Past
Conceived by Lois Weaver and inspired by Marleen Gorris’ film Antonia's Line, The Long Table is an experimental open public forum, a hybrid performance-installation-roundtable-discussion-dinner-party designed to facilitate dialogue through the gathering together of people with common interests. Discussion topics will consider what constitutes queer art and performance today, the ways in which artists are engaging queer identities and experiences across forms and disciplines, and how queer politics show up in performance and in life. Moderated by Shawna Lipton, TBA Guest Scholar and Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art.
Learn moreTBA artists jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham share insights and influences from their TBA project and larger performance series, Let ‘im Move You, including explorations of J-Sette dance that originated in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, other Black queer dance vocabularies, and the limits, imaginations, and tensions of performance contextualized by both White aesthetics and institutions as well as the sites and spaces of predominantly Black neighborhoods. With Andrew J. Brown/Sister James, TBA Guest Scholar and Asst. Professor of Performance Art, Fairhaven College Western Washington University.
Learn moreNXT LVL is back at PICA bringing another epic party for social justice back to Portland. In January, they brought some of the West Coast’s most exciting musicians for an all night dance party to raise money and bring awareness. They’ll be bringing that same energy and same mission to TBA—their surprise line-up will be one you won’t want to miss.
Learn moreCombining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) explores aging, anxiety, hidden desires, and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and an ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the performance troupe Split Britches lace this interactive piece with playful urgency and lethargy, to encourage discussion about the political landscape. In the “Situation Room,” twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weaves in satirical insights and humour. The two pioneering theatre-makers see undisturbed ordnances as a metaphor for the disregarded potential in elders, and hope to uncover buried resources in us all.
Learn moreIn connection with some of the broader themes in Kaneza Schaal’s and Cornell Alston’s JACK &, this discussion highlights local contemporary art practices that directly engage issues and experiences of incarceration, re-entry, and prison abolition and reform. Artists, participants, and facilitators from Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice Program and the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) discuss the art programs they have been organizing both inside and outside of CRCI, a minimum security state prison within Portland city limits. Created in collaboration with current and formerly imprisoned artists, writers, and musicians, these programs focus on conceptual art, Social Practice, comedy, and photography.
Learn moreKaneza Schaal and Cornell Alston join TBA Guest Scholar C. Riley Snorton to discuss their collaborative TBA performance, JACK &, sharing insights into the multidisciplinary project’s range of influences and references to social codes, from prison re-entry, to mid-century sitcoms, to feminist painters, to Black debutante balls. With C. Riley Snorton, TBA Guest Scholar, Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago.
Learn moreS1 at TBA is especially poignant given the 2016 Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, California, which resulted in new laws and regulations that have impacted artist-run spaces and artist communities around the country. Organizations and groups of artists are being forced to relocate, shift their program- ming, or shutter entirely. No exception to these pressures, S1 is considering the future of how to share and experience art together. Bringing the spirit of their programming to TBA is just the beginning.
Learn moreLet ‘im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu poe & Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from the artists’ seven-year research into J-Sette performance—the performance of joy and the conundrum of Black joy. The series currently consists of three live performance works and an installation. A Study uses J-Sette movement and performance structures as jumping-off points for experimentation with the role of strategy in collaborative creation and presentation. Rhythm, pattern, and attention become mechanisms for the artists to situate themselves in play, and to frame a movement conversation with primarily White audiences. This Is a Success explores J-Sette in relation to notions of African-American exceptionalism as expressed through middle-class, Black American values reiterated within the J-Sette form. The work continues the artists’ research of rhythm as a vehicle into subversion and satisfaction.
Learn moreQuestioning contemporary dance’s predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity, and the desexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity, and sass. The work weaves together vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine posturing. Four women execute a repetitive, complex set of movements that evolves, as each rotates hypnotically within the confines of a square. Over time, the meditative rigor of their steps dissolves into a tangle of commotion, blurring the distinction between the mundane and the glamorous.
