Past
Tight. Moving. Aural. Physical. Breath. Beat. Lost. Loose. Breathless. Minutes? Months? Meters? Monsters? Monograms? Macaroons? 15 m = ? Four ways. Samiya Bashir dreamcasts Portland poets Shayla Lawson and Dao Strom, plus special guest Ronaldo V. Wilson and collaborating artist Roland Dahwen Wu, as together they guide poetry through space. Four ways. Solve for the poem. What? See for yourself.
Learn moreBecca Blackwell shares insights into the creation of They, Themself, and Schmerm, including themes of gender and transition, strategies of humor, and forms of comedy and personal narrative. In dialogue with TBA Guest Scholar bart fitzgerald and Shawna Lipton, Chair, MA in Critical Studies, Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Learn moreFin de Cinema is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue & nightclub, Holocene. Fin de Cinema was established in 2009, and allows Portland-based pop and experimental musicians to re-interpret the soundtracks to classic art films. Fin de Cinema is debuting Andrei Tarkovksy’s The Mirror (1975) with a reimagined live score composed and performed by Golden Retriever, Brown Calculus (Members of Tribe Mars), Palm Dat and Noah Bernstein (members of Shy Girls), and Dylan Stark.
Learn moreDT is peri-conceptual, dis-experimental, and a-nihilist. DT is a blackened performance that is never not happening. DT is après-queer and post-ratchet. DT is anti anti-capital capital. DT is heavy evasion-- worthless.
Learn moreComprised of her signature story-driven stand-up and scored by sensual homemade pop, Erin Markey’s Boner Killer is an intimate musical conversation between what Markey thinks she can’t have and how she’d have it if she could. Driven by Whitney Houston’s lesbian mythologies, Europe™, and a Pretty Woman accident, Markey and bandmate Emily Bate sacrifice their lives to transform personal humiliations into naked feminist hope.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: An evening of protest songs to soothe your despair and stoke your outrage, unless Morgan screws it up! Drawing on the tradition of protest albums, stand-up comedy, new age ritual, experimental narrative, and cabaret, Morgan Bassichis Sings Protest Songs is an evening of queer world-making and unmaking accompanied by Senior Energy featuring Elizabeth LoPiccolo (flute, vocals), Kyle Combs (electronics, percussion, vocals), Rhys Ziemba (bass), and Sam Greenleaf Miller (percussion, vocals).
Learn moreTBA artist Morgan Bassichis and Guest Scholar Keith Hennessy talk comedy, queer performance histories and strategies, gender politics, maybe some mysticism or improvisation, and dive deeper into Bassichis' TBA Festival projects. Just a guess. With Keith Hennessy, dance and performance artist, activist, and writer.
Learn moreRECORD RELEASE SHOW: EMA (Erika M. Anderson) has been part of the West Coast noise and experimental music / performance scene for over 10 years. Originally from South Dakota, Anderson moved to LA and began playing with noise folk legends Amps For Christ before forming the group Gowns with Ezra Buchla. Gowns released the ground-breaking Red State in 2007, combining noise and drone elements with lyrical singing and melodies in ways that were rare at that time. After the breakup of Gowns, EMA released her breakout solo record Past Life Martyred Saints in 2011, which topped many critics "Best Of" lists that year. Since then she has continued to refine her unique sonic palette of synth drones, spoken narrative, and heavy guitar hooks. In 2015, she expanded into durational performance and installation, including performances at MoMA PS1 and The Barbican Centre that involved virtual reality. In August 2017, she released her latest record Exile In The Outer Ring. This TBA late night performance will be the first stop on her international tour supporting the record. DJ madison moore closes the night with all-encompassing bass and queer techno vibes.
Learn moreBIGHT OF THE TWIN tells the story of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and the Los Angeles-based artist and filmmaker Hazel Hill McCarthy III's journey to Ouidah in Benin to explore the origins of the Vodoun (Voodoo) religion.
Learn moreIn celebration of Pepper Pepper and friends’ fifth and final edition of Critical Mascara: A Post-Realness Drag Ball at TBA, don’t miss this roundtable and mimosa kiki by and for the growing Pacific Northwest ballroom scene. A diverse group of local dancers and performers will come together to get critical and connect about their practice and presence.
Learn moreArtist and writer Will Rawls discusses his durational performance, i make me [sic] for PICA, touching on the range of forms and influences in his choreographic and broader practice, most recently including an attention to "authorship, memory, race, and subjectivity as intersecting monuments in need of constant undoing." With TBA Guest Scholar Lydia Brawner, Curatorial Fellow, Performa.
Learn moreCritical Mascara: Portland’s “Post-Realness Drag Extravaganza” returns to PICA’s TBA stage for its 5th and FINAL installment.
