credit: Alan Simons / Courtesy of PICA

The Rude Mechs perform "The Method Gun."

A city, when it’s working, is a grand thing, a place teeming with productive collisions, accidental and deliberate. This steamy weekend, tramping to various shows mostly at the TBA Festival, I passed by little knots and big crowds of people doing so many other things, just sharing a cold beverage, digging into the newest indie music permutations at MusicfestNW or something completely different. And yes, I thought, the city is working the way the city should.

I’m going to give you a quick round-up of the highlights of my particular TBA-heavy weekend (with time-out for “God of Carnage” at Artists Rep). TBA is a great place to scout out the wilder side of the performing arts, where questions about the nature of art, its scope and its subjects, are all wide open. That’s art? Maybe so.

“The Hidden Life of Bridges,” Hawthorne Bridge: Outdoor events this weekend were problematic — so steamy. But this one at dusk on the north sidewalk of the Hawthorne Bridge caught a cool river breeze Thursday night (it ran through Saturday) and created a little oasis of reflection and conversation for its audience. The idea of Portland musician/civic analyst Tim DuRoche and Brooklyn artist Ed Purver was to celebrate the physical links that bind us by interviewing several people connected to the operation and maintenance of our bridges. They told their stories, talked about their jobs, even issued a few warnings, all projected upriver on the Morrison Bridge. The soundtrack, though, was on the Hawthorne Bridge, and it concluded live amplifications of bridge traffic. Graphs of the sound waves of the traffic were also projected on the Morrison Bridge, which made the video oscillate between interviews past and sound present. I especially liked it when the sound waves flat-lined and I realized there were no vehicles on the bridge behind me.  At that moment, I thought I detected all of us on the bridge exhaling hot lung air, replacing it with that cool breeze. (More here at Oregon Arts Watch.)

credit: Owen Carey

Patrick Dizney, Allison Tigard, Michael Mendelson and Trisha Miller in "God of Carnage."

credit: Steven Schreiber / Courtesy of PICA

Kyle Abraham and his dancers in "The Radio Show"

“The Radio Show,” Winningstad Theatre: For me, the revelation of the weekend, heck maybe the decade, was Kyle Abraham and his small company of crackingly good dancers. The sheer kinesthetic intelligence and physical aptitude on stage were amazing, and it was applied to a complex, layered choreography/theater that refused to be pinned down. Who would want to pin down those dancers, anyway? The movement bounced with, against and alongside a soundtrack that served as a sort of history of African-American radio during the past 50 years or so, from “You’ve Got the Best of My Love” to “Mary Don’t Weep” to “Oops Oh My,” with some talk radio thrown in, just to instruct all the ladies out there. Ladies, you know I’m right! But just to keep things unsettled, Antony and the Johnsons make an appearance along with some electronica and some dead silence. In fact, silence and stillness are a vital component of “The Radio Show,” which the program notes suggest combines Abraham’s thoughts on Alzheimer’s and the closing of a radio station. It’s brilliant stuff, and fortunately, unlike most of this weekend’s TBA performers, Abraham and company are sticking around to perform a new piece on Tuesday at Washington High School. I’m planning to be there.

“The Method Gun,” Imago Theatre:The Rude Mechs, an Austin-based theater company, did a deconstruction of  “A Streetcar Named Desire” for TBA, but lest you think the exercise was strictly academic, it involved helium balloons attached to the privates of two actors. I’ve already forgotten the context, exactly, but the image is now burned into my memory. Thanks for that, Rude Mechs! The set-up for “The Method Gun” is ingenious, though: The Rude Mechs try to reconstitute a performance by a troupe of actors of “Streetcar” that eliminated the roles of Blanche, Stanley, Stella and Mitch. Right. The troupe has been abandoned by their guru (“She gave us ourselves and now we don’t even have that”), but still they persevere through 11 years of rehearsal. So, the Mechs play themselves, they play the troupe members, they play the roles of troupe members playing minor characters in “Streetcar,” mostly for laughs, though some of the stuff starts to get serious, in fact, very serious. There ARE a couple of tiger jokes, though. Two tigers finish eating a clown: “Hey, did that taste funny to you?” And the end is quite beautiful, really, a wordless performance of “Streetcar” enacted in the spaces between sets of swinging lights: Theater can be dangerous.

So can TBA, and next weekend looks promising, too.