Past
Calling all Lovers, Creators, Change-makers, Hustlers, Baby Mamas, Nation Builders, Dreamers, Dancers, Revolutionaries, Freedom Fighters, Spiritual Gangsters, and Everyone in Between. YGBPortland and DUG come together to offer you a multi-sensory community experience that will feel like no dance party you have ever stepped into.
Learn moreAs part of an installation in PICA’s annex, Sara Magenheimer presents her new video, Best is Man’s Breath Quality, in which an ancient jellyfish suggests how new positions can inform our capabilities to heal. His deep-ocean vantage allows him to comment (through an authoritative voice-over) on a truer spectrum of human behavior seen up above; and his capacity for inflicting pain on human bodies finds parallels in our capacity to embody the more nebulous and unruly forces in life. With performances featuring singing and narration, Magenheimer explores how language mutates and reproduces itself in culture.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars d.a. carter and Robin Deacon present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s practice shifted dramatically. In a series of simple performances, the artist tells stories from his life and attempts to play one good song. Solano has exhibited internationally at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and is represented by Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City. In 2016, Solano was in residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab Program.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary theatre and performance artist and Reed alum Tina Satter joins Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Asst. Professor of Theatre, Reed College) for a conversation about her creative process and the influences and inspiration behind her TBA performance project, Ghost Rings.
Learn moreSounds et al presents Apperceptive Moment. Sound artists Ben Glas, Dolphin Midwives, Samson Stilwell and Amenta Abioto mix sound, visuals and movement into a cohesive exploration of the senses. The experimental performance will engage with acoustics, psychoacoustics, physical interaction with sound, movement, music and noise, to lead the audience on a journey through time and space.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Ghost Rings a narrative of friendship and family-making unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Jo Lampert form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance. Ghost Rings has previously been performed at New York Live Arts and Abrons Arts Center, as part of American Realness.
Learn more“Nothing without the sound / won’t show me things / I need to hear you talking.” —Fred Moten
Learn moreDead Thoroughbred artists sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin discuss process, concept, collaboration and their new TBA performance project in depth with Sampada Aranke (Asst. Professor, Art History, Theory, & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Kemi Adeyemi (Asst. Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Seattle).
Learn moreDrawing on his versatile 3+ octave voice, videos, monologues, and songs, Joseph Keckler delivers highlights of his work in an evening of wild miniature operas about contemporary life, haunted torch songs, and narratives infused with humor and longing.
Learn moreTight. Moving. Aural. Physical. Breath. Beat. Lost. Loose. Breathless. Minutes? Months? Meters? Monsters? Monograms? Macaroons? 15 m = ? Four ways. Samiya Bashir dreamcasts Portland poets Shayla Lawson and Dao Strom, plus special guest Ronaldo V. Wilson and collaborating artist Roland Dahwen Wu, as together they guide poetry through space. Four ways. Solve for the poem. What? See for yourself.
Learn moreBecca Blackwell shares insights into the creation of They, Themself, and Schmerm, including themes of gender and transition, strategies of humor, and forms of comedy and personal narrative. In dialogue with TBA Guest Scholar bart fitzgerald and Shawna Lipton, Chair, MA in Critical Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreFin de Cinema is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue & nightclub, Holocene. Fin de Cinema was established in 2009, and allows Portland-based pop and experimental musicians to re-interpret the soundtracks to classic art films. Fin de Cinema is debuting Andrei Tarkovksy’s The Mirror (1975) with a reimagined live score composed and performed by Golden Retriever, Brown Calculus (Members of Tribe Mars), Palm Dat and Noah Bernstein (members of Shy Girls), and Dylan Stark.
Learn moreDT is peri-conceptual, dis-experimental, and a-nihilist. DT is a blackened performance that is never not happening. DT is après-queer and post-ratchet. DT is anti anti-capital capital. DT is heavy evasion-- worthless.
