POV’s Architectural Performance

The Leftbank Project, a commercial office building, sits in the central Lloyd District of Portland, Oregon. Nestled on a traffic island opposite the Rose Quarter stadium, it is on the left bank of the Willamette, the river that cuts Seine-like through the city center. It’s a non-residential, traffic-knotted part of The City of Roses, somewhere most people just pass through en route to somewhere else. The Leftbank Project was originally the Hazelwood Building, a bakery and confectionary built in 1923. Since then, the building has gone through multiple transformations, from the Dude Ranch jazz club in the 1940s to Multicraft Plastics in the 1960s. Following a period of vacancy, developers in the late 2000s embarked on a renovation to craft a sustainable commercial hub for (as the Leftbank Project website claims) “folks who love hard work, and believe that the power of visibility and strength of community is taking each of us further than we could go alone.” The Project hosts a café on the ground floor, rows of bike racks, and a tenant roster that is an apt snapshot of contemporary Portland: Upright Brewing Company, Portland Parent Union, African Women’s Coalition, and Portland Farmer’s Market, among others. Throughout late 2013 and early 2014, POV Dance, Portland’s architectural performance company, took up a four month residency at Leftbank, where they created the enormous and visceral 3x3. Like all of POV’s work, 3x3 is a dance with a particular building. On a larger scale, the company’s body of work comprises a dance with the city itself. Portland’s POV Dance doesn’t just dance in nontraditional spaces: POV dances with architecture. POV doesn’t just dance in Portland: POV dances with Portland.

POV is Mandy Cregan and Noel Plemmons. The pair met in San Francisco when both studied and worked with site-specific choreographer Lizz Roman. With Roman, Cregan and Plemmons focused on partnering, inversion, and release, as well as the nontraditional use of traditional dance spaces. Cregan and Plemmons gravitated towards Portland in 2006 and 2007 for its accessibility and comparatively low cost of living, as well as the opportunity to bring something different to the city’s arts scene. What they found was an inviting dance community established by artists including Tere Mathern, Tahni Holt, Linda Austin, Minh Tran, and the ferocious Mary Oslund, of whom Plemmons says, “She set the stage for modern dance in Portland.” ¹ Within this landscape, Cregan and Plemmons realized that the way they were interested in dance was not what others were calling “site-specific.” In forming POV, they began calling their work “architectural” and started looking for specific urban spaces with which to dance. What unites all of their chosen spaces, from Leftbank to a former Ford Model T plant, is that each possesses a rich connection to Portland’s history and has also been reinvented in recent years. POV’s work comes to Portland at a time of the city’s increase in national and international attention, reinvention as an independent arts center, and a leader of urban renewal. While POV’s work is not dependent on Portland — they would like to make architectural dance in other cities too — their experiments have so far focused on their home. POV reveals not only architecture, but also the narrative of Portland as a city of DIY art and rich urban history.

A project-driven company, POV embarks on a new work only after they have found the right piece of architecture. “The architecture is the text,” ² says Cregan. Dancers, choreography, and design come later. In an interview, Plemmons elaborated on the distinction between site-specific and architectural performance: “Much of the time, site-specific dance is choreographed and rehearsed in a studio somewhere and then transplanted into the site. We simply can’t do that, as our choreography uses the existing architecture of a space as its foundation.” A POV performance typically is the culmination of a months-long rehearsal process that takes place entirely in the venue. This work invites audiences to re-see buildings they’ve passed dozens of times in...