#performance

BACKWORDS blog explores the intersection between presence and history. The blog is a platform that honors the moment of encounter that any one person experiences—with art, literature, music, performance, or place. Often, reflections fit multiple categories—the opposite of a news program or style blog, BACKWORDS is not preoccupied with immediacy. An event does not need to be current to be relevant, nor does a memory need to be close to its origins to hold its potency.

Featured Posts

2020 and The One Where We All Try to Stay Sane

Tunnel Vision: Preparing to Hike the Pacific Crest Trail

Giverny, This Way

Happy Holidays!

My First Foray Into The Wonderful Wallowas

Spice and Rain

Traveling with Less

Antibiotics and Balinese Dance, A Winning Combination

Let's Confuse Each Other In German: How I Turned 30 in Paris

A Tradition Continues

When I mention I’m going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival I often get a similar set of questions: When? Where? Do you, like, dress up? I can imagine people assembling a scene in their heads. Maybe a large field full of white tents. A long weekend of Elizabethan nerds in whimsical dress (I can say that, right? Since I fall into the category). Swords and/or jousting might be involved. In reality OSF is something of the opposite. The festival runs eight months out of the year

Three Plays in Seventeen Days: Blame the Victim, Populist Fervor, and a Farce

Humblebrag moment: March 2017 I peaked. What I mean by that, is that I went on the trip of a lifetime. For literature/theater/English histor

Cavalia’s Odysseo, Finally

I had walked by it, ridden the train by it – probably hundreds of times while the show was in Portland – so it was surreal to finally be inside the “White Big Top.” But instead of my hometown, I was in Irvine, California visiting my friend and former roommate, Shonna, and the Big Top was the reason she was there. Shonna works for Cavalia – the Montreal based entertainment company – and was (and still is) working on tour with their show, Odysseo. The space inside the tent was

Too Good To Cruise: Music on the Seas

That awkward moment when the cruise singer is one of the best live performances you've ever witnessed.

The Wonderful Town

Over the weekend, I was hosting a Portlander here in Hollywood—my friend, Ginger Duncan, down from the Pacific Northwest for her first visit to Los Angeles. Her visit comes on the heels of my own relocation just three weeks before: a sort of fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants uprooting that has repotted me back home and also not home. Home, in the sense that I was born in Los Angeles; home, likewise, in the sense that home is (as my friend, Asaf, is fond of saying) wherever you are.

Prolonged Performances of Grief

"Matty" Photo Credit: Molly Choma Matty and I are texting back and forth about the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead. At the end of last season, a terrifying sociopath with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire bludgeons someone to death, but we don’t get to see who. Tonight, we find out who dies. Even though Matty and I live together, I didn’t watch it with him.

Pokémon Go'ing Somewhere: How One Mega-Player in App Gaming Might Be A Small Step for Privacy an

On a relatively clear July evening in Central Park, dozens and dozens of New Yorkers—men and women, some teenagers, some even with children in tow, across a surprising spectrum of racial identities, gender expressions, and (presumably) backgrounds—flooded a section of the park in search of a single Pokémon. The members of the "mob," as some on YouTube called it, were all users of the new Niantic app for Android and iPhone, called Pokémon Go, which allows players to use geoloc

Giselle

We’re going to the opera house. THE Opera House. The ground was still sloughing off yesterday’s storm rains as we walked, threatening to soak our dress shoes. I can’t believe we’re walking toward THE opera house. I kept babbling at my companion, who received my constant exclamations with shared enthusiasm and a touch of patience. I was a little excited. Ever since I was young there was something about the white sails of the Sydney Opera House that called out to me. Not only d

On Queer Spaces, Pride, and the Shooting in Orlando

For a while now, I’ve been debating the merits of Pride, and had all but decided this year to not make an effort to attend. The performances and shows, the exhibition, the commercial enterprise that is Pride, and Pride month in June, can feel overwhelming and stripped of the real reason to have such an event amidst the abs, sponsored vodkas, and glitter. It’s easy to neglect the older I get, that Pride was an event I used to come out. It was how I got the conversation really

Ernesto Pujol's Awaiting in Salt Lake City

On 8 April 2010, I was invited to photograph a 13-hour durational performance art piece called “Awaiting,” in downtown Salt Lake City. The piece was organized by Ernesto Pujol, a Visiting Artist at the University of Utah’s Department of Art & Art History, and its first Endowed Art Residency recipient. Ernesto invited me personally—after a meal we shared with my photography instructor (his friend), Rosi Hayes. For some reason still unclear to me, especially as an undergraduate

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