Past
Tender Table is a series of stories about food, family, and identity told by femmes of color and nonbinary people of color. For each event, storytellers prepare a dish connected to the experiences they’ve shared. Audiences are invited to listen generously, spend time communally, and sample the food.
Learn moreTBA artists Andrew Schneider, Raquel André, and Alicia ayo Ohs employ contrasting styles of theatre performance but are equally interested in unanswerable questions about the human condition and our relationships to self, others, and modern culture. In radically different ways, these artists have also worked with local artists and non-artists to develop and perform their TBA pieces. This conversation will explore the artists’ distinct projects and processes as well as the overlaps in their practices. With Kate Bredeson and Peter Ksander, Reed College Theatre Faculty.
Learn moreTBA food vendors Big Elephant Kitchen, Mis Tacones, and Mija/Mija in discussion about the intersecting economies and politics of contemporary art, immigration, identity, and local food culture. Moderated by Jodie Cavalier, PICA Public Engagement Coordinator. Part of our refreshed TBA Food Program curated by Spencer Byrne-Seres. Lunch from local vendors will be for sale—come hungry!
Learn moreThis performance takes the form of a slow walk through a section of the city. All are welcome to participate. Please contact the TBA Box Office for any questions about or requests for mobility or accessibility accommodation. Audience will be asked to remove their shoes during parts of this performance. Please that this performance is not able to be ASL interpreted or have other accommodations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.
Learn moreBlurring the lines between fiction and reality, Awaiting Oblivion... follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked artists Tim Smith Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo to create a performance that will share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the '60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters). We follow Tim, Jeffrey, and AO in a radical flurry of street art, secret messages, and performance scores in a poetic fight for survival.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE Andrew Schneider and his team follow up their revolutionary, OBIE award-winning tech-theater masterpiece YOUARENOWHERE, with a mind-bending examination of what constitutes a single life, and the endless possible outcomes at the precise moment of death.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Contralto is an hourlong work for video, strings, and percussion. The piece features aspects of experimental music and documentary, with a cast of transgender women that speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises, accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes various conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE With spare aesthetics and focused intensity, choreographer Nacera Belaza invites the audience into an immersive experience through her vision and artistic process. Compagnie Nacera Belaza takes us on a journey through a trio of introspective, meditative and transcendent dance works, (whose titles translate as as The Night, The Crossing, and The Wire), revealing the evolution of her work as one would experience viewing three different paintings by a single artist in a gallery. Belaza’s hope is for each piece to become something new in the audience's imagination, that one’s gaze is sharpened when let in on the inner workings of the artist’s mind.
Learn moreUtopian Visions Art Fair (UVAF) is a platform for artists, gallerists, and curators to present projects that are speculative and working towards possible futures.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholars Andrew J. Brown/Sister James (Asst. Professor, Performance Practice, Fairhaven College/Western Washington University) and Shawna Lipton (Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art) present 30-minute back-to back lectures on their current research, thinking, and reflections on Festival projects, performances, and experiences. Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
Learn moreLoosely based on the original turn-of-the-century play by Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande is about love, silence, and the ineffable nature of human emotion. It bears the fluctuating trait of tragicomedy (funny/sad), and involves timekeeping, constant weeping, and the symbolism that epitomized the original play. As Pelléas et Mélisande engages a mystery it does not understand, the writers hope their audience might slip into this mystery, to find a new and surprising way to commune.
Learn moreFollowing their recent experience in PICA’s Spring 2018 Creative Exchange Lab residency program, current TBA artists Autumn Knight, Tim Smith-Stewart, Mariana Valencia, and Ji Yang come together for a conversation about their respective projects and performance practices. Artists will pose questions to each other, along with moderation by Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE ALBUM is an evening-length solo performance that researches my herstory from a tableaux of personal narratives, a product of approaches that compound ethnography, memoir, and choreography. Uniting text, song, and dance inside of the content of an album― a picture album, a song album, an autobiographical album, a herstorical album― the work finds ways to be an archive, or altar, for my body. My relationship to urbanity, vampires, love, and marginality arise with equal importance, as I orbit around the primary curiosity: I'm not sure who will write a herstory about me, so I'm starting now so that they can have good notes. In ALBUM, I make visible the surround, a chorus of influences that have shaped who I am.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: In Collection of Lovers, Raquel André envisions a particular collection—one made up of lovers. Between Lisbon, Ponta Delgada, Rio de Janeiro, Loulé, Minde, Paredes de Coura, Sever do Vouga, Ovar, Manaus, Barreiro, Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo, and Warsaw, André has collected 161 lovers. People of all nationalities, genders and ages, agree to meet her in an unfamiliar apartment, to build a fictional intimacy within the span of an hour. Throughout each city she travels, she encounters more lovers and the collection grows. These encounters are documented by photograph, to serve as content for an ever-evolving performance—to be further mediated in books, theater, T.V., and other formats. Collection of Lovers serves as a seemingly infinite archive, to show what a collection of relationships might mean. Throughout this peculiar body of work, André falls into a new abyss each time the door opens to a new lover, and fiction and reality become irresistibly entwined.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Sanity TV investigates the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche through a fictional talk show wherein there is no distinction between sanity or insanity. The interviews begin routinely, then slowly unravel toward something unrecognizable. The “guest” ultimately surrenders a position of authority, even if that authority is beyond their own ideas of self, if only for the duration of the interview.
