#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

The Returned (Les Revenants) Gives the Dead Life

This show believes itself to be different. And it is. But it also isn’t what it appears. I may be overcritical of zombie shows and movies given the oversaturation in recent years. I think that explorations of the zombie genre has to really show me something special, something different, to get my attention. I was very hesitant to start a show that my friend called a zombie/horror show. I had seen The Walking Dead and didn’t care for it. For me, at least, The Walking Dead walk

Artist Repertory Theatre's Blithe Spirit

On a chilly evening in mid-December, my friend Kate and I went to see Artists Repertory Theatre’s (ART) production of the comedy Blithe Spirit in downtown Portland. I was unfamiliar with the play and chose to not do any research into its content or subject matter in advance. In Kate’s case, she had seen the Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit once as a child with her parents, and only remembered enjoying it. Attending this performance as an adult would be a nostalgic experience for h

"Into the Woods"

On Tuesday, December 9th, following a weekend invitation from my friend, Lee, the pair of us braved the lines at Regal Cinemas Pioneer Place downtown for an advanced screening of Disney’s “Into the Woods,” adapted from Stephen Sondheim’s much-loved Broadway show. Somehow, we got in, taking two seats in the middle of the first row. With cricks in our necks and popcorn in hand, we waited for curtain. This wasn’t the first time I had longed for a Stephen Sondheim movie-musical t

Tanya Tagaq at TBA

Tanya Tagaq, an Inuit throat singer, performed at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s (PICA) Time Based Art (TBA) festival two months ago, in mid-September, with the heat of summer still lingering in the air outside Lincoln Hall. I went because I’m interested in contemporary native artists whose work often contends with appropriation, misrepresentation and the false perception that contemporary native people are not art and culture makers. I was also drawn to this p

Leading Light: Suniti Dernovsek & Holland Andrews

Studio 2 @ Zoomtopia from the outside looks like a dentist’s office, the old boxy kind from the 70s. The name might cull images of a room full of yoga mats for short-distance sprinters, but it is not. The venue has a sprung dance floor, modern theatrical lighting, an excellent sound system, and bleacher-style seating for 40-100 built from un-sanded birch wood. It also houses the N.E.W (New Expressive Works) artists residency program, which is how I came to see Suniti Dernovse

1 2 3