Past
A show performed by its audience. Taking the form of a theatrical “read-through,” attendees will pick up their scripts and navigate a text collectively, to create and perform a community. In the temporary microcosmic society that’s established over the course of the reading, everybody slowly but surely gets his or her role. WE ARE STILL WATCHING is a play in which the idea of “spectacle” slowly shifts to where we least expect it.
Learn moreAt this year’s Festival, Karen Sherman (Minneapolis) performs with set pieces she designs and builds herself, drawing on her skills in construction, while Linda Austin (Portland) performs with sculptural objects by artist David Eckard. Here, they talk about designing and constructing set pieces and choreographing with and for sculptural objects and visual artists.
Learn moreChoreographer Miguel Gutierrez will lead a unique walk through the world, guiding participants to awaken, explore, and illuminate their senses of the world around them.
Learn moreCombining science-fiction, electronic pop music, and audience participation, Boy Band Audition is an interactive performance night of dancing, singing, and imagining life after the future is over.
Learn moreDance, words, and scrap lumber are the raw materials for One with Others, an examination of who we become due to the choices we—or others—make.
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 Keith Hennessy (choreographer and TBA alum) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Bouchra Ouizguen's Ha!.
Learn moreSince the early 90s, Daniel Barrow has developed a unique style of “manual” animation, layering and manipulating his intricate drawings on overhead projectors. With The Thief of Mirrors, Barrow returns to TBA with the story of a jewel thief who wears the mask of a sad clown.
Learn moreTrue to PICA’s interdisciplinary, artist-driven focus, TBA visual artist Emily Roysdon—whose practice spans independent and collaborative work in performance, installation, printmaking, text, video, and curating—interviews visiting choreographers Bouchra Ouizguen (Morocco) and Nacera Belaza (France/Algeria) on their newest works.
Learn moreTools and tactics for dancing and performance, which may or may not include: doing movements, imagining doing movements, rolling on the floor, touching each other, talking, screaming, seeing, and being seen. Participants will access and build a sense of awareness, presence, decision making, quality, and imagination.
Learn moreInternational singing sensation DUBAIS has decided to end it all and to leave this world. The place in which DUBAIS now exists is neither heaven nor hell; both of those places actually refer to political parties, the Bible was mistranslated. All souls go to one place—the Unterwelt—a place split in two by ideologies and a wall. Using the city of Berlin as a main backdrop, this multi- media modern day pop opera investigates conceptions of morality, divisions of power, and the landscapes of political indifference.
Learn moreKim Gordon (CKM, Sonic Youth, Free Kitten, etc.) and Bill Nace (X.O.4, Vampire Belt, Ceylon Mange, etc.) will bathe THE WORKS in sound and film for the Portland premiere of their new band Body/Head.
Learn moreMoroccan choreographer Bouchra Ouizguen draws inspiration from the writings of the famed Persian poet and Sufi mystic Rumi to probe the obsessions lurking in each of us. In Ha!, she shares this exploration with her collaborators Fatima El Hanna, Fatima Aït Ben Hmad, and Naïma Sahmoud—a trio of Moroccan aïtas, traditional cabaret singers who are both celebrated and scorned for their performing tradition on the margins of society.
Learn more“Nacera Belaza practices the detail drawing, the imperceptible nuance, the painting of a slow-moving body with a play of light and shade. She is to the dance what Bresson is to the cinema...” —RTBF
Learn more“The professional insights of Erdal, who at times operates the lighting from the stage [...] illuminate his story, becoming a metaphor for his experiences and for life’s big questions... he uses the medium he knows so intimately [...] to present theatre with universal resonance.” —The Globe and Mail
Learn moreJamie Isenstein: Will Return is an exhibition, an occasion, and a publication. For the past fifteen years, Portland native and Reed College alumna Jamie Isenstein has created objects, drawings, mixed-media sculptures, and installations that engage the artist’s body as an artistic medium—a subject of humor, theatricality, and historical representation.
Learn moreDisjecta Curator-in-Residence Summer Guthery and artist Ieva Miseviciute will discuss comedy, problems, mimes, audience members as captives, undescribing performance, and fugues, all while sitting in very tall chairs.
Learn moreHolmes will combine applications of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’s Body-Mind Centering, Steve Paxton’s Contact Improvisation, and improvisational approaches in solo, duet, and ensemble dancing.
Learn moreIeva Misevičiūtė—former Lithuanian clown, academic, and practitioner of unproductive gymnastics presents her take on sketch comedy that lost its punch line and has been abstracted through dance and free-floating characters.
Learn moreLaura Arrington and Jesse Hewit discuss their newest work, ADULT, and reflect on their collaborative process subverting the dance duet. Moderated by Ju-Pong Lin, Faculty, MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts, Goddard College.
Learn more“Pensotti has a fine facility with irony, with the fine balance between comedy and tragedy.” —British Theatre Guide
Learn moreWISHFUL THINKING brings together the musicians of Led Er Est, Blues Control, Further Reductions, and The Coombe—bands that use hardware electronics to subvert the digital abstractions of the personal computer and resist the pure click-and-drag of the soft synth world. They’ll dissolve pop songs into walls of noise, and re-build aggressively rhythmic tracks that embrace the beauty of error in improvisation.
Learn more“In the beginning, Georg said, let there be no light. And there was dark. Silky, womb-like India-ink blackness. No emergency lighting in theaters, nada, nothing. And it was good. Mind-blowingly good.” —Los Angeles Times
Learn moreAnd lose the name of action balances neuroscience, improvisation, and paranormal investigations to explore the ghostlike traces that dance leaves on the mind and body.
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 Zoe Scofield (TBA alum and choreographer/dancer of zoe |juniper) for a casual, guided workshop and conversation about Laura Arrington & Jesse Hewit's ADULT.
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