To purchase advanced tickets, please visit http://vbc.cityrepair.org/tickets or call1-800-838-3006. Tickets are $15-25/night sliding scale at the door and are available for as little as $10/night in advance.

Where: The Disjecta Building, 230 E. Burnside (Click here for Map)

When: Friday May 18th to Saturday, May 26th, shows start at 7pm. Organic, Vegetarian Community Dinners from 5PM-7PM.

You can also buy tickets at these Portland locations:

Alberta Coop (NE) Website link

Chance of Rain Cafe (SE) on 32nd Ave at Hawthorne

Ecotrust (NW) Website link

Food Front (NW) Website link

Powell’s Books on Hawthorne (SE) Website link

Proper Eats (N) Website link

Web Link - Toby is the author of the first major North American book on permaculture, Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, and an adjunct assistant professor at Portland State University.
After obtaining a degree in biology from Tufts University, Toby worked for many years as a researcher in genetics and immunology, first in academic laboratories including Harvard and the University of Washington in Seattle, and then at Immunex, a major medical biotech company. At about the time he was growing dissatisfied with the direction biotechnology was taking, he discovered permaculture, a design approach based on ecological principles that creates sustainable landscapes, homes, and workplaces. A career change followed, and Toby and his wife spent ten years creating a rural permaculture site in southern Oregon. He was associate editor of Permaculture Activist, a journal of ecological design and sustainable culture, from 1999 to 2004. His current project is developing urban sustainability resources in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives. He teaches permaculture and consults and lectures on ecological design throughout the country. His writing has appeared in magazines such as Whole Earth Review, Natural Home, and Kitchen Gardener. He is available for workshops, lectures, and consulting in ecological design.

Web Link - Brad Lancaster is a permaculture teacher, designer, consultant, and activist living in Tucson, Arizona. He is a co-founder of Desert Harvesters. In addition, he is the author of Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands - Guiding Principles to Welcome Rain Into Your Life and Landscape.

Web Link - Dispatches from the Water Underground combines environmental victories in the sustainable-use movement with hands-on, participatory options for country and city dwellers. Not just a “how to” but a “why to,” the book begins with the story of dams in the American West–a story in which millions of acres of perfect farmland were flooded in order to irrigate the marginal land that, due to the same natural process that destroyed several ancient Native American civilizations, would turn the area into the Dust Bowl. Cleo Woelfle-Erskine and Laura Allen, both restoration activists and educators, demand a different approach for American watersheds and taxpayers. Through their own experiments with alternative water systems and thousands of hours of interviews with innovators from around the world, they create a comprehensive plan for re-using household water, constructing miniature wetlands, and improving our communities’ physical and political healths.

Web Link - Starhawk is a writer, teacher, activist, and Witch who has been a long-term leading voice in the Goddess movement. She is the author of several hallmark books in ecofemenism, women’s spirituality, and earth-based activism. She travels widely in North America and Europe teaching and lecturing. She is a founding member of Reclaiming, a network of communities committed to linking Goddess spirituality and work for social change, and writes a regular column for the Reclaiming Quarterly.

Web Link - Virginia Lopez was born in Cuba. She has studied Afro-Cuban drumming with Master drummer and recording artist, Amelia Pedroso, as well as other teachers in both Cuba and the United States. She has taught at drum camps in California, Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia.
Her mission is to provide a supportive atmosphere for women to learn to play percussion and to provide an appreciation of the rich tradition of Afro-Cuban music. Virginia created the Mambo Queens in 1994 in Portland, Oregon. The group repertory includes sacred music from the Yoruba tradition rendered on the Bata drums, Afro-Cuban rumbas, and lively Congolese-influenced comparsas that invite the audience to join in the dancing.

Web Link - Jujuba delivers a funky, danceable style of Nigerian Afrobeat and Juju music. The strength of the eleven-piece revolves around its energetic cohesion between percussion, rhythm and horn sections. Renowned for their ability to engage a wide variety of audiences, the band has no problem drawing a dance floor full of smiling faces at any event.
Jujuba features Nojeem Lasisi from Igbo Ora, Oyo State, in Nigeria. He ranks among the world’s elite talking drum players. Nojeem was given his first drum at age four by his father, also a master drummer, who handed down to Nojeem its powerful language. As a member of Nigerian superstar King Sunny Ade’s group, the African Beats, Nojeem toured the world and appears on numerous recordings with King Sunny, including “Seven Degrees North” and “Odu”.

