Books & Talks

Roxane Gay

7:30 p.m. Fri, Powell's City of Books, FREE
It’s been a scant five months since the fierce, funny author dropped Difficult Women, a short-story collection about women eking out existences across modern-day America. Now she’s back with Hunger, a memoir exploring food, body image, and pleasure.

Dance

Choreography XX

7:30 p.m. Thu–Fri, Washington Park Amphitheater, FREE
Last year, Oregon Ballet Theatre launched a competition to find three female North American choreographers to create world-premiere work for the company. Nearly 90 applicants threw their hats (err, bobby pins?) in the ring. Italian-Canadian dancer Gioconda Barbuto, Southern Californian Nicole Haskins, and Québec native Helen Simoneau emerged victorious, and you can behold the results at this free, alfresco show. For more, check our preview.

Music

Chamber Music Northwest Summer Festival

Various times and venues thru July 30, prices vary
With more than 60 concerts over the course of five weeks, the 47th annual festival aims to satisfy both chamber music purists—yes, there’s plenty of Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Schumann—and those looking for something spicier, whether jazz-inspired pieces or new work riffing on Twin Peaks. This year’s fest also features a week devoted to women composers. Plus, we take a closer look at this year's female focus.

Waterfront Blues Festival

Fri–Tue, Tom McCall Waterfront Park, prices vary
The city’s annual riverside blues fest celebrates 30 years of bringing the likes of Buddy Guy, Solomon Burke, and Sharon Jones (among many others) to mark summer in Portland, while raising millions for the Oregon Food Bank. The lineup for this year’s fest includes Malian blues king Vieux Farka Touré, rockabilly crooner Chris Isaak, and our own big band funk rockers MarchFourth. 

Pink Martini

7 p.m. Sat, McMenamins Edgefield, SOLD OUT
Celebrate summer with Portland’s “little orchestra” on the Edgefield lawn, playing their trademark, genre-crossing mix of classical, jazz, and old-fashioned pop.

Theater

Cabaret

7:30 p.m. Thu–Fri, 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sat, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sun, Keller Auditorium, $25–80
Manhattan’s Roundabout Theatre Company brings the Tony Award-winning musical to Portland. You know the story: set in pre-World War II Germany, Sally Bowles and the infamous Kit Kat Klub charm their audiences with tantalizing cabaret performances as trouble swirls outside.

CoHo Summerfest

7:30 p.m. Thu–Sat and 2 p.m. Sun, CoHo Theater, $20
Promising “innovative, irreverent performances,” CoHo stages a different show each weekend, including one about a fake Polish punk band and another about Mike Pence stiffing a dinner invitation from a trio of history’s most prominent women (presumably because his wife won’t be in attendance).

Visual Art

CLOSING Masao Yamamoto

11 a.m.–6 p.m. Thu–Sat, PDX Contemporary, FREE
The Japanese photographer’s lifelong fascination with birds is on full display in Tori, a collection of delicate gelatin silver prints of owls, eagles, pigeons, and other winged creatures. 

Group Exhibition

11 a.m.–5 p.m. Fri–Sat, Adams & Ollman, FREE
In this exhibit—its unwieldy title is I Was a Wall, and My Breasts Were Like Fortress Towers // Her Eyes Are Like Doves Beside Streams of Water—artists of different media, painters to sculptors, explore the representation and objectification of the female body.

Sam Hamilton

10 a.m.–8 p.m. Thu–Fri, 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Sat–Sun, Portland Art Museum, FREE–$19.99
In Standard Candles, the New Zealand artist bridges film, music, performance, and installation. The exhibit, Hamilton’s first solo showing in the US, also features the premiere screening of his feature-length film, Apple Pie.