The challenges of leading a non-profit start-up can manifest endlessly, from the loss of close collaborators to the gain of unexpected programs. Every year, since 2009 when InterArts assumed operation as an entity to produce No.Fest Music and Arts, I have succeeded in expanding programs and revenue. Growing substantially and steadily from 2008-2011. And in 2012, after a near dissolution, I brought InterArts back around and grew the organization tremendously by saving Cathedral Park Jazz Festival from dissolution itself! In actuality, CPJazz dissolved and we were supposed to re-animate the corpse. No kidding! But now, InterArts owns the DBA and CPJazz is no zombie; it is a thriving, young event once more. The twists and turns of this journey are exhilarating.

In a single bound, InterArts went from 3 years old to 33 years old–in a manner of speaking. Amazing! But this very opportunity came with immense challenges that again faced InterArts with the threat of dissolution. These issues were entirely internal and therefore it was a threat of no hard consequence–although it sowed seeds of rumors and doubt in the community. The opposition has been removed and the truth is revealing itself. Strangely, even a community event and organization may contain the seediest sides of show business. But I am committed to positivity and trust, maintaining the culture of community.

By April 1st of 2013, things were moving along swimmingly. We had reserves that helped us open The Point–a plan that had been in the works for years–and CPJazz was swinging in to the planning season with a positive outlook. And new team members were beginning to jump on board. Having overcome so many challenges over the years, a significant external problem could threaten all the gains that were just beginning to manifest growth at a sustainable level.

The Internal Revenue Service revoked InterArts tax-exempt status. The reason: failure to file form 990; a reason that has affected more than 300,000 non-profits, estimated, since 2011. The fact is in contention and we challenge the IRS judgement, because it was done automatically without review. We have the support of Congressman Blumenuer’s office and the work of our Taxpayer’s Advocate. If you want to read the facts, then I am pleased to share some letters between our offices. Furthermore, the IRS has notified that we are okay to continue operating while the wheels of resolution turn. There is no actual threat of dissolution before us, so long as we work to resolve it before the calendar year comes to a close. I estimate that tax-exempt status will be reinstated by InterArts fiscal year ending September 30th.

But during the first six weeks of working on this, we stopped financial transactions and focused on programming the jazz festival. I worked out several legally sound options to resolve the matter and keep all programming on track. I made phone calls, emails, google searches and crunched numbers to see how we could move forward legally. Options ranged from transferring CPJazz to simply complying with the wrongful judgement and shelling out the $500 with new application for tax-exempt status. The law provides other roads with more justice than that. But most of the time between April 1 and May 15, most attention went in to the laws. Because our lawyer did not know what to do about it, we had to become lawyers or find another one–and pay her with what? Chiefly, this problem was discussed between Richard Colvin, Myself, and Todd Guess (Vice President). But in the end, there still was just one option: FORWARD.

This happened mere weeks before the big scandal still making headlines, concerning the IRS scrutinizing small right-wing non-profit applicants. Congressman Blumenuer sits on the House Ways and Means Committee and will be reviewing the IRS tax-exempt department until investigations and recommendations are complete. The tax-exempt department is a total mess, from the reports I have been hearing. So this process may take a while.

This open letter provides explanation for what I would otherwise consider unacceptable, that is concerning the degree of progress in producing CPJazz. Sponsors deserve to know. Because transparency matters–even though everything will turn out as if it never happened. Regardless even of this trauma, CPJazz is rebuilding this year and The Point is just starting. These are normal bumps in the road and I am smoothing them out.

In closing, I will say that the growth I have gone through as a professional in the last year has been tremendous. Leadership is not easy. Sometimes we don’t realize we are putting ourselves in that position, and in my case, yes indeed, but I have never been more clear about the importance of it nor more confident in what I can contribute as an entrepreneur and ambassador of culture. If we don’t have your support already, please take this message as a token of perseverance. Because this is going to be another major growth year for InterArts and our beloved flagship event, CPJazz. I look forward to providing a successful Annual Report and Strategic Vision in September.

Thank You for Reading,

Sean R. Ongley

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For all of those people whom I owe something or places I have to go to, but am not getting to them, I am sorry, but you can now see what I’ve been dealing with. Upon arrival to this household on October 1st, it was alarming that almost no garbage had been removed, piled, swept, picked up, or cleaned at any time. Not only did we have plans to paint all interior and exterior, carpet, re-floor, and re-design this entire household, but we had years upon years of randomness left behind. Some of it was salvageable, some if it was garbage.

Here are some progress shots from October 1st through 19th. It starts with the household as The Yellow House, then in to the Post-Yellowism stage.

