Past
cvllerjerx (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.
Learn moreIndie electronic musician and vocalist Shannon Funchess has had her feet firmly planted in the fertile underground scene for two and a half decades. Also a DJ and sometime dancer for the likes of The Knife, Funchess is a multidisciplinary performance artist with a gravitation toward the synthesis of dark, angular sound, and visual bisection.
Learn moreRinde Eckert has been writing, composing, performing, and directing evocative and haunting performance pieces and plays that have pushed at the edges of recognized theatrical form since the early 1980s. My Fools: A Life in Song combines song, dramatic monologues, lecture, and video from his archive. Beginning with a montage of visually striking moments from his shows across the decades, My Fools is a series of variations on a smart, slightly cock-eyed Everyman who begins his journey with a pure sense of mission and descends into the maelstrom.
Learn moreDeep Under Ground (DUG) and Young Gifted & Brown (YGB) have been curating safe spaces for brown folks to congregate, express themselves, share stories, love one another, and move their bodies since early & mid-2015.
Learn moreItalian artist Alessandro Sciarroni returns to Portland with a performative reflection on the passing of time. Continuing his trilogy that began with Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow (TBA:15), Sciarroni now focuses on another traditional artform comprised of repeated actions: juggling. By remixing the pacing and sequence of gravity-defying moves (under the leg, under the arm, above the head, etc.), there is an almost endless combination of patterns to explore. Each repetition abstracts the performers’ movements, opening the possibilities of seeing the larger picture: flight, failure, kinetic potential.
Learn moreWhere lies the boundary between the body and the machine? In an empty space, illuminated only with cold light, Geumhyung Jeong explores the potential of the human: the sensuality, power, and mutability of the body. In seven peculiar “duets” with mundane objects (ranging from household appliances to mannequins), Jeong bestows a bizarre and disconcerting life to the inanimate through an intense and risky interaction with her own body, Combining dance, puppetry, and a technical mastery of theatrical conventions, the result is a moving choreography of the body and mind, crossing the dividing line between the human and inhuman, hallucination and reality.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: French/Moroccan author and director Mohamed El Khatib presents a solo lecture presentation on loss and remembrance, drawing from documents from his family’s past—newspaper clippings, emails, phone messages, scraps of exchanges with the father, recorded transcripts, videos. These snapshots of life evoke family, nationality, native language, memory, mourning and shift between documentary and fiction.
Learn moreReferencing the psychedelic light shows of the ’60s and ’70s as well as the harsh noise performances of contemporary avant-garde rebels like Bruce McClure, the Cinema Project collective, along with Portland-based musician Matt Carlson and friends, will create a momentary light and sound environment—a temporary dynamic installation in which to immerse audience members both wandering and still. Several 16mm projectors will run simultaneously and light beams will appear in the round. Moving images of man, woman, animal, landscape, or simply sheer color and light from analog loops and reels will overlap and penetrate one another, covering any and all surfaces possible, and manipulated live by human hands. The mechanics of cinematic experience will be laid bare and at times it will be very very loud.
Learn morePart lecture, part choreographic exposition, better to be alone than to wish you were is a solo performance that affirms the anticlimactic futility of lust, from its first intoxicating charge to its subsequent, stumbling pursuit. While slyly humorous, Hankins unabashedly exploits and strips her body of its poetic nature as it is offered up for consumption, judgment, and of course: desire. Created with an all-female production team, better to be alone… weaves seduction, stand-up comedy motifs, and forced voyeurism in an attempt to exhibit the extraordinary and cumbersome illogic of love and sex.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence until it has no name A live video essay that arrives through a base note, a vanishing point, an other history of orientations.
Learn moreSacha Yanow’s solo performance is an intimate psychological portrait of the artist’s father, her internalized dad, and patriarchy in general. For one night only, “Dad” covers and lip-syncs to his favorite songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s, shares footage of his 1970s winning appearance on the To Tell the Truth game show, presents motivational speeches, and more. His button-down shirts become his costumes, his yellow notepad usually reserved for stock market details contains his set list, and his Agatha Christie novel collection and Wall Street Journal become his props.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour explores the practice of Islamic Shiite religious ritual through dance and the body. In this performance, Chahrour takes the stage with two musicians and Leila, a professional mourner whose role it is to deliver the lamentations and honor the departed at a funeral. Woven from traditional Ataaba song verses and the plaintive cries of bereavement, the work is a poetic elegy to a fading cultural heritage. Leila’s Death addresses the relationships between the body and religion, the mourner and the deceased, the sacred and the performed.
Learn moreBlind Coven will feature Portland-based songwriter, songstress, and actor Amenta Abioto. Abioto’s work is on the cutting edge of all that is musical, theatrical, and literary. Her music is boldly mystical and soul-fired, and her raw improvisational live performances invoke elements of both theatrical surprise and magic through ancient African diasporic sounds and stories. She brings to the music scene funky academia while skipping vocally from soul-shaking gospel and smooth jazz to hip hop rhythms wrapped in West African beats. The performance will feature a boutique designed 10-channel surround sound system as well as correlating lighting and visuals from artist DB Amorin.
Learn moreAU’s new collaboration with the Camas High School choir is an explosive, joyful expression of community and creativity that blurs the lines between propulsive art-pop and avant-garde choral soundscapes. This concert is the summation of a yearlong project that found AU’s Luke Wyland working directly with Camas students to produce an entirely new body of music. In addition, Wyland worked closely with Camas Choir Director Ethan Chessin and the trailblazing arts education nonprofit Young Audiences of Oregon & SW Washington to craft a curriculum that exposed Camas students to varying aspects of the music business via members of the local industry.
Learn moreWelcome to the Neighborhood Live! expands the reach of the weekly radio broadcast bringing the very best from the northwest to the stage! DJ Klyph curates a night of hip hop featuring some of Portland’s finest including DJ/Producer/MC Omega Watts of Mello Orange, Oakland transport MC Brookfield Duece, NW MC Matty, and Producer Trox, plus familiar elements of the WTTN broadcast. Expect a great night of music and surprises.
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