Learn moreExperimental composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies shares insights and influences on her TBA project Contralto, including how it reflects her broader artistic practice that subversively examines psychoacoustics, queer and trans identities, and performance art. With musician and writer Sarah Dougher, Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies, Portland State University.
Learn moreSyd Barrett and Nina Simone. Curtis Mayfield and Richard Nixon. These are some of the radically differing voices juxtaposed within Vinyl Equations, a performance that presents a series of vinyl records in unusual combinations to generate the beginnings of an alternative, non-linear, non-genre based history of recorded music, in strictly analogue terms. Accompanied by a single record turntable, artist and writer Robin Deacon will share a collection of stories, lectures and possible dance routines that aim to uncover strange echoes and oblique similarities between the records he has chosen for analysis. From describing his childhood fear of Joy Division album covers, to the contemporary search for an obscure record of Caribbean folk songs featuring the voice of his mother, Vinyl Equations shifts between the realms of direct autobiographical account and fictional speculation in an approach that has come to characterize Robin Deacon’s work.
Learn moreSassafras, Cypress & Indigo—Black Screen Images and the (e)motive Notion of Freakiness is a lecture performance by Vaginal Davis, the internationally-revered, intersexed doyenne of intermedia arts and sciences. She takes public discourse to Dementia 13 levels as she spells out the queer and blatino experience in her own inimitable fashion, creating new words out of thin air and crashing, bull-in-a-Madame-Mau-china-shop style, over notions of propriety and reality. In short, her work can be described as disheveled, humorous, and rebellious.
Learn morePICA’s current cohort of Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence will make brief presentations about their current projects and broader artistic practice. Fall 2018 Lab artists include: Gordon Hall (NYC); Victoria Hunt (Australia); C. Davida Ingram; Tiona Nekkia McClodden (Philadelphia, PA); Roza Moshtaghi (Oslo/Tehran); Pepper Pepper (Portland, OR); and ariella tai (Portland, OR). A Q&A moderated by PICA’s Artistic Directors to follow. Don’t miss this festival favorite!
Learn moreAN INFECTED SUNSET is an ekphrastic long-form prose poem first conceived in August, 2016, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, police killings of unarmed Black men, and in the midst of the Standing Rock #NODAPL Resistance. During the writing of the poem, the settler colonial nation-state elected the 45th president of this colonized country, which revealed a sudden revival of extreme white supremacist nationalism. As the social landscape evolved, the Liberated Poem emerged as an offering to Indigenous communities and landscapes that strive for a decolonial and sovereign future, emancipated from white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial trauma drama. This performance poem is a reflection on queer sex, survival and death politics, indigenous identity, settler and heteronormative romanticism, environmental injustice, and the importance of honoring community.
Learn moreTBA artist Robin Deacon (Chair of Performance, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) shares insights into his TBA solo performance, Vinyl Equations, drawing on personal and political histories of music, family, and Afro-Caribbean diaspora. With Peter Simensky, Chair, MFA Visual Studies, Pacific NW College of Art.
Learn moreFIN DE CINEMA is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the second year in a row, with a reprise performance of their reimagined score to Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast (originally performed at Holocene in January of 2018). This year’s show will be composed and performed by Like A Villain, Patricia Wolf, John Niekrasz, Jonathan Sielaff, Amenta Abioto, and Noah Bernstein.
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Weird Allen Kaprow (WAK) presents self-karaoke, a new body of video, installation, and performance work that repurposes pop melodies to explore the political dimensions of self-care in our crumbling late capitalist democracy. Self-Karaoke features new songs and performances by special guest collaborators.
Learn moreNIC Kay discusses the TBA edition of Pushit!, a series of iterative “exercises” that question the limits and (im)possibilities of choreography and freedom, and engage the politics of resistance and reparation in the context of racialized space, neoliberal economy, emotional labour, and Black lives. With d.a. carter, Asst. Professor of Black Studies, Portland State University.
Learn more