Arts: Page 230

Welcome to the Playhouse

Portland’s athletic BodyVox dance company brings retrospective Urban Meadow to the Hult

Dance
Urban Meadow

Eugene Ballet Company presents a rare treat for Eugene audiences Saturday when Portland-based BodyVox returns to the Hult Center with Urban Meadow, a retrospective of work from its 18 dynamic seasons.  “We wanted to make a show that was repertory,” says BodyVox co-artistic director Jamey Hampton, sitting in the airy lobby of the BodyVox studio and performance space in northwest Portland.   Continue reading →

The Law of Thermal Dynamics

Get existential with Portland’s The Thermals

Music
The Thermals

Portland power-trio The Thermals are obsessed with death. “It’s a subject Hutch [Harris] and I think about a lot,” Thermals bassist Kathy Foster tells EW. Harris plays guitar, sings and is primary songwriter. “It’s always present,” she says of the specter of death. “Sometimes it can be scarier than other times. Sometimes I get obsessed with it, think about it a lot and have this doomed feeling: It’s inevitable.”  Continue reading →

A Post-Everything World

Music

Bay-area black-metal act Bosse-De-Nage makes music in a post-everything world. Read how the band’s sound is described in the media: post-hardcore, post-metal. It’s hard to know what any of that means. But listen to the band’s latest, 2015’s All Fours, and you can believe this might be music for a post-human world, or maybe a world where our industrial excesses finally overtake us — the sound of the last human hand reaching out from an oozing pool of toxic waste.  Continue reading →

The Queen Has Spoken

Music

Unfortunately, Beyoncé doesn’t seem to have Eugene in her sights and, if looking at the mostly male, mostly white lineups of Eugene’s biggest venues is any indication, they wouldn’t book her anyway. So to see Bey’s Lemonade tour, you’ll have to head north to Seattle. Continue reading →

Arts Hound

Visual Arts

The New Zone Gallery announced that it will be leaving its downtown digs at 164 W. Broadway in August after a 10-year run. Steve LaRiccia, New Zone’s treasurer and gallery coordinator, tells EW that the gallery is grateful to Oregon Contemporary Theatre, which has been subsidizing rent. “The owners of the building, Oregon Contemporary Theatre, who have leased us that space, they found a tenant to rent that space for like $3,000 a month,” LaRiccia says, “and we were paying $250.” Continue reading →

Getting Over It

Dysfunction is raised to the level of art in Jason Bateman’s The Family Fang

Film

Jason Bateman was that kid in high school everybody pretty much liked  — the vice president of the student body who ran track and dated not the prettiest but easily the coolest cheerleader, and who was on friendly terms with jocks and stoners alike (although secretly preferring stoners).  And yet, something about the guy strains against his better angels, as though being nice just isn’t cutting it. His mean streak is only a centimeter wide, but when he finds it, it’s like coming home. Continue reading →

The regional old-time scene is going to have one big hearth to gather round

Music
WOW Hall

The regional old-time scene is going to have one big hearth to gather round May 5-8: the inaugural Willamette Valley Old-Time Social put on by Eugene’s Mud City Old-Time Society. For the uninitiated, old-time music is an acoustic tradition of American music. Fiddle and banjo are the stars, making the sound a perfect catalyst for square dancing.  And old-time is not bluegrass; it gave birth to bluegrass. Old-time focuses on community and participation, regardless of skill level, more than performance. Continue reading →