Web Link - Rabbi Lerner, author of the forthcoming The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Relligious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) is not only rabbi of Beyt Tikkun but is also the editor of TIKKUN magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society. TIKKUN is one of the most respected intellectual/cultural magazines in the Jewish world, but also one of the most controversial because of its stand in favor of the rights of Palestinians, on the one hand, which locates him in the minds of many as the leader and most prominent spokesperson in the U.S. of Jewish supporters of the Israeli peace movement, and on the other hand, because of his stand critiquing the anti-religious and anti-spiritual biases of the secular Left, insisting that they need to address the spiritual hunger of Americans as equally important to their material needs (he calls this a hunger for “meaning” and says that for many Americans the desire to transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace and connect their lives to higher meaning is as important as any interest in money or things, and that one reason why people who might on purely economic grounds be supporting the liberal and progressive social change movements actually end up supporting the Right is that the Left doesn’t have a “politics of meaning”). He is the co-author with Cornel West of a book entitled Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin, and several other books.

Web Link - based in the Pacific Northwest, yet encompassing the world, delivers passionate offerings of Bohemian vaudvillany. Gut-bucket swing, Arabic belly dance, Tangos, Ukrainian folk-punk ballads, Klezmer and vigorous originals mingle with Absurdist, Bohemian, Neo-Classical and European Cabaret style, all played with skill, exuberance and a gritty vagabond edge. A surefire spectacle.” [The Oregonian] Vagabond Opera is an operatic European circus cabaret with high-flying displays of musical pyrotechnics matched by witty and incendiary theatrical derring-do. This is the new wave of opera–lusty (trained) voices singing in Balkan and Arabic tongues–Opera liberated and reinvented for the rest of us. VAGABOND OPERA has shared stages with Al Franken, Brave Combo, the Oregon Symphony, 3-Leg Torso, Circus Contraption and has appeared at the Oregon Country Fair, the Willamette Valley Folk Festival and headlined on Oregon Public Radio’s LIVE WIRE.
VAGABOND OPERA leads a dedicated, impassioned and enthusiastic following. Their versatility, mastery of genres, theatricality, and extensive repertoire is a siren song that lures audiences to classical concerts, jazz clubs, contemporary cabarets, and bohemian bar stomps. Every show is a cabaret of rich musical phrasing, sparkling lyrics and indomitable stage presence!

Web Link - Nala Walla is a transdisciplinary artist, teacher and performer who emphasizes the central role that the participatory arts must play in healing fractured ecologies and communities. Her BODYECOLOGY and BODYVERSITY workshops synthesize body-based art forms with principles of deep ecology in order to move beyond the rational and facilitate a holistic, wholebody understanding of permaculture. Nala bridges ecologic and artistic sensibilities through the BCOLLECTIVE, based on her off-the-grid homestead on Marrowstone Island, Washington.
Read Nala’s article titled “Zone Zero: Where Permaculture Meets the Arts” published in the Winter 2006 issue of Permaculture Activist Magazine.

Web Link - Paul Stamets has been a dedicated mycologist for over thirty years. Over this time, he has discovered and coauthored four new species of mushrooms, and pioneered countless techniques in the field of edible and medicinal mushroom cultivation. He has received several awards and distinctions for his work promoting bioremediation and mycoremediation.
He has written six books on mushroom cultivation, use and identification; his books Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms and The Mushroom Cultivator (coauthor) have long been hailed as the definitive texts of mushroom cultivation. His newest book is Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save The World.

Click here for more info on Pickathon Roots Music Festival, August 3-5

Web Link - The sound of the Portland, Oregon’s Foghorn Stringband could have come barreling through the grille-cloth of those big console radios in the living rooms of the 1950’s, when the traditional sounds of rural America were still on the minds of young musicians transferring the old-time music to a distinctively modern age. Their tight instrumental work and line-up - fiddle, banjo, mandolin, bass and guitar - is reminiscent of early bluegrass, but their powerful approach is whole-heartedly old-time, centered largely by the fiddle. Devoted to the interpretation and performance of American stringband music, their style encompasses early country music, the fiddle repertoire of the Southern Appalachians and the Midwest, and the stringband sounds of the Piedmont region. They are highly regarded by traditional music lovers, and have recently been tapped by one of the country’s most renowned musicians of the genre, Dirk Powell, to perform as the Dirk Powell Band. While they are committed to playing authentic old-time music, the members of Foghorn Stringband are not strict recreationists in costume; yet neither are they experimentalists of the digital age. Whether it’s on stage in a rock venue, a bluegrass festival, or at a dance in the Grange Hall, they further this great tradition through a profound belief that old-time music, played in a traditional way, is still relevant and very much alive in the 21st century.