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Tonight was the first night of the Time Based Art Festival! My name is Joni, and I’ll be covering several of the TBA’s events as the week goes on. For those of you who don’t already know, the TBA Festival is an annual interdisciplinary art festival here in Portland, Oregon. The show is put on by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and this year is their tenth year. To celebrate, they are hosting a the festival that promises to be bigger and better than ever! The festival is being held in its long-time abandoned high school home on 12th and Stark in South East Portland.

When we arrived to the festival we immediately went to the box office, which is managed out of a darling little yellow vintage Airstream teardrop trailer. The lines were quick and efficient, and holding my pass in my hand felt so good…it was finally happening! The ticketing system uses small credit card type passes that feature a small scratch-off area, underneath which is PICA’s logo. This little detail, combined with several other little “oh, wow” moments throughout the night made me feel very confident that the festival is in great hands with its new director,

The evening began with a delicious-looking fancy dinner served to around one hundred or so people on the lawn outside the high school. This is an event I couldn’t afford and didn’t attend, although everyone looked very nice and surprisingly not stuck-up. If I had to narrow down the type of people who attended that dinner I would say horn-rimmed glasses and Vespas.

At 8:30 PM the festival art got underway with a performance of Big Art Group’s “The People—Portland”. The group comes from New York City and they have been touring the world with their experimental performance ensemble for over ten years. The fascinating piece they put on is quite complicated and may be tricky to describe to anyone who wasn’t there. It features pre-recorded interviews with people from around Portland, which are played on the massive brick side wall of the abandoned Washington High School. The projection is so large that the faces of those speaking are 10-15 feet in height. In conjunction with these interviews, which mainly feature discussions about war, justice, democracy, etc., there is a live play being both performed AND filmed, inside the high school. The play that’s being performed is “The Oresteia”, which is a trilogy of Greek tragedies (although to be honest, for most of the show I mistakenly thought they were just trying to do their own weird rendition of “The Odyssey”). What made the show so interesting was the way the play was performed. It featured actors in little or no makeup, usually with plain clothes on or a simple costume, or ill-fitting wig, wearing signs to indicate their characters, and dramatically overacting the entire time.

I found the performance to be very outrageous, although that’s appropriate given that Big Art Group’s leaders have expressed in the past that they want their work to be “very transgressive”.

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Dance+ Program Image

This weekend, July 26-28, Conduit Dance hosted their first annual DANCE+ series. Different sets of performances were featured from July 19-21, but it was only last night I had the opportunity to see the final run. The purpose of this series is to perpetuate new talent by featuring collaborative performances by young artists. On July 28^th, I witnessed A Moment of Your Time by Friendly Pheromones Dance Co., advantAGE by Gregg Bielemeier, Keyon Gaskin, and Philippe Bronchtein, and The Loveliest Landscape, by Danielle Ross and Christi Denton. A performance by Luciana Proano Dance entitled Tsunami was cancelled for unstated reasons. The purpose of this article is to highlight The Loveliest Landscape. But I will devote a paragraph to the first two shows.

The first run of the evening was A Moment of Your Time, a lively trio dance featuring live music from Wave Clamor Bellow. There are frequently male and female dancers sharing the stage in dance performance, naturally the dynamics of relationship can be expressed through that duality. Striking me first was the physical difference between the leading dancers, being male and female. She is a small thing, capable of crawling all his austere form; she embraced him the way light creeps in to open spaces. He supported her with concentration and nothing sexual was at play. These two begin the piece but a third woman enters, bringing the struggle, competition, and confusion to the story. But when they go in to unison, making a triangle, it suggests that when we are alone, we are really together. With the music of WCB, playing electric guitar and electrified viola powered by warm amplifiers and an array of electronic foot pedals/loopers that allow for advanced orchestration while contributing their own movement to their own work — the soundtrack became emotional and helped fuel life in to an already dynamic dance.

Something that makes me happy in contemporary performance is humor. I really do find that experimental art is a big joke; the artist takes the traditional form and gives the unexpected, precisely what a punch line provides. advantAGE is quite fun, a duo performance by the elderly balding gray haired white man, Gregg Bielemeier, and the young vibrant selectively hairy black man, Keyon Gaskin; just make one of them female and you have a complete duality, but I think we can see the irony already. In a rather competitive way, the duo begins by opening and slamming the venue doors, walking on stage and performing their solo, separately together. You watch Bielemeier’s masterful steps and you know he is a teacher, choreographer, but you watch Gaskin, and you know he is a student, dancer; both are great talents. Music is comprised of effected-looped blues and pop tunes manipulated live by a single young man looking geeky in glasses seated at a small desk with his Macbook Pro, contributing to the humor and surrealism of it all.  The duo coalesces in their funny ways while removing and adding clothing, making vocal declarations. In the end, they put on these strange fabrics that sort of look like a dress, each helping the other “zip up” in the back, meandering off stage while creepily singing off-time snippets of the psychedelically treated sounds of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” by McFadden and Whitehead. Fade out and end: applause.

