Past
First Nations Performing Arts is focused on cultural change, commissioning, touring, and presenting Indigenous performance, as well as capacity building for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous performing arts sectors.
Learn moreIn this creative engagement between Cree sound artist Chloe Alexandra Thompson and Pacific Islander interdisciplinary artist DB Amorin, the pair work towards a joint generative investigation of survivance, waves in their many forms, and the ever-changing relationship of knowledge and tradition to that which is more than human.
Learn moreUnderstanding extraterrestrials as a product of American mythology requires seeing the multiplicity of fears in the American consciousness. Just like the hydra of conspiracy that shapes America as a nation, the intersections between extraterrestrials and the American nation-state fracture into even more intricate pieces of an unsolvable puzzle. Multimedia artist and scholar Kite performs an experimental lecture, “What‘s on the Earth is in the Stars, and What’s in the Stars is on the Earth,” which probes the real conspiracies through multiple dimensions: Lakota epistemologies and the American paranormal.
Learn moreClown Down 2: Clown Out of Water finds Portland's premiere drag clown, Carla Rossi, trapped on a rock in the ocean next to a seagull with IBS while the sea level rises. Clowning and climate disaster ensue.
Learn moreDeriving from the antique alchemistic concept of the four humors, melancholia has been a subject in science, culture, and art for centuries. Originally seen as the result of an imbalance of one of the four humors connected to a specific temperament called “black bile,” melancholia was connected to a deep sense of sadness that was believed to lead to depression, insanity, and later genius in the arts. Based in an auto-biographical collage this lecture will talk about death, birth, and past-potential-futures, proposing Black Melancholia as a place of solace and care for Black Life.
Learn moreRenowned artist, filmmaker, and writer Zach Blas will present a brand new performance lecture as part of the NIGHT SCHOOL program for this year's TBA Festival. Blas’ engagement in Portland is in partnership with the MA in Critical Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art at Willamette University.
Learn more“Drag Animism” explores Pepper’s personal and artistic explorations into cyborg consciousness and dirt-witch-glamour. It’s a visual and performative meditation on digital and physical bodies, the enchantment of nature, and the slippery potential of activating “persona power.”
Learn moreArab.AMP Live presents the legendary Sir Richard Bishop, guitarist and founding member of the band Sun City Girls, hybrid performance artist Lime Rickey International, and ethno-psych trio Descending Pharaohs. Arab.AMP is a platform for experimental music and live art from the Southwest Asian North African diaspora and allied communities.
Learn moreCelebrated New York and Florida filmmaker Sasha Wortzel debuts her films on the West Coast in this one-night screening. Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel uses film to examine queer place-making, geographies of resistance, and the systems that marginalize, extract, and erase communities, peoples, and histories. The films will be followed by a Q & A with Wortzel.
Learn moreAdrienne Truscott made THIS. THIS is a solo performance which may not always be a solo. THIS is a small or large or medium act of artistic survivalism and an ever-evolving work that adjusts, in real time, the libretto of the performance the artist is attempting to do which changes with each performance to reflect the new context brought by the performance at hand. THIS is a run-on sentence. THIS is a grift. THIS is a piece of cake.
Learn morejaamil olawale kosoko’s meditative multi-channel film and installation Syllabus for Black Love serves as the ship inside which the multimedia performance the hold is positioned. Through rhythmic and restorative gestures, the hold creates a perceptive and somatic experience for both performer and audience.
Learn moreThe first of a new series, this episode premieres Joseph Keckler’s new musical film about a mysterious and transformative encounter, showcases an in-studio performance by vocalist and composer Holland Andrews, and features a conversation between the two artists.
Learn moreWriter Sylvan Oswald presents High Winds, a performance text about a trans man whose insomnia sparks a fantastical search for his estranged half-brother through hallucinatory desert landscapes. Gas stations, local legends, and unlikely rock formations become terrain for explorations of fear, fantasy, masculinity, and what lies “deep inside America.” Video by Katherine Freer and an electro-acoustic score by JJJJJerome Ellis set an otherworldly tone. The performance is based on Sylvan’s book of the same name, created with graphic designer Jessica Fleischmann and published by X Artists' Books (2017).
Learn moreNOTHINGBEING is a live performance project that investigates ways to embody the presence of nothingness and “being,” breathing spaces that we could easily dismiss and considering possibilities for the unfiltered self. Developed with the collaborators Samita Sinha, David Thomson, and Anna Martine Whitehead, this project addresses the notion of presence from multiple performative modalities such as moments of highly physical movement, a communal meditation, and internal activation of sensory memories.
Learn moreCelebrate the start of TBA:22 at our Opening Night with a headlining performance by renowned Los Angeles-based musician San Cha.
Learn more100 Keyboards is a live music performance/installation featuring as the title implies over 100 keyboards. This performance focuses on the phenomenon of “interference sound," the complex distribution of sound pressure and other parameters as sound waves of the same frequency but with a different direction of transmission overlap. As each keyboard plays a sustained note of a certain pitch, and as the number of notes increases, a “moiré of sound” is created. The auditory experience is akin to weaving an individual “textile pattern" (the original meaning of “moiré") and a sound equivalent to the visual “moiré effect.”
Learn moreFaye Driscoll's first solo exhibition, Come On In, offers an enveloping sensory installation. Bringing the immersive experience of her performance works into the gallery, Come On In conjures states of longing and seizes desire as I take listeners on a journey that reflects upon power and presence, yearning and absence, while inviting them to reconceive their body and its limits.
Learn moreLet 'im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from their decade-long research into J-Sette performance. Intervention brings together a group of Black dancers for a live outdoor performance work on sidewalks and in alleyways in historically or predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Learn moreThis offering is a sci-fi-inspired multi-sensory stim, a personal reflection on the ways our sensitive systems intertwine with surroundings—how they collapse time, reorganize, spin out, and regulate. Apogee is climax at a distance.
Learn moreIn Raja Feather Kelly’s HYSTERIA, Kelly continues his study of pop culture and its displacement of queer Black subjectivity. Picking up where his 2018 performance UGLY left off, Kelly re-situates himself as a glamorous, extraterrestrial entity—both alien to the world and wholly consuming its pop-cultural byproducts. HYSTERIA marks the collapse of fiction into fact, tracking the subsequent inner turmoil, confusion, and mania that Kelly sets out to exorcise.
Learn moreAT THE END OF EMPIRE: the glitching of ghosted bodies haunting, collapsing time and space. As the rumble unbounds, dust blows to sleep in the heart of those existing. Veiled figures, both on screen and embodied, perform rituals at the end of empire.
Learn moreMia Imani interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between the worlds of art and science.
Learn moreTHE BLUE WALK is a spectacle of LOVE. It activates RAGE, TENDERNESS, REST, RHYTHM and THE HOLINESS OF THE BLACK BODY ON THE LIVING PLANET as a healing channel of release and power.
Learn moreAs part of a creative residency at PICA, Emily Johnson gathers an extraordinary group of collaborating artists to create an in-process activation and installation as part of her newest work in development, Being Future Being. Along with composer Raven Chacon, visual and tattoo artist Holly Mititquq Nordlum, and artist and mask maker Drew Michael, the group delves into the power of creation to build a visual, aural, and ancestral landscape of Indigenous power.
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