Learn moreCloth making—among the oldest forms of human cultural production—provides inspiration for Ann Hamilton’s multi-venue project, habitus, located at three sites: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Municipal Pier 9, and on social media. habitus weaves the mediums of text, textile, and image together for an imaginative and tactile exchange between artist and audience. As cloth swaddles us at birth and covers us in sleep; as a folded blanket can tell a story of trade; as a flag carries the symbol of a nation, Hamilton’s multi-venue exhibition invites us to touch and be touched by the fabric of human experience.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar C. Riley Snorton (Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago) will present a lecture on his current research at the intersection of Black, Africana, trans, queer, and performance studies. A distinguished interdisciplinary scholar and writer, Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
Learn moreKaren Sherman joins PICA’s Erin Boberg Doughton (Artistic Director & Curator of Performance) for a conversation about her TBA performance Soft Goods and its thematic connections to one of the Festival’s major through-lines—the visible, invisible and precarious “work” of being an artist, arts worker, and citizen in the context of performing arts, cultural industry, creative economy, and our political moment.
Learn moreTo kickoff the 16th TBA Festival, step into the thriving Pacific Northwest street-and-club dance community and experience a 7-to-smoke freestyle dance battle, The Beautiful Street, where dancers will compete, round for round, in the styles of breakdance, hip-hop, house, locking, popping, vogue, waacking, and more. Celebrating individuality, creativity, and technique, freestyle dancers are fueled by the music, each other, and the crowd. This battle will engage and inspire. The dance battle will be followed by an epic dance party!
Learn morePICA’s Time-Based Art Festival activates the city of Portland, Oregon, with contemporary art projects that bring artists and audiences together, creating a vibrant community through live performances, music, screenings, workshops, talks, and visual art installations. TBA is interdisciplinary, and champions those artists who are challenging forms and working across mediums.
Learn moreswallow is a multi-channel video installation of visual gestures from contemporary television and film exploring parts of black femme existence considered less desirable for consumption. what resistance sits wet and warm in the offal? swallow considers the different imperatives around consumption that exist for black bodies and what it feels like to hunger for things that catch in your throat. how do we read black femme queerness into, underneath and behind these visual spaces? how does it look, feel and sound, to open things up so that we can fit inside?
Learn moreBETWEEN. highlights artists working within the queer and trans diaspora, and the unique voices coming from between or beyond the binary. This exhibition aims to queer the curatorial process, taking into account current visibility politics and presenting the work of LGBTQIA2S+ artists in ways that challenge normative art world conventions.
Learn moreSubharmonic: A Sonic Arts Symposium spans two immersive days of interactive workshops, thought-provoking panels, and live performances for artists and audiences of all experience levels to explore, discuss, and engage with a broad range of contemporary and experimental sound art and its influences. Programs will touch on electronic and noise music, video and light installation, film and video, space and architecture, racial and gender equity in the field, and more.
Learn morePortland’s Inaugural South Asian American Arts Festival will be an all-ages, multi-cultural celebration that showcases and highlights South Asian arts and artists living and working in America.
Learn moreDance provocateurs Luke George and Daniel Kok exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience. In order to unravel shared lines of connection, to suspend tension and to unleash collective desires, Kok and George look to macramé, sailors’ knots, Chinese knots and rope bondage to weave together an interactive experience of collectivity. Bunny is a nickname given to the person being tied in rope bondage. In this work, we ask ourselves this question: What if everyone (in the theatre) is a Bunny?
Learn moreCollaborators Dorothée and Holland met at the 2016 TBA Festival as part of PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab Residency. Now, they have come together to realize Munyaneza’s bold, visionary, and deeply determined new performance work, Unwanted. In dialogue with Lisa Jarrett, artist and Asst. Professor of Community and Context Arts, Portland State University.
Learn morePart song and dance, part IBQTPOC prom, but mostly dedicated to honoring the labor and intelligence of indigenous and brown punk energy that continues the fight against heteropatriachy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Join us as we honor the revolutionary spirit of activists, artists, and lovers whose lives were lost, whose lives are threatened, and those who are yet to come. This is as much a sweaty celebration as it is a ceremony. Albuquerque, New Mexico’s angry pop punk trio, Weedrat, and San Antonio’s riot grrrl chicano punk band, FEA, will provide live music along with local poetry that will help set the tone for the evening. Video projections, live printing, and punk/riot grrrl music will do the rest. Bring your beautiful body, and let’s collectively celebrate how far we’ve come as community while we smash heteropatriarchy to pieces.
Learn moreThis spring, rapper 2 Chainz announced his “Pretty Girls <3 Trap Music” tour featuring a Gospel Choir (Trap Choir). Church in the Trap House, in conversation with Josef Sorret’s “Spirit in the Dark”, explores the religious themes and aesthetics in contemporary trap music, and what happens when the lines of sacred and secular are blurred, removed, and combined.
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