Danielle Ross, Choreographer, and Christi Denton, Composer, have been working together for a little more than one year. The Loveliest Landscape is their latest and most collaborative work and they are beginning to find intimacy in the creative process. Christi explains that in the past several projects, sound and movement were territories dominated by their creators, but for this, the collaboration deepened with Ross hearing ideas on movement and Denton hearing ideas on sound; the trust has been formed, now they let each other into personal space.

The Loveliest Landscape is a solo performance by Danielle Ross. You see her leaning against the back wall underneath the studio window, body contorted in dim light before migrating, pressed against the wall, to the other side under the other window, stopping and looking dead on to the audience. She moves over to a spotlight on wheels and spins it slowly until the stream of photons strikes each audience member. The light goes out, sound goes out. The music is that surreal, arrhythmic, electronic sampling and synthesis you can expect from a Mills graduate (Denton), making the bed for impressions of imagery via projection. Images are projected against the back wall: stucco, automobile tire, moss on concrete, metal grating, painted brick, etc. urban images. The slides go out; this is when Danielle picks up her step.

Ross tends to follow impulses across the stage, and in my naïve interpretation, I can’t really place the symbolism or emotion with all of it; a solo is not as easy to interpret because the artist deals only with their self. I contemplate what her background in dance is and I assume she brings martial arts to contemporary techniques. After the show, I ask her. She studied at Berkeley, CA, going in as an athlete but later studied performance, ballet, and Capoeira, alongside Political Science. So that explains it.

Floating on the bed of sound ala Christi, and set on a stage developed by the duo, the piece continues along those themes laid out above: light and texture. Ross pulls a string of LED lights out of a small case into a snake-like curve. Then she forms mounds of flour on the floor, each to its own independent LED light. The piece unfolds with the continued sounds, movements, and images that were established in the first half of the piece, it ends with compressed air blowing the mounds of flour across the stage, making a messy plume. Ross slowly returns to the original position she started with, under the window against the wall, and resigns to a half-fetal position, laying in the dust of her own flour mounds.

It was closing night for the DANCE+ series and if I hadn’t been tired, I could tell you about getting drinks with the dancers. I can tell you that I slept well last night, but that’s about all. For more information on this and other programs, you can visit www.conduit-pdx.org.

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The next opportunity that we can specifically offer is CPJazz 2012. By attending the event and composing blogs on our behalf, you will enjoy VIP access backstage and interview artists. If you are a video or photo blogger, we would LOVE you!

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Open Engagement is a free annual conference on socially engaged art. Directed and founded by Jen Delos Reyes and planned in conjunction with the Art and Social Practice program.

Each year the conference themes are directly related to the current research and inquiry of the students in the Art and Social Practice program at Portland State University. Students and faculty work together to select the featured presenters, who then also become faculty in the Art and Social Practice MFA program.

Open Engagement fosters both local, national and international dialogue and partnerships around socially engaged art making.

Past presenters and institutions involved in Open Engagement include: Watts House Project, Nato Thompson, Darren O’Donnell, Bad at Sports, Mark Dion, Hideous Beast, Amy Franceschini, David Horvitz, InCUBATE, Henry Jenkins, National Bitter Melon Council, Parfyme, Lisa Radon, Shannon Stratton, Temporary Services, Ted Purves, The Hammer, The Portland Art Museum, Linda Weintraub, Future Farmers, Pacific North West College of Art.

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FROM THE BLOG:

It wasn’t before several minutes in to the performance that I actually recognized a certain move as a break step; I like going in with a clean slate and definitely a touch naïve. Regardless of my naiveté, the great thing about this group is their originality and energy, not the fact that it’s world-class hip-hop dance. Perhaps what threw me at the beginning was the utter lack of hip-hop music, or maybe it was three men on their shoulders doing the bicycle. Either way, Kafig is your indicator, meaning “Cage.” Take it ironically because I witnessed no limitations in this Compagnie…. [READ MORE]

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#1) New Board (well… sort of). The only true newbie is Mary-Sue Tobin as Vice President, bringing with her a rich history as a saxophonist, educator, and sat on the Board of Creative Music Guild. Luke Lefler, co-founder of Show and Tell Gallery 501(c)(3) joined roughly six months ago but simply watched us go dormant, and he is now Secretary. Rolf Semprebon rejoined after taking leave, he’s the founding Treasurer and brings years of experience on the KBOO finance committee as well as tax preparation services. And finally, the person both resolving and causing some of these challenges, founding President, Sean Ongley remains in his chair at the Board, up for reelection this September. Also, joining as the Program Committee chairman, Paul Evans, another jazz player with a great long list of musical instruments he can play as well as professional accomplishments, including ownership of two small businesses.

