Event Recap: "Where The Revolution Began" Release Celebration at Ziba

This recap is authored by contributor Karen Munro.  The Head of the UO Portland Library and a recipient of an MFA in Fiction from the Iowa Writers Workshop, Karen discusses books, reading, and writing on her wonderful blog Munrovian.

The revolution may have begun at SW Third and Clay, but it continued yesterday at Ziba Design’s new digs, where Randy Gragg presided over the launch of a new book on the history of Lawrence and Anna Halprin’s extraordinary contributions to Portland’s cultural and civic life.

Where the Revolution Began, published by Spacemaker Press, is a gorgeous compilation of photographs by Susan Seubert and essays by Gragg, Janice Ross, and John Beardsley.  Archival photographs, sketches, and drawings help bring to life the chain of public plazas that the Halprins helped create in Portland in the turbulent 1960s.

The book, and yesterday’s launch, also harken back to “Frozen Music II: The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin,” performed at the Ira Keller Fountain in September 2008.  City Dance, part of TBA 2008, was performed in and around the fountain by a troupe of over a hundred professional and amateur dancers.  A celebration of the Halprin collaboration between dance and design, the performance was choreographed by Linda K. Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, and Linda Austin, and accompanied by Third Angle New Music Ensemble (which also substantially supported the venture.)  Frankly, it was a pretty glorious union of some of Portland’s brightest creative stars, and I can say from personal experience that the crowds (despite the heat) were enormous.

Amazingly, all these artists reunited for yesterday’s launch.  As Gragg showed slides and told the story of the Halprins’ work, Ron Blessinger of Third Angle filled the room with haunting, echoing violin song, and the dancers made their way across the wide concrete floor of Ziba’s auditorium.  Their progress was diagonal, non-linear–a time-bound evocation of the way the plazas lie across Portland’s landscape.  As Gragg’s narrative moved through the decade, the dances changed, shifting from reflective to raucous and then back.  At the end of the show, all four dancers exited through the audience, climbing Ziba’s big concrete stadium seats like a giant’s staircase, silently handing out buttons that read “Play”.

It was a terrific show.  The Halprin spirit of creativity, play, and collaboration was wonderfully present, from City Commissioner Nick Fish’s introduction to the final screening of Frozen Music, a film of the City Dance performance of 2008.  Like Halprin encouraging hippies and straight-arrows alike to play in the city’s fountains, Gragg finished up by enjoining us to do whatever we wanted next:  sit and watch the film, leave, get a drink, or talk to our neighbors.  And like the fountains and the dance and the spirit that inspired them, the whole thing was free.

You can get a copy of Where the Revolution Began from the Halprin Landscape Conservancy.  You may also want to make a donation to the Conservancy, which is launching a community effort to make the Halprin Open Spaces a National Historic Monument, protecting them in perpetuity.  The Halprin Landscape Conservancy is a 501c3 non-profit organization.