Past
Yelling 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.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreIn addition to major video installation, Alka domo — on view at PICA August 24 through September 24, 2023 — Seba Calfuqueo will present Flowing Like Waterfalls (2022-2023) in PICA's Annex on August 26 at 3:30 pm. Flowing Like Waterfalls is a 20-minute performance that approaches the power of water's fluidity as a means to explore the body, gender, sexuality, and the relationship of water with life, forests, and ecosystems.
Learn moreJoin drag duo Carla Rossi and Pepper Pepper for a wellness seminar gone wrong—or right?—when the mushrooms peak. Tackling wellness culture, microdosing, land acknowledgments, and featuring a lipsync on an actively-inflating airbed, GLOOP is a gauntlet of spectacularly unhinged drag from two of Portland’s most beloved grifters.
Learn moreThe final night of performances for Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound will showcase Sholeh Asgary (Oakland, CA) and Nyokabi Kariũki (Nairobi, Kenya; Baltimore, MD; New York, NY). Iranian-born Asgary expansive practice includes immersive works, live performances, and participatory scores and uses visual, sound, and collective processes. Asgary will also be facilitating a workshop on Monday, March 6 at PICA (click here for details). The compositions of Nyokabi Kariũki (Nairobi, Kenya; Baltimore, MD; New York, NY) span genres from classical contemporary and experimental-electronic to sound art, pop, film, and (East) African musical traditions. She often performs with piano, vocals, electronics, and with several instruments from the African continent. A single ticket grants entry to both performances.
Learn moreNight Two of live performances for Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound begins with musician and creative technologist Crystal Quartez (Portland, OR), whose richly textured and complex soundscapes for dance music and performances are sometimes translated from data from the natural and social world. Following Quartez will be celebrated New York-based musician and producer Hiro Kone (the alias of Nicky Mao), whose expansive sounds draw from modular synthesis, noise, and field recordings. A single ticket grants entry to both performances.
Learn moreThe first night of live shows for Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound begins with a performance by San Francisco-based Lucy Liyou (San Francisco, CA), acclaimed for their innovative use of text-to-speech vocals in experimental music and piano. Immediately following, Astoria, Oregon-based Nivhek (Grouper’s Liz Harris) will perform a live version of the new project ENGINE, which uses train and car engine noise from Portland drag races, local railway tracks, and synth and other electronics. A multichannel installation of ENGINE was commissioned by PICA for the Remembering to Remember exhibition, on view at PICA through March 19th. A single ticket grants entry to both performances.
Learn moreCurated by Roya Amirsoleymani and Felisha Ledesma, Remembering to Remember: Experiments in Sound is a multifaceted program of 15+ international, national, and local artists spanning six live performances; five newly commissioned multichannel compositions; four film/video works at the intersection of sound and moving image; and one month of artist residencies, community workshops, and public engagements. The container for this breadth of programming is an exhibition that will be on view at PICA from February 17 to March 19, 2023, with an opening reception on Friday, February 17, 2023, 6:00 - 8:000 pm. Artists include Adee Roberson, Alison O’Daniel, bone lattice, Crystal Quartez, Hiro Kone, Kite & Robbie Wing, Lucy Liyou, Nivhek, Nyokabi Kariũki, Reese Bowes, Saint Abdullah, Sholeh Asgary, Synth Library Portland, Takashi Makino, and Tomoko Sauvage.
Learn moreUwU & Friends is a multidisciplinary event series showcasing underground dance music created by, and for, Portland’s Queer, Trans, Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and Trans/Gender nonconforming community. With the dancefloor as the center, established and emerging DJs and artists explore a new type of party—a queer utopia.
Learn moreRadio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ is the first collaboration between Hanako Hoshimi-Caines, Zoë Poluch, and Elisa Harkins. It is an Indigenous futuristic concert, a beautiful and uncomfortable dance performance, and a perverse triangle of shifting power that seeks to be unfaithful to both minimalism and postmodern dance’s claims to so-called “neutrality.” This choreography in the expanded field haunts the recognizable toolbox of abstraction, form, repetition, and pattern by striving to make visible that which has been kept invisible and illegible in colonial systems of aesthetics. Within Radio III / ᎦᏬᏂᏍᎩ ᏦᎢ there are many references to the number 3; there are 3 performers, the piece has 3 sections, and there are 3 duets, one being a triplet. Created and developed on the Muscogee Reservation, Stockholm, Sweden, and Montréal, Quebec, the piece brings together components and concerns that are an interdisciplinary and counter-colonial approaches to performance.
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