Past
It’s time we said it, 2016 has been rough. Every passing month has added yet another weight on our collective heads making it harder and harder to keep them up. We’re in the middle of a contentious election year that feels like never-ending satire. We’re getting yelled at by talking heads spouting propaganda, grandiose statements, and empty promises. All while our social media reverberates a never ending echo chamber of opinions on pretty much everything from systemic racism to Pokemon Go.
Learn moreNo No Soliciting will feature several of Portland’s most talented and respected musicians and songwriters performing songs specifically written for the event. Each songwriter will take several different directives from the audience regarding form, key, tempo, melody, instrumentation, and lyrical content to compose a song in 15 minutes. Once the song is written, they will return to the ensemble, walk the band and audience through the composition, and then perform the song while the following songwriter is composing the next song.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Thomas’ most recent project, Distance is Not Separation, she takes us back to what it means to be a femme black person growing up playing on the street corner, waiting till the street lights came on, the street lights being a signal for the darkness coming. Both a symbol and warning sign for ones safety. The last moments before the call and response between mother/parent/queer family and child: “It’s time to come home, I’m coming.” Thomas investigates the black femme body in relation to the athletic body, thinking about value and skills. Thomas rethinks and rebalances how we see and observe sports imagery, the labor and value of craftsmanship, the hairdresser, the janitor, the ‘exotic’ dancer, and how language constructs and transcribes symbols onto the black femme body.
Learn moreCritical Mascara, “A Post-Realness Drag Extravaganza,” returns for its fourth year serving a wild hybrid of dance, vogue, and drag competition unlike any other! Critical Mascara celebrates community and creativity through competition and now collaboration. Producer and Hostess Pepper Pepper with DJ Zaq Desfleurs are joined by celebrated choreographer Kumari Suraj as MC and Portland’s luminaire Isaiah Esquire. Together they curate and judge the Pacific Northwest’s largest, queerest, and most fabulous extravaganza.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: On May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 13 in Santa Barbara, California, in a rampage motivated by his lack of success with women—a fixation he had detailed in a series of confessional and defiant YouTube videos. New York City multimedia artists Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble respond to this wound to the body of Love with a modern-day ritual performance suffused with humor and experimentation. Mining source material ranging from self-help dating advice to confessional shopping videos, the group unpacks, isolates, and rearranges contemporary romantic mythologies and situates Rodger’s actions within a broader collection of found love stories and online video content. Within the sacred space of the performance, this “musical priesthood” will lead a group meditation on insecurity, longing, and masculinity, performing humanity’s common search for Love as we misunderstand it.
Learn morePICA COMMISSION: In Meg Wolfe’s lushly physical New Faithful Disco, belief is made manifest as energy. A queer-love power-trio of dancers—taisha paggett, Marbles Radio, and Wolfe—feel and feed on that energy, remixing it as they prepare to take on something BIG. Is it Love? Faith? Impermanence? Pleasure? Power? Propelled by nature sounds and fresh rhythms, the dancers build communal energy into an accumulated whirlwind wrought with awkwardness and contradiction. New Faithful Disco opens up time, triggers fading histories, and confronts who we are now.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: In the darkness of a cinema space, the audience sits blindfolded. Behind each row of audience members is a row of children who in hushed voices describe a film only they can see. Accompanied by the soundtrack (which has no dialogue), the whispered descriptions are a fragile, fragmentary and at times struggling but courageous attempt by the children to make sense of what they see projected on the screen.
Learn moreA weekend-long, build-it-ourselves outdoor modern art museum, artist Libby Werbel orchestrates an exhibition in the heart of the city, inviting an impressive roster of performers to engage with the space. PMOMA draws a direct link between Portland’s lack of a major contemporary art museum and the impressive output of our creative community. Do Portland’s quickly shifting economic demands endanger the cultural equity essential to maintaining the quality of any major city? Is it possible to have a museum without an established infrastructure to support it? What does a museum look like when fashioned through our ideal ethical processes?
Learn moreThe Portland Museum of Modern Art curates a night of powerful and joyful performances. PMOMA creator Libby Werbel presents a selection of performers who will activate the PMOMA exhibition in Pioneer Courthouse Square throughout the weekend. Tropic Green (Oakland, CA) incorporates reggae, house, spirituals, and Afrofuturist themes in her rhythmic performances, Dynasty Handbag (Los Angeles, CA; previously part of TBA:15) emcees with her absurd mix of improv, comedy, and movement, and radical trio Strange Babes (Portland, OR) offers an eclectic DJ set. Video works by Julia Calabrese. PMOMA at the WORKS is a wild sampling of what PMOMA has in store for a jam-packed weekend in the Square. Surprise performances will abound!
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bulgarian performer Ivo Dimchev is known for breaking taboos in his provocative and boldly physical pieces. While his work blends performance art, dance, theater, and visual art, Dimchev’s enormous musicality and his remarkable vocal gift are at the center of each of his productions. For this live musical event, he has selected 15 songs from his past performances to present as independent, individual opuses. Accompanied on the piano by Dimitar Gorchakov, Dimchev displays his prodigious talent in a stirring concert that leaps between the feral and the virtuosic.
Learn moreWearing 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.
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