Past
Get ready to get down at the TBA:25 closing party, Dirty Thirty. This high-energy blowout marks the last official night of the Festival, bringing together artists, audiences, and the entire TBA community for one unforgettable throwdown.
Learn moreRave meets experimental late-night talk show at Club Alive, a multidisciplinary queer performance party. Hosted by Portland artist Kye Alive, Club Alive brings together DJs, musical acts, dance performances, live interviews, dramatic entrances, group experiments, and bizarro house band Special Permission (featuring local musician Wolfgang Black) for an unpredictable celebration of crowd power. How alive are you willing to be?
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.
Learn moreAn immersive evening of ethereal performance, film, and sound, with textures of reflection dipped in impressions of deconstruction and decay. A new project by Liz Harris (Grouper), featuring guests January Hunt and Dicky Bahto.
Learn moreFeeling of Home will reconstruct what home and healing can feel like for local, intergenerational Black and Brown artists and communities. In this space we will focus on home and what it feels like for the individual but also what home feels like when we come together as a community.
Learn more‘JUDY' is a queer party that materializes every last Saturday night of the month at a dive bar in Portland, Oregon. Run by queer women and exclusively featuring female identified, trans, and non-binary DJs, JUDY was started in 2014. Each month, JUDY features hand-drawn flyers of community members, party people, and over-the-top queens, with the ritual of crowning of a new “Judy” at every party.
Learn moreThis event will have ASL interpreters and open captioning. Leading Deaf musician, artist, and advocate Myles de Bastion and their CymaSpace collaborative curate a night of experimental music and sound that centers Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing artists and audiences. Through visual, vibrational, light-based, and other immersive and multi-sensory interpretations and displays of sound, this night of performances will create multiple modes and nodes of access for Deaf and Hearing audiences alike, expanding our notions and perceptions of artistic and experiential possibilities for music and sound art. ASL interpretation, captioning, and other forms of accessibility and accommodation will be provided.
Learn moreTBA artist Myles de Bastion—an artistic director, musician, creative altruist, and advocate for Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing communities—is joined by others working for greater access and inclusion for Disabled artists and audiences. * This conversation will be ASL interpreted
Learn morePDXBall presents The Back to School Kiki Ball, a thrilling competition that shows a glimpse of Portland's dynamic Kiki ballroom community. The Kiki ballroom scene is a subculture of the mainstream ballroom world and was created to practice walking or competing in the many ‘categories’ of the international ballroom arena. The theme "Back to School" will influence the decor, competitive categories, and attire of the participants. Spectators and first-time ball attendees are welcome to join in the fun by dressing to the theme. If it is your first time at a ball, you are highly encouraged to attend and cheer on the competitors who have trained for each category. Join us in celebrating a powerful and inspiring community that uplifts and centers queer and trans black, indigenous land, people of color.
Learn moreHolocene presents Fin de Cinema, a new live score of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus, composed and performed by local musicians. “Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.” - Criterion
Learn moreNOCHE LIBRE is a radical Latinx DJ collective of women creating space for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. We spin music that spans genres and geography from cumbia and quebradita to dancehall and perreo. We celebrate our family’s roots and rituals by carrying on the tradition of puro pinche pair.
Learn moreTBA:19 Opening Night Like a Villain (Holland Andrews) will be performing a night of expansive, ceremonial, extended-technique vocal compositions to draw in the opening of this year's TBA Festival.
Learn moreOne of the brightest voices on the Portland hip-hop scene is Alana Chenevert, aka The Last Artful, Dodgr. Her name is a nod to her hometown of Los Angeles, a pun on its baseball team, a reference to Oliver Twist, and it illustrates a life spent dodging bullets. Since arriving in Portland in 2013, she’s made the city her own and has quickly become a rising star. Press and fans have compared her to Chance the Rapper, Missy Elliott, and Dizzee Rascal with lyrics inspired by Sufjan Stevens. While we’re always sad to see the festival end, brilliant hip-hop delivered by a queer black woman is the perfect way to say ‘until next year.’
