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Join PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence for brief presentations about their current projects and practices over happy hour drinks!
Learn moreIn this workshop with TBA Opening Night artist Holland Andrews—whose experimental artistic practice spans composition, visual art, and performance using operatic and extended vocal technique—participants will explore guided meditation, vocal embodiment practice, performance, and collaboration.
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 moreJoin PICA’s Artistic Directors, Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy for a final TBA:18 farewell. They’ll be a pancake brunch, Vic’s infamous Bloody Mary bar, and plenty of time for conversation and reflections about the past 10 days. Let’s bask in the last festival moments together.
Learn moreTender Table is a series of stories about food, family, and identity told by femmes of color and nonbinary people of color. For each event, storytellers prepare a dish connected to the experiences they’ve shared. Audiences are invited to listen generously, spend time communally, and sample the food.
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 moreTBA food vendors Big Elephant Kitchen, Mis Tacones, and Mija/Mija in discussion about the intersecting economies and politics of contemporary art, immigration, identity, and local food culture. Moderated by Jodie Cavalier, PICA Public Engagement Coordinator. Part of our refreshed TBA Food Program curated by Spencer Byrne-Seres. Lunch from local vendors will be for sale—come hungry!
Learn moreThis workshop brings together different modes of making into our practices. Whether you're a movement-based artist, a playwright, a poet or a painter, we will look into our writing/journal/note taking practices and stretch them beyond the studio, canvas, page, and stage. We will process our creative forms via movement improvisation, conversation and embodied listening activities.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholars Andrew J. Brown/Sister James (Asst. Professor, Performance Practice, Fairhaven College/Western Washington University) and Shawna Lipton (Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art) present 30-minute back-to back lectures on their current research, thinking, and reflections on Festival projects, performances, and experiences. Drinks and light refreshments will be served.
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 moreRelease-Receive-Become....You are an envelope which contains space. Not just a space, but an empty space. First, you try to receive all the sounds when freeing your head and the rest of your body. When you learn to receive, you will learn to become the embodiment of every sound that you hear.
Learn morePICA’s current cohort of Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence will make brief presentations about their current projects and broader artistic practice. Fall 2018 Lab artists include: Gordon Hall (NYC); Victoria Hunt (Australia); C. Davida Ingram; Tiona Nekkia McClodden (Philadelphia, PA); Roza Moshtaghi (Oslo/Tehran); Pepper Pepper (Portland, OR); and ariella tai (Portland, OR). A Q&A moderated by PICA’s Artistic Directors to follow. Don’t miss this festival favorite!
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 morePortland artist-run space and TBA late-night artists/curators S1 will facilitate a workshop on sound collage and layering with multiple DJ set-ups, taught by members of the internationally recognized S1 Synth Library. Explore basic concepts of using CDJS and how to create soundscapes and unexpected layers and rhythms from field recordings, samples, and more. No expertise or experience necessary.
Learn moreConceived by Lois Weaver and inspired by Marleen Gorris’ film Antonia's Line, The Long Table is an experimental open public forum, a hybrid performance-installation-roundtable-discussion-dinner-party designed to facilitate dialogue through the gathering together of people with common interests. Discussion topics will consider what constitutes queer art and performance today, the ways in which artists are engaging queer identities and experiences across forms and disciplines, and how queer politics show up in performance and in life. Moderated by Shawna Lipton, TBA Guest Scholar and Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art.
Learn moreTBA artists jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham share insights and influences from their TBA project and larger performance series, Let ‘im Move You, including explorations of J-Sette dance that originated in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, other Black queer dance vocabularies, and the limits, imaginations, and tensions of performance contextualized by both White aesthetics and institutions as well as the sites and spaces of predominantly Black neighborhoods. With Andrew J. Brown/Sister James, TBA Guest Scholar and Asst. Professor of Performance Art, Fairhaven College Western Washington University.
Learn moreLet’s practice creating dances. By using sensorial, perceptual, anatomical, spatial, formal, behavioral, verbal and imaginative pathways, we will transform our individual movement patterning; play with technical structures, improvisational concepts, and choreographic frameworks; and groove to some sweet jams. We will attempt to abandon ‘neutrality’ and uncover our bodies’ ingrained knowledge and history.
Learn moreIn connection with some of the broader themes in Kaneza Schaal’s and Cornell Alston’s JACK &, this discussion highlights local contemporary art practices that directly engage issues and experiences of incarceration, re-entry, and prison abolition and reform. Artists, participants, and facilitators from Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice Program and the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) discuss the art programs they have been organizing both inside and outside of CRCI, a minimum security state prison within Portland city limits. Created in collaboration with current and formerly imprisoned artists, writers, and musicians, these programs focus on conceptual art, Social Practice, comedy, and photography.
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 moreJoin dance artists and curators from TBA’s Opening Night event The Beautiful Street for a workshop in Hip Hop Grooves & Popping Technique. We will explore how to integrate these moves into both choreography and improv/freestyle dance. Open to anyone who enjoys moving and having fun!
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar C. Riley Snorton (Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago) will present a lecture on his current research at the intersection of Black, Africana, trans, queer, and performance studies. A distinguished interdisciplinary scholar and writer, Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Co-presented with PNCA’s MA in Critical Studies Program.
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