Learn moreComprised of her signature story-driven stand-up and scored by sensual homemade pop, Erin Markey’s Boner Killer is an intimate musical conversation between what Markey thinks she can’t have and how she’d have it if she could. Driven by Whitney Houston’s lesbian mythologies, Europe™, and a Pretty Woman accident, Markey and bandmate Emily Bate sacrifice their lives to transform personal humiliations into naked feminist hope.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: An evening of protest songs to soothe your despair and stoke your outrage, unless Morgan screws it up! Drawing on the tradition of protest albums, stand-up comedy, new age ritual, experimental narrative, and cabaret, Morgan Bassichis Sings Protest Songs is an evening of queer world-making and unmaking accompanied by Senior Energy featuring Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute, vocals), Kyle Combs (electronics, percussion, vocals), Rhys Ziemba (bass), and Sam Greenleaf Miller (percussion, vocals).
Learn moreRECORD RELEASE SHOW: EMA (Erika M. Anderson) has been part of the West Coast noise and experimental music / performance scene for over 10 years. Originally from South Dakota, Anderson moved to LA and began playing with noise folk legends Amps For Christ before forming the group Gowns with Ezra Buchla. Gowns released the ground-breaking Red State in 2007, combining noise and drone elements with lyrical singing and melodies in ways that were rare at that time. After the breakup of Gowns, EMA released her breakout solo record Past Life Martyred Saints in 2011, which topped many critics "Best Of" lists that year. Since then she has continued to refine her unique sonic palette of synth drones, spoken narrative, and heavy guitar hooks. In 2015, she expanded into durational performance and installation, including performances at MoMA PS1 and The Barbican Centre that involved virtual reality. In August 2017, she released her latest record Exile In The Outer Ring. This TBA late night performance will be the first stop on her international tour supporting the record. DJ madison moore closes the night with all-encompassing bass and queer techno vibes.
Learn moreBIGHT OF THE TWIN tells the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Hazel Hill McCarthy III's journey to Ouidah in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodoun (Voodoo) religion.
Learn moreIn celebration of Pepper Pepper and friends’ fifth and final edition of Critical Mascara: A Post-Realness Drag Ball at TBA, don’t miss this roundtable and mimosa kiki by and for the growing Pacific Northwest ballroom scene. A diverse group of local dancers and performers will come together to get critical and connect about their practice and presence.
Learn moreIn collaboration with dramaturg Kate Bredeson (Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College), this afternoon series will illuminate the work of dramaturgs in dance and new performance.
Learn morecvllerjerx (angelica maria millan lozano, maximiliano carlos - raphael francisco martinez) exclaim “nothing is civilized anymore. esta noche the kids get loud! they’re not going to bed early tonight. ART AS BRAT through clothes, poetry, performance and dance.”” As resident artists within the festival the collaborators will interrogate and celebrate the spaces art and audiences inhabit while exploring the value of collective and absurd outbursts en un mundx locx.
Learn moreUS West Coast Premiere: Part classic standup comedy special, part teen zine vomit confessional, They, Themself and Schmerm is Becca’s disturbingly hilarious personal tale of being adopted into a Midwestern religious family, trained to be a girl, molested, and plagued by the question, “How do I become a man and do I even want that?”
Learn moreInspired by the art & life of James Baldwin, Stew explores Baldwin’s trailblazing legacy through songs co-written by longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, co-creator, along with Stew, of the Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange. For TBA:17, the two will present a stripped down, intimate version of Notes of a Native Song, which places at the forefront Stew's intensely personal & problematic relationship with Baldwin's work. Stew’s uniquely incisive lyrics combine with rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz in this powerful homage to the inspiring writer, who famously confronted issues of gender, race, and class distinction.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bassichis will present an evening of “new and preexisting” daily meditations alongside musician Kyle Combs. In Morgan’s own words, “Maybe you don’t have time and it’s hard because you’re on Amazon looking for adrenal formulas and you don’t know how to work the podcast app and the MTA is crumbling as a kind of mood ring of everything else and in those cases you could come to this night and we will meditate for you, not in your place but on your behalf, especially if you didn’t have a chance to fully grieve George Michael as if that’s even possible, as if anything is ever fully grieved, as if anything is ever fully over, as if you really want to spend an entire evening of your life in a room with other people, back to back, front to front, side to side, cheek to cheek, and not run, but stay put and meditate to some songs about secret pools and Polish forests and being scared shitless or shitful, being scared shitty. You don’t need to bring anything! Feel free to bring your roommate or come alone, it’s totally fine either way.”
Learn more