Past
Internationally 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 moreLearn from last year's Critical Mascara Vogue winner and local vogue instructor Daniel Girón (aka Carbon Electra) as he breaks down the five (5) fundamentals of Vogue Femme: Hand Performance, Cat Walk, Duck Walk, Floor Work, and Spin Dip. This class is open to all levels of vogue enthusiasts who wish to take their fundamentals to the next level by adding the element of performance.
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 moreTaught by performers from Alessandro Sciarroni's UNTITLED_I will be there when you die workshop is for anyone who wishes to learn and practice fundamental juggling techniques and apply them to individual and group composition and sequence.
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 morePICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Dorothée Munyaneza (Rwanda/France) and Moya Michael (South Africa/Belgium), discuss their performance practices, political and personal influences, and transnational perspectives on working artistically between Europe and their native countries. In dialogue with Lili Chopra, Artistic Director, French Institute Alliance Française.
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 moreEXPERIMENTAL WRITING: In this writing workshop we will in the dark automatic what is already cut the extra for our purposes the language image through a series of prompts, some poetic, some physical, some remembering, some riding. Instead of writing say knife, instead of writing say table bottom, instead of writing say record and transcribe. Gently together now. Open to anyone! If you think this workshop is probably not for you because you are not a writer then it is probably for you.
Learn moreNew to contemporary art but curious to learn more? Enjoy sharing thoughts and perspectives with other audience members? Ready to deep-dive into the ideas and themes in an artist’s work? Field Guide is a unique opportunity for facilitated dialogue and exchange among a small group of festival-goers eager to discover and explore a particular exhibition or performance in more depth, including an artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences. In this session, join TBA:16 Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi for a pre-show workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of Ali Chahrour's Leila's Death, and post-show conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreAli Chahrour shares insights into his deeply layered TBA performance, Leila’s Death, as informed by contemporary choreography, religious ritual, and local tradition in Lebanon. TBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University) brings expertise in gender, art, and Lebanese politics and culture to an interpretation and discussion of the work.
Learn moreArtist Britt Hatzius shares her process behind the innovative and engaging Blind Cinema, and exchanges thoughts with Darren O’Donnell (Artistic Director, Mammalian Diving Reflex) on their mutual socially engaged art practices and experiences working with children and youth to generate innovative projects for intergenerational audiences.
Learn moreNew to contemporary art but curious to learn more? Enjoy sharing thoughts and perspectives with other audience members? Ready to deep-dive into the ideas and themes in an artist’s work? Field Guide is a unique opportunity for facilitated dialogue and exchange among a small group of festival-goers eager to discover and explore a particular exhibition or performance in more depth, including an artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences. Join TBA:16 Guest Scholar Stephanie DeGooyer for a preparatory workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of A.K. Burns' exhibition, A Smeary Spot, and debrief conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art or dance expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreTBA visual artists Dylan Mira, Keijaun Thomas, and Sacha Yanow join curators Kristan Kennedy (PICA) and Stephanie Snyder (Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College) to share insight into the artists' festival projects and discuss the significance of making and curating visual performance art now.
Learn morePICA welcomes ten artists who will be in residence throughout TBA as part of our Creative Exchange Lab program. Twice a year, the Creative Exchange Lab convenes 7–10 local, national, and international artists who spend three weeks immersed in research, new project development, and idea exchange.
Learn moreMembers of this New York-based, experimental theatre company elaborate on the themes of modern masculinity and desire in their TBA performance, The Art of Luv (Part I): Elliot, in conversation with Kate Bredeson, Associate Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Learn moreChoreographer Morgan Thorson discusses her TBA project, Still Life, an ongoing installation that processes loss, killing, and extinction through movement and stillness, and features both local and visiting dance artists performing in galleries of the Portland Art Museum. In conversation with Sara Krajewski, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum.
Learn moreDANCE/MOVEMENT: What would it be like to move from your blind spot? To not think of a future. To dismantle rote kinetic pathways. To facilitate immersion in the awkward and half-welcomed. To draw the invisible out from the hyper-visible. To suspend what's familiar. To challenge emergent assumptions. Engage with these ideas through choreographic structures pulled from New Faithful Disco performer Marbles Jumbo Radio's longstanding work with Simone Forti as well as their current research.
Learn moreNew to contemporary art but curious to learn more? Enjoy sharing thoughts and perspectives with other audience members? Ready to deep-dive into the ideas and themes in an artist's work? Field Guide is a unique opportunity for facilitated dialogue and exchange among a small group of festival-goers eager to discover and explore a particular exhibition or performance in more depth, including an artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences. Join artist and educator Lisa Jarrett for a pre-performance workshop with presentation and discussion; group viewing of Keijaun Thomas' Distance is Not Separation..., and a post-show conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art or performance expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreCarlos Motta will speak about his recent videos, installations, sculptural works, and the upcoming symposium Nefandus: Colonial Sexual Alterity and Histories for the Future, which he is co-convening with historian Pablo Bedoya at the Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) in Miami. These projects investigate pre-conquest and colonial sexualities, a topic that has traditionally held a marginal place on contemporary artistic, academic, political, and cultural agendas. Motta’s practice suggest that the dissemination of knowledge about sexuality and gender in the colonial period may prove important to understand the conditions of sexual and gender politics in the present.
Learn moreA.K. Burns’ epic four-channel video installation, A Smeary Spot, is infused with a constellation of queer bodies and futurities; feminist theory and sci-fi; dance, performance, and cinematic image; and radical politics and philosophies of space and time. Burns shares the impetuses and influences of her TBA project in dialogue with TBA Guest Scholar Stephanie DeGooyer. See DeGooyer’s essay on A Smeary Spot in this year’s TBA Visual Art publication.
Learn moreDANCE/MOVEMENT: Taught by Roberto Martinez of Christian Rizzo's d’aprés une histoire vraie, this workshop will revisit some extracts of the piece that test the body's various substances and qualities. We will take time to investigate, interrogate, and appropriate them using a variety of compositional devices as well as collaborative writing. Participants will not only discover how to navigate the material from the performance's choreography, but individually interpret, play, and improvise with it.
Learn moreTBA artists and scholars discuss what it means to make experimental performance through a Black queer feminist lens in light of the contemporary politics and evolving aesthetics of race, gender, sexuality, and the body. With Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, sidony o’neal, taisha paggett, and Keijaun Thomas. Moderated by Ariel Osterweis, TBA:16 Guest Scholar.
Learn moreFor the first time, we've invited six visiting and local scholars and artists to immerse themselves in TBA as an experimental site for critical inquiry, engaged research, and intellectual exchange with artists and audiences. In this program of brief presentations followed by Q&A, our inaugural TBA Guest Scholars will share their current academic and artistic research, critical questions, and deep reflections spanning disciplines and forms. Catch our our Guest Scholars in action throughout the festival as lecturers, conversation and panel moderators, Field Guide facilitators, essayists, bloggers, manifesto-makers, and resident provocateurs.
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