Past
A charged site. Ways and means. “...various little ways of changing things.”
Learn moreYour forecast for the final day of TBA: Spicy, salty, and refreshing and bright with a Bloody Mary or seven...
Learn moreClosing night at THE WORKS lights up the sky with an explosion of a million stars. Enter the sensorial and phantasmagoric world of Evelyn.
Learn moreJoël Barraquiel Tan (Director of Community Engagement, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco) and Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Assistant Professor, Theatre & Performance Studies, Reed College) will make prepared remarks that address the theme of this year’s symposium, Seniors, Sexuality & Spirituality: Art and Social Change. Remarks will be followed by a Q&A and broader.
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex's Artistic Director, Darren O’Donnell, provides a glimpse into the company's research and creative process; their numerous socially engaged art and performance projects (including TBA:14 performance All the Sex I’ve Ever Had); and the broader landscape and politics of art and civic engagement with Ariana Jacob, a Portland-based social practice artist.
Learn moreJoin artists, activists, and thinkers from Portland and beyond for a participation-oriented community forum exploring ideas, practices, and possibilities within the shifting terrain of art and social change. Using a small-group format, eclectic teams--including performing and visual artists, scholars of multiple disciplines, activists working within a range of sectors, LGBT Requiem Mass Think Tank participants, TBA Festival audiences, and members of the public--will gather to tackle burning issues, discuss specific projects, and devise arts-based scenarios to address local problems. Open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Learn morePICA makes transparent the creative process of a new commission and future TBA Festival project, Holcombe Waller’s LGBT Requiem Mass. Requiring extensive cross-cultural engagement across LGBT, faith-based, and contemporary art communities, PICA and Waller have convened a think tank of national and local specialists in various areas of queer and LGBT activism and advocacy; progressive, inclusive, and affirming churches; queer spirituality studies; and socially engaged art and performance. For this public roundtable, Waller will introduce LGBT Requiem Mass's broader artistic vision and political aspiration at this stage of development, while members of the think tank will share highlights from their previous day's convening. Together, the Roundtable conversation will launch a more expansive, day-long symposium that draws on and builds from some of its key questions, ideas, and critical concerns.
Learn moreMorocco-based choreographer Meryem Jazouli offers a workshop for contemporary dancers that proposes shared time and space to discover the realm where the poetic and vulnerable coincide. The class will start off with a warmup to activate the senses, followed by a dance Jazouli will share that each person will experience and personalize while imparting it with a unique meaning.
Learn moreOneohtrix Point Never, aka acclaimed experimental composer Daniel Lopatin, takes the audience on an odyssey through his latest work R Plus Seven. Hypnotic and unexpected in equal measure, R Plus Seven is full of satisfyingly complex sonic puzzles.
Learn moreIn GERMINAL, French artists Halory Goerger and Antoine Defoort create one of the most talked-about recent works of contemporary international theater. Both whimsical and deeply philosophical in approach, GERMINAL asks: if we had the opportunity to start the world from scratch, how would we do it?
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreHalory Goerger and Antoine Defoort dissect GERMINAL’s philosophical investigations into a staging of the construction and deconstruction of society, civilization, and the world. Moderated by Kate Bredeson, Assistant Professor of Theater, Reed College.
Learn moreWE ARE THE INSTITUTION: after inside/outside there is this mass of people. We are already whole. We're all here together. Administrators need to be involved in the uselessness of practice. Beyond outcome and object, there is a culture of questions, a pursuit of pleasure, an acceptance of our inevitable wasting. This workshop will create a non-utilitarian space for the human basis of art. Though open to all, this workshop is designed for art’s administrators and artists working in concert in the hot bed of the studio. Come, be useless, be pleasure, be awkward, be sincere, be wasted.
Learn moreArca is a Venezuelan producer, artist, mixing engineer and DJ now based in Brooklyn, New York. Fresh off of his latest work &&&&&, audio-visual collaborations with Jesse Kanda at MoMA PS1 and producing projects with Kanye West, Arca will set THE WORKS ablaze with his off the grid structures and sound mutations of club music.
Learn morePositioning three Chrysler minivans atop 42 inflatable airbeds, Sugarmann creates a slow-motion wreck.
Learn more[Not About Face] is always engaging, sometimes awkward, sometimes an exercise in failure, finally ecstatic... it's as if it's a gift, as if somehow the touching and the following and the watching and the listening, has shaped this movement, making it an expression of our collective desire. —Alison Croggon, ABC Arts
Learn moreIn Mon, Ma, Mes, the NYC-based dancer, choreographer, and writer examines the permeability between the real and the fictive in a disarming and interactive retrospective of his life and work.
Learn moreExperimentalists Liz Harris (Grouper) and Paul Clipson discuss HYPNOSIS DISPLAY, a their cross-disciplinary collaboration of live sound performance and 16 mm film. They are joined by Andrew Neerman of Beacon Sound, a record store/music label in Portland.
Learn moreIn their individual and collaborative work, Hilary Clark and Luke George share an investigation into the ways we exist, move, relate, and experience ourselves and one another, and how that translates into presence and performance. In this workshop, we will consider how to develop tools, methods and questions for ourselves towards openness, vulnerability, rebellion, ability and perceived lack of ability, and about how being a performer is also being a maker and an audience. The workshop will include improvisation as a practice and tool to know our bodies while generating energy and depth.
Learn moreSQUART! says "Get your ass on stage, be spontaneous, short-circuit the forces of habit and expectation in the face of the dominant order, celebrate this space of not knowing to make something strange together!” —Jeremy Wade, SQUART! Berlin Celebrity Judge, 2014
Learn moreMammalian Diving Reflex, of the revered social practice-based work Haircuts by Children (TBA:07), returns with All the Sex I’ve Ever Had. Mammalian uses storytelling to plunge fearlessly into provocative uncharted waters with a frank, vulnerable and unpredictable work that examines intimacy, old age, youth obsessed culture and sex.
Learn moreWe cordially invite you to an “elegant” al fresco dinner (in a parking lot), served with the gone-but-not-forgotten flourish of the grand restaurants of yesteryear. For one night, we’ll summon the uncompromising finesse of James and Julia (Beard and Child DUH!), and we’ll capture the style of Sardi’s, Elaine’s, and the Pump Room, where table-side Caesars and flaming desserts were the norm.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome. Limited to 25 participants.
Learn moreJoin the community choir! Singer, composer and performing artist Holcombe Waller will lead warm up and rehearsal for a working excerpt from his new project, LGBT Requiem Mass. This full-body chorale music workshop will include writing, improvisation, and discussion to explore the convergence of LGBT voice, song, community and the legacy and shadow of Christian liturgical and spiritual music. Amateur and professional singers, sight-readers and ear-exclusive learners all welcome. Wear comfortable clothes you can move in.
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