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PBF Cover to Cover: SPEKTRUM Tea Service

Sat, Nov 5, 2022 from 7:00 pm - 8:00 pm PDT
Little Barn, 3121 SE Taylor, Portland, OR 97214

Nick Jaina is an author and musician living in Oakland, California. His 2015 memoir Get It While You Can was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s, Atlantic Monthly, Wilderness House Review, Somnambulist, Oregon Journal of the Humanities, and many other places. He has composed music scores for feature films, such as the indie comedy All Sorts and the forest fire documentary Elemental. He also co-founded a ballet collective in New York City, in which he was the musical composer and worked with dancers from Julliard and New York City Ballet and performed works at the Baryshnikov Center and BAM Center for the Arts.

His new book, SPEKTRUM, is a literary re-creation of an immersive light and sound exhibit of the same name that he co-created in the Santa Cruz Mountains in 2018. That installation was composed of seven rooms, each one a different color of the rainbow. Each guest walked through one at a time in silence, reading beautiful letters placed for them, playing a mysterious piano that sounded more beautiful than anything they had heard before. The Santa Cruz Good Times said of the performance, “Spektrum challenges what art looks and feels like. It’s a range of emotion and otherworldly experiences all tucked away in a little wooden box in the woods.”

The book SPEKTRUM is in second person present tense, and upon reading it, you feel a spell being cast on you. Each chapter is a different color, and as you read through it, you feel like your presence somehow changes the words on the page. It is published by Modern Mythographer Press in the fall of 2022.

The live presentation of the book SPEKTRUM is a tea service that occurs in small rooms across the country. To simulate the intimacy of the original exhibition, the seating is limited to eight people maximum for each show. When the guests arrive, they spin a color wheel that determines the color for the hour. The lighting is changed to transform the room, the guests take a seat and are served tea. Nick begins looping guitar music to create a sound bed for the recitation of the appropriate chapter of the book, which he has memorized.

The combination of all these factors makes for a complete unique experience. Part performance, part gathering, part workshop, it is inescapable and unforgettable.

Event contact: Nick Jaina, nickjaina@gmail.com

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