashion, craft, and multimedia installation by the employees of Portland Center Stage.

FEATURING: Paula Buchert (Cutter/Draper, Costume Shop);  Michael Buchino (Graphic Designer);  Barbara Casement (Costume Crafts Artisan); Kelly Cullom (Production Assistant); Katherine Fitch (Overhire, Costume Shop); Geno Franco (Charge Scenic Artist, Scene Shop); Bonnie Henderson-Winnie (Wardrobe Supervisor); Susi Jenkins (Crafts, Stitcher, Dresser); Michael Jones (Carpenter/Welder, Scene Shop); Megan K. Kahrs (Accounting Manager); Kelly Keiler (Overhire, Costume Shop); Fuchsia Lin (First Hand, Costume Shop); Timothy McGarry (Electrician, Running Crew); Patrick Weishampel (Multimedia Designer)

Also on the Mezzanine for First Thursday:

Colored Pencils Art and Culture Night

We are honored to host Colored Pencils,  a monthly multicultural art and culture evening featuring the rich traditions of New Portland, an  extraordinary array of social and cultural capital drawn from our immigrant, ethnic minority, and mainstream communities’ joint bank account. Join us from 5:30-7:30 pm for an evening of visual and performing arts, co-hosted by Kalakendra : Society for the performing arts of India. This is an excellent time to remember, as Nim Xuto, one of the co-organizers reminds us: “Life is so short, sweet family. Let’s get together. Teach and learn.”

Mark Appelbaum’s The Metaphysics of Notation

On Friday, February 5, we team up with Third Angle New Music Ensemble for the first in a month-long series of weekly noon-time performances . For these free performances, 3A and PCS invite a bevy of artists to interpret and respond to Mark Applebaum’s dazzling, epic graphic score “The Metaphysics of Notation” –animating  the public spaces of the Gerding Theater’s lobby with all manner of sound, sight and movement.

“How do these images make you feel? If you were a poet, what words come to mind? A dancer, how would you move? A musician, what notes would you play?”

Applebaum’s score is a stunning, 72-foot-long work of visual art teeming with fantastical musical glyphs, where the meaning is deliberately left undefined by the composer. This circuitous, unusual work will wind its way around the Mezzanine of the Gerding Theater at the Armory and invite the audience to experience it in a variety of delightfully different visual and auditory ways.

Featuring:
February 5: Catlin Gabel 8th Grade Drama Students
February 12: Blum Blum Shub Sound Poetry Coincidence
February 19: Quadrophonnes Saxophone Quartet
February 26: Dance Artist Linda Austin

Fridays in February at noon
Portland Center Stage
Mezzanine, Gerding Theater at the Armory

This creative exploration is in anticipation of Third Angle’s innovative concert “Chance/Perchance: A Musical Happening,” on Friday, March 5 — featuring work by David Schiff, Terry Riley and Mark Applebaum — at the Hollywood Theatre. For more information on Third Angle and their upcoming performance Click Here

This Friday, the eighth grade drama class from Catlin Gabel (under the watchful stewardship of  teacher Deirdre Atkinson, a highly valued talent on the local theaterscape) will set the bar by being the first to tackle Metaphysics of Notation.

Ms. Atkinson noted, “this project is so exciting for us in so many ways…we’re exploring new forms of performance and collaboration; we’re playing with site-specific construction out in the world and we’re inviting the general public to share our work…I’d say our first challenge is the abstractness of the piece and of the whole project. It has been such a thrill to see the kids discovering the piece and the process. Of course, the real piece would be watching the process…the performance is merely a distillation of the actual responses and/or interpretation of Mark Applebaum’s composition. The kids are really excited about performing on Friday. They are thrilled (in their own teenage way) to be making connections to a larger creative community.”

You can read more about Atkinson and the Catlin Gabel students’  explorations here

And finally. . .

