Oregon Public Broadcasting

This weekend, musician and artist Holcombe Waller has a grand homecoming in the works. He’s spent much of the past year developing a new show that defies classification, combining music and visual art. It’s called “Into The Dark Unknown”. April Baer reports on Waller’s vision of hope amid hopelessness.   

Waller Video

Fans of Holcombe Waller’s work often talk about his ability to bring light and humanity into some very dark subjects. But Waller hadn’t anticipated the gloomy, post-bubble world into which he’d deliver his latest show.

When he started writing, it was 2006, and the world seemed a little less fractured. At least, to most people.

Holcombe Waller:  “The way the show starts is with an anecdote about my mom, and a conversation I had with her about marriage at my kitchen table.”

Waller says he was going through a time of feeling included, but isolated.

Holcombe Waller: “I’m gay, and so I can’t get married, and a lot of my close friends from childhood were getting married— often! So I was going to a lot of weddings. I was home for a friend’s wedding. I was feeling down, I was talking to my mom about it.”
 
(music lyric) "Son, I stood here by your father, over 30 some odd years / If there's one thing I should tell you, you have to face your own fear / Whether married or alone, you are always on your own."

Holcombe Waller:  “This song, ‘Into the Dark Unknown’ is about facing an unknown future, potentially on one’s own”

Waller’s struggle coming to terms with the future gave way to a song cycle exploring wider questions about uncertainty, family, and what it means to connect in the world.

As the show developed, he landed several national and regional arts grants that made it possible to produce the work on a bigger scale than he’d ever tried before, with staging, lights, costuming, and six or seven original video works.

Over the past six months, the show has evolved and taken shape for performances in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco, before coming to the town Waller’s called home for the past five years, Portland.

Erin Boburg Doughton is with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, or PICA, one of the groups that invested in Waller’s work for the show.

Erin Boburg Doughton: “Every artist thinks they can throw a little video onstage, and they’re gonna make a complete show. But what a lot of people don’t know is that Holcombe really is a video artist in his own right, and he’s really in control of all that technology and ideas.”

Waller’s video ideas come to lush life with vivid color, offering poignant glimpses of people who seem trapped in their lovely settings, unable to see the possibilities all around them.

With these images and music, Waller’s trying to nudge his audience toward a vision of the Dark Unknown that’s less fearful.

Holcombe Waller   “Embracing the unknown and being excited about it. About the unforeseen possibilities that are unfolding before us. That we just havent’ thought if things yet.  You tend to have a sense you know how it’s going to work out. It’s always gone terribly wrong, and it’ll just keep going that way. Which is never true.”

(music lyric) “…One way or another, we are going to meet each other.….”

Holcombe Waller’s show Into the Dark Unknown begins tonight, running through Sunday at Portland’s Imago Theater.

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