Past
Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo—Black Screen Images and the (e)motive Notion of Freakiness is a lecture performance by Vaginal Davis, the internationally-revered, intersexed doyenne of intermedia arts and sciences. She takes public discourse to Dementia 13 levels as she spells out the queer and blatino experience in her own inimitable fashion, creating new words out of thin air and crashing, bull-in-a-Madame-Mau-china-shop style, over notions of propriety and reality. In short, her work can be described as disheveled, humorous, and rebellious.
Learn moreAN INFECTED SUNSET is an ekphrastic long-form prose poem first conceived in August, 2016, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub shooting, police killings of unarmed Black men, and in the midst of the Standing Rock #NODAPL Resistance. During the writing of the poem, the settler colonial nation-state elected the 45th president of this colonized country, which revealed a sudden revival of extreme white supremacist nationalism. As the social landscape evolved, the Liberated Poem emerged as an offering to Indigenous communities and landscapes that strive for a decolonial and sovereign future, emancipated from white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchal settler colonial trauma drama. This performance poem is a reflection on queer sex, survival and death politics, indigenous identity, settler and heteronormative romanticism, environmental injustice, and the importance of honoring community.
Learn moreTBA artist Robin Deacon (Chair of Performance, School of the Art Institute of Chicago) shares insights into his TBA solo performance, Vinyl Equations, drawing on personal and political histories of music, family, and Afro-Caribbean diaspora. With Peter Simensky, Chair, MFA Visual Studies, Pacific NW College of Art.
Learn moreFIN DE CINEMA is a recurring live film score series curated by Gina Altamura of Portland music venue and nightclub, Holocene. This series, established in 2009, allows local pop and experimental musicians to reinterpret the soundtracks to classic art films. FIN DE CINEMA returns to TBA for the second year in a row, with a reprise performance of their reimagined score to Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast (originally performed at Holocene in January of 2018). This year’s show will be composed and performed by Like A Villain, Patricia Wolf, John Niekrasz, Jonathan Sielaff, Amenta Abioto, and Noah Bernstein.
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Weird Allen Kaprow (WAK) presents self-karaoke, a new body of video, installation, and performance work that repurposes pop melodies to explore the political dimensions of self-care in our crumbling late capitalist democracy. Self-Karaoke features new songs and performances by special guest collaborators.
Learn moreNIC Kay discusses the TBA edition of Pushit!, a series of iterative “exercises” that question the limits and (im)possibilities of choreography and freedom, and engage the politics of resistance and reparation in the context of racialized space, neoliberal economy, emotional labour, and Black lives. With d.a. carter, Asst. Professor of Black Studies, Portland State University.
Learn moreFamed for fashion-forward Black and Brown queer dance parties like Legendary Mondays, CAKE, and Decadent, bart fitzgerald is throwing a festival extravaganza. It’s LEGENDARY on a Sunday night. Wear your festival clothes. Make bad choices.
Learn moreJACK & is a stand-up routine turned sitcom baking fiasco that mingles cakes and kitchen disasters, recipes and remedies, jokes, and goldfish to paint the portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed. The comedy of errors is structured on social codes and training from prison reentry programs to debutante balls. The performance considers re-entry to society after prison, focusing not the time one has served but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state.
Learn moreFollowing his final performance of Some Styles of Masculinity (Part 3: “Comedian”), Gregg Bordowitz will be in conversation with Stephanie Snyder (Anne and John Hauberg Curator and Director, The Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College), curator of Bordowitz’s retrospective, I Wanna Be Well. Attendance at this evening’s performance is not required in order to take part in the Post-Show Conversation.
Learn moreIn this three-part performance-lecture series, titled Some Styles of Masculinity (2017) and presented as part of the exhibition “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon,” Gregg Bordowitz explores tropes of masculinity that have been formative to his own coming-of-age. Each evening, Bordowitz considers a different seminal figure: the rock star, the rabbi, or the comedian. Key Yiddish words for all three are farbissener, rakhmones, and schpilkes. Some Styles of Masculinity extends Bordowitz’s understanding of gender as “bound up, entangled, with ethnic, religious, and national identities as well as sexuality, race, and class.”
Learn morePortland artist-run space and TBA late-night artists/curators S1 will facilitate a workshop on sound collage and layering with multiple DJ set-ups, taught by members of the internationally recognized S1 Synth Library. Explore basic concepts of using CDJS and how to create soundscapes and unexpected layers and rhythms from field recordings, samples, and more. No expertise or experience necessary.
Learn moreUS WEST COAST PREMIERE: Can resistance be choreographed? Pushit!, a site-responsive performance by NIC Kay, is a meditation on emotional labor and the impossibility of the stage as a place of freedom for the Black performer. This work is part of a larger set of exercises in getting-well-soon.
Learn moreConceived by Lois Weaver and inspired by Marleen Gorris’ film Antonia's Line, The Long Table is an experimental open public forum, a hybrid performance-installation-roundtable-discussion-dinner-party designed to facilitate dialogue through the gathering together of people with common interests. Discussion topics will consider what constitutes queer art and performance today, the ways in which artists are engaging queer identities and experiences across forms and disciplines, and how queer politics show up in performance and in life. Moderated by Shawna Lipton, TBA Guest Scholar and Chair, MA Critical Studies, Pacific NW College of Art.