Web Link - Jackstraw’s music springs from the traditional core of Bluegrass. The band mixes original and traditional songs, shaping them through wicked harmonies & ferocious pickin’. Playing over 200 shows a year, they have impressed and inspired critics and dancers around the country.
“, . . . comforting proof that the widening popularity of bluegrass threatens neither authenticity nor energy.” The Oregonian (2006)

Web Link - Sassparilla are street musicians hailing from the home of the blues, Chicago. They are synonymous with old Maxwell Street, famed for its blues, casual drinking, rows of garish saloons and street vendors.
“Their music often has a rumpled sound to it, as though they are tucking in their shirttails as they play. Other times, their compositions come together with a sudden smoothness or elegance.”
Since moving to Portland, Sassparilla has found themselves at the “heart of the Pohemian music movement” of Portland. “Bands embodying the latest evolution in the Portland music scene: the Pohemian fusion of turn-of-the-century musical traditions and carnivalesque performances.” St. Johns Sentinel (2006)
Sassparilla play Americana, blues, rag-blues from the 20’s and 30’s, country blues, barrelhouse blues, jug band and trance blues.

Web Link - Michael Meade is a renowned storyteller, author, and scholar of mythology, anthropology, and psychology. He combines hypnotic and fiery storytelling, street savvy perceptiveness, and spellbinding interpretations of ancient myths with a deep knowledge of cross-cultural rituals. His ability to tap into ancestral sources of wisdom to help people of today heal their communities inspires thousands of men and women throughout the United States, Canada, and the British Isles. His unique translations of age-old myths and symbols into culturally relevant, everyday language earned him an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Pacifica Graduate Institute. Michael is also the founder of Mosaic Multicultural Foundation, author of The Water of Life, co-editor of The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, and editor of the cross-cultural anthology on rites of passage: Crossroads: A Quest for Contemporary Rites of Passage.

Web Link - Everyone Orchestra will bring their infectiously entertaining brand of improvisational jams to the VBC 07. The show will feature group founder and conductor Matt Butler , as well as String Cheese Incident’s Michael Kang, longtim e Leftover Salmon bassist and EO regular Tye North, string wizard Darol Anger, keyboardist Asher Fulero , and more.
EO shows consistently focus on musical juxtaposition and the expansion of experiential boundaries, but as many can attest, the most intriguing aspect of Everyone Orchestra performances is their elimination of the “fourth wall,” encouraging and demanding a melding of audience members and performers in a way that few have previously experienced. In addition to an impressive musical experience, each EO appearance includes live painting too.
The list of Everyone Orchestra alumni reads like a who’s who of jam band music and beyond including members of The Grateful Dead, Phish, moe. , Derek Trucks Band, Railroad Earth, and Jimmy Herring, Adrian Belew, Taj Mahal and Maria Muldaur among a growing legion of other performers. Butler’s version of breaking down the barriers between musician and audience derives in part from desert art festival Burning Man’s ‘no spectators, only participants’ ethic and is undoubtedly influenced by his old friend and mentor Ken Kesey, the king of the Merry Pranksters.

Web Link - Deep Dark and downright massive tribal dub DJ set from Rain of Phutureprimitive

We will be converging one last time before we swirl our different ways to have french toast, orange juice, tea and coffee. Afterwards, we will offer two tours to check out what 10 whole days of local activation can do to transform place. There will be an inner-circle collective bike ride, and a bio-diesel bus taking others on a ride to the outer-circle.

Web Link - Jon Young has passionately researched and practiced techniques used by native cultures to mentor their children as naturalists, trackers and valued community members. He has combined the teachings of many cultures along with tools of modern field ecology to create powerful approaches to education that trigger our natural blueprint for learning. Jon founded Wilderness Awareness School in 1983. Since, Jon has shared his vision, skills and innovative thinking to spearhead initiatives in nature awareness training, wildlife tracking, permaculture, herbal studies, and mentoring.