Learn moreFor Corbeaux (‘crows’ or ‘ravens’ in French), Bouchra Ouizguen brings a cast of 9 female Moroccan performers and 30 Portland performers to create this site specific, immersive performance ritual. At the crossroads of multiple influences, Corbeaux is inspired by the ritual trance dances of the Marrakech region, and by the community figure of the uncensored ‘fool’ in Persian literature of the 8th to the 11th centuries. Ouizguen always comes back to the subject of the social significance of femininity and this piece is a variation on themes that fascinate her: roots, instinct, and connection to the mother, to the Earth and to love. The work is utterly unique, and resides in a space of ritual and contemplation.
Learn moreIn collaboration with dramaturg Kate Bredeson (Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College), this afternoon series will illuminate the work of dramaturgs in dance and new performance. A talk by Katherine Profeta, followed by a roundtable on dance dramaturgy, together investigate how dramaturgs work, and provoke conversations about the role of dramaturgical collaboration in new work. This program is grateful for the support of the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas, who awarded Portland dramaturg Kate Bredeson the 2017 Bly Fellowship that helps to make this series possible.
Learn moreRenowned musical and performing artists Stew and Heidi (The Negro Problem, Passing Strange) discuss the impulses and influences behind the creation of their TBA performance, Notes of a Native Song, inspired by the life, work, and politics of James Baldwin. With TBA Guest Scholar d.a. carter, Assistant Professor of Black Studies, Portland State University.
Learn morecvllerjerx (angelica maria millan lozano, maximiliano carlos - raphael francisco martinez) exclaim “nothing is civilized anymore. esta noche the kids get loud! they’re not going to bed early tonight. ART AS BRAT through clothes, poetry, performance and dance.”” As resident artists within the festival the collaborators will interrogate and celebrate the spaces art and audiences inhabit while exploring the value of collective and absurd outbursts en un mundx locx.
Learn moreHow might moving, listening, and being together as distinctly orientated bodies in everyday social and political spheres, further heighten our capacity to see what is hidden, erased, marginalized, forced underground? how might active, embodied investigations of place and purpose catalyze perspective?
Learn moreReturning for the second consecutive year, No No Soliciting will feature several of Portland's most talented and respected musiciansand 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 next songwriter is composing the new next song.
Learn moreUS West Coast Premiere: Part classic standup comedy special, part teen zine vomit confessional, They, Themself and Schmerm is Becca’s disturbingly hilarious personal tale of being adopted into a Midwestern religious family, trained to be a girl, molested, and plagued by the question, “How do I become a man and do I even want that?”
Learn moreInspired by the art & life of James Baldwin, Stew explores Baldwin’s trailblazing legacy through songs co-written by longtime collaborator Heidi Rodewald, co-creator, along with Stew, of the Tony Award-winning musical Passing Strange. For TBA:17, the two will present a stripped down, intimate version of Notes of a Native Song, which places at the forefront Stew's intensely personal & problematic relationship with Baldwin's work. Stew’s uniquely incisive lyrics combine with rock, rhythm and blues, and jazz in this powerful homage to the inspiring writer, who famously confronted issues of gender, race, and class distinction.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: Bassichis will present an evening of “new and preexisting” daily meditations alongside musician Kyle Combs. In Morgan’s own words, “Maybe you don’t have time and it’s hard because you’re on Amazon looking for adrenal formulas and you don’t know how to work the podcast app and the MTA is crumbling as a kind of mood ring of everything else and in those cases you could come to this night and we will meditate for you, not in your place but on your behalf, especially if you didn’t have a chance to fully grieve George Michael as if that’s even possible, as if anything is ever fully grieved, as if anything is ever fully over, as if you really want to spend an entire evening of your life in a room with other people, back to back, front to front, side to side, cheek to cheek, and not run, but stay put and meditate to some songs about secret pools and Polish forests and being scared shitless or shitful, being scared shitty. You don’t need to bring anything! Feel free to bring your roommate or come alone, it’s totally fine either way.”
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in one’s embodied experiences, Direct Path to Detour seeks to evoke various mental and physical states that arise at the intersection of multiple value systems, social pressure, expectation, personal experiences, and body memory. Some of those things are sometimes explicitly clear, but some are often unarticulated and uncertain. In this poetic investigation, a solo performer attempts to observe and hold all on the equal plane, believing that they can and should exist simultaneously without logic and rationale.
Learn moreDohee Lee’s one-woman solo performance, MU/巫, utilizes cutting-edge wireless sensors to control technology and seamlessly integrate sound, film and animation with her exquisite live performance of dance, singing, and percussion. The meaning of MU/巫in Korean is “shaman.” Shaman is connector. The thread of connection is myth. Myth connects us to our lands, nature, history, belief systems, and to each other. Myth connects us through time and space. From our homelands to new lands. From ancestor time to the present. Shining a light on how we may continue to the future.
Learn moreWEST COAST PREMIERE: I make me [sic] is a solo choreography adapted continually as an installation for galleries, museums, and alternative spaces. Using the alphabet as a loose structure, Rawls spins out short lectures and other performance material culled from a life history of dance, consumption, and self-definition. The nonlinear and live composition of movement, objects, sound, and text produce an attenuated sense of time and situation, sparking the potential for a body to claim its rights as a work-in-progress, while tugging subtly at the institutional and architectural framework that holds it.
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