Past
Dohee Lee’s one-woman solo performance, MU/巫, utilizes cutting-edge wireless sensors to control technology and seamlessly integrate sound, film and animation with her exquisite live performance of dance, singing, and percussion. The meaning of MU/巫in Korean is “shaman.” Shaman is connector. The thread of connection is myth. Myth connects us to our lands, nature, history, belief systems, and to each other. Myth connects us through time and space. From our homelands to new lands. From ancestor time to the present. Shining a light on how we may continue to the future.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: I make me [sic] is a solo choreography adapted continually as an installation for galleries, museums, and alternative spaces. Using the alphabet as a loose structure, Rawls spins out short lectures and other performance material culled from a life history of dance, consumption, and self-definition. The nonlinear and live composition of movement, objects, sound, and text produce an attenuated sense of time and situation, sparking the potential for a body to claim its rights as a work-in-progress, while tugging subtly at the institutional and architectural framework that holds it.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars Lydia Brawner and Keith Hennessy present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreInternationally esteemed choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen (Marrakech) sheds light on the creative process and visual, sonic, and movement elements or Corbeaux, which celebrates the power of the feminine through intensive, intimate public performances in collaboration with several artists from Morocco and over twenty local Portland participants. In dialogue with Angela Mattox, PICA Artistic Director.
Learn moreImmediately following P-Orridge’s performance the dance floor will open up for an evening of celebration and music curated by Y.G.B.Portland. Bomba con Buya, a Chicago-based ensemble that aims to preserve and advance Bomba, Puerto Rico's oldest surviving dance form, will invigorate the audience with Buya (translated to mean good spirit in Taino, the language spoken among the island's indigenous population). Atlanta-based artist and DJ, Father Fannie, closes the evening with their set.
Learn moreGet the first look at TBA:17 as we kick off the festival with our annual Opening Night Dinner. Enjoy a sneak peak of the festival by dining with local, national, and international artists and curators. This year's dinner by Field Day Feasts and Gatherings will have an elevated block party feel outside of our new home at 15 NE Hancock. This year's dinner will feature everything from this season's Pacific Northwest bounty. Join us to raise our glasses together to toast TBA:17 and new beginnings at PICA.
Learn moreAs part of our free and ongoing program, join PICA and Guest Facilitator Candace Kita for a small-group experience exploring the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences in Field GuideTakahiro Yamamoto’s Direct Path to Detour, in which the artist, as a queer Japanese immigrant to the US, examines the physical and emotional effects of clashing cultural values in a globalized society. Through pre- and post-show conversation and participation, we’ll discover key themes and ideas in the work while sharing our own thoughts and perspectives on the performance. All are welcome—no prior contemporary dance or performance experience required! Light refreshments will be served.
Learn moreDirect Path to Detour is a new dance work by Portland-based choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto. Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in our embodied experiences, this dance evokes mental and physical states at the intersection of value systems, social pressures, expectations, and personal experiences of four dancers, all of whom have an intimate relationship with bridging multiple societies by birth, residence, upbringing and/or religion. Direct Path to Detour envelops the performers in a poetic, visceral experience of resistance, surrender, sincerity, and fiction.
Learn morePICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Ntsikelelo "Boyzie" Cekwana (Johannesburg) and keyon gaskin (Portland) exchange thoughts on making critically engaged dance, choreography, and performance that attends to questions of race and the persistence of colonialism and apartheid in artistic and cultural contexts. In conversation with Vivian Phillips of Seattle Theatre Group.
Learn moreRinde Eckert has been writing, composing, performing, and directing evocative and haunting performance pieces and plays that have pushed at the edges of recognized theatrical form since the early 1980s. My Fools: A Life in Song combines song, dramatic monologues, lecture, and video from his archive. Beginning with a montage of visually striking moments from his shows across the decades, My Fools is a series of variations on a smart, slightly cock-eyed Everyman who begins his journey with a pure sense of mission and descends into the maelstrom.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen is co-founder of Beirut’s Zoukak Theatre Company, founded in 2006 to develop an engaged professional theatre practice with a commitment to creativity as a form of resistance. Junaid will position Zoukak as a case study to illuminate the broader landscape of art and politics in Lebanon, sharing the origins of the company as a platform for contemporary performance and vehicle for social change, in a country lacking adequate public and cultural policy and haunted by cycles of ceaseless crisis.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Dept of Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University) traces the history of the modern Lebanese state through an engagement with the archives of the country's high court. Ethnography of daily life at the courthouse is coupled with archival research in order to think more critically about mainstream Lebanese history and technologies of research, census taking, and the politics of identity.
Learn moreChoreographer Alessandro Sciarroni returns to TBA with Untitled, featuring the nuanced repetition, gesture, and durational movement of professional jugglers against a live ambient soundscape. Esteemed Portland choreographer and TBA Guest Scholar Linda K. Johnson invites Sciarroni to unpack the conceptual and aesthetic influences on this meditative experimental work.
