Things to Do in Portland This Week, December 2025
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The most familiar version of The Nutcracker to US audiences is perhaps George Balanchine’s. In 1954, Balanchine adapted the classic for the New York City Ballet, tweaking and simplifying Marius Petipa’s original 1892 choreography so kids could actually play the kids at its center. Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky’s score stayed in, and most modern productions stick with it. Still, despite banners trumpeting “George Balanchine’s The Nutcracker,” every Nutcracker finds its own nuance—the ballet did grow out of a short story rewritten by different authors across decades, after all. Some contemporary Nutcrackers find their quirks through years of Christmastime runs. Others rework the ballet more directly to cut out racial stereotypes. Then there are harder pivots, like Portland dance company Open Space’s NOT-Cracker (December 5–7, Newmark Theatre, $41.75+), which builds itself entirely against the doll-come-to-life fable.
Or almost entirely. A good chunk of that reliable Tchaikovsky score remains, but instead of a tale about a young girl whisked off by a sentient toy soldier, NOT-Cracker follows a nonbinary Portlander named Ted who can’t dance—until they’re whisked off by an alterna ensemble. More subverted holdouts of the traditional ballet convince Ted otherwise: Alongside Open Space’s full company and over 60 students, street dancer NØIR (as the Toy Soldier) and Tokyo street dancer and choreographer Uno (as the Sugar Plum Fairy) teach Ted all the wild and colorful ways dance might look.
Oregon Ballet Theatre’s long-standing Nutcracker name-drops Balanchine and hews closer to the classic pointe-shoe-and-tutu style. As it has for more than 20 years now, the juggernaut is running through most of the month at the Keller (December 5–24, $35+). That’s not to say Oregon’s most traditional ballet company is afraid of zhuzhing the canon. Last year, OBT worked with choreographer Phil Chan’s Final Bow for Yellowface organization to nix the infamous “Chinese Tea” scene and its cliché racism, instead writing in an entirely new act. While ostensibly less inspired, a partnership with Fred Meyer means this year’s festivities include a meet and greet with Sugar Plum and Soldier Doll at the Fred Meyer on NE Weidler December 18—a nontraditional stage, to be sure.
More things to do this week
VISUAL ARTS Blue Sky 1985–1995: The Second Decade
5–8PM THU, DEC 4; THRU DEC 27 | BLUE SKY GALLERY, FREE
For the second of five anniversary exhibitions celebrating its 50th birthday, Blue Sky, the city’s lone photography gallery, is remounting selected work from shows it held between 1985 and 1995. The gallery is an international landmark of the photography world. For context, and an idea of what this sprawling exhibition might include, here are a few photographers who had solo shows there during the aforementioned decade (check out the gallery’s extensive online archive): William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand, Nan Goldin, Robert Rauschenberg, Martin Parr, Gordon Parks, Paul Strand. At the First Thursday opening: a “dress the decade” costume contest of sorts and limited $200 prints.
BOOKS Jaydra Johnson and Jessica Pedrosa
7–9PM, FRI DEC 5 | UP UP BOOKS, FREE ($5–20 SUGGESTED DONATION)
Nonprofit small press and literary record label (think vinyl pressings of Eileen Myles readings) Fonograf Editions is rounding out its annual fundraising campaign with a night of readings and conversation devoted to so-called “challenging art”—that’s the good kind. Portland Monthly contributor Jaydra Johnson, author of the memoir Low, which is all about trash, will chat with local poet and author Jessica Pedrosa; Fonograf is set to publish Pedrosa’s debut memoir, Encircle, in 2026. Fonograf is into “the interdisciplinary, experimental, and unclassifiable”—again, the good stuff, things that “resist, bend, and break expectations.” Surely that notion also applies to whatever you may think a public chat about experimental art might look like.
MUSIC Mdou Moctar
8PM TUE, DEC 9 | POLARIS HALL, $25+
Moctar’s shredding, psychedelic guitar songs—he plays in the distinct Tuareg genre and sings in the Tamasheq language—first reached a global audience via a compilation album from Portland record label Sahel Sounds; Music from Saharan Cellphones collected MP3 tracks that were, until that point, exchanged hand-to-hand throughout the Sahara. He’s since released several albums with Matador, including Funeral for Justice, in 2024, and an acoustic version of that album titled Tears of Injustice this winter.
Elsewhere...
- Lindsay Costello on Oregon Contemporary’s latest exhibition: A “sprawling love note unembarrassed by its devotion” to Ursula K. Le Guin, who “began her career publishing under an androgynous pseudonym in Playboy and ended it as one of American literature’s most far-out visionaries.” (Portland Mercury)
- Douglas Perry on Guido “Young Firpo” Bardelli: “No one ever handed him a gun back then. It was well established how dangerous he was without one.” (The Oregonian)
