Logo
San Juan
ISSUE #34.26 • PERFORMANCE •
[PERFORMANCE]

4x4: The Ballet Project (White Bird)


Four on the floor: All ballet, all night long.

Social bookmarking | Permalink
Email | Print | Rate It! | 0 comments
Recently in "Performance"

May 7th, 2008
Spring Awakenings | It’s May! The sun is out! Bring on the homoerotic turmoil!0 comments

April 30th, 2008
Nobody Here But Us Chickens (Third Rail)0 comments

April 23rd, 2008
The Long Christmas Ride Home | Theatre Vertigo shakes up the floating world.0 comments

April 16th, 2008
Slaughter on Tenth Avenue (Oregon Ballet Theatre) | Oregon Ballet Theatre shoots to thrill with Balanchine's Slaughter.1 comment

April 16th, 2008
Too Cool For Words | NYC’s Wordless Music Series comes to Portland.1 comment

April 9th, 2008
Sometimes a Great Notion (PCS) | REVIEW: We are lumberjacks. We’re not OK.3 comments

April 2nd, 2008
Air-Condition (White Bird Dance) | PREVIEW: Brenda Angiel’s floating dance party.0 comments

March 26th, 2008
The Tudor Choir | Mozart: the original music pirate.0 comments

March 19th, 2008
Albert Herring (Portland Opera) | Spitzeresque tale: Chastity is the best policy.0 comments

March 12th, 2008
Divas and Decapitation | Big-headed queens or beheaded teen? Take your pick.0 comments


ARTISTIC FOURTITUDE: (Clockwise from bottom right) Eugene Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Oregon Ballet Theatre, Pacific Northwest Ballet.
BY HEATHER WISNER | 503-243-2122

[May 7th, 2008]

Apparently there’s been some confusion over 4x4: The Ballet Project, the last show of White Bird’s current season. For the record, 4x4 isn’t a collaboration among ballet companies, nor is it four entire companies performing separately or together. And it’s not exactly a dance-off, according to White Bird co-founder Paul King.

King dreamt up the project while he was in the shower thinking about the best way to cap White Bird’s 10th anniversary season. He and co-founder Walter Jaffe have already integrated tango, hip-hop and flamenco into a modern-heavy rotation. “But we didn’t really do ballet,” King said. So he phoned the artistic directors of four West Coast companies—San Francisco Ballet, Seattle’s Pacific Northwest Ballet, Eugene Ballet Company and Oregon Ballet Theatre—and proposed a shared bill. They liked it.

To make 4x4 work logistically and financially, each company is only sending enough dancers to do one piece. All the pieces will be Portland premieres. SFB is dancing the five-man Concerto Grosso, created by its director, Helgi Tomasson; PNB brings company member Olivier Wevers’ snappy new Shindig; OBT offers Christopher Wheeldon’s springlike Rush and Eugene Ballet presents Toni Pimble’s Still Falls the Rain, a work inspired by religious intolerance. Eugene Ballet, smaller and lesser-known than the other companies, is the wild card in this show, although King has fielded requests for them over the years. Except for OBT, none of these companies has played Portland in the past decade, and they’ve never performed together.














icon Story continues below

advertisement
OMSI
advertisement

So that’s what 4x4 is, but will it be ballet overload for an audience that gravitates toward contemporary dance? King doesn’t think so, since each of the works has a contemporary bent and most of the modern dancers the series has hosted have a ballet base anyhow. He likens this to his previous career as a pastry chef. “In the pastry-chef world, you get French training and you can cook whatever you want,” he said. “It’s the same with dancers and classical training.”

SEE IT: Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall, 1037 SW Broadway, 790-2787. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, May 8-9. $20-$62.

 

Rate This Story
Be the first to rate this story.

Comment on the "4x4: The Ballet Project (White Bird)" article



Recently in Willamette Week
May 17th 2008Higher Ed | Reed College is exceptional for more than academics. It’s one of America’s most permissive colleges for experimenting with drugs.
May 17th 2008Best New Band 2008 | Portland music insiders take our local scene to the chopping block—and come out with 10 new faves.
May 17th 2008For The Love of Politics | WW’s endorsement page-turner has all the candidates worth falling for this election.
May 17th 2008Say Amen, Somebody | African-American ministers struggle to make their voices heard in America’s whitest city.
May 17th 2008Green With Envy | Seven things Portland should do if we’re serious about being green.
May 17th 2008Kvetch Fest | 27 things we hate about the city we love.
May 17th 2008Bitter Pill | A Portland doc flips on big pharma and reveals its “dirty little secret.”
May 17th 2008Gunfight at the OR Corral | A crusader who fought the Mob or a long-established Oregonian? Inside the shootout to become the next attorney general.
May 17th 2008Lean Cuisine | Has Portland lost its insatiable appetite for its restaurant scene?
May 17th 2008Barack In The Day | Long before Obama ran for president, he was a state senator in Illinois. Here’s what he did.