Past
Horizon is the perceived line where sky meets Earth—a locator in constant motion. Horizon is a dance.
Learn moreOmni Rail is an ambisonic, walk-through instrument designed from the stairwells, railings, and cable system of Portland’s historic 511 Building, transforming the architecture itself into a resonant body. The instrument is its own speaker system, both metaphorically and physically.
Learn moreA random encounter with a camera on the streets of Tallinn, Estonia made choreographer and dancer Rakesh Sukesh a momentary poster boy for a right wing news channel’s campaign against immigration from Asia and Africa. What happens to his body when it is rendered into a viral, racist symbol? In because i love the diversity (this micro-attitude, we all have it), Rakesh tells the story of his own journey through the powerful semi-improvisational, trance-like movement technique that makes him such an in-demand teacher across the world. *show has brief full nudity.
Learn moreIn Preparation for Disappearances to Come is a music/dance collaboration. It is a machine to practice remembering and forgetting. It is an occasion for us to slyly, if futilely, enact strategies to sidestep the inevitability of our own future dissolution and the ephemerality of performance. It is a prompt to consider how our lives and works dissolve, replenishing the cultural compost that nourishes the future, even as we ourselves are forgotten. In Preparation for Disappearances to Come is presented by Performance Works NorthWest with the support of the PICA's SPACE Program.
Learn moreNOTHING#15: a bluff is the third part of Knight’s series. This performance presents Knight alone, responding improvisationally to a mostly empty space, its features, and its audiences.
Learn moreAutumn Knight’s performances create spaces for intimacy between the audience and performer. Her series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff is a three-part investigation into the Italian concept of “dolce far niente,” or “the sweetness of doing nothing.”
Learn moreOsten Cetto : Four Snakes is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, film, and tattoo’s relationship to body and shape, the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space. The performance is accompanied by a program of short films from Indigenous filmmakers.
Learn morePart freewheeling comic lecture, part podcast, and part play, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World is a thrilling ride down the rabbit hole of Wikipedia and murder mystery podcasts about a case you’ve never heard of.
Learn moreThe first installment of Autumn Knight’s performance series NOTHING#15: a bar, a bed, a bluff, NOTHING#15: a bar enacts a social experiment that transforms PICA’s warehouse space into a host club, where a multitude of performers take on the task of provoking desire and exchanging acts of care with audience members.
Learn moreIn this performance, artist JJJJJerome Ellis presents portions of their latest project, Aster of Ceremonies. Using piano, saxophone, electronics, and voice, they perform excerpts from Benediction, a devotional song cycle attending to eighteenth and nineteenth century Black runaway slaves who stuttered.
Learn moreYelling Choir is a performance process that reimagines voice, presence, and power. Created by Maxx Katz, the Choir is a vehicle for experimental relational technology, using play, somatic awareness, and vocal practice to reform the psychosocial basis of community relationships.
Learn moreGranular Synthesis converges installation, sound, and video in a nonlinear presentation of digital fragments in reference to diasporic memory. The work integrates experimental sampling, splicing, and rearrangement, as well as conceptual methodologies around collapse and incompletion.
Learn moreCurated and hosted by Carla Rossi, Carla Rossi’s Queer Horrors presents short horror films intercut with performances from Portland’s finest ghouls—plus an artist market, psychic readings, and a dance party complete with a Friday the 13th costume contest. It’ll be a scream!
Learn moreGoner is a live, suspenseful choreography delving into the depths of psychological horror. Exploring alienation, migration, violence, and more, it crafts radical visual culture from a marginalized perspective and engages a new Black tradition of horror in live performance.
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 moreThis new “solo” performance by Morgan Bassichis humbly attempts to ensure that the performer Frank Maya’s legacy is no longer overlooked, while also resolving the bottomless queer search for laughter in times of crisis and for fame and father figures and intense attachment dynamics no matter how fleeting.
Learn moreFORCE! an opera in three acts is a Black femme story of interior lives and shared fantasies. What blooms in the shadows of the bureaucratic state, of carceral power? What dreams of a sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls? Through sound, movement, and shared silences—as well as lessons learned from direct action, mutual aid, and emergent strategies—we put into practice the free worlds of our dreams.
Learn moreTe Moana Meridian is a major new experimental opera based on a speculative United Nations General Assembly Resolution that upends the colonial machinations embedded within our current means of determining global space and time by relocating the international prime meridian from the UK to Te Moananui-ā-Kiwa/the South Pacific Ocean.
Learn moreThe Things Around Us is a solo, live-looping, music and narrative performance featuring trumpet, clarinet, everyday objects, and darkly humorous stories about other people. Composed, written, and performed by Ahamefule J. Oluo.
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 moreEqual parts survey exhibition and emergent experiment, Outside Inside World activates PNCA’s 511 Gallery as a showcase for works in the Videotones archive as well as a site for making and sharing new work.
Learn moreFor the 2024 Artists’ Biennial, presented by Oregon Contemporary, Bean Gilsdorf presents an experimental lecture-performance that enmeshes facts, figures, memes, and clichés about the arts with key theories from psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.
Learn moreTrue to the title, we’ll slowly share more information about each Time-Released program over the coming months. Read on to learn more.
Learn moreMake Banana Cry is a critical and destabilizing dance performance that questions Asian stereotypes while examining the transmission of cultural identity.
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