When you register for to this year’s Portland Creative Conference on Saturday September 12, you’ll be buying a lot more than a blast of creativity for yourself. You already know you’re going to get a peak inside the heads of some of our most innovative and visionary thinkers. But did you know that you’ll also be making it possible for the kids in K-12 to explore their own creativity? Well, you will!
Once again, Keeping the Beat is proud to be the non-profit fiscal agent for the event. Keeping the Beat is a nonprofit public charity dedicated to supporting arts education in Oregon. That means proceeds from the Portland Creative Conference will be distributed to one or more K-12 arts education programs. In today’s economy, that kind of support is more important than ever.
Last year Keeping the Beat was able to distribute a total of $4,000 from the Conference proceeds to two educational programs: Caldera, an arts education program for underserved Oregon youth, and the Performing Arts Department of the St. Helens School District. The programs were related in some way to two of the keynote presenters at last year’s conference.
For more details see the recent press release on the Keeping the Beat site.
After Gus Van Sant, Academy Award-winning Director, revealed new avenues of creativity discovered while directing “Good Will Hunting,” he showed some of his early work, including two 1930s-style short films done with sharp-edged political satire—one with William Burroughs, the other featuring Allen Ginsberg.
Cliff Freeman, winner of 30 Clio Awards for such commercial campaigns as “Where’s the Beef,” “Pizza, Pizza,” and the York’s Peppermint Patty “Get the Sensation,” entertained us with some hilarious clips that never made it to the screen, and many that did.
Alf Clausen, seven-time Emmy Award nominee for original musical scores for “The Simpsons,” walked us through the process of writing music for a series when the composer, scriptwriters, actors, animators, and executives never set foot in the same room. He closed with the on-screen final version of his two most acclaimed pieces, “We Put the Spring in Springfield,” and “Checking In.”
But, with all of the aforementioned luminescent talent, the most memorable presentation was one by the outrageous Denny Dent, a performance artist billed as “A Two-Fisted Art Attack.” Armed with three brushes in each hand, Dent dipped into buckets of day-glo and then, to the loud pulsating blast of “The Rolling Stones,” attacked a 6-foot-tall black canvas. His whole body gyrated with the beat as he flung formless swipes of color across the canvas amidst the nonstop screaming and applause of the crowd until, in less than 10 minutes, a perfect rendering of the full-lipped face of Mick Jagger emerged.
As if that were not “shocking” enough, Matt showed us a French TV commercial that flashed a glimpse of the Simpson family in full frontal nudity! Groening then redeemed himself by rolling his favorite episode, “The Simpsons’ Bible Stories”. He wanted us to see it because, as he put it, “I never get to enjoy watching people enjoying watching”. So we all indulged him and enjoyed!
Don Hahn, Disney producer gave us a sneak preview of Fantasia 2000 with a scene animated to Stravinsky’s “The Firebird” due to hit the screens January 1, 2000, (assuming we are all still here!)
For many of us, the crowning moment came when Eugenio Zanetti, Oscar winning art director of “What Dreams May Come” shared his comments about the source of his inspiration for this project and how he lives his life. There were tears and a standing ovation as he openly and passionately revealed his own creative process—getting out of the way, opening to something greater than himself, being still and listening and letting the ideas simply flow into beautiful expression. His presentation epitomized the sentiments expressed by many of the other speakers and seemed to coalesce the underlying theme of the whole conference.
