Past
Co-Presented with c3:initiative Cannupa Hanska Luger site specific performance at c3:initiative. AFRAID NOT performative action by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger will tie a physical line from the tools of ar-ti-fa-ct to their task.
Learn moreA Body in Places is the omnibus title of Eiko’s first solo project, which started with her revisiting post-nuclear disaster Fukushima and her twelve hour performance at Philadelphia Station in 2014. Its scale and modes of presentation vary radically and incorporate both performative and non-performative elements.
Learn moreunearth mines histories of desire and loss, recasting the black box theater as parietal underground.
Learn morePortland-based curatorial initiative Nat Turner Project presents The Black Condition, Live!, the materializing of a multimedia lyric essay by Los Angeles-based artist jayy dodd. This audio-visual performance retells an account of fetishization, technology & obsession. Spectators, acclimate at your own risk.
Learn moreThis performance takes the form of a slow walk through a section of the city. All are welcome to participate. Please contact the TBA Box Office for any questions about or requests for mobility or accessibility accommodation. Audience will be asked to remove their shoes during parts of this performance. Please that this performance is not able to be ASL interpreted or have other accommodations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.
Learn moreBlurring the lines between fiction and reality, Awaiting Oblivion... follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked artists Tim Smith Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo to create a performance that will share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the '60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters). We follow Tim, Jeffrey, and AO in a radical flurry of street art, secret messages, and performance scores in a poetic fight for survival.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE Andrew Schneider and his team follow up their revolutionary, OBIE award-winning tech-theater masterpiece YOUARENOWHERE, with a mind-bending examination of what constitutes a single life, and the endless possible outcomes at the precise moment of death.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Contralto is an hourlong work for video, strings, and percussion. The piece features aspects of experimental music and documentary, with a cast of transgender women that speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises, accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes various conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE With spare aesthetics and focused intensity, choreographer Nacera Belaza invites the audience into an immersive experience through her vision and artistic process. Compagnie Nacera Belaza takes us on a journey through a trio of introspective, meditative and transcendent dance works, (whose titles translate as as The Night, The Crossing, and The Wire), revealing the evolution of her work as one would experience viewing three different paintings by a single artist in a gallery. Belaza’s hope is for each piece to become something new in the audience's imagination, that one’s gaze is sharpened when let in on the inner workings of the artist’s mind.
Learn moreLoosely based on the original turn-of-the-century play by Maurice Maeterlinck, Pelléas et Mélisande is about love, silence, and the ineffable nature of human emotion. It bears the fluctuating trait of tragicomedy (funny/sad), and involves timekeeping, constant weeping, and the symbolism that epitomized the original play. As Pelléas et Mélisande engages a mystery it does not understand, the writers hope their audience might slip into this mystery, to find a new and surprising way to commune.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE ALBUM is an evening-length solo performance that researches my herstory from a tableaux of personal narratives, a product of approaches that compound ethnography, memoir, and choreography. Uniting text, song, and dance inside of the content of an album― a picture album, a song album, an autobiographical album, a herstorical album― the work finds ways to be an archive, or altar, for my body. My relationship to urbanity, vampires, love, and marginality arise with equal importance, as I orbit around the primary curiosity: I'm not sure who will write a herstory about me, so I'm starting now so that they can have good notes. In ALBUM, I make visible the surround, a chorus of influences that have shaped who I am.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: In Collection of Lovers, Raquel André envisions a particular collection—one made up of lovers. Between Lisbon, Ponta Delgada, Rio de Janeiro, Loulé, Minde, Paredes de Coura, Sever do Vouga, Ovar, Manaus, Barreiro, Bergen, Stavanger, Oslo, and Warsaw, André has collected 161 lovers. People of all nationalities, genders and ages, agree to meet her in an unfamiliar apartment, to build a fictional intimacy within the span of an hour. Throughout each city she travels, she encounters more lovers and the collection grows. These encounters are documented by photograph, to serve as content for an ever-evolving performance—to be further mediated in books, theater, T.V., and other formats. Collection of Lovers serves as a seemingly infinite archive, to show what a collection of relationships might mean. Throughout this peculiar body of work, André falls into a new abyss each time the door opens to a new lover, and fiction and reality become irresistibly entwined.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Sanity TV investigates the flexible boundaries of identity and psyche through a fictional talk show wherein there is no distinction between sanity or insanity. The interviews begin routinely, then slowly unravel toward something unrecognizable. The “guest” ultimately surrenders a position of authority, even if that authority is beyond their own ideas of self, if only for the duration of the interview.
