Past
Filipina choreographer Eisa Jocson joins Clare Croft, Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University of Michigan, to share insight into her artistic process and technique and the intersection of gender, labour, seduction politics, and social mobility in her TBA performances, Death of the Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer.
Learn moreDennis Scholl, Knight Foundation Vice President / Arts and well known art collector, talks about what today's audiences want from the arts. Dennis will give examples from Knight’s own engaging initiatives, including Random Acts of Culture, the Knight Arts Challenge and Community Supported Art (CSA). He will also discuss the challenge cultural institutions face in keeping pace with their audiences in the face of the digital revolution and changing demography.
Learn morePortland electronic music collective and record label Dropping Gems curates a night at The Works featuring London’s Little People, and crewmembers DJAO from Seattle and hometown stalwarts Philip Grass. The artists featured here are known for adding non-traditional live elements to their performances to create an immersive sonic journey. Expect a melting pot of intricate and lush synthesized soundscapes, taking traditional hip-hop melodies, and flipping them upside down.
Learn moreFrom pole dancing to macho dancing, choreographer Eisa Jocson investigates labour and representations of the dancing body in the service industry and exposes gender formation, seduction politics, and Filipino social mobility.
Learn morePICA's education and public engagement series, Field Guide helps audiences discover and feel more informed about contemporary performance. Through facilitated workshops with visiting and local faculty, focused explorations of artist's work, and connection with other festival-goers, Field Guide sessions include various combinations of pre-show workshops, social outings to performances, post-show conversations, and online interviews and media to more deeply contextualize the art and artists of our time.
Learn moreUnique' has generally come to mean 'slightly out of the ordinary,' but Samita Sinha's voice warrants the true meaning of the hackneyed accolade... mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact. —Time Out
Learn moreTHEESatisfaction are artists that blend elements of hip-hop, electronic, and dance. They’re positive energy. Black energy, black women leaping oceans and continents at a single bound. With positive strength of purpose. Even crowds with nary a right foot between them find the steps when faced with THEESat’s unorthodox but right-on-time rhythms. Synchronized, sinewy and sensuous, the regal Stas and Cat channel the higher, whipping like waves of space-borne radiation onstage, leaving a trail of glowing observers abuzz like Geiger counters. THEESatisfaction, the Queens Supreme. Bring yourself!
Learn moreGet a first look at our home for TBA:14 as we officially kick off the first night of the Festival with Opening Night Dinner. This year's dinner will be a nomadic block party, a "seed to plate" local meal crafted by Stacey Givens (The Side Yard Farm and The Nomadic Chef) with table vessels designed by Daniel Duford. Givens is a combination urban farmer and chef, working closely with other farmers, ranchers, and artists as collaborators and sourcing every element of the meal as locally as possible.
Learn moreThe rhythm of a wave, a kaironic triangle, intuits another possible time.What goes unseen in time and how do we measure our own? Waves of history, what floats?
Learn moreAs round as an apple, as deep as a cup is a group of projects, perhaps an exhibition, maybe a poem. The presentations are not odes to something… the artists may or may not be poets, but all of it is OF poetry. For sure the installations, performances, and publications produced will rely on poetics… the study of how different parts come together, contributing to the never-ending search for “subject.” I hope that the endeavor feels like this. Like a thing broken apart and then put together again in the mouth—made real by reading it out loud. The projects are meant to behave like the carefully chosen discordant words in a certain kind of poem. The kind of poem that is a problem to ponder.” —Kristan Kennedy
Learn moreFor the better part of a century 16mm was the medium of choice for a coterie of artists dedicated to expanding the parameters of what was then called "film art." This medium and its project are now historical. The works that remain are the dwindling trace of a once practicing Secret Society. That society was Cinema.
Learn moreAlgerian choreographer Nacera Belaza will share exercises that seek movements from within the self but remain neutral and open to the space around the body. The exercises propose a free and open movement that feels out the space, seizing it and investing it with action.
Learn moreDropping Gems takes over THE WORKS with a night of sly samples and sultry, dance-ready beats from DJ Rap Class and singer/producer Natasha Kmeto.
Learn moreNacera Belaza’s mesmerizing choreography commands attention with its spare aesthetics and focused intensity. In this one-night-only duet with her sister, Belaza concentrates on the starting point of her work, looking inwards and moving out from the intimate to the surface, until the movement disappears. It is a simple idea, and an endless and vital one.
Learn moreA show performed by its audience. Taking the form of a theatrical “read-through,” attendees will pick up their scripts and navigate a text collectively, to create and perform a community. In the temporary microcosmic society that’s established over the course of the reading, everybody slowly but surely gets his or her role. WE ARE STILL WATCHING is a play in which the idea of “spectacle” slowly shifts to where we least expect it.
Learn moreAt this year’s Festival, Karen Sherman (Minneapolis) performs with set pieces she designs and builds herself, drawing on her skills in construction, while Linda Austin (Portland) performs with sculptural objects by artist David Eckard. Here, they talk about designing and constructing set pieces and choreographing with and for sculptural objects and visual artists.
Learn moreChoreographer Miguel Gutierrez will lead a unique walk through the world, guiding participants to awaken, explore, and illuminate their senses of the world around them.
Learn moreCombining science-fiction, electronic pop music, and audience participation, Boy Band Audition is an interactive performance night of dancing, singing, and imagining life after the future is over.
Learn moreDance, words, and scrap lumber are the raw materials for One with Others, an examination of who we become due to the choices we—or others—make.
Learn moreSince the early 90s, Daniel Barrow has developed a unique style of “manual” animation, layering and manipulating his intricate drawings on overhead projectors. With The Thief of Mirrors, Barrow returns to TBA with the story of a jewel thief who wears the mask of a sad clown.
Learn moreTrue to PICA’s interdisciplinary, artist-driven focus, TBA visual artist Emily Roysdon—whose practice spans independent and collaborative work in performance, installation, printmaking, text, video, and curating—interviews visiting choreographers Bouchra Ouizguen (Morocco) and Nacera Belaza (France/Algeria) on their newest works.
Learn moreTools and tactics for dancing and performance, which may or may not include: doing movements, imagining doing movements, rolling on the floor, touching each other, talking, screaming, seeing, and being seen. Participants will access and build a sense of awareness, presence, decision making, quality, and imagination.
Learn moreInternational singing sensation DUBAIS has decided to end it all and to leave this world. The place in which DUBAIS now exists is neither heaven nor hell; both of those places actually refer to political parties, the Bible was mistranslated. All souls go to one place—the Unterwelt—a place split in two by ideologies and a wall. Using the city of Berlin as a main backdrop, this multi- media modern day pop opera investigates conceptions of morality, divisions of power, and the landscapes of political indifference.
Learn moreKim Gordon (CKM, Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, etc.) and Bill Nace (X.O.4, Vampire Belt, Ceylon Mange, etc.) will bathe THE WORKS in sound and film for the Portland premiere of their new band Body/Head.
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