Past
New 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. In this session, join TBA:16 Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi for a pre-show workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of Ali Chahrour's Leila's Death, and post-show conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreAli Chahrour shares insights into his deeply layered TBA performance, Leila’s Death, as informed by contemporary choreography, religious ritual, and local tradition in Lebanon. TBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University) brings expertise in gender, art, and Lebanese politics and culture to an interpretation and discussion of the work.
Learn moreReferencing the psychedelic light shows of the ’60s and ’70s as well as the harsh noise performances of contemporary avant-garde rebels like Bruce McClure, the Cinema Project collective, along with Portland-based musician Matt Carlson and friends, will create a momentary light and sound environment—a temporary dynamic installation in which to immerse audience members both wandering and still. Several 16mm projectors will run simultaneously and light beams will appear in the round. Moving images of man, woman, animal, landscape, or simply sheer color and light from analog loops and reels will overlap and penetrate one another, covering any and all surfaces possible, and manipulated live by human hands. The mechanics of cinematic experience will be laid bare and at times it will be very very loud.
Learn morePart lecture, part choreographic exposition, better to be alone than to wish you were is a solo performance that affirms the anticlimactic futility of lust, from its first intoxicating charge to its subsequent, stumbling pursuit. While slyly humorous, Hankins unabashedly exploits and strips her body of its poetic nature as it is offered up for consumption, judgment, and of course: desire. Created with an all-female production team, better to be alone… weaves seduction, stand-up comedy motifs, and forced voyeurism in an attempt to exhibit the extraordinary and cumbersome illogic of love and sex.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence of a woman under the influence until it has no name A live video essay that arrives through a base note, a vanishing point, an other history of orientations.
Learn moreSacha Yanow’s solo performance is an intimate psychological portrait of the artist’s father, her internalized dad, and patriarchy in general. For one night only, “Dad” covers and lip-syncs to his favorite songs from the ‘50s and ‘60s, shares footage of his 1970s winning appearance on the To Tell the Truth game show, presents motivational speeches, and more. His button-down shirts become his costumes, his yellow notepad usually reserved for stock market details contains his set list, and his Agatha Christie novel collection and Wall Street Journal become his props.
Learn moreUS PREMIERE: Lebanese choreographer Ali Chahrour explores the practice of Islamic Shiite religious ritual through dance and the body. In this performance, Chahrour takes the stage with two musicians and Leila, a professional mourner whose role it is to deliver the lamentations and honor the departed at a funeral. Woven from traditional Ataaba song verses and the plaintive cries of bereavement, the work is a poetic elegy to a fading cultural heritage. Leila’s Death addresses the relationships between the body and religion, the mourner and the deceased, the sacred and the performed.
Learn moreArtist Britt Hatzius shares her process behind the innovative and engaging Blind Cinema, and exchanges thoughts with Darren O’Donnell (Artistic Director, Mammalian Diving Reflex) on their mutual socially engaged art practices and experiences working with children and youth to generate innovative projects for intergenerational audiences.
Learn moreBlind Coven will feature Portland-based songwriter, songstress, and actor Amenta Abioto. Abioto’s work is on the cutting edge of all that is musical, theatrical, and literary. Her music is boldly mystical and soul-fired, and her raw improvisational live performances invoke elements of both theatrical surprise and magic through ancient African diasporic sounds and stories. She brings to the music scene funky academia while skipping vocally from soul-shaking gospel and smooth jazz to hip hop rhythms wrapped in West African beats. The performance will feature a boutique designed 10-channel surround sound system as well as correlating lighting and visuals from artist DB Amorin.
Learn moreAU’s new collaboration with the Camas High School choir is an explosive, joyful expression of community and creativity that blurs the lines between propulsive art-pop and avant-garde choral soundscapes. This concert is the summation of a yearlong project that found AU’s Luke Wyland working directly with Camas students to produce an entirely new body of music. In addition, Wyland worked closely with Camas Choir Director Ethan Chessin and the trailblazing arts education nonprofit Young Audiences of Oregon & SW Washington to craft a curriculum that exposed Camas students to varying aspects of the music business via members of the local industry.
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 Stephanie DeGooyer for a preparatory workshop with presentation and discussion, group viewing of A.K. Burns' exhibition, A Smeary Spot, and debrief conversation over light refreshments. No contemporary art or dance expertise required. Bring a friend!
Learn moreTBA 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.
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