Past
TBA visual artists Dylan Mira, Keijaun Thomas, and Sacha Yanow join curators Kristan Kennedy (PICA) and Stephanie Snyder (Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College) to share insight into the artists' festival projects and discuss the significance of making and curating visual performance art now.
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.
Learn morePICA welcomes ten artists who will be in residence throughout TBA as part of our Creative Exchange Lab program. Twice a year, the Creative Exchange Lab convenes 7–10 local, national, and international artists who spend three weeks immersed in research, new project development, and idea exchange.
Learn moreMembers of this New York-based, experimental theatre company elaborate on the themes of modern masculinity and desire in their TBA performance, The Art of Luv (Part I): Elliot, in conversation with Kate Bredeson, Associate Professor of Theatre at Reed College.
Learn moreIt’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 moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In the early 19th century, a Colombian named Martina was investigated by the colonial court for being a hermaphrodite, after being accused by her female lover of having an “unnatural body.” Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire, a woman named Nour is married off to the brother of her lover after her mother finds the two women together in bed. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents these parallel stories as an imagined correspondence between the two women, exposing the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and tradition have shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexual body. Separated by geography, culture, and religion they both faced the consequences of defying sex and gender norms.
Learn moreChoreographer Morgan Thorson discusses her TBA project, Still Life, an ongoing installation that processes loss, killing, and extinction through movement and stillness, and features both local and visiting dance artists performing in galleries of the Portland Art Museum. In conversation with Sara Krajewski, Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art, Portland Art Museum.
Learn moreDANCE/MOVEMENT: What would it be like to move from your blind spot? To not think of a future. To dismantle rote kinetic pathways. To facilitate immersion in the awkward and half-welcomed. To draw the invisible out from the hyper-visible. To suspend what's familiar. To challenge emergent assumptions. Engage with these ideas through choreographic structures pulled from New Faithful Disco performer Marbles Jumbo Radio's longstanding work with Simone Forti as well as their current research.
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 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 artist and educator Lisa Jarrett for a pre-performance workshop with presentation and discussion; group viewing of Keijaun Thomas' Distance is Not Separation..., and a post-show conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art or performance expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreCarlos Motta will speak about his recent videos, installations, sculptural works, and the upcoming symposium Nefandus: Colonial Sexual Alterity and Histories for the Future, which he is co-convening with historian Pablo Bedoya at the Pérez Art Museum (PAMM) in Miami. These projects investigate pre-conquest and colonial sexualities, a topic that has traditionally held a marginal place on contemporary artistic, academic, political, and cultural agendas. Motta’s practice suggest that the dissemination of knowledge about sexuality and gender in the colonial period may prove important to understand the conditions of sexual and gender politics in the present.
Learn moreA.K. Burns’ epic four-channel video installation, A Smeary Spot, is infused with a constellation of queer bodies and futurities; feminist theory and sci-fi; dance, performance, and cinematic image; and radical politics and philosophies of space and time. Burns shares the impetuses and influences of her TBA project in dialogue with TBA Guest Scholar Stephanie DeGooyer. See DeGooyer’s essay on A Smeary Spot in this year’s TBA Visual Art publication.
Learn moreDANCE/MOVEMENT: Taught by Roberto Martinez of Christian Rizzo's d’aprés une histoire vraie, this workshop will revisit some extracts of the piece that test the body's various substances and qualities. We will take time to investigate, interrogate, and appropriate them using a variety of compositional devices as well as collaborative writing. Participants will not only discover how to navigate the material from the performance's choreography, but individually interpret, play, and improvise with it.
Learn moreTBA artists and scholars discuss what it means to make experimental performance through a Black queer feminist lens in light of the contemporary politics and evolving aesthetics of race, gender, sexuality, and the body. With Kemi Adeyemi, Sampada Aranke, sidony o’neal, taisha paggett, and Keijaun Thomas. Moderated by Ariel Osterweis, TBA:16 Guest Scholar.
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 moreFor the first time, we've invited six visiting and local scholars and artists to immerse themselves in TBA as an experimental site for critical inquiry, engaged research, and intellectual exchange with artists and audiences. In this program of brief presentations followed by Q&A, our inaugural TBA Guest Scholars will share their current academic and artistic research, critical questions, and deep reflections spanning disciplines and forms. Catch our our Guest Scholars in action throughout the festival as lecturers, conversation and panel moderators, Field Guide facilitators, essayists, bloggers, manifesto-makers, and resident provocateurs.
Learn moreNarcissister talks performance, dance, video art, photography, and activism across popular and experimental media with TBA Guest Scholar Ariel Osterweis, whose critical research and writing closely consider race and movement in Narcissister’s practice.
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 moreCreators of Portland's very own House of Aquarius - William Ylvisaker, Grace Eucker, and Akela Jaffi - bring you a Saturday morning dance workshop for connecting with your own personal movement. Beginning with a guided meditation focused on waking and moving the body's individual pieces, the class will provide a blueprint for the freedom to move the way that best suits you. The intention of this class is to create the same freedom and confidence in learning choreography as with improvisational movement. There will be space to learn, share, play, interact, and heal.
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!
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