Past
A panel discussion with PICA’s Artistic Directors and other curators and arts administrators to consider how art institutions host, celebrate, and make people feel welcome in their spaces. Moderated by Spencer Byrne-Series, PICA's Exhibitions Director, and curator of TBA:FOOD.
Learn moreChoreographer Ligia Lewis discusses the many layers and references in her TBA performance, Water Will (in melody), with Portland-based scholar bart fitzgerald.
Learn moreIn conversation with Reuben Tomás Roqueñi (Yaqui, Mayo, Chicanx), experimental musician, composer, and visual artist Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) shares more about her practice, including TBA performance collaborations with Marcus Fischer and Raven Chacon.
Learn moreMiguel Gutierrez and San Cha discuss how queer Latinx experience informs their respective experimental practices in dance and music, including discursive debates around aesthetics, abstraction, and cultural identity in performance making.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence for brief presentations about their current projects and practices over happy hour drinks!
Learn moreChoreographer Mia Habib has created a 50-person, community performance that examines and reflects the physical embodiment and witnessing of protest, demonstration, and critical mass. In conversation with Roya Amirsoleymani, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement, the artist discusses the development of the indoor and outdoor Portland iterations of this emergent, participatory, public intervention through its political, conceptual, and choreographic lenses.
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 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 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 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 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 moreFollowing his final performance of Some Styles of Masculinity (Part 3: “Comedian”), Gregg Bordowitz will be in conversation with Stephanie Snyder (Anne and John Hauberg Curator and Director, The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College), curator of Bordowitz’s retrospective, I Wanna Be Well. Attendance at this evening’s performance is not required in order to take part in the Post-Show Conversation.
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 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 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 moreFollowing this matinee performance, Sara Magenheimer joins PICA Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy and Lumi Tan, Curator, The Kitchen (NYC) for a post-show conversation with audiences about her TBA installation and performance, I Collect Neglected Venoms.
Learn moreInternationally celebrated experimental vocalist and performance artist Tanya Tagaq joins Portland artists Wendy Red Star and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano for a conversation drawing on mutual wide-ranging artistic and political influences, including Indigenous feminisms and gender politics, critiques of colonialist structures, cultural heritage, and contemporary forms. With Wendy Red Star, artist and educator, and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, artist and PICA/PNCA Curatorial Fellow.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artist Manuel Solano and Roy Pérez (Asst. Professor of English and American Ethnic Studies, Willamette University), discuss Manuel's TBA project and the artist's broader practice across visual art, video, performance, and music, drawing from pop and celebrity culture, appropriation, and personal queer narrative. In English and Spanish.
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 moreChoreographer Faye Driscoll shares her creative process, collaboration with dancers, audience and artist co-creation, and the underlying themes and concepts that drive the Thank You for Coming series. With Rachel Carrico, PhD, Dance Faculty Fellow, University of Oregon.
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 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 moreTBA artist Morgan Bassichis and Guest Scholar Keith Hennessy talk comedy, queer performance histories and strategies, gender politics, maybe some mysticism or improvisation, and dive deeper into Bassichis' TBA Festival projects. Just a guess. With Keith Hennessy, dance and performance artist, activist, and writer.
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.
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