Past
Six 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 moreCo-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.
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