Things to Do in Portland This Week
Image: Michael Novak
You’re reading Seeing Things, our regular column about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, plays, and other events we’re attending. Sign up to receive it in your inbox each week.
Image: Jason Hill
STAGE Telephone
Thru JULY 11 | REED COLLEGE PERFORMING ARTS BUILDING, $45 (STUDENT, SENIOR, AND RUSH TICKETS $25)
Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble’s production of the Ariana Reines play stages both a vaudeville reenactment of Alexander Graham Bell inventing the telephone (act 1) and a monologue based on a schizophrenic patient of Carl Jung’s who famously believed she had a telephone inside of her (act 2). The third act is a hauntingly intimate slipstream of anonymized dialogues with the perforated texture of a dial tone. (“Oh come on. I call you.” “You don’t. I pay attention. You don’t.”) —MT
Art Portland Arts Week
Thu–Sun, JULY 9–12 | VARIOUS LOCATIONS | SOME EVENTS FREE, OTHERS TICKETED
Who says arts and sports can’t get along? This inaugural festival features a gallery walk (nearly 20 galleries across the city have programmed sports-themed shows), panel conversations, screenings of A League of Their Own and Bring It On at the Tomorrow Theater, a futsal tournament, “an evening of competitive art” at PICA, and a free outdoor performance at the brand-new Darcelle XV Plaza. —RJ
Stage Portland Pride Play Festival
VARIOUS TIMES FRI–SUN, JULY 10–12 | BACK DOOR THEATER, $20 SUGGESTED PER SHOW
Returning for its second year, this fest features eight staged readings of plays that engage with queer experiences, one of which will receive a full production in 2027. Among the offerings: Challah if You Queer Me by Allison Fradkin, Queerly Departed by Ian Trutt, and Boo! by Deanna Strasse. —RJ
Film Hollywood Theatre Centennial Week
Fri–Fri, July 10–17 | Hollywood Theatre, prices vary, some special events members-only
The Portland nonprofit movie house/national treasure kicks off its 100th birthday party July 10 with a 35mm screening of the first film ever to show there when it opened in 1926, the silent comedy More Pay, Less Work, with live organ accompaniment. The week continues with more 35mm screenings of such favorites as Evil Dead 2 and Back to the Future, a screening of the Hollywood's own 70mm print of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the opening of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, also in 70mm. (Several screenings are already sold out.) —MS
Books Oregon Summer Writers Workshop Readings
7:30PM SUN–SAT, JULY 12–18 | REED COLLEGE’S CERF AMPHITHEATRE, FREE
Tin House might have gotten a rebrand earlier this year as the McCormack Writing Center, but the organization’s weeklong writers’ workshop, held annually at Reed College since 2003, continues. Each evening, a handful of faculty members—whose work spans fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and various unclassifiable genres—take to the Cerf Amphitheatre stage for a free reading. The biggest name this year is Pulitzer finalist and PEN/Hemingway Award winner Torrey Peters (Detransition Baby, Stag Dance), but others to know include Denne Michele Norris, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Jamel Brinkley, Sarah Aziza, and Kelli Jo Ford. —RJ
Broadway Hell’s Kitchen
7:30PM TUE–FRI, 2 & 7:30PM SAT & SUN, JULY 14–19 | KELLER AUDITORIUM, FROM $57+
It’s a good time to be a New Yorker. Go play pretend as the North American tour of Alicia Keys’s acclaimed jukebox musical, which takes a semiautobiographical approach to the singer’s Manhattan upbringing, makes a Portland stop. —RJ
Performance The One
7:30PM THU & FRI, 4PM SAT & SUN, JULY 16–19 | PSU BOILER ROOM, $15–40
Is self-love the key to romantic success? That’s what Andrea Parson, a former NW Dance Project company member and onetime Princess Grace Award winner, heard from her mom at age 8. Three decades later, she’s exploring the question in a solo piece that draws together movement, confession, and clowning. Directed by Jessica Wallenfels (who, fun fact, appeared in Twin Peaks as a teenager), the work considers Parson’s own dating experience as well as the life of a medieval religious recluse. Date night, made. —RJ
Film La Jetée
7pm Wed, July 15 | Kiggins Theatre, $12–15
French filmmaker Chris Marker’s 1962 time-travel short screens at downtown Vancouver’s Kiggins Theatre with a live performance of a new electronic score. Officially "un photo-roman," or a story told in still images, the postapocalyptic time-loop tale inspired Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film 12 Monkeys. —MS
Image: courtesy Chris Lazarus
Music Cathedral Park Jazz Festival
Fri–Sun, July 17–19 | Cathedral Park, Free
There’s no better way to take in jazz than in July, on a blanket on the grass, under the swooping arches of the St. Johns Bridge, for free. The venerable fest turns 46 this year; arrive early and leave the umbrellas and tents at home. Among those on the bill: bluegrass trio Dadweed, jazz-fusion group Greaterkind, and a Sade tribute band. —RJ
comedy Shane Torres Works It Out
7PM SAT, JULY 18 | KICKSTAND COMEDY, $15–20
It’s been more than 10 years since Houston-born comedian Shane Torres, who in 2013 was crowned Portland’s Funniest Person at Helium Comedy Club, moved from the Rose City to Brooklyn. In the last decade, he’s done the late-night rounds, hosted a podcast with Kyle Kinane, and released an hourlong TV special, The Blue Eyed Mexican. Tonight, the self-proclaimed “Native-American Meatloaf impersonator,” once known for “brutally honest jokes about cracking toilet seats and selling plasma,” will test out new material. —RJ
Community World Naked Bike Ride
Gather at 6:30pm, ride at 8:30pm Sat, July 25 | Wilshire Park, Free
Get your body paint ready for one of the biggest events on the cycling calendar. It’s a protest against oil dependence, a celebration of bodies, and a quintessential Portland experience, even if that just means getting stuck waiting for thousands of your naked, smiling neighbors to pass. —RJ
Festival Pickathon
July 30–Aug 2 | Pendarvis Farm, Happy Valley, Day passes from $238+
Sometimes, a KBOO fundraiser grows up to be one of the country’s most beloved music festivals. Find stages set among trees, hammocks strung up for lounging, and a bill featuring Steve Earle, Alela Diane, Quasi, the Womack Sisters, and Fabiano do Nascimento. —RJ
Ongoing
Visual art David Hockney
THRU July 26 | Portland Art Museum, $22.50–27.50, ages 17 and under free
Few contemporary artists are as famous as Hockney, who died June 11 at age 88. He cut his teeth as a pop artist in the 1960s, working in California and his native England. In contrast to the larger pop movement’s use of mass-market imagery in fine art (ad slogans, logos, and celebrity kitsch), Hockney depicted intimate, often personal scenes with an intensely flat and iconographic style. He made paintings that looked like ads instead of turning ads into paintings. Painter is usually the first on a list of Hockney’s trades, followed by draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, crafty MacGyver of outmoded technologies, and on and on. In recent years, he primarily worked with an iPad. His digitally produced work, elaborately printed at large scale or shown on various inventive screen displays, makes up a chunk of the more than 200 pieces in David Hockney: Works from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation. But the two-story exhibition draws on more than six decades of his career. There are no traditional paintings on canvas, however. While this does leave a hole in the show’s otherwise retrospective scope, it also speaks to Hockney’s endless experiments with the textures (and often the intentional lack of texture) that printmaking, photography, and more rudimentary examples of digitized painting software can offer. —MT
Burlesque Dolly!
thru Sept 20 | Paris Theatre, $39+