October 1, 2002

VISIT INCUBATES INGENIOUS DANCE

Author: CATHERINE THOMAS - Special Writer, The Oregonian

In one of the most original performances seen on Conduit's dance stage this season, Linda Austin,
Sally Silvers and Cydney Wilkes -- three veterans of New York's East Village avant-garde
performance art scene -- transformed the space into an otherworldly theater of the bizarre.

In "Tijuana Picnic," their four-part program that concluded Sunday, peculiarity reigned in a play of
extremes: grotesquerie became elegant, fitful dreams materialized in movement, and cartoonlike
wrestlers clashed.

Austin, co-founder of the local experimental dance center Performance Works NorthWest, has
forged a reputation as one of the region's most innovative constructors of movement collage, an
abstractionist who employs wildly hybrid props. A former Silvers dancer, Austin recently brought the
New York postmodernist to Portland for a three-week residency, culminating in the creation of a
new work.

The evening's title work, which Silvers choreographed for Austin, Wilkes, Jesse Berdine and Jim
McGinn, revealed Silvers in possession of abundant wit and a striking ability to forge a coherent
theme from chaotic movement. Clad in chaps over black tights and kneepads, the foursome spewed
water from their mouths, puffed their stomachs, teased the audience with sizzling samba swivels, and
went head-to-head in acrobatic showdowns.

Austin was at the peak of her craft in her solo "Of Monsters & Marvels," creating with only a
smattering of props a carny freak show of misfits. Austin's head, encased in a television monitor,
played warped close-ups of contorted grimaces; video mutated her body into a plastic doll exposing
fish-scale flesh.

Silvers' celebrated solo, "Shouting Out Loud," was virtually incomprehensible in its pastiche of
wayward appendages and quick-fire movements that dared the viewer to look away. Silvers danced
one moment with a yogi's calm and the next like a helter-skelter caricature, her ingenuity clearly on
display.