Past
Dance provocateurs Luke George and Daniel Kok exploit the physical properties of rope and knots to unpick the boundaries of desire, trust, consent and communion between artist and audience. In order to unravel shared lines of connection, to suspend tension and to unleash collective desires, Kok and George look to macramé, sailors’ knots, Chinese knots and rope bondage to weave together an interactive experience of collectivity. Bunny is a nickname given to the person being tied in rope bondage. In this work, we ask ourselves this question: What if everyone (in the theatre) is a Bunny?
Learn moreCollaborators Dorothée and Holland met at the 2016 TBA Festival as part of PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab Residency. Now, they have come together to realize Munyaneza’s bold, visionary, and deeply determined new performance work, Unwanted. In dialogue with Lisa Jarrett, artist and Asst. Professor of Community and Context Arts, Portland State University.
Learn moreFollowing this matinee performance, Sara Magenheimer joins PICA Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy and Lumi Tan, Curator, The Kitchen (NYC) for a post-show conversation with audiences about her TBA installation and performance, I Collect Neglected Venoms.
Learn morePart song and dance, part IBQTPOC prom, but mostly dedicated to honoring the labor and intelligence of indigenous and brown punk energy that continues the fight against heteropatriachy, white supremacy, and settler colonialism. Join us as we honor the revolutionary spirit of activists, artists, and lovers whose lives were lost, whose lives are threatened, and those who are yet to come. This is as much a sweaty celebration as it is a ceremony. Albuquerque, New Mexico’s angry pop punk trio, Weedrat, and San Antonio’s riot grrrl chicano punk band, FEA, will provide live music along with local poetry that will help set the tone for the evening. Video projections, live printing, and punk/riot grrrl music will do the rest. Bring your beautiful body, and let’s collectively celebrate how far we’ve come as community while we smash heteropatriarchy to pieces.
Learn moreThis spring, rapper 2 Chainz announced his “Pretty Girls <3 Trap Music” tour featuring a Gospel Choir (Trap Choir). Church in the Trap House, in conversation with Josef Sorret’s “Spirit in the Dark”, explores the religious themes and aesthetics in contemporary trap music, and what happens when the lines of sacred and secular are blurred, removed, and combined.
Learn moreInternationally celebrated experimental vocalist and performance artist Tanya Tagaq joins Portland artists Wendy Red Star and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano for a conversation drawing on mutual wide-ranging artistic and political influences, including Indigenous feminisms and gender politics, critiques of colonialist structures, cultural heritage, and contemporary forms. With Wendy Red Star, artist and educator, and Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, artist and PICA/PNCA Curatorial Fellow.
Learn moreThis interactive, multimedia, youth-designed and -led workshop focuses on deconstructing the concept of masculinity by examining societal impacts, pressures, stigmas and notions of masculine identity through the lenses, frameworks, and perspectives of minority, male-identified people of color. A showcase of immersive visual vignettes will be shared expressing individual stories through video and art, coupled with collective analysis and discussion among participants.
Learn moreCalling all Lovers, Creators, Change-makers, Hustlers, Baby Mamas, Nation Builders, Dreamers, Dancers, Revolutionaries, Freedom Fighters, Spiritual Gangsters, and Everyone in Between. YGBPortland and DUG come together to offer you a multi-sensory community experience that will feel like no dance party you have ever stepped into.
Learn moreDorothée Munyaneza with Holland Andrews, Bruce Clarke, and Alain Mahé directs our gaze towards the aftermath of genocide. Here, we explore the psychic repercussions of 100,000 to 250,000 Rwandan women raped in the span of four months in 1994 who proceeded to have children from their attacks.
Learn moreSarah AbuAbdallah will be in embedded within the festival, producing new work, screening video, reading texts and generating performance work addressing the confines and freedoms of contemporary life in Saudi Arabia, addressing the boundaries of family, friends, and society at large for women, technology, humanity, magic, poetry and language. ZeroZero is a dreamscape created by video projection and live reading and performance. “00” is a name of a cat the artist dreamt of chasing, and using the cat's story as an entry point to speak of loss, dreams, and belonging.
