Past
Will 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.
Learn moreFirst 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 more