Sounds. Like. Portland:
Jim Brunberg with special guest Jonathan Newsome

Jim Brunberg (a Portland-based singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who hails from Coralville, Iowa) honed his rich talent in the coffee houses and taverns of San Francisco. Jim loves “heckling from the crowd, broken strings, and dressing rooms without ventilation.”  PCS regulars will recognize him as the guy with the bass  who sang with Storm Large during last summer’s hit, Crazy Enough.   A vital member of the Portland music community, Brunberg istechnical director for LiveWire Radio and the man behind Mississippi Studios .   A master craftsman of a songwriter, Brunberg is a musical charmer with a warm voice, an irreverent wit and versatile musical chops.  Don’t just ask me, ask some of the folks he’s toured with over the years, strummers, pickers, thumpers and shouters as diverse as Greg Brown, Tracy Grammer, Hot Tuna, Willie Nelson, The Indigo Girls, Huey Lewis, and Rat Dog.
He’ll be joined by Miraflores’ Jonathan Newsome and invite a friend or two to open through out this month of Saturdays (including one Matt Schulte on Feb. 27—watch for it!).

Saturdays in February from 5-7 pm, Lobby (Gerding Theater)

Cosponsored by Music Millennium

PCS’s Community Programs made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and James F. & Marion L. Miller Foundation.

“You should wear white more often—it becomes you.
The next person to speak to you will have a very intriguing proposal to make.
A lot of people in this room wish they were you.”—Frank O’Hara

À la recherche du temps Pardue

In conjunction with our Main Stage production of Grey Gardens , PCS is proud to host an exhibition of breathtaking white-on-white paintings by Portland visual artist Eugenia Pardue .

Please join us here for an Artists Reception on First Thursday, June 4 from 5-7 pm in the Lobby of the Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW Eleventh). Featuring the music of Grammy-nominated singer Nancy King and jazz pianist Steve Christofferson , refreshments and no-host bar.  Paintings will be on view until July 26. Exhibition made possible in part with the cooperation of the Heidi McBride Gallery .

A critically-acclaimed presence in the Portland visual artscape, Eugenia Pardue has had numerous solo, group shows and  international exhibitions (including at Linfield College, Jordan Schnitzer Museum, at Art Basel, Switzerland, at Mark Woolley Gallery and at the Nines Hotel in the coveted Presidential Suite).

Pardue’s stunning white-on-white works are concerned with nature, sensuality and ornament. In her studio, deploying gallon upon gallon of acrylic paint, the artist uses tools to braid, mold, and weave paint into shapes that are sometimes soft and graceful, sometimes spiky and dynamic.

Reflecting an inclination toward both the opulent decorative roots of painting and the heroic impulse of contemporary abstract canvases, Pardue’s work references, “flowers, vines, trees, seed pods, and other vegetative motifs I find in the world around me, as well as in antique floral prints, wall paper, tiles, tapestries, and jewelry design.”  The paintings are pure, meditative, and sacred, painterly and sculptural, minimalist and maximalist, serene and dramatic.

Whimsy and foreboding mix it up in the work of Pardue—inspiring a meditation on the color white in all its varieties:

White as elegance, cooling, hopeful balm or a blurring, burning intensity. Like the polarity between Grace Kelly’s wedding dress and the sweat-and sin-inducing velocity of Jimmie Lunceford’s big band playing White Heat (delivered at a blistering 364 beats-per-minute). White as hygiene, modesty, innocence, or for the Japanese–death and “deuil blanc” mourning. The color white can suggest an aching, minimalist ars poetica where white space is synonymous with silence and small gesture—think of John Cage’s 4′33”—the  little white dress of the avant-garde. White-on-white painting can conjure a slow-motion riot between translucence and opacity offering infinite variations, permutations, and transfigurations of white that are far from blank or meaning-free.

Simultaneously baroque, austere and threatening in their beauty, Pardue’s paintings mirror the promise of the 1940s-era Bouvier Beales, prior to going native and becoming what Kim Morgan describes as “exotic birds of a paradise lost–two real-life Daisy Buchanan’s gone Baby Jane Hudson.”

The paintings’ organic and botanical sensuality suggests echoes of another 1940s era siren:  the moral ambiguity of white-dressed Lana Turner in the Postman Always Rings Twice. Hollywood figured that “dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did less sensuous.” Instead of purity or hope, Turnerian White took on a corrosiveness that was anything but neutral.

