Past
One of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local artists and scholars. Each small-group session creates context around contemporary performance and a particular artist's social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences through a pre-show workshop with lecture and discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreVisiting choreographers Meryem Jazouli (Morocco) and Mamela Nyamza (South Africa) will discuss their respective creative practices, current projects, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and cultural outreach and engagement with their communities. Moderated by PICA's Artistic Director, Angela Mattox, with time for audience Q&A.
Learn moreFilipina choreographer Eisa Jocson joins Clare Croft, Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University of Michigan, to share insight into her artistic process and technique and the intersection of gender, labour, seduction politics, and social mobility in her TBA performances, Death of the Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer.
Learn moreDennis Scholl, Knight Foundation Vice President / Arts and well known art collector, talks about what today's audiences want from the arts. Dennis will give examples from Knight’s own engaging initiatives, including Random Acts of Culture, the Knight Arts Challenge and Community Supported Art (CSA). He will also discuss the challenge cultural institutions face in keeping pace with their audiences in the face of the digital revolution and changing demography.
Learn morePortland electronic music collective and record label Dropping Gems curates a night at The Works featuring London’s Little People, and crewmembers DJAO from Seattle and hometown stalwarts Philip Grass. The artists featured here are known for adding non-traditional live elements to their performances to create an immersive sonic journey. Expect a melting pot of intricate and lush synthesized soundscapes, taking traditional hip-hop melodies, and flipping them upside down.
Learn moreFrom pole dancing to macho dancing, choreographer Eisa Jocson investigates labour and representations of the dancing body in the service industry and exposes gender formation, seduction politics, and Filipino social mobility.
Learn morePICA's education and public engagement series, Field Guide helps audiences discover and feel more informed about contemporary performance. Through facilitated workshops with visiting and local faculty, focused explorations of artist's work, and connection with other festival-goers, Field Guide sessions include various combinations of pre-show workshops, social outings to performances, post-show conversations, and online interviews and media to more deeply contextualize the art and artists of our time.
Learn moreUnique' has generally come to mean 'slightly out of the ordinary,' but Samita Sinha's voice warrants the true meaning of the hackneyed accolade... mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact. —Time Out
Learn moreLos Angeles-based visual artist Jennifer West discusses her newest TBA:14 project, Flashlight Filmstrip Projections, and experimentation with the synesthetic, performative, and material qualities of film with Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator at PICA
Learn moreHere was a deeply intellectual experience of consciousness conveyed through physicality. Across the synapses between sensation and thought, the animal and the human, the ecological and illogical, the participants in Super Nature roared, howled, tingled, and leapt, flinging themselves over to feel out the distance and, for a moment, close the gap between the animal spirits and what it means to act naturally. — jkramer.net
Learn moreTHEESatisfaction are artists that blend elements of hip-hop, electronic, and dance. They’re positive energy. Black energy, black women leaping oceans and continents at a single bound. With positive strength of purpose. Even crowds with nary a right foot between them find the steps when faced with THEESat’s unorthodox but right-on-time rhythms. Synchronized, sinewy and sensuous, the regal Stas and Cat channel the higher, whipping like waves of space-borne radiation onstage, leaving a trail of glowing observers abuzz like Geiger counters. THEESatisfaction, the Queens Supreme. Bring yourself!
Learn moreGet a first look at our home for TBA:14 as we officially kick off the first night of the Festival with Opening Night Dinner. This year's dinner will be a nomadic block party, a "seed to plate" local meal crafted by Stacey Givens (The Side Yard Farm and The Nomadic Chef) with table vessels designed by Daniel Duford. Givens is a combination urban farmer and chef, working closely with other farmers, ranchers, and artists as collaborators and sourcing every element of the meal as locally as possible.
Learn moreOur inner host(ess) with the most(ess) has broken loose, blitzed on wine coolers, with a stack of O.G. Better Homes & Gardens to inspire the party–planning. For TBA, Team Delicious and our cocktail soul mates, Merit Badge, will bring back a bygone era when “entertaining” meant more than a kale salad.
Learn moreThe rhythm of a wave, a kaironic triangle, intuits another possible time.What goes unseen in time and how do we measure our own? Waves of history, what floats?
Learn moreMSHR presents a cybernetic system made up of hand-built analog synthesizers and digitally fabricated hieroglyphic sculptures. Light, sound, and shape are pulled through nested feedback eddies as the system unfolds. Visitors become part of the feedback cycle, steering its course through their intentional engagement and ambient presence.
Learn moreAs round as an apple, as deep as a cup is a group of projects, perhaps an exhibition, maybe a poem. The presentations are not odes to something… the artists may or may not be poets, but all of it is OF poetry. For sure the installations, performances, and publications produced will rely on poetics… the study of how different parts come together, contributing to the never-ending search for “subject.” I hope that the endeavor feels like this. Like a thing broken apart and then put together again in the mouth—made real by reading it out loud. The projects are meant to behave like the carefully chosen discordant words in a certain kind of poem. The kind of poem that is a problem to ponder.” —Kristan Kennedy
Learn more2014 Time-Based Art Festival
Learn moreCULTURE-HEALING. In this commissioned project, celebrated queer feminist artist Wynne Greenwood transforms the Cooley Gallery into a studio and performance space in order to re-engage her groundbreaking art band—Tracy + the Plastics—in relationship to her most recent experimental video, installation, and object-based works.
Learn moreTexting is tacky. Calling is awkward. Email is old. PICA and TBA are "hotspots" for Miranda July's Somebody project.
Learn moreFor the better part of a century 16mm was the medium of choice for a coterie of artists dedicated to expanding the parameters of what was then called "film art." This medium and its project are now historical. The works that remain are the dwindling trace of a once practicing Secret Society. That society was Cinema.
Learn moreAlgerian choreographer Nacera Belaza will share exercises that seek movements from within the self but remain neutral and open to the space around the body. The exercises propose a free and open movement that feels out the space, seizing it and investing it with action.
Learn moreDropping Gems takes over THE WORKS with a night of sly samples and sultry, dance-ready beats from DJ Rap Class and singer/producer Natasha Kmeto.
Learn moreNacera Belaza’s mesmerizing choreography commands attention with its spare aesthetics and focused intensity. In this one-night-only duet with her sister, Belaza concentrates on the starting point of her work, looking inwards and moving out from the intimate to the surface, until the movement disappears. It is a simple idea, and an endless and vital one.
Learn morePICA’s new Field Guide program will take off during TBA, offering up new avenues for you to explore, experience, and discuss concepts and forms in contemporary dance. Join guest Field Guide faculty Tonya Lockyer (dance artist/educator and Artistic Director of Velocity Dance Center in Seattle) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People's performance of And lose the name of action.
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