Learn moreTBA:17 Guest Scholars d.a. carter and Robin Deacon present back-to-back lectures that engage their current research, practice, ideas, and questions.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artist Manuel Solano and Roy Pérez (Asst. Professor of English and American Ethnic Studies, Willamette University), discuss Manuel's TBA project and the artist's broader practice across visual art, video, performance, and music, drawing from pop and celebrity culture, appropriation, and personal queer narrative. In English and Spanish.
Learn moreCreative duo Maya Vivas and Leila Haile will facilitate a participatory discussion surrounding the history of art institutions, gatekeeping, Queer Black art, and their motivations behind opening Ori Gallery, a QTPOC-focused radical art space.
Learn moreKlyph once again curates a night of hip-hop music for the TBA festival featuring artists representing Portland, Oregon. A night celebrating hip-hop and social consciousness with performances by Champagne Duane, Wynne and special guests DJ O.G. One.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Through painting, performance and video, Manuel Solano’s work references pop culture and personal memories to inform on Manuel’s own queer identity and bittersweet experiences. After becoming blind for life in 2014 as a result of an HIV-related infection, Manuel’s practice shifted dramatically. In a series of simple performances, the artist tells stories from his life and attempts to play one good song. Solano has exhibited internationally at Museo Carrillo Gil, Zona MACO and is represented by Galería Karen Huber, Mexico City. In 2016, Solano was in residence at PICA as part of the Creative Exchange Lab Program.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary theatre and performance artist and Reed alum Tina Satter joins Catherine Ming T’ien Duffly (Asst. Professor of Theatre, Reed College) for a conversation about her creative process and the influences and inspiration behind her TBA performance project, Ghost Rings.
Learn moreChoreographer Faye Driscoll shares her creative process, collaboration with dancers, audience and artist co-creation, and the underlying themes and concepts that drive the Thank You for Coming series. With Rachel Carrico, PhD, Dance Faculty Fellow, University of Oregon.
Learn moreThrough interactive discussion, this workshop will center the creation of performative works that unapologetically explore the the realizing of one’s Black identity, including in White consumer based structures. We will share stories, tips, and tricks and form solidarity lists to keep participants strong in the face of adversity while being Black and vulnerable.
Learn moreSounds et al presents Apperceptive Moment. Sound artists Ben Glas, Dolphin Midwives, Samson Stilwell and Amenta Abioto mix sound, visuals and movement into a cohesive exploration of the senses. The experimental performance will engage with acoustics, psychoacoustics, physical interaction with sound, movement, music and noise, to lead the audience on a journey through time and space.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In Ghost Rings a narrative of friendship and family-making unfurls through a pop song cycle that burrows and soars with a mix of deadpan magical realism and a thoroughly feminist worldview. Playwright and performer Tina Satter, songwriters and performers Chris Giarmo and Erin Markey and performer Jo Lampert form a family band of yesteryear as they offer a tender and harrowingly funny, visual and sonic experience that traverses unexpected layers of romance. Ghost Rings has previously been performed at New York Live Arts and Abrons Arts Center, as part of American Realness.
Learn more“Nothing without the sound / won’t show me things / I need to hear you talking.” —Fred Moten
Learn moreDead Thoroughbred artists sidony o’neal and keyon gaskin discuss process, concept, collaboration and their new TBA performance project in depth with Sampada Aranke (Asst. Professor, Art History, Theory, & Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) and Kemi Adeyemi (Asst. Professor, Gender & Sexuality Studies, University of Washington, Seattle).
Learn moreDrawing on his versatile 3+ octave voice, videos, monologues, and songs, Joseph Keckler delivers highlights of his work in an evening of wild miniature operas about contemporary life, haunted torch songs, and narratives infused with humor and longing.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: In the second installment of her Thank You for Coming series, Driscoll uses the ritual of storytelling to explore our human reliance on stories to relate to one another and form identities as individuals and citizens.
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