Past
Karen Sherman joins PICA’s Erin Boberg Doughton (Artistic Director & Curator of Performance) for a conversation about her TBA performance Soft Goods and its thematic connections to one of the Festival’s major through-lines—the visible, invisible and precarious “work” of being an artist, arts worker, and citizen in the context of performing arts, cultural industry, creative economy, and our political moment.
Learn moreJ-Sette, also known as Bucking, is a performance style popular in the southern United States, practiced widely among majorettes and drill teams at historically Black colleges and universities, and also among teams of primarily queer men who compete in gay clubs and pride festivals. The workshop focuses on bombastic performance energy, complex relationships to rhythm and music, movement precision, group dynamics, and discovering joy in flesh and community. We will explore how the performance of J-Sette creates expectations around attention and accountability to a community, and how it positions leadership. All bodies are encouraged to participate, regardless of previous training or ability.
Learn moreCollaborators Dorothée and Holland met at the 2016 TBA Festival as part of PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab Residency. Now, they have come together to realize Munyaneza’s bold, visionary, and deeply determined new performance work, Unwanted. In dialogue with Lisa Jarrett, artist and Asst. Professor of Community and Context Arts, Portland State University.
Learn moreFollowing this matinee performance, Sara Magenheimer joins PICA Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy and Lumi Tan, Curator, The Kitchen (NYC) for a post-show conversation with audiences about her TBA installation and performance, I Collect Neglected Venoms.
Learn moreThis spring, rapper 2 Chainz announced his “Pretty Girls <3 Trap Music” tour featuring a Gospel Choir (Trap Choir). Church in the Trap House, in conversation with Josef Sorret’s “Spirit in the Dark”, explores the religious themes and aesthetics in contemporary trap music, and what happens when the lines of sacred and secular are blurred, removed, and combined.
Learn moreInternationally celebrated experimental vocalist and performance artist Tanya Tagaq joins Portland artists Wendy Red Star and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano for a conversation drawing on mutual wide-ranging artistic and political influences, including Indigenous feminisms and gender politics, critiques of colonialist structures, cultural heritage, and contemporary forms. With Wendy Red Star, artist and educator, and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, artist and PICA/PNCA Curatorial Fellow.
Learn moreThis interactive, multimedia, youth-designed and -led workshop focuses on deconstructing the concept of masculinity by examining societal impacts, pressures, stigmas and notions of masculine identity through the lenses, frameworks, and perspectives of minority, male-identified people of color. A showcase of immersive visual vignettes will be shared expressing individual stories through video and art, coupled with collective analysis and discussion among participants.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars d.a. carter and Robin Deacon present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artist Manuel Solano and Roy Pérez (Asst. Professor of English and American Ethnic Studies, Willamette University), discuss Manuel's TBA project and the artist's broader practice across visual art, video, performance, and music, drawing from pop and celebrity culture, appropriation, and personal queer narrative. In English and Spanish.
Learn moreCreative duo Maya Vivas and Leila Haile will facilitate a participatory discussion surrounding the history of art institutions, gatekeeping, Queer Black art, and their motivations behind opening Ori Gallery, a QTPOC-focused radical art space.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary theatre and performance artist and Reed alum Tina Satter joins Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Asst. Professor of Theatre, Reed College) for a conversation about her creative process and the influences and inspiration behind her TBA performance project, Ghost Rings.
Learn moreChoreographer Faye Driscoll shares her creative process, collaboration with dancers, audience and artist co-creation, and the underlying themes and concepts that drive the Thank You for Coming series. With Rachel Carrico, PhD, Dance Faculty Fellow, University of Oregon.
Learn moreThrough interactive discussion, this workshop will center the creation of performative works that unapologetically explore the the realizing of one’s Black identity, including in White consumer based structures. We will share stories, tips, and tricks and form solidarity lists to keep participants strong in the face of adversity while being Black and vulnerable.
Learn moreDead Thoroughbred artists sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin discuss process, concept, collaboration and their new TBA performance project in depth with Sampada Aranke (Asst. Professor, Art History, Theory, & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Kemi Adeyemi (Asst. Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Seattle).
Learn moreTight. Moving. Aural. Physical. Breath. Beat. Lost. Loose. Breathless. Minutes? Months? Meters? Monsters? Monograms? Macaroons? 15 m = ? Four ways. Samiya Bashir dreamcasts Portland poets Shayla Lawson and Dao Strom, plus special guest Ronaldo V. Wilson and collaborating artist Roland Dahwen Wu, as together they guide poetry through space. Four ways. Solve for the poem. What? See for yourself.
Learn moreBecca Blackwell shares insights into the creation of They, Themself, and Schmerm, including themes of gender and transition, strategies of humor, and forms of comedy and personal narrative. In dialogue with TBA Guest Scholar bart fitzgerald and Shawna Lipton, Chair, MA in Critical Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreTBA artist Morgan Bassichis and Guest Scholar Keith Hennessy talk comedy, queer performance histories and strategies, gender politics, maybe some mysticism or improvisation, and dive deeper into Bassichis' TBA Festival projects. Just a guess. With Keith Hennessy, dance and performance artist, activist, and writer.
Learn moreIn celebration of Pepper Pepper and friends’ fifth and final edition of Critical Mascara: A Post-Realness Drag Ball at TBA, don’t miss this roundtable and mimosa kiki by and for the growing Pacific Northwest ballroom scene. A diverse group of local dancers and performers will come together to get critical and connect about their practice and presence.
Learn moreArtist and writer Will Rawls discusses his durational performance, i make me [sic] for PICA, touching on the range of forms and influences in his choreographic and broader practice, most recently including an attention to "authorship, memory, race, and subjectivity as intersecting monuments in need of constant undoing." With TBA Guest Scholar Lydia Brawner, Curatorial Fellow, Performa.
Learn moreIn collaboration with dramaturg Kate Bredeson (Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College), this afternoon series will illuminate the work of dramaturgs in dance and new performance.
Learn moreIn collaboration with dramaturg Kate Bredeson (Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College), this afternoon series will illuminate the work of dramaturgs in dance and new performance. A talk by Katherine Profeta, followed by a roundtable on dance dramaturgy, together investigate how dramaturgs work, and provoke conversations about the role of dramaturgical collaboration in new work. This program is grateful for the support of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, who awarded Portland dramaturg Kate Bredeson the 2017 Bly Fellowship that helps to make this series possible.
Learn moreRenowned musical and performing artists Stew and Heidi (The Negro Problem, Passing Strange) discuss the impulses and influences behind the creation of their TBA performance, Notes of a Native Song, inspired by the life, work, and politics of James Baldwin. With TBA Guest Scholar d.a. carter, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, Portland State University.
Learn moreHow might moving, listening, and being together as distinctly orientated bodies in everyday social and political spheres, further heighten our capacity to see what is hidden, erased, marginalized, forced underground? how might active, embodied investigations of place and purpose catalyze perspective?
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars Lydia Brawner and Keith Hennessy present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
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