Learn moreTBA artists jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham share insights and influences from their TBA project and larger performance series, Let ‘im Move You, including explorations of J-Sette dance that originated in Historically Black Colleges and Universities, other Black queer dance vocabularies, and the limits, imaginations, and tensions of performance contextualized by both White aesthetics and institutions as well as the sites and spaces of predominantly Black neighborhoods. With Andrew J. Brown/Sister James, TBA Guest Scholar and Asst. Professor of Performance Art, Fairhaven College Western Washington University.
Learn moreLet’s practice creating dances. By using sensorial, perceptual, anatomical, spatial, formal, behavioral, verbal and imaginative pathways, we will transform our individual movement patterning; play with technical structures, improvisational concepts, and choreographic frameworks; and groove to some sweet jams. We will attempt to abandon ‘neutrality’ and uncover our bodies’ ingrained knowledge and history.
Learn moreNXT LVL is back at PICA bringing another epic party for social justice back to Portland. In January, they brought some of the West Coast’s most exciting musicians for an all night dance party to raise money and bring awareness. They’ll be bringing that same energy and same mission to TBA—their surprise line-up will be one you won’t want to miss.
Learn moreEqually funny and heartbreaking, Soft Goods lays bare the beauty and brutality of backstage culture. Performed by an ensemble of stage technicians and dancers, and structured as a live load-in and technical rehearsal for a performance that never happens, the show illuminates the lonesomeness of theaters, the spectral elegance of a lighting focus, the choreography of labor, and the labor of dance. Soft Goods is a meditation on work, life, loss, and occupational self-obliteration.
Learn moreCombining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) explores aging, anxiety, hidden desires, and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and an ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the performance troupe Split Britches lace this interactive piece with playful urgency and lethargy, to encourage discussion about the political landscape. In the “Situation Room,” twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weaves in satirical insights and humour. The two pioneering theatre-makers see undisturbed ordnances as a metaphor for the disregarded potential in elders, and hope to uncover buried resources in us all.
Learn moreIn connection with some of the broader themes in Kaneza Schaal’s and Cornell Alston’s JACK &, this discussion highlights local contemporary art practices that directly engage issues and experiences of incarceration, re-entry, and prison abolition and reform. Artists, participants, and facilitators from Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice Program and the Columbia River Correctional Institution (CRCI) discuss the art programs they have been organizing both inside and outside of CRCI, a minimum security state prison within Portland city limits. Created in collaboration with current and formerly imprisoned artists, writers, and musicians, these programs focus on conceptual art, Social Practice, comedy, and photography.
Learn moreKaneza Schaal and Cornell Alston join TBA Guest Scholar C. Riley Snorton to discuss their collaborative TBA performance, JACK &, sharing insights into the multidisciplinary project’s range of influences and references to social codes, from prison re-entry, to mid-century sitcoms, to feminist painters, to Black debutante balls. With C. Riley Snorton, TBA Guest Scholar, Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies, University of Chicago.
Learn moreJoin dance artists and curators from TBA’s Opening Night event The Beautiful Street for a workshop in Hip Hop Grooves & Popping Technique. We will explore how to integrate these moves into both choreography and improv/freestyle dance. Open to anyone who enjoys moving and having fun!
Learn moreLet ‘im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu poe & Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from the artists’ seven-year research into J-Sette performance—the performance of joy and the conundrum of Black joy. The series currently consists of three live performance works and an installation. A Study uses J-Sette movement and performance structures as jumping-off points for experimentation with the role of strategy in collaborative creation and presentation. Rhythm, pattern, and attention become mechanisms for the artists to situate themselves in play, and to frame a movement conversation with primarily White audiences. This Is a Success explores J-Sette in relation to notions of African-American exceptionalism as expressed through middle-class, Black American values reiterated within the J-Sette form. The work continues the artists’ research of rhythm as a vehicle into subversion and satisfaction.
Learn moreQuestioning contemporary dance’s predisposition towards neutrality, authenticity, and the desexualization of the female body, ANTHEM embraces theatricality, virtuosity, and sass. The work weaves together vernacular dance styles to explore labor, play, and feminine posturing. Four women execute a repetitive, complex set of movements that evolves, as each rotates hypnotically within the confines of a square. Over time, the meditative rigor of their steps dissolves into a tangle of commotion, blurring the distinction between the mundane and the glamorous.
Learn moreCloth making—among the oldest forms of human cultural production—provides inspiration for Ann Hamilton’s multi-venue project, habitus, located at three sites: The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Municipal Pier 9, and on social media. habitus weaves the mediums of text, textile, and image together for an imaginative and tactile exchange between artist and audience. As cloth swaddles us at birth and covers us in sleep; as a folded blanket can tell a story of trade; as a flag carries the symbol of a nation, Hamilton’s multi-venue exhibition invites us to touch and be touched by the fabric of human experience.
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