Past
Syd 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.
Learn moreSubharmonic: A Sonic Arts Symposium spans two immersive days of interactive workshops, thought-provoking panels, and live performances for artists and audiences of all experience levels to explore, discuss, and engage with a broad range of contemporary and experimental sound art and its influences. Programs will touch on electronic and noise music, video and light installation, film and video, space and architecture, racial and gender equity in the field, and more.
Learn moreDance provocateurs Luke George and Daniel Kok exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience. In order to unravel shared lines of connection, to suspend tension and to unleash collective desires, Kok and George look to macramé, sailors’ knots, Chinese knots and rope bondage to weave together an interactive experience of collectivity. Bunny is a nickname given to the person being tied in rope bondage. In this work, we ask ourselves this question: What if everyone (in the theatre) is a Bunny?
Learn morePart song and dance, part IBQTPOC prom, but mostly dedicated to honoring the labor and intelligence of indigenous and brown punk energy that continues the fight against heteropatriachy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Join us as we honor the revolutionary spirit of activists, artists, and lovers whose lives were lost, whose lives are threatened, and those who are yet to come. This is as much a sweaty celebration as it is a ceremony. Albuquerque, New Mexico’s angry pop punk trio, Weedrat, and San Antonio’s riot grrrl chicano punk band, FEA, will provide live music along with local poetry that will help set the tone for the evening. Video projections, live printing, and punk/riot grrrl music will do the rest. Bring your beautiful body, and let’s collectively celebrate how far we’ve come as community while we smash heteropatriarchy to pieces.
Learn moreDorothée Munyaneza with Holland Andrews, Bruce Clarke, and Alain Mahé directs our gaze towards the aftermath of genocide. Here, we explore the psychic repercussions of 100,000 to 250,000 Rwandan women raped in the span of four months in 1994 who proceeded to have children from their attacks.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s practice shifted dramatically. In a series of simple performances, the artist tells stories from his life and attempts to play one good song. Solano has exhibited internationally at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and is represented by Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City. In 2016, Solano was in residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab Program.
Learn moreSounds et al presents Apperceptive Moment. Sound artists Ben Glas, Dolphin Midwives, Samson Stilwell and Amenta Abioto mix sound, visuals and movement into a cohesive exploration of the senses. The experimental performance will engage with acoustics, psychoacoustics, physical interaction with sound, movement, music and noise, to lead the audience on a journey through time and space.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Ghost Rings a narrative of friendship and family-making unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Jo Lampert form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance. Ghost Rings has previously been performed at New York Live Arts and Abrons Arts Center, as part of American Realness.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In the second installment of her Thank You for Coming series, Driscoll uses the ritual of storytelling to explore our human reliance on stories to relate to one another and form identities as individuals and citizens.
Learn moreDT is peri-conceptual, dis-experimental, and a-nihilist. DT is a blackened performance that is never not happening. DT is après-queer and post-ratchet. DT is anti anti-capital capital. DT is heavy evasion-- worthless.
Learn moreComprised of her signature story-driven stand-up and scored by sensual homemade pop, Erin Markey’s Boner Killer is an intimate musical conversation between what Markey thinks she can’t have and how she’d have it if she could. Driven by Whitney Houston’s lesbian mythologies, Europe™, and a Pretty Woman accident, Markey and bandmate Emily Bate sacrifice their lives to transform personal humiliations into naked feminist hope.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: An evening of protest songs to soothe your despair and stoke your outrage, unless Morgan screws it up! Drawing on the tradition of protest albums, stand-up comedy, new age ritual, experimental narrative, and cabaret, Morgan Bassichis Sings Protest Songs is an evening of queer world-making and unmaking accompanied by Senior Energy featuring Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute, vocals), Kyle Combs (electronics, percussion, vocals), Rhys Ziemba (bass), and Sam Greenleaf Miller (percussion, vocals).
Learn moreCritical Mascara: Portland’s “Post-Realness Drag Extravaganza” returns to PICA’s TBA stage for its 5th and FINAL installment.
Learn moreFor Corbeaux (‘crows’ or ‘ravens’ in French), Bouchra Ouizguen brings a cast of 9 female Moroccan performers and 30 Portland performers to create this site specific, immersive performance ritual. At the crossroads of multiple influences, Corbeaux is inspired by the ritual trance dances of the Marrakech region, and by the community figure of the uncensored ‘fool’ in Persian literature of the 8th to the 11th centuries. Ouizguen always comes back to the subject of the social significance of femininity and this piece is a variation on themes that fascinate her: roots, instinct, and connection to the mother, to the Earth and to love. The work is utterly unique, and resides in a space of ritual and contemplation.
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