Past
PICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Ntsikelelo "Boyzie" Cekwana (Johannesburg) and keyon gaskin (Portland) exchange thoughts on making critically engaged dance, choreography, and performance that attends to questions of race and the persistence of colonialism and apartheid in artistic and cultural contexts. In conversation with Vivian Phillips of Seattle Theatre Group.
Learn moreTaught by performers from Alessandro Sciarroni's UNTITLED_I will be there when you die workshop is for anyone who wishes to learn and practice fundamental juggling techniques and apply them to individual and group composition and sequence.
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 moreJunaid Sarieddeen is co-founder of Beirut’s Zoukak Theatre Company, founded in 2006 to develop an engaged professional theatre practice with a commitment to creativity as a form of resistance. Junaid will position Zoukak as a case study to illuminate the broader landscape of art and politics in Lebanon, sharing the origins of the company as a platform for contemporary performance and vehicle for social change, in a country lacking adequate public and cultural policy and haunted by cycles of ceaseless crisis.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Dept of Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University) traces the history of the modern Lebanese state through an engagement with the archives of the country's high court. Ethnography of daily life at the courthouse is coupled with archival research in order to think more critically about mainstream Lebanese history and technologies of research, census taking, and the politics of identity.
Learn morePICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Dorothée Munyaneza (Rwanda/France) and Moya Michael (South Africa/Belgium), discuss their performance practices, political and personal influences, and transnational perspectives on working artistically between Europe and their native countries. In dialogue with Lili Chopra, Artistic Director, French Institute Alliance Française.
Learn moreChoreographer Alessandro Sciarroni returns to TBA with Untitled, featuring the nuanced repetition, gesture, and durational movement of professional jugglers against a live ambient soundscape. Esteemed Portland choreographer and TBA Guest Scholar Linda K. Johnson invites Sciarroni to unpack the conceptual and aesthetic influences on this meditative experimental work.
Learn moreEXPERIMENTAL WRITING: In this writing workshop we will in the dark automatic what is already cut the extra for our purposes the language image through a series of prompts, some poetic, some physical, some remembering, some riding. Instead of writing say knife, instead of writing say table bottom, instead of writing say record and transcribe. Gently together now. Open to anyone! If you think this workshop is probably not for you because you are not a writer then it is probably for you.
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 moreNew to contemporary art but curious to learn more? Enjoy sharing thoughts and perspectives with other audience members? Ready to deep-dive into the ideas and themes in an artist’s work? Field Guide is a unique opportunity for facilitated dialogue and exchange among a small group of festival-goers eager to discover and explore a particular exhibition or performance in more depth, including an artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences. In this session, join TBA:16 Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi for a pre-show workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of Ali Chahrour's Leila's Death, and post-show conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreAli Chahrour shares insights into his deeply layered TBA performance, Leila’s Death, as informed by contemporary choreography, religious ritual, and local tradition in Lebanon. TBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University) brings expertise in gender, art, and Lebanese politics and culture to an interpretation and discussion of the work.
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 moreArtist Britt Hatzius shares her process behind the innovative and engaging Blind Cinema, and exchanges thoughts with Darren O’Donnell (Artistic Director, Mammalian Diving Reflex) on their mutual socially engaged art practices and experiences working with children and youth to generate innovative projects for intergenerational audiences.
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 moreNew to contemporary art but curious to learn more? Enjoy sharing thoughts and perspectives with other audience members? Ready to deep-dive into the ideas and themes in an artist’s work? Field Guide is a unique opportunity for facilitated dialogue and exchange among a small group of festival-goers eager to discover and explore a particular exhibition or performance in more depth, including an artist’s social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences. Join TBA:16 Guest Scholar Stephanie DeGooyer for a preparatory workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of A.K. Burns' exhibition, A Smeary Spot, and debrief conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art or dance expertise required. Bring a friend!
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