- Portland Office of Transportation. Greg is a Traffic Safety Specialist for the Community and School Traffic Safety Partnership in the Portland Office of Transportation. He focuses on bicycle safety, crash data mapping and analysis, and assists with traffic calming, school traffic safety, and pedestrian safety. His background includes work with poverty and homeless issues (including working with the founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless), environmental issues (including research for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition about growth management issues), and has worked in various parts of Portland Transportation (traffic operations, bicycle parking, and technology).
Outside of work, Greg co-chairs the City Club of Portland’s Growth Management and Environment committee, volunteers with several local organizations, gardens, and plays the harmonica.

- Lydia Doleman teaches ecological construction and creative, community development practices in both northern and southern hemispheres. Her work in natural building is the most daring and ambitious in the NW region, transforming ordinary opportunities into spectacular, new forms of artistic expression. Her work with homeless people at Dignity Village, to build affordable housing at $187.00 per dwelling is a miracle, and her “Women’s Carpentry” courses have been life-transforming for scores of women. Lydia is the lead builder in the City Repair Project.

- Local Politician and champion of social and ecological justice.

Web Link - The Extra Action Marching Band, shuffle, loiter, charge, and crawl around embracing the environment and quite frequently those close by. Defying categorization, this mutant lovechild of traditional peripatetic music and ecstatic turmoil consists of a hypnotically driving drum section, a ear piercing all brass horn line with a touch bull horn sfx, which is lead by a brutally sexy and provocative flag team. Extra Action uses the history of marching bands combined with acoustically loud volumes and musical languages of the world to get people to recognize their own powers through interaction and involvement. Using this historic platform inconjunction with the musical traditions of New Orleans street bands combined with the horn-in-your-ear nature of Serbia/Roma gypsy trumpet bands over the complexities of the African/Latin beats together a very powerful (other) worldly sound and a captivating performance that is unique and unforgettable.

Web Link - March Fourth Marching Band has evolved into a high-energy, eclectic and mobile unit of good times, taking a Fellini-esque mix of Mardi Gras mayhem, afro beat, Mexican hustle, sultry samba, big band, and gypsy folk to the streets and parks, and the club and festival scene–anywhere people seek liberation through booty-shaking beats, driving bass, and high-flying horn arrangements. Accompanied by their surrealist troupe of stilt-dancers, fire-spinners, and costumed beauties, they are a new love-party paradigm.

- is internationally recognized as a prominent permaculture teacher, designer and speaker. She is the founder of Sustainable Living Designs (SLD), The Permaculture Institute of Northern California (PINC), and Regenerative Design Institute (RDI). Penny has been working professionally in the land management and development field for 25 years and has extensive experience in all phases of ecologically sound landscape design and construction as well as the use of natural non-toxic building materials. She specializes in site planning & design of resource-rich landscapes, integrating rainwater collection, edible landscaping, pond and water systems, habitat development and watershed restoration for homes, co-housing communities, businesses and diverse-yield perennial farms. Penny is currently on the board of the Solar Living Institute in Hopland, California and has served on the Redwood Empire Chapter of the Green Building Council. In addition, Penny Livingston-Stark is serving on The Institute of Noetic Sciences’ Site Development Committee. She co-created the Ecological Design Program and its curriculum at the San Francisco Institute of Architecture and co-founded the West Marin Grower’s Group, West Marin Farmer’s Market and the Community Land Trust Association of Marin.

Featuring Kazum, Cirque Rojo, Sustainable Living Roadshow, Batty’s Hippodrome, Krebsic Orchestra, and more - is a journey deep into the world of the Circus and the nomadic culture that surrounds it, indigenous to no one place but with roots across the globe. Not only a show but a gathering of amazement, amusement, education and awareness, igniting the fire within us all to express ourselves creatively and be bound only by our hearts and imagination.
The Wanderlust Circus strives to be true to its words. Everything from William Batty’s message of “Liberty, Equality, Loyalty, and Self-Expression” to the Sustainable Living Roadshow’s mindful midway of environmental and sustainability games come directly from our hearts and we proudly stand by these ideals every day and night.

Web Link - 3 Leg Torso formed in 1996 as violin, cello and accordion trio with the mission of creating original modern chamber music for their unique instrumentation. Over the following years the band has expanded both its musical mission and its size to become a quintet that now performs its eclectic synthesis of chamber music, tango, klezmer, latin and world music. As principal composers, founding members Béla Balogh (on violin and trumpet) and Courtney Von Drehle (on accordion) provide the core of 3 Leg Torso’s sound. They are joined by veteran percussionist/mallet player Gary Irvine, the fastidious mallets/percussion of Kyle MacLowry and the fiery upright bass player Michael Papillo.

