Past
The Bay Area’s legendary boundary-breaker Fauxnique (the drag queen alter-ego of artist/choreographer/dancer Monique Jenkinson) leads an expedition through layers of femme artifice and authenticity. We will rigorously honor practices of drag tradition and boldly expand definitions of drag performance. Be prepared to move and WERQ! Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreMusicians rooted in punk feminism will perform a selection of songs expanding the notion of Riot Grrrl "hits," ranging from Canadian indie pop Cub to S.F. queercore Tribe 8. The audience can sing along to karaoke style videos made for this occasion by Dana Bishop-Root & Ginger Brooks Takahashi of General Sisters and Deirdre Logue & Allyson Mitchell of FAG Feminist Art Gallery. Live Riot pulls into focus the politics that arise when revisiting the lyrics and spirit of these fearless and danceable songs. Following the show Ginger will DJ the night away as you dance it out. Singing, we must rage!
Learn moreHolcombe Waller’s Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title is a ceremonial choral work that deeply explores contemporary faith, advocacy through art, and collective catharsis. Performed in historic Trinity Episcopal Cathedral with an all-abilities community choir drawn from all walks of life towards the project’s mission, Requiem Mass is an emotional and personal work invoking remembrance and peace for the dead who have suffered persecution for their sexual orientation or gender expression. Requiem Mass was additionally informed by research into the pivotal gay history from the 1980s through present day and by community engagement that has included working with experts in liturgical music, queer theory, faith-based equality initiatives as well as over 100 participants in a series of choral workshops with Waller over the past year.
Learn moreLeading curators discuss the festival format as a uniquely relevant platform for global contemporary art, performance, and public engagement. With Angela Mattox, PICA's TBA Festival (Portland, OR); Jeff Khan, Performance Space (Sydney, Australia); Norman Armour (PuSh Festival, Vancouver, BC); and Vallejo Gantner (PS122 / COIL Festival, New York City). Moderated by Sara Krajewski, Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum. Note: We regret that Seunghyo Lee (Festival Bo:m, Seoul) and Helen Cole (In Between Time Festival, Bristol, UK), both listed in the TBA Festival print catalog, are unable to join us.
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT DINNER AT THE WORKS! To kick off the first night of TBA:15, this year's Opening Night Dinner guests will enjoy a sneak peek of the Festival's visual art program and a champagne toast before being whisked away to dine at our TBA:15 central hub. This year’s dinner will highlight everything from the season’s bounty, expertly prepared with love by the accomplished chefs of Feastworks. Gather at the PICA family table with friends and artists for a radiant late summer feast that is not to be missed!
Learn moreWHAT IS TIME? a new site-specific performance composition illustrating historical perceptions of time in the ‘age of anxiety’. Referencing philosophical topics such as the meaning of life, existentialism, and time, this work intends to explore, interpret, and draw lines of interconnectivity through improvised movement and sound.
Learn moreFor TBA:15, Jibade-Khalil Huffman presents two concurrently running video works. Within the exhibition space, each will operate independently finding moments of alignment that express a larger narrative between the two. The result is an exploration of adaptation, mediation, and the act of seeing by way of pursuing the vanishing point and the nostalgia of drive-in movie theaters.
Learn moreSimensky’s multi-part Surface Contents 1 & 2 employs gold in a series of actions, prints, and architectural interventions. The resulting work will form a dialogue that sees gold as a literal index of locatable value and something ever-shifting in meaning and immense influence.
Learn moreA charged site. Ways and means. “...various little ways of changing things.”
Learn moreYour forecast for the final day of TBA: Spicy, salty, and refreshing and bright with a Bloody Mary or seven...
Learn moreClosing night at THE WORKS lights up the sky with an explosion of a million stars. Enter the sensorial and phantasmagoric world of Evelyn.
Learn moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreMorocco-based choreographer Meryem Jazouli offers a workshop for contemporary dancers that proposes shared time and space to discover the realm where the poetic and vulnerable coincide. The class will start off with a warmup to activate the senses, followed by a dance Jazouli will share that each person will experience and personalize while imparting it with a unique meaning.
Learn moreOneohtrix Point Never, aka acclaimed experimental composer Daniel Lopatin, takes the audience on an odyssey through his latest work R Plus Seven. Hypnotic and unexpected in equal measure, R Plus Seven is full of satisfyingly complex sonic puzzles.
Learn moreIn GERMINAL, French artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort create one of the most talked-about recent works of contemporary international theater. Both whimsical and deeply philosophical in approach, GERMINAL asks: if we had the opportunity to start the world from scratch, how would we do it?
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local 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 discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreWE ARE THE INSTITUTION: after inside/outside there is this mass of people. We are already whole. We're all here together. Administrators need to be involved in the uselessness of practice. Beyond outcome and object, there is a culture of questions, a pursuit of pleasure, an acceptance of our inevitable wasting. This workshop will create a non-utilitarian space for the human basis of art. Though open to all, this workshop is designed for art’s administrators and artists working in concert in the hot bed of the studio. Come, be useless, be pleasure, be awkward, be sincere, be wasted.
Learn moreArca is a Venezuelan producer, artist, mixing engineer and DJ now based in Brooklyn, New York. Fresh off of his latest work &&&&&, audio-visual collaborations with Jesse Kanda at MoMA PS1 and producing projects with Kanye West, Arca will set THE WORKS ablaze with his off the grid structures and sound mutations of club music.
Learn morePositioning three Chrysler minivans atop 42 inflatable airbeds, Sugarmann creates a slow-motion wreck.
Learn more[Not About Face] is always engaging, sometimes awkward, sometimes an exercise in failure, finally ecstatic... it's as if it's a gift, as if somehow the touching and the following and the watching and the listening, has shaped this movement, making it an expression of our collective desire. —Alison Croggon, ABC Arts
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