Learn moreDeep Under Ground (DUG) and Young Gifted & Brown (YGB) have been curating safe spaces for brown folks to congregate, express themselves, share stories, love one another, and move their bodies since early & mid-2015.
Learn moreItalian artist Alessandro Sciarroni returns to Portland with a performative reflection on the passing of time. Continuing his trilogy that began with Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow (TBA:15), Sciarroni now focuses on another traditional artform comprised of repeated actions: juggling. By remixing the pacing and sequence of gravity-defying moves (under the leg, under the arm, above the head, etc.), there is an almost endless combination of patterns to explore. Each repetition abstracts the performers’ movements, opening the possibilities of seeing the larger picture: flight, failure, kinetic potential.
Learn moreWhere lies the boundary between the body and the machine? In an empty space, illuminated only with cold light, Geumhyung Jeong explores the potential of the human: the sensuality, power, and mutability of the body. In seven peculiar “duets” with mundane objects (ranging from household appliances to mannequins), Jeong bestows a bizarre and disconcerting life to the inanimate through an intense and risky interaction with her own body, Combining dance, puppetry, and a technical mastery of theatrical conventions, the result is a moving choreography of the body and mind, crossing the dividing line between the human and inhuman, hallucination and reality.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: French/Moroccan author and director Mohamed El Khatib presents a solo lecture presentation on loss and remembrance, drawing from documents from his family’s past—newspaper clippings, emails, phone messages, scraps of exchanges with the father, recorded transcripts, videos. These snapshots of life evoke family, nationality, native language, memory, mourning and shift between documentary and fiction.
Learn moreReferencing the psychedelic light shows of the ’60s and ’70s as well as the harsh noise performances of contemporary avant-garde rebels like Bruce McClure, the Cinema Project collective, along with Portland-based musician Matt Carlson and friends, will create a momentary light and sound environment—a temporary dynamic installation in which to immerse audience members both wandering and still. Several 16mm projectors will run simultaneously and light beams will appear in the round. Moving images of man, woman, animal, landscape, or simply sheer color and light from analog loops and reels will overlap and penetrate one another, covering any and all surfaces possible, and manipulated live by human hands. The mechanics of cinematic experience will be laid bare and at times it will be very very loud.
Learn morePart lecture, part choreographic exposition, better to be alone than to wish you were is a solo performance that affirms the anticlimactic futility of lust, from its first intoxicating charge to its subsequent, stumbling pursuit. While slyly humorous, Hankins unabashedly exploits and strips her body of its poetic nature as it is offered up for consumption, judgment, and of course: desire. Created with an all-female production team, better to be alone… weaves seduction, stand-up comedy motifs, and forced voyeurism in an attempt to exhibit the extraordinary and cumbersome illogic of love and sex.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence until it has no name A live video essay that arrives through a base note, a vanishing point, an other history of orientations.
Learn moreSacha Yanow’s solo performance is an intimate psychological portrait of the artist’s father, her internalized dad, and patriarchy in general. For one night only, “Dad” covers and lip-syncs to his favorite songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s, shares footage of his 1970s winning appearance on the To Tell the Truth game show, presents motivational speeches, and more. His button-down shirts become his costumes, his yellow notepad usually reserved for stock market details contains his set list, and his Agatha Christie novel collection and Wall Street Journal become his props.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour explores the practice of Islamic Shiite religious ritual through dance and the body. In this performance, Chahrour takes the stage with two musicians and Leila, a professional mourner whose role it is to deliver the lamentations and honor the departed at a funeral. Woven from traditional Ataaba song verses and the plaintive cries of bereavement, the work is a poetic elegy to a fading cultural heritage. Leila’s Death addresses the relationships between the body and religion, the mourner and the deceased, the sacred and the performed.
Learn moreBlind Coven will feature Portland-based songwriter, songstress, and actor Amenta Abioto. Abioto’s work is on the cutting edge of all that is musical, theatrical, and literary. Her music is boldly mystical and soul-fired, and her raw improvisational live performances invoke elements of both theatrical surprise and magic through ancient African diasporic sounds and stories. She brings to the music scene funky academia while skipping vocally from soul-shaking gospel and smooth jazz to hip hop rhythms wrapped in West African beats. The performance will feature a boutique designed 10-channel surround sound system as well as correlating lighting and visuals from artist DB Amorin.
Learn moreAU’s new collaboration with the Camas High School choir is an explosive, joyful expression of community and creativity that blurs the lines between propulsive art-pop and avant-garde choral soundscapes. This concert is the summation of a yearlong project that found AU’s Luke Wyland working directly with Camas students to produce an entirely new body of music. In addition, Wyland worked closely with Camas Choir Director Ethan Chessin and the trailblazing arts education nonprofit Young Audiences of Oregon & SW Washington to craft a curriculum that exposed Camas students to varying aspects of the music business via members of the local industry.
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