Learn moreJUDY is a queer, femme, and non-binary-centered party that materializes every last Saturday night of the month at a dive bar in Portland, Oregon. Run by queer women and exclusively featuring female identified, trans, and non-binary DJs, JUDY was started in 2014. Each month, JUDY features hand-drawn flyers of community members, party people, and over-the-top queens, with the ritual of crowning a new “Judy” at every party.
Learn moreSounds et al presents an electroacoustic collaboration from duos Caspar Sonnet/Kozue Matsumoto, and Kaori Suzuki/John Krausbauer.
Learn moreS.E.C.R.E.T.S. presents Prince Romeo the Crow, a theatrical performance of the eponymous album that explores the duality of love and fear, and the forces that shape our actions and fates.
Learn moreAN INFECTED SUNSET is an ekphrastic long-form prose poem first conceived in August, 2016, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, police killings of unarmed Black men, and in the midst of the Standing Rock #NODAPL Resistance. During the writing of the poem, the settler colonial nation-state elected the 45th president of this colonized country, which revealed a sudden revival of extreme white supremacist nationalism. As the social landscape evolved, the Liberated Poem emerged as an offering to Indigenous communities and landscapes that strive for a decolonial and sovereign future, emancipated from white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial trauma drama. This performance poem is a reflection on queer sex, survival and death politics, indigenous identity, settler and heteronormative romanticism, environmental injustice, and the importance of honoring community.
Learn moreFIN DE CINEMA is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the second year in a row, with a reprise performance of their reimagined score to Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast (originally performed at Holocene in January of 2018). This year’s show will be composed and performed by Like A Villain, Patricia Wolf, John Niekrasz, Jonathan Sielaff, Amenta Abioto, and Noah Bernstein.
Learn moreFamed for fashion-forward Black and Brown queer dance parties like Legendary Mondays, CAKE, and Decadent, bart fitzgerald is throwing a festival extravaganza. It’s LEGENDARY on a Sunday night. Wear your festival clothes. Make bad choices.
Learn moreNXT LVL is back at PICA bringing another epic party for social justice back to Portland. In January, they brought some of the West Coast’s most exciting musicians for an all night dance party to raise money and bring awareness. They’ll be bringing that same energy and same mission to TBA—their surprise line-up will be one you won’t want to miss.
Learn moreS1 at TBA is especially poignant given the 2016 Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, California, which resulted in new laws and regulations that have impacted artist-run spaces and artist communities around the country. Organizations and groups of artists are being forced to relocate, shift their program- ming, or shutter entirely. No exception to these pressures, S1 is considering the future of how to share and experience art together. Bringing the spirit of their programming to TBA is just the beginning.
Learn moreTo kickoff the 16th TBA Festival, step into the thriving Pacific Northwest street-and-club dance community and experience a 7-to-smoke freestyle dance battle, The Beautiful Street, where dancers will compete, round for round, in the styles of breakdance, hip-hop, house, locking, popping, vogue, waacking, and more. Celebrating individuality, creativity, and technique, freestyle dancers are fueled by the music, each other, and the crowd. This battle will engage and inspire. The dance battle will be followed by an epic dance party!
Learn morePart song and dance, part IBQTPOC prom, but mostly dedicated to honoring the labor and intelligence of indigenous and brown punk energy that continues the fight against heteropatriachy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Join us as we honor the revolutionary spirit of activists, artists, and lovers whose lives were lost, whose lives are threatened, and those who are yet to come. This is as much a sweaty celebration as it is a ceremony. Albuquerque, New Mexico’s angry pop punk trio, Weedrat, and San Antonio’s riot grrrl chicano punk band, FEA, will provide live music along with local poetry that will help set the tone for the evening. Video projections, live printing, and punk/riot grrrl music will do the rest. Bring your beautiful body, and let’s collectively celebrate how far we’ve come as community while we smash heteropatriarchy to pieces.
Learn moreCalling all Lovers, Creators, Change-makers, Hustlers, Baby Mamas, Nation Builders, Dreamers, Dancers, Revolutionaries, Freedom Fighters, Spiritual Gangsters, and Everyone in Between. YGBPortland and DUG come together to offer you a multi-sensory community experience that will feel like no dance party you have ever stepped into.
Learn more