Past
NIGHT TRIPPER is at once an outdoor ritual, social event, forest walk, and concert that unfolds in the theatre of the outdoors at the first glow of dusk. The piece features dancers, art objects, a local choir, and potent forest spirits. Ancient mythology meets a vision of contemporary life where dreams and reality merge into an otherworldly tale. NIGHT TRIPPER explores the idea of nature as a place of healing, destruction, immanence, and transcendence.
Learn moreFor this culminating conversation, join PICA's Creative Exchange Lab artists will share their experiences and interpretations of the festival and residency, including TBA as a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration, critical inquiry, creative research, and community. Moderated by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator, PICA.
Learn more2015 marks 20 years of PICA. Join us along the TBA Festival Flight: Local Legacies & Landscapes to reflect on our current context, and shifts in the local landscape, with a focus on how to continue nurturing thought-provoking contemporary art in Portland and ensure that our artists thrive.
Learn moreOne of two TBA Festival Flights, Identity & The Body reflects a range of artists from diverse disciplines who work across dance/choreography and interdisciplinary performance to engage the embodied politics and poetics of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and their intersections.
Learn moreBorn from Bronx street gang culture in the 1970's, Breaking became a worldwide dance style by the ‘80's. Fever One of NYC's legendary Rocksteady Crew has lectured on Hip Hop history, theory, and culture and taught Breaking around the world, including top universities. Wear comfortable clothes and be ready to explore hip hop history as well as Breaking basics. Movement; All Levels.
Learn moreDakhaBrakha is a force of intricate vocal harmonies, pounding drums, and murmuring cello that builds to an anthem and invocation of visual spectacle. Droning vocals, crimson beads, and punk sensibilities serve as backdrop for their their mission to bring the music of Ukraine to the world. DakhaBrakha is intimately tied to their homeland—crafting new sonic worlds for traditional songs with one foot in urban avant-garde theatre and one foot in Ukrainian village life. Accompanied by a sweeping range of instrumentation, DakhaBrakha crafts a powerful performance at the crossroads of Ukrainian folklore, politics, pop, punk, and theatre.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session join Lisa Jarrett, Artist and DePriest Visiting Professor of Art & Ethnic Studies at Portland State University, in exploring artist Dana Michel's practice and her work Yellow Towel. Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn moreIn light of rapid economic development in West Coast cities, how are local artists and cultural institutions faring? What opportunities and challenges have arisen? How do race, class, and other factors influence our experiences? How do intergenerational artists and arts leaders recount Portland’s past and imagine its future? What can we learn from other cities’ shifting landscapes? Featuring Victoria Frey (PICA, Portland); Andre Middleton (Black Creative Collective and RACC, Portland); Julie Phelps (CounterPulse, San Francisco) and more. Moderated by Ethan Seltzer, Professor of Urban Studies & Planning, Portland State University.
Learn moreDana Michel discusses complex performance work Yellow Towel and its explorations of race, gender, body politics, and their intersections. With Lisa Jarrett, Artist and DePriest Visiting Professor of Art and Ethnic Studies, Portland State University.
Learn moreJoin PICA and Know Your City as we look back on PICA’s 20-year history through a tour of central Portland! Together, we’ll see sites that shaped our colorful past; share memories of intimate moments and outrageous spectacles; and consider the city’s arts, urban, and economic landscape through the lens of PICA’s pioneering itinerant model. We’ll visit our place of origin; venues for groundbreaking exhibitions and performances; infamous parties and costume balls; early TBA sites transformed from raw warehouses to magical festival hubs; and more. Guest speakers will share unforgettable stories of how PICA and Portland have evolved—and what it means to our future as artists, an arts institution, and a city.