Learn moreS.E.C.R.E.T.S. presents Prince Romeo the Crow, a theatrical performance of the eponymous album that explores the duality of love and fear, and the forces that shape our actions and fates.
Learn moreSyd Barrett and Nina Simone. Curtis Mayfield and Richard Nixon. These are some of the radically differing voices juxtaposed within Vinyl Equations, a performance that presents a series of vinyl records in unusual combinations to generate the beginnings of an alternative, non-linear, non-genre based history of recorded music, in strictly analogue terms. Accompanied by a single record turntable, artist and writer Robin Deacon will share a collection of stories, lectures and possible dance routines that aim to uncover strange echoes and oblique similarities between the records he has chosen for analysis. From describing his childhood fear of Joy Division album covers, to the contemporary search for an obscure record of Caribbean folk songs featuring the voice of his mother, Vinyl Equations shifts between the realms of direct autobiographical account and fictional speculation in an approach that has come to characterize Robin Deacon’s work.
Learn moreSassafras, Cypress & Indigo—Black Screen Images and the (e)motive Notion of Freakiness is a lecture performance by Vaginal Davis, the internationally-revered, intersexed doyenne of intermedia arts and sciences. She takes public discourse to Dementia 13 levels as she spells out the queer and blatino experience in her own inimitable fashion, creating new words out of thin air and crashing, bull-in-a-Madame-Mau-china-shop style, over notions of propriety and reality. In short, her work can be described as disheveled, humorous, and rebellious.
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Weird Allen Kaprow (WAK) presents self-karaoke, a new body of video, installation, and performance work that repurposes pop melodies to explore the political dimensions of self-care in our crumbling late capitalist democracy. Self-Karaoke features new songs and performances by special guest collaborators.
Learn moreJACK & is a stand-up routine turned sitcom baking fiasco that mingles cakes and kitchen disasters, recipes and remedies, jokes, and goldfish to paint the portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed. The comedy of errors is structured on social codes and training from prison reentry programs to debutante balls. The performance considers re-entry to society after prison, focusing not the time one has served but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state.
Learn moreIn this three-part performance-lecture series, titled Some Styles of Masculinity (2017) and presented as part of the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Gregg Bordowitz explores tropes of masculinity that have been formative to his own coming-of-age. Each evening, Bordowitz considers a different seminal figure: the rock star, the rabbi, or the comedian. Key Yiddish words for all three are farbissener, rakhmones, and schpilkes. Some Styles of Masculinity extends Bordowitz’s understanding of gender as “bound up, entangled, with ethnic, religious, and national identities as well as sexuality, race, and class.”
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Can resistance be choreographed? Pushit!, a site-responsive performance by NIC Kay, is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the stage as a place of freedom for the Black performer. This work is part of a larger set of exercises in getting-well-soon.
Learn moreEqually funny and heartbreaking, Soft Goods lays bare the beauty and brutality of backstage culture. Performed by an ensemble of stage technicians and dancers, and structured as a live load-in and technical rehearsal for a performance that never happens, the show illuminates the lonesomeness of theaters, the spectral elegance of a lighting focus, the choreography of labor, and the labor of dance. Soft Goods is a meditation on work, life, loss, and occupational self-obliteration.
Learn moreCombining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) explores aging, anxiety, hidden desires, and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and an ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the performance troupe Split Britches lace this interactive piece with playful urgency and lethargy, to encourage discussion about the political landscape. In the “Situation Room,” twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weaves in satirical insights and humour. The two pioneering theatre-makers see undisturbed ordnances as a metaphor for the disregarded potential in elders, and hope to uncover buried resources in us all.
Learn moreLet ‘im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu poe & Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from the artists’ seven-year research into J-Sette performance—the performance of joy and the conundrum of Black joy. The series currently consists of three live performance works and an installation. A Study uses J-Sette movement and performance structures as jumping-off points for experimentation with the role of strategy in collaborative creation and presentation. Rhythm, pattern, and attention become mechanisms for the artists to situate themselves in play, and to frame a movement conversation with primarily White audiences. This Is a Success explores J-Sette in relation to notions of African-American exceptionalism as expressed through middle-class, Black American values reiterated within the J-Sette form. The work continues the artists’ research of rhythm as a vehicle into subversion and satisfaction.
Learn moreQuestioning contemporary dance’s predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity, and the desexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity, and sass. The work weaves together vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine posturing. Four women execute a repetitive, complex set of movements that evolves, as each rotates hypnotically within the confines of a square. Over time, the meditative rigor of their steps dissolves into a tangle of commotion, blurring the distinction between the mundane and the glamorous.
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