Past
Dance provocateurs Luke George and Daniel Kok exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience. In order to unravel shared lines of connection, to suspend tension and to unleash collective desires, Kok and George look to macramé, sailors’ knots, Chinese knots and rope bondage to weave together an interactive experience of collectivity. Bunny is a nickname given to the person being tied in rope bondage. In this work, we ask ourselves this question: What if everyone (in the theatre) is a Bunny?
Learn moreDorothée Munyaneza with Holland Andrews, Bruce Clarke, and Alain Mahé directs our gaze towards the aftermath of genocide. Here, we explore the psychic repercussions of 100,000 to 250,000 Rwandan women raped in the span of four months in 1994 who proceeded to have children from their attacks.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Ghost Rings a narrative of friendship and family-making unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Jo Lampert form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance. Ghost Rings has previously been performed at New York Live Arts and Abrons Arts Center, as part of American Realness.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In the second installment of her Thank You for Coming series, Driscoll uses the ritual of storytelling to explore our human reliance on stories to relate to one another and form identities as individuals and citizens.
Learn moreDT is peri-conceptual, dis-experimental, and a-nihilist. DT is a blackened performance that is never not happening. DT is après-queer and post-ratchet. DT is anti anti-capital capital. DT is heavy evasion-- worthless.
Learn moreComprised of her signature story-driven stand-up and scored by sensual homemade pop, Erin Markey’s Boner Killer is an intimate musical conversation between what Markey thinks she can’t have and how she’d have it if she could. Driven by Whitney Houston’s lesbian mythologies, Europe™, and a Pretty Woman accident, Markey and bandmate Emily Bate sacrifice their lives to transform personal humiliations into naked feminist hope.
Learn moreUS West Coast Premiere: Part classic standup comedy special, part teen zine vomit confessional, They, Themself and Schmerm is Becca’s disturbingly hilarious personal tale of being adopted into a Midwestern religious family, trained to be a girl, molested, and plagued by the question, “How do I become a man and do I even want that?”
Learn moreInspired by the art & life of James Baldwin, Stew explores Baldwin’s trailblazing legacy through songs co-written by longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, co-creator, along with Stew, of the Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange. For TBA:17, the two will present a stripped down, intimate version of Notes of a Native Song, which places at the forefront Stew's intensely personal & problematic relationship with Baldwin's work. Stew’s uniquely incisive lyrics combine with rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz in this powerful homage to the inspiring writer, who famously confronted issues of gender, race, and class distinction.
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in one’s embodied experiences, Direct Path to Detour seeks to evoke various mental and physical states that arise at the intersection of multiple value systems, social pressure, expectation, personal experiences, and body memory. Some of those things are sometimes explicitly clear, but some are often unarticulated and uncertain. In this poetic investigation, a solo performer attempts to observe and hold all on the equal plane, believing that they can and should exist simultaneously without logic and rationale.
Learn moreDohee 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 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 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 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: 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 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.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 13 in Santa Barbara, California, in a rampage motivated by his lack of success with women—a fixation he had detailed in a series of confessional and defiant YouTube videos. New York City multimedia artists Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble respond to this wound to the body of Love with a modern-day ritual performance suffused with humor and experimentation. Mining source material ranging from self-help dating advice to confessional shopping videos, the group unpacks, isolates, and rearranges contemporary romantic mythologies and situates Rodger’s actions within a broader collection of found love stories and online video content. Within the sacred space of the performance, this “musical priesthood” will lead a group meditation on insecurity, longing, and masculinity, performing humanity’s common search for Love as we misunderstand it.
Learn morePICA COMMISSION: In Meg Wolfe’s lushly physical New Faithful Disco, belief is made manifest as energy. A queer-love power-trio of dancers—taisha paggett, Marbles Radio, and Wolfe—feel and feed on that energy, remixing it as they prepare to take on something BIG. Is it Love? Faith? Impermanence? Pleasure? Power? Propelled by nature sounds and fresh rhythms, the dancers build communal energy into an accumulated whirlwind wrought with awkwardness and contradiction. New Faithful Disco opens up time, triggers fading histories, and confronts who we are now.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bulgarian performer Ivo Dimchev is known for breaking taboos in his provocative and boldly physical pieces. While his work blends performance art, dance, theater, and visual art, Dimchev’s enormous musicality and his remarkable vocal gift are at the center of each of his productions. For this live musical event, he has selected 15 songs from his past performances to present as independent, individual opuses. Accompanied on the piano by Dimitar Gorchakov, Dimchev displays his prodigious talent in a stirring concert that leaps between the feral and the virtuosic.
Learn moreWearing mask and merkin, Narcissister’s spectacle-rich live performances tackle issues of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, contemporary dance, unabashed eroticism, and her trademark mannequin mask are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical representations and challenging the audience to question its own attraction and repulsion. Rather than abandon the contaminated site of sexual fetish, Narcissister dives headlong into the murky depths of fantasy and its racist and gendered dynamics, exposing and deconstructing their power.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: 2004, Istanbul. A few minutes before the end of a performance, out of nowhere, a group of men erupt on stage, break out into a very short folk dance, and then immediately disappear. The powerful memory of a traditional dance leads French choreographer Christian Rizzo on a bold and hypnotic exploration of masculine ritual. Stepping onto a stark white stage, the eight dancers are propelled by two live drummers. Their undulating movements build into frenetic bursts of dance that recall the centuries-old dances of the Mediterranean. By turns tender and vibrantly joyful, the all-male ensemble rides the friction between folkloric practice and formal contemporary performance, building a communal, visceral force.
Learn moreFor years Mike Daisey has been working on an insane project: a live, 24-hour monologue on the scale of War and Peace and The Iliad. Unbelievably, this dream will at last be realized as the finale of this year’s TBA Festival.
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