#2) New Festival (no No.Fest). Saving Cathedral Park Jazz Festival while parting from No.Fest Music and Arts is panning out to have its caveats and challenges. It’s going to be a large task for InterArts to successfully swing round 32 of CPJazz, starting from a zero budget and a spotty last few years. Meanwhile, independent from any organization, Jeffrey Helwig has rebranded “No.Fest Music and Arts” by calling it simply “NOFEST” while simplifying the concept to mostly experimental and pop, ala 2008, but much larger. Meanwhile, Cathedral Park Jazz Festival Committee 501(c)(3) is being dissolved by an attorney as we speak, and InterArts has been selected by 18 Year veteran Gary Boehme to absorb the assets. We thank Mr. Helwig for connecting us initially.

#3. Revision 2.2 (connecting a purpose). InterArts hasn’t taken on a narrative of its own because it was simply the organization presenting No.Fest, but we had more in mind than that. Our Mission out the gate was grandiose and ideal but shed little light on the intent driving our operations. In the long scheme of InterArts, you can imagine festivals starting and passing on, like a nest for industrious creatives to develop their work and honor the non-profit tradition in its wake. You can imagine our website being a convergence of new artists to promote and bloggers to gain exposure for the purpose of covering the arts.  Therefore, we will focus on umbrella  and community outreach to produce cultural and educational programming; by reaching out to artists and producers to offer the umbrella, assistance with grant writing, planning, and budgeting, we can do greater good for more artists while securing our financial outlook. That’s why we will be promoting the annual election in September to expand our current Board and help CPJazz and more productions gain momentum toward independence.

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When: June 24 7pm-Late, June 25 10am-Late. Visual exhibition through July.
Where: Historic St. Johns PDX at Multiple Sites
Cost: $1 Suggested Donation

UPDATES  6.12.2001
Doug Theriault replaced Daniel Menche. Alma Brasileira replaced Na Mesa. Virginia Jones and Nathan Brannon were added to the stand-up showcase. Hoop Dreams (collaborative multimedia piece) replaced Brenna Murphy. Steele+Currin dropped from the lineup, and other minor changes. The final bill of seventy-nine visual and performance works in nineteen St. Johns sites is below.

MUSIC HIGHLIGHTS
The new and inspiring Portland Peace Choir opens. Local chapter of the Zulu Nation, Oregon Universal mainlines the hip hop stage. Psych-twang of Michael Hurley, Indian classical violin by Rasika School of Music, the live film score of SNDTRKR, electronic booms of Gulls and White Rainbow, the annual return of Smegma’s Dr. Id, the eastern dance music of KBOO’s DJ Anjali and The Incredible Kid with Dr. J, plus Moodring, Doug Theriault, Right On John, The Architects, and so much more, total up to more than forty musical performances at No.Fest!

VISUAL HIGHLIGHTS
Main stage will be adorned with a Mega*Tent inspired by ’09 headliner Mega*Church and a cardboard sculpture-map called Mini-No.Fest. Hip hop stage presentation by Mannequinhead, plus a live graffiti exhibition will take over vacant space. And a hefty dose of multimedia from artists like Chris Lael Larson, Ron Mason Gassaway, and more, totaling sixteen visual works.

DANCE/THEATER HIGHLIGHTS
Classical Indian dance with Jayanthi Raman will grace the main stage and contemporary dance  with Jin Camou and Jean-Paul Jenkins. A No.Fest first time stand-up showcase with five of Portland’s most adventurous comics including Richard Bain and Nathan Brannon, plus a special appearance by comedy-magic act Wizardo Stardust (John Simone). For spoken word, the mythical Walt Curtis, a poetry block from Show & Tell Gallery, and a most special (not for kids) puppet act by Cast Iron Carousel Marionette Troupe.

WORKSHOPS HIGHLIGHTS
Grand Detour’s Sound/Image Playground by Ben Popp follows The Early Bird Kidz Fest, kicking off in the square 10am with art, song, and dance! Neil Fegan will demonstrate his truly surreal bicycle designs at the The Bike Lab. Rock will give fencing demos at Salle Trois Armes.

NOTE:
Cast Iron Carousel will perform at 7:30pm both Friday and Saturday nights in a location TBA.
Neil Fegan Bike Demo will be based in the Bike Lab with details TBA.
Enjoy the KBOO simulcast on floor pillows at The Yellow House, with installations reopening at 1pm.

MEDIA SPONSORS:
KBOO Community Radio, Redefine Magazine, Radio23

PRINCIPLE CONTRIBUTORS:
St. Johns Business Boosters, St. Johns Neighborhood Association, Home Sweet Home Realty

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