Learn morePhilippe Quesne and Vivarium Studios creates a technical theatre lab that modifies genre conventions to generate an ambiguous universe. The work eschews mastery in favor of curiosity through humor, malaise, questioning, and an upended world vision. In this workshop, we will consider the importance of space and set through Quesne’s rigorous practice. Theatre Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreYellow Towel take its name from Dana Michel’s childhood habit of wearing a yellow towel to emulate blonde girls. Influenced by the aesthetics of fashion, queer culture, and comedy, Michel creates a richly textured and gut wrenching account of black culture stereotypes. Yellow Towel is a conceptual performance work that explores an abstracted marginal character in a performative ritual. This political, honest, and fearless work warrants attention as Michel questions socially ingrained constructions of normativity.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session, join Choreographer and Performance Artist Keith Hennessy in exploring the practice of Radhouane El Meddeb and his work Au temps où les arabes dansaient... Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn morePhilippe Quesne shares the unique artistic vision of innovative theatre lab Vivarium Studios and their TBA project, La Mélancolie des Dragons . With Kate Bredeson, Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College.
Learn moreIn this workshop, we will create short, original solo performance works with built-in coping mechanisms for the inevitable accident of live performance. We will employ/practice inexperience, loopholes, Fibonacci, plagiarism, idiosyncrasies, performance scores, and anything else we want. Please bring one problematic object from your world. Theatre / Movement / Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreOpposing Forces utilizes tropes of contemporary performance to expose fears around the feminine in our culture through the hyper masculine dance style of Breaking. With curiosity, vulnerability, and power, five world-class B-Boys uncover binary perceptions of gender using a range of dance contexts: battling, commercial dance, and cyphering. Featuring Fever One of Rocksteady Crew, Brysen "Just Be" Angeles of Massive Monkees, Alfredo "Free" Vergara of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Mozes Lateef Sa'Leem of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Michael O'Neal Jr of Beat Hippies/CHPT 1, an original score played live by WD4D, stage design by Ben Zamora, and lighting design by Amiya Brown.
Learn moreSeminal French director and TBA alum Philippe Quesne returns with the large-scale theater work La Mélancolie des dragons. Filled with Quesne’s disarming wit and hints of magical realism La Mélancolie is set amid a snowy landscape of classic rock and medieval recorders where a band of metalheads is on a quest to build an amusement park devoted to hard-rock. To create his works, Quesne employs a domino effect—the last scene of a work falls into the first scene of the next. La Melancolie was born at the end of his celebrated work L’Effet de Serge (TBA:08). With an ingenious hand for reinventing the conventions of theater, Quesne smartly constructs La Melancolie into a work that celebrates the absurd and finds the profound joy of friendship.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session, join Seattle-based dance, theatre, and performance critic Omar Willey in exploring artist Amy O'Neal's Opposing Forces. Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn moreGood Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag (DH) is a live, conceptual, one-hour hybrid morning / late-night / children’s show for adults, hosted by everyone’s favorite no one, Dynasty Handbag.
Learn moreSeattle-based dance and theatre critic Omar Willey joins Amy O’Neal and collaborators to discuss Opposing Forces through the lenses of gender, race, hip hop, and aesthetic experiments with Breaking.
Learn moreIn this provocative performative lecture, renowned artist, curator, and educator Marc Bamuthi Joseph uses poem and image to catalog his arc from working on issues of environment in West Oakland to premiering a 6-week installation for Creative Time in New York City's Central Park. The 7-year journey in between describes an individual and collective prototype for uncovering narratives of black joy in these American hours of chaos. Along the way, Bamuthi will touch on the ethics of hip-hop generation organizing; as the true frontline organizers of the current Black Lives Matter movement are women, gender neutral, or queer, we are faced with the question of how the politics of the dance floor become inert when exposed to the politics of social liberation.
Learn moreFranco-Tunisian choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb illuminates cultural, historical, and aesthetic influences including complex explorations of gender, ethnicity, and the body. With Angela Mattox, Artistic Director, PICA.
Learn moreWe will focus on the performer’s presence in space when light (natural or artificial) designs or denies vision. A series of reflections will be initiated around the body and its relationship to memory. We will discuss the problem of translating the performer’s inner experience during research and development into something readable to the outside.
Learn moreFrench-Tunisian Choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb carefully observed his mother and his aunts preparing couscous and the national dishes served at his family’s gatherings from marriages to circumcisions to mourning rituals… In Je danse et vous en donne à bouffer, El Meddeb expresses his love of preparation, and the sensuality of food in a form of sacredness and performative sharing. In this performance, El Meddeb is immersed in his loves of dancing and cooking. Seated before his couscous maker, he performs and prepares couscous with generosity and poetry.
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