Past
Duet Love performs love, lust, and charged energy. Portland choreographer Tahni Holt returns to the TBA Festival with her latest work that presents coupled bodies performing gendered states around the romantic premise of the “duet.”
Learn moreWith virtuoso chops, rock-star charisma, and an appetite for pushing her instrument to the edge of avant-garde adventurousness, Maya Beiser is the post-modern diva of the cello.” – The Boston Globe
Learn moreChristopher Sutton describes his whole life as revolving around his love of music. RE: Disc COVER is part performance, thoughtful dissertation, and dance party based on artist Sutton’s lifelong journey as a collector of 12” vinyl.
Learn moreCanadian-based musician and sound artist, explores the intersection of noise, dissonance, and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft that is both physical and emotive. Marking Hecker’s Portland debut, this rare concert will be an immersive sensory experience that includes both recent and debut material.
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 moreCRITICAL MASCARA "A Post-Realness Drag Ball" returns to the TBA stage with a much anticipated sequel evening of fabulousness and extravaganza. CRITICAL MASCARA features some of the Pacific Northwest's most courageous and raw talent all competing to win 666$ in a queer driven dance-off drag spectacular! The evening is hosted by, the one and only, Pepper Pepper with celebrity judges, features special guest performers, and wraps up with a raucous late-night dance party for all! Come dressed as your fiercest self!
Learn moreIn this concert for film, Inuit throat singer and famed tour de force vocalist, Tanya Tagaq reclaims the controversial 1922 silent film Nanook of the North. Tagaq’s innovative vocals and deep sense of Arctic life work to create a powerful soundscape of authentic emotion and pulsing breath against the backdrop of the film’s racially charged clichés. In Nanook, Tagaq’s haunting singing is joined by violinist Jesse Zubot, genius drummer Jean Martin, and Juno Award-winning composer Derek Charke’s original film score to frame the vintage semi-documentary of an Inuk family in a revealing contemporary light.
Learn moreFrom pole dancing to macho dancing, choreographer Eisa Jocson investigates labour and representations of the dancing body in the service industry and exposes gender formation, seduction politics, and Filipino social mobility.
Learn morePICA's education and public engagement series, Field Guide helps audiences discover and feel more informed about contemporary performance. Through facilitated workshops with visiting and local faculty, focused explorations of artist's work, and connection with other festival-goers, Field Guide sessions include various combinations of pre-show workshops, social outings to performances, post-show conversations, and online interviews and media to more deeply contextualize the art and artists of our time.
Learn moreUnique' has generally come to mean 'slightly out of the ordinary,' but Samita Sinha's voice warrants the true meaning of the hackneyed accolade... mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact. —Time Out
Learn moreHere was a deeply intellectual experience of consciousness conveyed through physicality. Across the synapses between sensation and thought, the animal and the human, the ecological and illogical, the participants in Super Nature roared, howled, tingled, and leapt, flinging themselves over to feel out the distance and, for a moment, close the gap between the animal spirits and what it means to act naturally. — jkramer.net
Learn moreTHEESatisfaction are artists that blend elements of hip-hop, electronic, and dance. They’re positive energy. Black energy, black women leaping oceans and continents at a single bound. With positive strength of purpose. Even crowds with nary a right foot between them find the steps when faced with THEESat’s unorthodox but right-on-time rhythms. Synchronized, sinewy and sensuous, the regal Stas and Cat channel the higher, whipping like waves of space-borne radiation onstage, leaving a trail of glowing observers abuzz like Geiger counters. THEESatisfaction, the Queens Supreme. Bring yourself!
Learn moreMSHR presents a cybernetic system made up of hand-built analog synthesizers and digitally fabricated hieroglyphic sculptures. Light, sound, and shape are pulled through nested feedback eddies as the system unfolds. Visitors become part of the feedback cycle, steering its course through their intentional engagement and ambient presence.
Learn moreNacera Belaza’s mesmerizing choreography commands attention with its spare aesthetics and focused intensity. In this one-night-only duet with her sister, Belaza concentrates on the starting point of her work, looking inwards and moving out from the intimate to the surface, until the movement disappears. It is a simple idea, and an endless and vital one.
Learn morePICA’s new Field Guide program will take off during TBA, offering up new avenues for you to explore, experience, and discuss concepts and forms in contemporary dance. Join guest Field Guide faculty Tonya Lockyer (dance artist/educator and Artistic Director of Velocity Dance Center in Seattle) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People's performance of And lose the name of action.
Learn moreA show performed by its audience. Taking the form of a theatrical “read-through,” attendees will pick up their scripts and navigate a text collectively, to create and perform a community. In the temporary microcosmic society that’s established over the course of the reading, everybody slowly but surely gets his or her role. WE ARE STILL WATCHING is a play in which the idea of “spectacle” slowly shifts to where we least expect it.
Learn moreDance, words, and scrap lumber are the raw materials for One with Others, an examination of who we become due to the choices we—or others—make.
Learn morePICA’s new Field Guide program will take off during TBA, offering up new avenues for you to explore, experience, and discuss concepts and forms in contemporary dance. Join guest Field Guide faculty Keith Hennessy (choreographer and TBA alum) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Bouchra Ouizguen's Ha!.
Learn moreSince the early 90s, Daniel Barrow has developed a unique style of “manual” animation, layering and manipulating his intricate drawings on overhead projectors. With The Thief of Mirrors, Barrow returns to TBA with the story of a jewel thief who wears the mask of a sad clown.
Learn moreKim Gordon (CKM, Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, etc.) and Bill Nace (X.O.4, Vampire Belt, Ceylon Mange, etc.) will bathe THE WORKS in sound and film for the Portland premiere of their new band Body/Head.
Learn moreMoroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen draws inspiration from the writings of the famed Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi to probe the obsessions lurking in each of us. In Ha!, she shares this exploration with her collaborators Fatima El Hanna, Fatima Aït Ben Hmad, and Naïma Sahmoud—a trio of Moroccan aïtas, traditional cabaret singers who are both celebrated and scorned for their performing tradition on the margins of society.
Learn more“Nacera Belaza practices the detail drawing, the imperceptible nuance, the painting of a slow-moving body with a play of light and shade. She is to the dance what Bresson is to the cinema...” —RTBF
Learn more“The professional insights of Erdal, who at times operates the lighting from the stage [...] illuminate his story, becoming a metaphor for his experiences and for life’s big questions... he uses the medium he knows so intimately [...] to present theatre with universal resonance.” —The Globe and Mail
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