Past
WEST 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 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 Ariel Osterweis for a pre-show workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of Narcissister's Narcissistic Advance, and post-show conversation over light refreshments. No prior contemporary art or performance experience required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreJoin esteemed Portland choreographer and TBA:16 Guest Scholar Linda K. Johnson for a unique Field Guide workshop on Morgan Thorson's Still Life, to include exercises in close observation, light movement, and deep discussion to enhance our experience with repetition, duration, and other elements of ephemeral performance. No prior experience necessary. Bring a friend!
Learn moreIn a spirited launch of this year's TBA, artistic directors of leading national and international art and performance festivals speak to the concentrated time, space, and place of “the festival” as an unparalleled platform for artistic presentation, audience experience, curatorial research, political engagement, and cross-cultural confluence of people and ideas. With Angela Mattox (TBA Festival, Portland); Silvia Bottiroli (Santarcangelo Festival, Italy); Helen Cole (In Between Time Festival, Bristol, UK); and Melissa Levin (River to River Festival, NYC). Moderated by Stephanie Snyder, Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College.
Learn moreTBA opening night artist Juliana Huxtable discusses her multidisciplinary practice across music, poetry, performance, and the politics of race and gender with TBA Guest Scholar, Sampada Aranke (Asst. Professor, History and Theory of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Art Institute).
Learn moreDANCE/MOVEMENT: Get warmed up for Critical Mascara's "A Post-Realness Extravaganza" with legendary Father Stephaun Blahnik. In this workshop, we will cover voguing basics, then apply those skills to progressively challenging drills and battles. Ideal as an introduction to voguing or for those wishing to improve techniques and stamina. Come ready to sweat! Will you ring the alarm, or throw in the towel!?
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 moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: A Smeary Spot, 2015 is a 53 minute 4-channel video installation drawing on theater and documentary methods to rework the genre of science fiction. The title, A Smeary Spot is a references to the sun borrowed from feminist sci-fi writer Johanna Russ. The sun, a dense concentration of heat and light, is an organizing principle of time, place and ego. What potential emerges when we glance away from the source and settle into the blurry residue of the afterimage? This work re-orients the audience within a speculative present. Shot in two locations: on public lands in the deserts of southern Utah and inside a black box theater, where performers deliver recitations of appropriated and altered texts that compose a loose manifesto on being. Inside this cinematic experience is a surreal narrative of bodies in transition (both movement and definition) that act out, delivering curious combinations of language, materiality and gestures. Among these bodies, the land, the water, the refuse pile and the theater are not simply grounds, resources, waste or stages upon which these actions occur, they are sprawling protagonists, like the sun—permeating and persistent.
Learn moreThere’s no place like home… gather with us at the PICA family table with friends and artists for an unforgettable feast from Stacey Givens of The Side Yard Farm.
Learn moreStrut out your powerful Runway, Waacking, goddess realness! This 90 min "pumps optional" adventure through dance will leave you feeling physically empowered with a new sense of self confidence. Learn exciting Heels & Waacking foundation paired with sexy beats and exciting exercises to get you ready for the Waacking battle at Critical Mascara, or just acquire some new moves to impress friends at the club! With favorite local artists and performer, Isaiah Tillman, and renowned Waacking dancer, choreographer, and artist Kumari Suraj.
Learn moreDan Seward, also known as Bunnybrains, is a musician, curator and promoter in Hudson, New York, where he runs the celebrated (and somewhat nomadic) record store, John Doe Records. This exhibition focuses on Bunnybrains thirty plus years as a transgressive, mutable, collaborative, performative project and what it means to illustrate the life of a true muse. From live broadcasts of Bunnybrains radio show Battlefield Earth, participatory workshops, rotating guest exhibitions, spontaneous happenings and performances, the artist shares their space with you in an effort to vivify "Bunnybrains is all".
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