Dmae talks with award-winning veteran dance artist Linda Austin about her newest original show Ordinary Devotions running March 14-23 at Performance Works Northwest. Austin says this experimental dance work honors the particularities of her 65-year old body and its hunger for tactility.

(Aired 11am 3/5/19 on KBOO 90.7 FM or always on stagenstudio.com and always on  iTunes)

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Linda Austin ‘s Ordinary Devotions

Thurs-Sat March 14-16 at 8pm

LInda Austin
Linda Austin. Photo: Jeff Forbes

Sun March 17 at 5pm
Wed-Sat March 20-23 at 8pm
Doors open 30 min. before showtime
Performance Works NW | 4625 SE 67th Ave. | Portland, OR 97206

Seating is extremely limited: 28 tickets available per performance
$16 general admission, $12 seniors, students, limited income
Wednesday, March 20 is Pay What You Will
Advance tickets HERE
Arts for All click HERE

Ordinary Devotions, created and performed by award-winning PWNW Director Linda Austin, is a meditation-in-action on the ordinary/extraordinary life of the aging body and a tactile and tender apprehension of the world to hand. An intimate drama of gesture and sensation unfolds alongside a bracingly unorthodox use of objects: e.g. a white vinyl tarp, a twig, stones, a lamp worn on the body, cassette tapes, and multiple spools of thread. Throughout, task-like activity yields to poetically and emotionally-charged movement, text, and image—evoking vulnerability and  hints of mortality. Beauty, humor, a bit of rebellious “orneriness”, and awkwardness all find their place in the precarious world of this dance, itself situated within a larger world apprehensive about its own survival.

LInda Austin
LInda Austin. Photo: Jeff Forbes

Austin collaborates with composer and sound artist Juniana Lanning, who has been collecting, digitally manipulating, and adding to sounds drawn from the dancer’s deployment of objects as well as other real-world phenomena—a process mirroring Austin’s own attentiveness to the life of the material world. Kelly Rauer,whose practices also include movement and photography, is creating video interventions that enhance elements of the space’s architecture as well as bringing a rushing sensation of the outside world into the studio/theater.