Past
„The Want“ adapts Marie-Koltes’ In the Solitude of Cotton Fields (1985) as an experimental dance, musical score, and opera--with a libretto littered with interjections from Derrida to Missy Elliot--examining language, desire, and the contract between performer and audience. Curated by Kristan Kennedy and Roya Amirsoleymani
Learn moreSUSAN, the follow-up to Ahamefule J. Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. The performance on Sept 14 will be ASL interpreted.
Learn moreSUSAN, Ahamefule J. Oluo’s darkly comic musical portrait of his mother, builds one story out of many, a journey from Section 8 housing in 1980s Seattle, to the mangrove swamps of the Niger Delta, to the Clallam Bay Correctional Facility. With stunning new compositions performed by some of Seattle's best musicians, combined with soul-baring stand-up interludes, Oluo explores two intertwining narratives: his mother’s life as the white, Midwestern wife of a Nigerian chief, and later a destitute single mother; and his own journey to Nigeria as an adult, to visit his late father’s village and discover a family on the other side of the world. SUSAN, the follow-up to Oluo’s acclaimed musical Now I’m Fine, is a story about the failings of men and the endurance of women. It is a crystalline slice of American life; a collision of class, race, bodies, love, and men with bad intentions; a tragedy about the most comically optimistic person on earth. Through decades of chaos and catastrophe, one thing was always consistent. Susan loved her children. She loved them so much. SUSAN is a story about doing what it takes.
Learn moreRenowned dance, performance, and visual artist Eiko Otake discusses her expansive TBA performance and exhibition projects with esteemed Portland-based artist and choreographer, Linda K. Johnson and PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Visual Art, Kristan Kennedy.
Learn moreThis event will have ASL interpreters and open captioning. Leading Deaf musician, artist, and advocate Myles de Bastion and their CymaSpace collaborative curate a night of experimental music and sound that centers Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing artists and audiences. Through visual, vibrational, light-based, and other immersive and multi-sensory interpretations and displays of sound, this night of performances will create multiple modes and nodes of access for Deaf and Hearing audiences alike, expanding our notions and perceptions of artistic and experiential possibilities for music and sound art. ASL interpretation, captioning, and other forms of accessibility and accommodation will be provided.
Learn moreEiko Otake collaborates with artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines, both living and dead, for her evolving Duet Project. Eiko is accompanied by Ishmael Houston -Jones, Marc Mccloughan, Alexis Moh.
Learn moreStarring Anthony Hudson—the human vessel for Portland’s premiere drag clown Carla Rossi—Looking for Tiger Lily (Solo) utilizes song, dance, drag, and video to put a queer spin on the ancestral tradition of storytelling. Asking what it means for a queer, mixed Native person to experience their heritage through white normative culture as they recount growing up watching the 1960 production of Peter Pan featuring Sondra Lee’s blonde, blue-eyed, 'Indian Princess' Tiger Lily, Anthony (and Carla) draws from a songbook stretching across Disney’s Pocahontas to Cher’s "Half- Breed." Not just autobiography, Looking for Tiger Lily (Solo) is a coming-of-age story that's more than cowboys versus Indians.
Learn moreInspired by the Latin word nexus meaning ‘a binding together,’ NEXUS 1 is an experimental exhibition format that aims at linking and merging the works of four European and two US artists, creating a visual-poetical experience in time and space. NEXUS 1 is a collaborative project exploring sensitive issues relevant for the participants, the social groups they belong to, and the current socio-political situation in Europe and the US. Merging different mediums including performance, film, music, installation and poetry in a single work, this collaborative international exchange will be developed during a residency at PICA and PNCA, and exhibited for the first time during the TBA Festival. Curated by Adela Demetja (Tirana / Frankfurt a.M.) with Dante Buu (Rožaje), Raluca Croitoru (Bucharest / Rotterdam) Emily Henderson (Portland), Adrian McBride (Portland), and Selma Selman (Bihac / NYC).
Learn moreSan Cha is a singer-songwriter, based in the City of Angels, increasingly known for her visceral and explosive live performances. Her name, derived from the Spanish word sancha, which translates to ‘mistress’, is a mischievous reference to the title of ‘San’, given to male saints in the Catholic tradition. Fans of cumbia and punk, bolero and electro, flock to see San Cha’s emotional renditions of traditional Mexican rancheras and original songs that queer conventions of identity, power and love. Her striking stage presence is accompanied by the one-of-a-kind garments she adorns, aesthetic reflections of the years spent performing in drag and club scenes in the Bay. San Cha was most recently the headlining act at the kickoff of the 2019 Red Bull Music Festival, with upcoming performances at the Levitt Pavilion, Getty Museum and Santa Monica Pier. Partner Program Presented by lumber room Curated by Libby Werbel In conjunction with their exhibition Kate Newby A puzzling light and moving. Limited seating, no reservations, doors at 6:30
Learn moreIn conversation with Jaclyn I. Pryor, Anthony Hudson / Carla Rossi (Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde) shares insights into the TBA performance Looking for Tiger Lily (Solo), including how the performance serves to queer acenstral storytelling practices, artistic and pop cultural references, and stereotypes of Native identities. * This conversation will be ASL interpreted
Learn moreTBA:19 Roland Dahwen THE OVERSEAS BANQUET
Learn moreVisiting curator Adela Demetja is joined by Portland-based writer, curator, and artist Lucy Cotter, and collaborating artists from Europe and the U.S. In dialogue, they’ll share more about their residency time in Portland, the contexts and landscapes in which they each live and make work, and their collaborative TBA performance project.
Learn moreExperimental composer and improvisor Kara-Lis Coverdale plays an acoustic solo concert on the pipe organ at First Presbyterian Church, co-presented with Variform Gallery.
Learn moreChoreographer Ligia Lewis discusses the many layers and references in her TBA performance, Water Will (in melody), with Portland-based scholar bart fitzgerald.
Learn moreSix Latinx performers map an elusive choreography of obsessive and perverse action within an unstable terrain of bodies, materials and sounds. Inspired by This Bridge Called my Back - an anthology of feminist essays that explore identity and critique white feminism. West Coast Premiere
Learn moreIn conversation with Reuben Tomás Roqueñi (Yaqui, Mayo, Chicanx), experimental musician, composer, and visual artist Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) shares more about her practice, including TBA performance collaborations with Marcus Fischer and Raven Chacon.
Learn moreMiguel Gutierrez and San Cha discuss how queer Latinx experience informs their respective experimental practices in dance and music, including discursive debates around aesthetics, abstraction, and cultural identity in performance making.
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWater Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers, using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of 'the will,' this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe.
Learn moreALL - a physical poem of protest investigates the individual and shared agency of choreography in social, political, and artistic spaces. An epic durational community performance, it considers the force of the protesting body and human mass through the meditative action of walking and running in circles.
Learn moreIn this workshop with TBA Opening Night artist Holland Andrews—whose experimental artistic practice spans composition, visual art, and performance using operatic and extended vocal technique—participants will explore guided meditation, vocal embodiment practice, performance, and collaboration.
Learn moreChoreographer Mia Habib has created a 50-person, community performance that examines and reflects the physical embodiment and witnessing of protest, demonstration, and critical mass. In conversation with Roya Amirsoleymani, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement, the artist discusses the development of the indoor and outdoor Portland iterations of this emergent, participatory, public intervention through its political, conceptual, and choreographic lenses.
Learn moreTBA:19 Opening Night Like a Villain (Holland Andrews) will be performing a night of expansive, ceremonial, extended-technique vocal compositions to draw in the opening of this year's TBA Festival.
Learn more