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Subharmonic: 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.
Learn morecvllerjerx (angelica maria millan lozano, maximiliano carlos - raphael francisco martinez) exclaim “nothing is civilized anymore. esta noche the kids get loud! they’re not going to bed early tonight. ART AS BRAT through clothes, poetry, performance and dance.”” As resident artists within the festival the collaborators will interrogate and celebrate the spaces art and audiences inhabit while exploring the value of collective and absurd outbursts en un mundx locx.
Learn moreUS West Coast Premiere: Part classic standup comedy special, part teen zine vomit confessional, They, Themself and Schmerm is Becca’s disturbingly hilarious personal tale of being adopted into a Midwestern religious family, trained to be a girl, molested, and plagued by the question, “How do I become a man and do I even want that?”
Learn moreInspired by the art & life of James Baldwin, Stew explores Baldwin’s trailblazing legacy through songs co-written by longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, co-creator, along with Stew, of the Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange. For TBA:17, the two will present a stripped down, intimate version of Notes of a Native Song, which places at the forefront Stew's intensely personal & problematic relationship with Baldwin's work. Stew’s uniquely incisive lyrics combine with rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz in this powerful homage to the inspiring writer, who famously confronted issues of gender, race, and class distinction.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bassichis will present an evening of “new and preexisting” daily meditations alongside musician Kyle Combs. In Morgan’s own words, “Maybe you don’t have time and it’s hard because you’re on Amazon looking for adrenal formulas and you don’t know how to work the podcast app and the MTA is crumbling as a kind of mood ring of everything else and in those cases you could come to this night and we will meditate for you, not in your place but on your behalf, especially if you didn’t have a chance to fully grieve George Michael as if that’s even possible, as if anything is ever fully grieved, as if anything is ever fully over, as if you really want to spend an entire evening of your life in a room with other people, back to back, front to front, side to side, cheek to cheek, and not run, but stay put and meditate to some songs about secret pools and Polish forests and being scared shitless or shitful, being scared shitty. You don’t need to bring anything! Feel free to bring your roommate or come alone, it’s totally fine either way.”
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in one’s embodied experiences, Direct Path to Detour seeks to evoke various mental and physical states that arise at the intersection of multiple value systems, social pressure, expectation, personal experiences, and body memory. Some of those things are sometimes explicitly clear, but some are often unarticulated and uncertain. In this poetic investigation, a solo performer attempts to observe and hold all on the equal plane, believing that they can and should exist simultaneously without logic and rationale.
Learn moreDohee Lee’s one-woman solo performance, MU/巫, utilizes cutting-edge wireless sensors to control technology and seamlessly integrate sound, film and animation with her exquisite live performance of dance, singing, and percussion. The meaning of MU/巫in Korean is “shaman.” Shaman is connector. The thread of connection is myth. Myth connects us to our lands, nature, history, belief systems, and to each other. Myth connects us through time and space. From our homelands to new lands. From ancestor time to the present. Shining a light on how we may continue to the future.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: I make me [sic] is a solo choreography adapted continually as an installation for galleries, museums, and alternative spaces. Using the alphabet as a loose structure, Rawls spins out short lectures and other performance material culled from a life history of dance, consumption, and self-definition. The nonlinear and live composition of movement, objects, sound, and text produce an attenuated sense of time and situation, sparking the potential for a body to claim its rights as a work-in-progress, while tugging subtly at the institutional and architectural framework that holds it.
Learn moreIndustrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge inaugurates our 15th TBA festival in our new East Side home. P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and performance and visual artist who has been regarded as a provocateur and an icon of the British avant-garde since the early 1970s. S/he’ll be opening the festival with a sonic and visual performance ritual that should not be missed.
Learn moreAs part of our free and ongoing program, join PICA and Guest Facilitator Candace Kita for a small-group experience exploring the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences in Field GuideTakahiro Yamamoto’s Direct Path to Detour, in which the artist, as a queer Japanese immigrant to the US, examines the physical and emotional effects of clashing cultural values in a globalized society. Through pre- and post-show conversation and participation, we’ll discover key themes and ideas in the work while sharing our own thoughts and perspectives on the performance. All are welcome—no prior contemporary dance or performance experience required! Light refreshments will be served.
Learn moreDirect Path to Detour is a new dance work by Portland-based choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto. Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in our embodied experiences, this dance evokes mental and physical states at the intersection of value systems, social pressures, expectations, and personal experiences of four dancers, all of whom have an intimate relationship with bridging multiple societies by birth, residence, upbringing and/or religion. Direct Path to Detour envelops the performers in a poetic, visceral experience of resistance, surrender, sincerity, and fiction.
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