Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] [ piano playing classical music over speaker ] WOMAN: I think you can burst forward with more gusto.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

My name is Dani Rowe, and I am the artistic director of Oregon Ballet Theatre and I'm a choreographer.

And a mom!

[ music continues playing ] WOMAN: Dani Rowe was selected because she had such a breadth of experience as a dancer.

Touch his hand first here, and then you're like, ahh!

WOMAN: And she's internationally recognized as a choreographer.

To get any kind of recognition is very difficult, and especially as a female choreographer.

International recognition is important because, in a selfish sense, it raises the visibility of Oregon Ballet Theatre that she is here.

She just needs... that way a little sooner.

Welcome to the imaginary circus!

You'll forget everything you see here tonight!

ROWE: I started choreographing by accident, really.

After I moved to San Francisco, I had the opportunity to be involved with small dance projects, and the choreographer was always late.

And so my partner said to the director of the project, "How about Dani just creates it, because we're not getting anywhere?"

And he said okay, and so I did.

I realized how much I adored working with dancers.

I realized that I preferred it to dancing.

I try to create a space where they have the opportunity to put something out there, for better or worse, no judgment.

[ all laughing ] She has such an open, free, engaging, fun way of creating.

Everybody's involved, and so it kind of feels like you created something together.

[ all singing, exclaim ] When you're working with dancers, it's like time stops or falls away.

[ classical music playing ] Worries don't exist.

[ soft piano melody plays ] I have choreographed for big companies to very small companies.

[ men grunting rhythmically ] One of them also was Oregon Ballet Theatre, and that was how my relationship started with OBT.

I will still be choreographing from time to time whilst also being the director of OBT.

[ classical piano music playing over speaker ] The best part about being an artistic director is that I am trusted to nurture these incredible artists.

She knows exactly what to say to help me bring it to another level each time.

Like, you have to convince yourself from the beginning that you've totally got this.

SIMEON: There's intention to every detail.

And so enter into the space without any question marks.

It's like, "Ha-ha!

I dare you to take your eyes off me."

[ classical piano music playing ] WOMAN: She's really helped me focus telling the story.

Whether it's a port de bras toward the prince or a feeling of fear, feeling frightened, as the swan, she really brings that real feeling out of you.

I'm seeing this happen all up here.

WHEATON: So I'm kind of not being afraid to dive into the artistry of it.

She creates space to feel safe to explore.

That way it gets the best out of you.

Yeah, beautiful!

[ ♪♪♪ ] ROWE: This is my theory.

When you go and see little kids in a ballet class, you'll see a sea of female-identifying kids, and then you'll see one or two boys.

When I was growing up, a boy would enter the studio, and it would be like, "Oh, my gosh, we have a boy!

Let's all celebrate the boy!"

I think that just filters through to the top, but I think that's changing.

I know so many incredible women that are taking on these leadership positions.

I think she will be absolutely wonderful for the female dancers in the company, because she knows what it's like to be one of the women.

There's a little more power, mm-hmm.

[ ♪♪♪ ] ROWE: I started dancing in Australia when I was 5.

I started performing when I was 18 and then kept going until I was 35.

I was a principle dancer for the Australian Ballet, and then I got a little taste of what was happening outside of Australia and I knew that I wanted to be a part of that.

[ classical music playing ] I was fortunate enough to be offered a position with Houston Ballet.

And then again I got restless and moved to the Netherlands and danced with Nederlands Dans Theater.

Nederlands Dans Theater is arguably the best contemporary dance company in the world.

The transition from the classical world, the traditional ballet world, into the contemporary world was massive.

I felt like I almost had to strip away everything that I had been training for and start all over again.

In the end, it was the most liberating experience.

You can start there and then... As ballet dancers, we are so hyper aware of line and exactly where every fingernail is positioned and every eyelash is positioned.

[ raucous jazz music playing ] The contemporary dancers moved so freely, moved from a place that was more internal.

-[ upbeat music playing ] -Your turn.

I think as children, we dance because we have to.

If they hear music, they start to move their bodies.

It's just innate and it comes from within.

