Past
Wearing mask and merkin, Narcissister’s spectacle-rich live performances tackle issues of gender, racial identity, and sexuality. Humor, pop songs, elaborate costumes, contemporary dance, unabashed eroticism, and her trademark mannequin mask are her tools in deconstructing stereotypical representations and challenging the audience to question its own attraction and repulsion. Rather than abandon the contaminated site of sexual fetish, Narcissister dives headlong into the murky depths of fantasy and its racist and gendered dynamics, exposing and deconstructing their power.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: 2004, Istanbul. A few minutes before the end of a performance, out of nowhere, a group of men erupt on stage, break out into a very short folk dance, and then immediately disappear. The powerful memory of a traditional dance leads French choreographer Christian Rizzo on a bold and hypnotic exploration of masculine ritual. Stepping onto a stark white stage, the eight dancers are propelled by two live drummers. Their undulating movements build into frenetic bursts of dance that recall the centuries-old dances of the Mediterranean. By turns tender and vibrantly joyful, the all-male ensemble rides the friction between folkloric practice and formal contemporary performance, building a communal, visceral force.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Within the galleries of the Portland Art Museum, Morgan Thorson stages an ensemble dance cycle that uses time as both subject and practice to process killing, extinction, and loss. Exploring both the vast span of geological time and the brevity of a single human life, Still Life considers both the long-ago, as represented by the museum artifacts and dioramas, and the immediate reality of violence and natural disaster. The piece enacts the death of choreography by erasing elements of the performance; with each repetition of the cycle, something is lost—a dancer, a sequence, or sound. While the audience is welcome to come and go from the intimate space of the performance, the long-form choreography investigates dance as a living and dying thing, as well as a practice in comfort and survival.
Learn moreJuliana Huxtable will treat opening night audiences to a dynamic experience sonically and visually. The night will play between text, sound and video, questioning the parameters between club and gallery. In her work, Huxtable explores the intersections of race, gender, queerness, and identity. She uses a diverse set of means to engage these issues, including self-portraiture, text-based prints, performance, nightlife, music, writing, and social media. Huxtable’s work has been featured in group presentations at MoMA PS1, New York (2014); White Columns Annual, White Columns, New York (2014); “Take Ecstasy with Me,” Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2014); Frieze Projects, London (2014); and2015 Triennial: Surround Audience, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2015); among other venues.
Learn morePICA COMMISSION: Commissioned for the opening night of TBA:16, Fanfare: Birth > Rebirth is a celebration of new life. With each beginning comes an infinite amount of possibilities to change ideas, lives, and events. Commemorating the opening of PICA’s new home, 15 NE Hancock, the fanfare will be performed by an ensemble comprised of hundreds of local non-professional brass and woodwind players of all ages directed by Kelly Pratt. Within the piece, there will be several sections open to improvisation to reflect the shifting dynamics of the audience and ensemble.
Learn moreNIGHT TRIPPER is at once an outdoor ritual, social event, forest walk, and concert that unfolds in the theatre of the outdoors at the first glow of dusk. The piece features dancers, art objects, a local choir, and potent forest spirits. Ancient mythology meets a vision of contemporary life where dreams and reality merge into an otherworldly tale. NIGHT TRIPPER explores the idea of nature as a place of healing, destruction, immanence, and transcendence.
Learn moreDakhaBrakha is a force of intricate vocal harmonies, pounding drums, and murmuring cello that builds to an anthem and invocation of visual spectacle. Droning vocals, crimson beads, and punk sensibilities serve as backdrop for their their mission to bring the music of Ukraine to the world. DakhaBrakha is intimately tied to their homeland—crafting new sonic worlds for traditional songs with one foot in urban avant-garde theatre and one foot in Ukrainian village life. Accompanied by a sweeping range of instrumentation, DakhaBrakha crafts a powerful performance at the crossroads of Ukrainian folklore, politics, pop, punk, and theatre.
Learn moreYellow Towel take its name from Dana Michel’s childhood habit of wearing a yellow towel to emulate blonde girls. Influenced by the aesthetics of fashion, queer culture, and comedy, Michel creates a richly textured and gut wrenching account of black culture stereotypes. Yellow Towel is a conceptual performance work that explores an abstracted marginal character in a performative ritual. This political, honest, and fearless work warrants attention as Michel questions socially ingrained constructions of normativity.
Learn moreOpposing Forces utilizes tropes of contemporary performance to expose fears around the feminine in our culture through the hyper masculine dance style of Breaking. With curiosity, vulnerability, and power, five world-class B-Boys uncover binary perceptions of gender using a range of dance contexts: battling, commercial dance, and cyphering. Featuring Fever One of Rocksteady Crew, Brysen "Just Be" Angeles of Massive Monkees, Alfredo "Free" Vergara of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Mozes Lateef Sa'Leem of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Michael O'Neal Jr of Beat Hippies/CHPT 1, an original score played live by WD4D, stage design by Ben Zamora, and lighting design by Amiya Brown.
