Past
Portland-based Lu Yim brings to TBA:15 a solo work of mourning and melancholia. From here they depart, measuring the distance within body, thought, language, and feeling; as portal / continent / object / subject / memory / tool. Actions of voice, sound and movement turn the internalized outward. This is not my body performing but where my body has gone suspended in a place where a question repeats.
Learn moreA solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance, and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in the 1980s—where Newports are bought in singles at corner bodegas, and sex saturated notes are passed in class.
Learn moreTyondai Braxton is known for experimenting with music in a way that feels like a game of coloring outside the lines—tracing patterns that unexpectedly jet sideways. Braxton brings to TBA:15 a solo performance featuring modular synthesizer and samples. Braxton will be performing pieces from HIVE1 his first album in six years and his Nonesuch Records debut.
Learn moreTwo men hunt each other as a kinetic light sculpture hovers and cuts through the air, signaling keystrokes from a hacked ’50s typewriter. Featuring archival wire-tap transcriptions, the missives of communist spies, and MRI brain scans, The Institute of Memory (TIMe) conjures a portrait of director Lars Jan’s enigmatic father — a Cold War operative whose story exhibits how the future of privacy looks dangerously like the darkest era of its past. Jan packs TIMe with a brilliant set of collaborators that include Pablo N. Molina, Nathan Ruyle, Chris Kuhl, Sonny Valicenti, composer and vocalist Mariana Sadovska, and Obie-winner Andrew Schneider, among others.
Learn moreNothing To You is a temporary site-specific installation that will act as a frame for an encounter. MPA will direct an action that tours the perimeters of thoughtful collision between bodies, objects and sound within the space. Here, speakers mature into characters, and bodies regress into objects, calling into question the notion of pre-tense, the state of being before action, during approximately 45 minutes of provocative and attentive collapse.
Learn moreGet a glimpse of the Portland dance scene in this afternoon of two works by local choreographers.
Learn morekeyon gaskin it's not a thing
Learn moreLauded Italian choreographer and theatre director Alessandro Sciarroni is known for his stagings that marvel and works that straddle dance, performance art, and ritual anthropology. In FOLK-S, the Schuhplatter, a Bavarian folk dance, meaning “shoe batter”, is refined to its most essential form invoking a sense of playful experimentation and ritualized trance.
Learn moreHolcombe Waller’s Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title is a ceremonial choral work that deeply explores contemporary faith, advocacy through art, and collective catharsis. Performed in historic Trinity Episcopal Cathedral with an all-abilities community choir drawn from all walks of life towards the project’s mission, Requiem Mass is an emotional and personal work invoking remembrance and peace for the dead who have suffered persecution for their sexual orientation or gender expression. Requiem Mass was additionally informed by research into the pivotal gay history from the 1980s through present day and by community engagement that has included working with experts in liturgical music, queer theory, faith-based equality initiatives as well as over 100 participants in a series of choral workshops with Waller over the past year.
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT: The influential and relentlessly relevant rock band of mythical standing Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks kick off TBA:15 with a free concert for all! Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks are veteran Portland-based musicians Joanna Bolme, Mike Clark, Jake Morris, and frontman Stephen Malkmus.
Learn moreClosing night at THE WORKS lights up the sky with an explosion of a million stars. Enter the sensorial and phantasmagoric world of Evelyn.
Learn moreHYPNOSIS DISPLAY is an original live sound and 16mm film collaboration between experimental vocalist and musician Grouper (Liz Harris) and filmmaker Paul Clipson.
Learn moreOneohtrix Point Never, aka acclaimed experimental composer Daniel Lopatin, takes the audience on an odyssey through his latest work R Plus Seven. Hypnotic and unexpected in equal measure, R Plus Seven is full of satisfyingly complex sonic puzzles.
Learn moreIn GERMINAL, French artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort create one of the most talked-about recent works of contemporary international theater. Both whimsical and deeply philosophical in approach, GERMINAL asks: if we had the opportunity to start the world from scratch, how would we do it?
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreArca is a Venezuelan producer, artist, mixing engineer and DJ now based in Brooklyn, New York. Fresh off of his latest work &&&&&, audio-visual collaborations with Jesse Kanda at MoMA PS1 and producing projects with Kanye West, Arca will set THE WORKS ablaze with his off the grid structures and sound mutations of club music.
Learn more[Not About Face] is always engaging, sometimes awkward, sometimes an exercise in failure, finally ecstatic... it's as if it's a gift, as if somehow the touching and the following and the watching and the listening, has shaped this movement, making it an expression of our collective desire. —Alison Croggon, ABC Arts
Learn moreIn Mon, Ma, Mes, the NYC-based dancer, choreographer, and writer examines the permeability between the real and the fictive in a disarming and interactive retrospective of his life and work.
Learn moreSQUART! says "Get your ass on stage, be spontaneous, short-circuit the forces of habit and expectation in the face of the dominant order, celebrate this space of not knowing to make something strange together!” —Jeremy Wade, SQUART! Berlin Celebrity Judge, 2014
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex, of the revered social practice-based work Haircuts by Children (TBA:07), returns with All the Sex I’ve Ever Had. Mammalian uses storytelling to plunge fearlessly into provocative uncharted waters with a frank, vulnerable and unpredictable work that examines intimacy, old age, youth obsessed culture and sex.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome. Limited to 25 participants.
Learn moreIn 2013 Portland based artist, photographer, and comic Jason Traeger began documenting Portland Oregon’s internationally recognized stand-up comedy scene in his blog, Portland Stand-up Comedy Photo Album. Over 2,000 posts later, the blog and Traeger’s photos stand as the definitive document of the comedic explosion flowering in Portland. Taking inspiration from his blog, Traeger will host an evening of boundary pushing stand-up comedy featuring some of his favorite funny people from Portland and beyond.
Learn moreJennifer West launches the first of her new pre-post fragmented cinematic environments where viewers are invited into an environment of flashlights, projections, filmstrips, images, and shadows. The Los Angeles-based artist will premiere the first in this series of interactive cinematic installations at this year’s TBA Festival.
Learn moreA Living Documentary is a raw comedic reflection on the trials and tribulations of earning a living as a professional theater artist in the 21st century. Intertwining elements of musical comedy, documentary, and fiction, Hopkins’ newest work intersperses autobiographical storytelling with portrayals of semi-fictional comedic characters, all the while asking myriad questions about the realities of artistic life in New York City.
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