- For the past ten years, Helen has been trying to create what she calls “transformative theater”, that is, theater that goes to the root of society’s inequities and injustices in order to transform both the audience and the actors who take on the roles.
Helen Hill is the Playwright of Perfection. Her past work includes the critically acclaimed Filmore Hotel. The entire cast of Filmore Hotel were all current and former homeless people and all current residents of Dignity Village, a visionary homeless camp in Portland, Oregon. Much like her other works, Filmore Hotel was created from various personal experiences throughout Helen’s life.
Time Out of Mind, about Oregon’s Ku Klux Klan in the early 1920s, has been on tour for two years in rural high schools, performing arts centers, and theaters across Oregon, bringing a discussion of racial and religious intolerance into focus in small communities. Time Out of Mind is currently under contract with the State of Oregon’s Department of Revenue as part of their diversity awareness training program this fall.
“I like to work with ‘nonprofessional’ casts that have lived the material, I like to hand them a story or a framework and give them the freedom to reinterpret that story and make it entirely their own, because the empowerment of the actors leads to the empowerment all of who experience the performance. I believe that casting plays with people who have lived through poverty, oppression and other social injustices can break down walls between us and create a starting point for a wave of social change that extends to the audience and beyond.
I try to create living, instructive, transformative narratives in a theatrical framework. This work most closely recalls storytelling of old, when the cultural information of a tribe or society was held and transferred by storytellers who, through their art, provided a sense of continuity and social conscience.”

Web Link - Betty LaDuke is a highly accomplished painter, printmaker, activist, and teacher whose work celebrates cultural diversity and the planet we live on. It serves as a bridge between people, continents, and cultures by sharpening our sensitivity to life’s diversity. As the artist has commented, the current body of work honors the special relationship that we have with the earth, for when we honor the earth, we honor ourselves.
LaDuke has traveled to Asia, the South Pacific, Latin America, Africa and continues her journey. During her annual journeys, LaDuke always carries a sketchbook to record her impressions of people and how they relate to their environment. Later, in her Ashland, OR studio, these sketches are catalysts for her large acrylic paintings that evolve slowly between myth and reality. During these years, LaDuke has been featured in more than 200 one-person exhibitions through the United States. In addition to her artwork, she has published six books and four videos on her work and travels. She is an artist and activist who, has been an advocate for social change and racial equity, the rights of women, children, and the underprivileged, and of preserving our environment for future generations to come.

Web Link - Timothy Hull is from Whidbey Island Washington, and has toured over the past eight years bringing his songs, guitar, stories and humor to colleges, clubs, pubs coffee houses, and conferences, coast to coast. His style fits into formats ranging from rowdy scenes to formal halls. He is appreciated by a wide array of people - from political activists, to traditional music fans, punks to quiet people, lovers of a well told story, acoustic guitar enthusiasts, and funky people everywhere.

In Association with The Sustainable Business Network of Portland

Finding Our Way Home: Seven Generations Beyond

Salmon know it, going upriver. Monarch butterflies know how to find the pine grove in Michoacan. The doves that nest near my house in SW Portland know how to find this place in spring. And we humans–what question, story, song, lullaby, idea, or quest calls us here to Portland? Come join the Sustainable Business Network of Portland and writer/storyteller Kim Stafford as we invite you to relish the mix: taste, listen, remember, and follow for home. An interactive evening exploring this wonderful place we call Cascadia and giving voice to our stories, dreams and visions.

Web Link - Kim Stafford is a Portland native, and founder of the Northwest Writing Institute, a zone for experimental expression about place, identity, and story.He is the author of “Having Everything Right: Essays of Place,” and Muses Among Us: Eloquent Listening and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft.” That book includes the following manifesto: “In our time is a great thing not yet done–it is the marriage of Woody Guthrie’s gusto and the Internet. It is the composing and wide sharing of songs and stories by those with voice for those with need.”

The Sustainable Business Network of Portland (SBNP) is an alliance of more than 350 locally owned independent businesses, service providers, community organizations and individuals committed to building a more socially, environmentally and financially sustainable local economy while preserving and enhancing our sense of Place through a Local First campaign encouraging citizens to choose locally owned businesses.