Past
FORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared fantasies. What blooms in the shadows of the bureaucratic state, of carceral power? What dreams of a sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls? Through sound, movement, and shared silences—as well as lessons learned from direct action, mutual aid, and emergent strategies—we put into practice the free worlds of our dreams.
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian is a major new experimental opera based on a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution that upends the colonial machinations embedded within our current means of determining global space and time by relocating the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn moreThe Things Around Us is a solo, live-looping, music and narrative performance featuring trumpet, clarinet, everyday objects, and darkly humorous stories about other people. Composed, written, and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo.
Learn morePart beer garden, party happy hour, and part afterparty, BEFORE & AFTER is an opportunity to come together with the TBA:24 community at PICA. These dedicated gatherings bookend the festival experience with a blend of celebration, conversation, and decompression, offering space to grab a drink or a bite before the first performance of the day, or cap off the evening after daily events have wrapped up. With a variety of food and drink options to explore, BEFORE & AFTER is more than a pit stop—it's a time to deepen your connections and extend the magic of TBA.
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Learn moreEqual parts survey exhibition and emergent experiment, Outside Inside World activates PNCA’s 511 Gallery as a showcase for works in the Videotones archive as well as a site for making and sharing new work.
Learn moreTBA:24 schedule at a glance.
Learn moreThe 2024 Time-Based Art Festival opens by honoring the Portland tradition of First Thursday with a come one, come all jam session with Videotones, Elbow Room’s neurodiverse digital media collective. No musical ability required—bring yourself, an instrument,* your voice. Come make a sound or just witness our giant, undulating community band.
Learn moreTrue to the title, we’ll slowly share more information about each Time-Released program over the coming months. Read on to learn more.
Learn moreMake Banana Cry is a critical and destabilizing dance performance that questions Asian stereotypes while examining the transmission of cultural identity.
Learn moreIn 2001, artist and filmmaker K8 Hardy set out to document her daily outfits on video.
Learn moreDB Amorin's "long shadow" is a 45-minute soundwalk composition inspired by the desire to return to that which may no longer be familiar to us. The layered audio experience, drawing on the artist’s memories of the Ko’olau mountain range, the transition of season, and the longing for vanishing eras, is designed to trace the path of the MAX Red Line from the urban center of Portland to the Portland International Airport as a soundtrack for the movement towards unreachable places.
Learn moreTHE ACHE is the third installment of Allie Hankins’ five-part performance series of projects entitled, By My Own Hand. Developed in collaboration with Hannah Krafcik, THE ACHE calls attention to the myriad of ways selfhood can be constituted and remixed through creative acts of self-determination; it takes shape as 1) a video exhibition 2) a publication release and 3) a series of free intergenerational art-making workshops facilitated by local artists dee bustos, Muffie Delgado-Connelly, Midori Hirose, and Ralph Pugay.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreJoin drag duo Carla Rossi and Pepper Pepper for a wellness seminar gone wrong—or right?—when the mushrooms peak. Tackling wellness culture, microdosing, land acknowledgments, and featuring a lipsync on an actively-inflating airbed, GLOOP is a gauntlet of spectacularly unhinged drag from two of Portland’s most beloved grifters.
Learn moreA creation of Black narrative, an offering to Black lineage, Black Feast is a culinary event celebrating Black artists and writers through food. Black Feast: Black Imagerial, envisioned by artists Intisar Abioto, Akela Jaffi, and Salimatu Amabebe with creative support from Annika Hansteen-Izora, is a culinary creation and site-specific performance on Black-stewarded land inspired by the legacies of Black movement artists in Portland and the Pacific Northwest.
Learn moreUwU & Friends is a multidisciplinary event series showcasing underground dance music created by, and for, Portland’s Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Trans/Gender nonconforming community. With the dancefloor as the center, established and emerging DJs and artists explore a new type of party—a queer utopia.
Learn moreRadio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is the first collaboration between Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Zoë Poluch, and Elisa Harkins. It is an Indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance, and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality.” This choreography in the expanded field haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition, and pattern by striving to make visible that which has been kept invisible and illegible in colonial systems of aesthetics. Within Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ there are many references to the number 3; there are 3 performers, the piece has 3 sections, and there are 3 duets, one being a triplet. Created and developed on the Muscogee Reservation, Stockholm, Sweden, and Montréal, Quebec, the piece brings together components and concerns that are an interdisciplinary and counter-colonial approaches to performance.
Learn moreFirst Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring, and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors.
Learn moreIn this creative engagement between Cree sound artist Chloe Alexandra Thompson and Pacific Islander interdisciplinary artist DB Amorin, the pair work towards a joint generative investigation of survivance, waves in their many forms, and the ever-changing relationship of knowledge and tradition to that which is more than human.
Learn moreUnderstanding extraterrestrials as a product of American mythology requires seeing the multiplicity of fears in the American consciousness. Just like the hydra of conspiracy that shapes America as a nation, the intersections between extraterrestrials and the American nation-state fracture into even more intricate pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. Multimedia artist and scholar Kite performs an experimental lecture, “What‘s on the Earth is in the Stars, and What’s in the Stars is on the Earth,” which probes the real conspiracies through multiple dimensions: Lakota epistemologies and the American paranormal.
Learn moreClown Down 2: Clown Out of Water finds Portland's premiere drag clown, Carla Rossi, trapped on a rock in the ocean next to a seagull with IBS while the sea level rises. Clowning and climate disaster ensue.
Learn moreDeriving from the antique alchemistic concept of the four humors, melancholia has been a subject in science, culture, and art for centuries. Originally seen as the result of an imbalance of one of the four humors connected to a specific temperament called “black bile,” melancholia was connected to a deep sense of sadness that was believed to lead to depression, insanity, and later genius in the arts. Based in an auto-biographical collage this lecture will talk about death, birth, and past-potential-futures, proposing Black Melancholia as a place of solace and care for Black Life.
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