And so I kind of relearned how to approach my dance from that place.

I can't see him!

Dada will come out soon.

So for the three years that I was dancing with NDT, my husband was simultaneously dancing with San Francisco Ballet.

So we were jetting across the world... [ laughs ] ...to see each other, and that got somewhat exhausting.

I really wanted to start a family.

Okay, what shall I draw?

A monster?

A monster.

My biggest inspiration would be my daughters.

Children just have the most untarnished perspective.

I always look to my daughters when I'm feeling a little jaded or if I'm a little stuck.

They have the funniest and the most fresh perspective on things.

Now we can just brush their hair.

Okay, well, while we brush their hair, I'm going to put some music on, and I want to get your opinion.

[ soft violin melody playing ] What do you think, Ags?

I like it.

The beginning is a little bit sad... ROWE: Seeing Aggie brushing the hair, it reminded me of repetition, of doing something with your hands that's so soothing.

It's something that I'll probably draw upon in a piece.

My daughters help to remind me of the importance of play.

[ "Swan Lake" playing ] My biggest goal is to provide security for our dancers and they feel like they can be in that sanctuary.

Through that support, that they can then get on the stage and produce work that's absolutely incredible and that our audiences, they are completely blown away and moved.

[ gentle piano melody playing ] I hope that I leave the dancers with a joy, this pure love for what they do.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: I really prefer to paint on site.

The weather gets into the painting somehow, the wind gets into the painting somehow, the smells of the air get into the painting somehow.

It's of a certain moment, it's a certain place.

If you're open, all that stuff gets into the paintings.

I do no planning.

But I love the idea that at any moment, the world will present itself to you in the most beautiful way you could ever imagine and everything seems to be in the right place and everything looks like it was put together by some mad genius.

I was a kind of a purist for a long time and I thought, "It has to be from observation, it has to be unmediated observational artifact," whether it was a portrait or whether it was a landscape.

I've gotten to realize that the studio is where you really finish the paintings.

I make paintings from paintings sometimes.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I feel like I won the lottery, moving to Portland, because it's so beautiful.

The landscape is so diverse, and I've only explored this much of Oregon, too, and I feel like it's been more than I can handle.

So I don't lack for subjects.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I discovered Astoria purely by accident.

It was a friend from college came out to visit, we just headed west and wound up in Astoria.

I kind of made a mental note, "I gotta come back here."

[ gulls cawing ] My brother died of brain cancer when he was my age now.

I took a week off and just went to Astoria because I needed to just be by myself.

Astoria was just kind of a hunch because I had this positive memory of it.

So it was a very healing week.

That first week that I spent in Astoria, a lot of time driving around, scoping out locations.

One is high up looking out over an empty field.

So the horizon's always going to be high.

And all the planes are parallel to you, which to me, is Cubism.

[ laughs ] Astoria is a Cubist town.

It's a working-class, scrappy Cubist town.

I don't know anybody in Astoria.

I still don't know anybody in Astoria.

I go there all the time.

I go there to paint, I don't socialize.

I have no contact with that city in any other way.

[ boat horn blows, seal barking ] It's a purely visual love affair.

[ film reel clicking ] I remember the moment exactly.

I went out for dinner with a friend, and there was this little like a photo frame that has rotating images in it like an album but it's a still frame, and I thought, "What if you made a drawing, actual size, and you just loaded the drawings in a sequence?

Then you'd have a little story frame that would tell a story."

And so I got one of those and I made a little film.

It could only take so many images, so that was the constraint.

That was my first animated film, "Ghost."

[ ♪♪♪ ] Then I got really into it.

My second film, "The Immortal Head..." [ ♪♪♪ ] ...which is about the Weimar period transitioning into the Nazi period, a kind of love story, love/horror story.

I won best animated film in Los Angeles at the Independent Filmmakers Showcase.

That was a huge boost.

I was shocked.

I thought it was a mistake.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The camera I use is a Nikon SLR, it's nothing special.

The program I make them in is iMovie.

The images are all hand-drawn.

Everything's handmade.

So eraser crumbs, smudges, that's good.