The works look lovely against the renovated 1891 walls of the Armory, but could easily fit into the collection of a Norma Desmond, Miss Havisham, Edie or any of those “rowdy girls that mesmerize us with their musty mansions, fierce honesty, and haunting presence.”

Like the wildly creative Little Edie, the paintings refuse to be held within the acceptable bounds of the frame —seeking instead to be alive in the world and in the minds of the viewer. The work straddles a fragile tipping-point between clarity and grace and danger and seduction and begs the ultimate white question: does illumination truly trump darkness?

FIVE REASONS TO COME TO CAFÉ SOCIETY 2.0 AT PCS THIS FRIDAY:

1.       It’s opening night of GREY GARDENS and you just can’t wait. . . .meee-owwww.

2.       Our special featured guest is ASCAP-award winning jazz pianist-composer Ezra Weiss (who penned the infectious and whimsical jazz-fueled Alice in Wonderland last winter at NW Childrens Theater)

3.       You’ll get a sneak preview of visual artist Eugenia Pardue’s stunning white-on-white paintings on display in the public lobbies of the Gerding Theater, exhibited in conjunction with GREY GARDENS (courtesy the Heidi McBride Gallery)

4.       If you come early you might score a highly precious, in-demand ticket for CRAZY ENOUGH.

5.       Spring has sprung and the Pearl is alive with the sound of music, theater, love and life!

Portland Center Stage and the Portland Area Theatre Alliance invite you to join us this Friday, May 29, 5-7 pm, for Cafe Society 2.0 —our monthly social gathering featuring music, lively conversation and cocktails—your opportunity to mingle with mighty Portland art-makers, doers, schemers and dreamers, eavesdrop on the scene!

Café Society 2.0 is all-ages, free and open to the public. Drinks & refreshments available from the Armory Café. 5-7 pm in the Lobby, Gerding Theater at the Armory (128 NW Eleventh).

Portland Center Stage’s Community Programs are made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, and the Oregon Community Foundation.

For starters, tonight we kick off Envisioning America: Jews and the Broadway Musical, our season-long partnership with the Mittelman Jewish Community Center (and supporting partner, the Multnomah Public Library) at how Jewish artists contributed to the genesis and growth of that singular American art form, the Broadway Musical.

Tonight, tape the debate and come listen to Marc Acito, Alan Berg and Dave Frishberg/Rebecca Kilgore navigate the journey of Berlin, Gershwin, Loesser, Jerry Herman among others to the lights of Broadway.

Why else is this night different? I can’t for the life of me remember when as a city we had to decide between staying home and listening to people discuss politics or going out to experience art, music, theater and culture. Only in Portland.

The Envisioning America series is made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W.  Mellon Foundation, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, and the Oregon Community Foundation

Live, local First Thursday music by some of indie Portland pop’s finest returns to the Armory this week with GREY ANNE–a captivating, seductively sardonic, lyrical talent imbued with a high-thread count of deadpan whimsy (imagine, if you can,  the musical progeny of Buck Henry and Blythe Danner).  Music kicks off in the Main Lobby from 6-7:15 pm and is free, all-ages and open to the public.

The artist formerly known as Per Se, Grey Anne is the the wing-wearing, wisecracking, emotionally-charged musical alter-ego of one, Anne Adams, whom the Willamette Week lauds as:

“a sweet-voiced angel. . .and one of [Portland's] greatest unknown pop treasures.”

Recently adopting Grey Anne as a  new stage moniker (”not only because it evokes pigeons, cobblestones, and foggy morality, but because I was called that as a kid”), Adams is gearing up for  a soon-to-be released album Facts ‘n’ Figurines in the works (rumored to be available in November) which will feature such audience faves and Guys and Dolls-relevant titles  as Adelaide.

Wanna sample? Try this on for size.

Before Guys and Dolls or after work, sample a spectacular array of art from the Mark Woolley and Beppu Wiarda galleries on the PGE Gallery and Ellyn Bye Studio lobby levels and relax with a drink from the Armory Café.

Our free First Thursday series is made possible in part by grants from the Andrew W.  Mellon Foundation, Maybelle Clark Macdonald Fund, and the Oregon Community Foundation