Learn moreSeminal French director and TBA alum Philippe Quesne returns with the large-scale theater work La Mélancolie des dragons. Filled with Quesne’s disarming wit and hints of magical realism La Mélancolie is set amid a snowy landscape of classic rock and medieval recorders where a band of metalheads is on a quest to build an amusement park devoted to hard-rock. To create his works, Quesne employs a domino effect—the last scene of a work falls into the first scene of the next. La Melancolie was born at the end of his celebrated work L’Effet de Serge (TBA:08). With an ingenious hand for reinventing the conventions of theater, Quesne smartly constructs La Melancolie into a work that celebrates the absurd and finds the profound joy of friendship.
Learn moreGood Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag (DH) is a live, conceptual, one-hour hybrid morning / late-night / children’s show for adults, hosted by everyone’s favorite no one, Dynasty Handbag.
Learn moreFrench-Tunisian Choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb carefully observed his mother and his aunts preparing couscous and the national dishes served at his family’s gatherings from marriages to circumcisions to mourning rituals… In Je danse et vous en donne à bouffer, El Meddeb expresses his love of preparation, and the sensuality of food in a form of sacredness and performative sharing. In this performance, El Meddeb is immersed in his loves of dancing and cooking. Seated before his couscous maker, he performs and prepares couscous with generosity and poetry.
Learn morePreparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome attempts to prepare for the end of men. Simultaneously committed to conservation and archival efforts, Preparation for the Obsolescence works in the tradition of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the performative lecture / demonstration format. Utilizing absurdist humor, web technology, a male gaze simulator, choreography, token cultural gestures, and MIT data points, this work both combats and stirs rumors about the implications of the Y chromosome's reputed demise.
Learn moreAkio Suzuki & Aki Onda "ke i te ki" American Tour is organized by ISSUE Project Room. The project is supported by the Asian Cultural Council.
Learn morePortland-based Lu Yim brings to TBA:15 a solo work of mourning and melancholia. From here they depart, measuring the distance within body, thought, language, and feeling; as portal / continent / object / subject / memory / tool. Actions of voice, sound and movement turn the internalized outward. This is not my body performing but where my body has gone suspended in a place where a question repeats.
Learn moreA solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance, and visual art installation, Bronx Gothic gives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in the 1980s—where Newports are bought in singles at corner bodegas, and sex saturated notes are passed in class.
Learn moreTyondai Braxton is known for experimenting with music in a way that feels like a game of coloring outside the lines—tracing patterns that unexpectedly jet sideways. Braxton brings to TBA:15 a solo performance featuring modular synthesizer and samples. Braxton will be performing pieces from HIVE1 his first album in six years and his Nonesuch Records debut.
Learn moreTwo men hunt each other as a kinetic light sculpture hovers and cuts through the air, signaling keystrokes from a hacked ’50s typewriter. Featuring archival wire-tap transcriptions, the missives of communist spies, and MRI brain scans, The Institute of Memory (TIMe) conjures a portrait of director Lars Jan’s enigmatic father — a Cold War operative whose story exhibits how the future of privacy looks dangerously like the darkest era of its past. Jan packs TIMe with a brilliant set of collaborators that include Pablo N. Molina, Nathan Ruyle, Chris Kuhl, Sonny Valicenti, composer and vocalist Mariana Sadovska, and Obie-winner Andrew Schneider, among others.
Learn moreNothing To You is a temporary site-specific installation that will act as a frame for an encounter. MPA will direct an action that tours the perimeters of thoughtful collision between bodies, objects and sound within the space. Here, speakers mature into characters, and bodies regress into objects, calling into question the notion of pre-tense, the state of being before action, during approximately 45 minutes of provocative and attentive collapse.
Learn moreGet a glimpse of the Portland dance scene in this afternoon of two works by local choreographers.
Learn morekeyon gaskin it's not a thing
Learn moreLauded Italian choreographer and theatre director Alessandro Sciarroni is known for his stagings that marvel and works that straddle dance, performance art, and ritual anthropology. In FOLK-S, the Schuhplatter, a Bavarian folk dance, meaning “shoe batter”, is refined to its most essential form invoking a sense of playful experimentation and ritualized trance.
Learn moreHolcombe Waller’s Requiem Mass: LGBT / Working Title is a ceremonial choral work that deeply explores contemporary faith, advocacy through art, and collective catharsis. Performed in historic Trinity Episcopal Cathedral with an all-abilities community choir drawn from all walks of life towards the project’s mission, Requiem Mass is an emotional and personal work invoking remembrance and peace for the dead who have suffered persecution for their sexual orientation or gender expression. Requiem Mass was additionally informed by research into the pivotal gay history from the 1980s through present day and by community engagement that has included working with experts in liturgical music, queer theory, faith-based equality initiatives as well as over 100 participants in a series of choral workshops with Waller over the past year.
Learn moreOPENING NIGHT: The influential and relentlessly relevant rock band of mythical standing Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks kick off TBA:15 with a free concert for all! Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks are veteran Portland-based musicians Joanna Bolme, Mike Clark, Jake Morris, and frontman Stephen Malkmus.
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