Paper, textures, all good.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I don't write a script.

I trust that the script will reveal itself as I go.

It's not an art of the motion picture, it's an art of the still image.

That's why I call it the Kino Graphic Novel.

It's like early cinema and the graphic novel together.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Then I thought I'd make an adaptation of "Dracula."

And then one of my students said, "You've gotta make that movie.

It's the greatest love story ever."

And I thought, "Hm, 'Dracula,' a love story?"

And then I realized it actually is a great love story, but it's not the one you think.

[ ♪♪♪ ] So I thought, "I have something new to add to this story."

I saw it as a film about a marriage that was possessed by a demon.

And I think that's an interesting reading of it, and it's more of a psychological reading of "Dracula."

So my vampire hunter is an analyst-- a psychoanalyst.

But it's a very faithful adaptation in every other sense.

Films are, to me, kind of mysterious.

I think they're almost like raw psychic material in a certain way.

I don't know if that's good or bad, but I feel like they're very real to me.

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] A painting should be like a silent film.

Because there is, even in a painting of somebody sitting at a table or reading a book, there is a kind of an implication of a story, or at least an invitation to one.

I worked with this model for about 20 years.

To paint another human being or to draw another human being is a kind of a sacred thing, I think.

To see the other is a sacred thing.

I made a series of paintings for a show I had called "Look Out."

They were all Rückenfigur in art history, which is looking at the back-- German word, Rückenfigur-- the back of a figure, looking out.

I like that format because the figure stands in relation to the landscape the way we stand in relation to the painting.

So the figure is both in the landscape and outside of it.

And because the figure has their back to us, they are also outside of us.

So there is a sense of separation that's built into that format that seemed to speak very powerfully for me to the sense of separation many people felt during the pandemic.

So I thought that these backs looking at the world were kind of the emblem of what a lot of us were feeling at that time, to be part of and not part of, to be isolated and yet wanting to be, you know, in a space where other people might be.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My latest show at Augen Gallery is called "Saudade."

It's a Portuguese word that means "a longing for something that may never come back."

It's not the same as nostalgia.

Sort of an idea of a loss... and melancholy.

And the joy you take in the fragility of every moment is kind of what I think that saudade-- encompassed the past, the fleeting nature of life and the expectation that things might turn out better... that makes every moment of life in some ways more precious, more scary, and, in its own way, more beautiful because it's fleeting.

[ gulls cawing ] If one really pays attention to how you see things and how you experience things, that will tell you how to do the art, how to communicate it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The only thing we ever have to offer as artists is us.

My aspirational ideal is to paint from the point of view of love.

I love Astoria.

I love my model.

That's a world.

It's enough of a world for me.

[ static crackles over speaker ] [ ♪♪♪ ] MAN: In 1995, I started an organization called the Coalition of Independent Music Stores.

And two other coalitions popped up out of that.

And in 2007, those three coalitions got together and started an event called Record Store Day.

They went to the industry and goes, "Can you make us some compelling product for our customers on vinyl?"

And vinyl had been gone since the late '80s.

We hired a publicist, and he told the story that, "Record stores aren't gone.

And guess what?

They sell records."

At the same time, he put out a notice about Record Store Day that there was going to be 50 unique releases on this day that you could come down and get.

Some were on colored vinyl, some were unreleased, some were records that hadn't been in print for years.

That was the beginning of the renaissance of vinyl.

And each year, it just kept going up.

And Record Store Day got better and better, and the amount of people that were interested in vinyl got larger.

Young people who'd quit coming to the record stores in the early 2000s started coming to the record stores again and having that experience of going home and opening up their record and being one-and-one with their stereo and enjoying a side of a record.

That alone probably saved independent record stores in the United States or in the world, because now Record Store Day is happening in Japan, Ireland, England, France, you name it.

They're all part of it now.

-A Gigi and Aggie shoe.

-[ girls giggling ] I got them from Chanel.

[ laughs ] [ ♪♪♪ ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at the stories we're working on right now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Ahh!

Did that feel good?

-Yes.

-That looked good.

Mm-hmm.

[ laughs ] What?

Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by...