Past
An all-levels voguing workshop facilitated by members of Portland’s PDXBall. Come learn and have fun, or practice in preparation for PDXBall’s TBA Late Night kiki ball competition!
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWith varied natural and urban instrumentation, including violin, Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and pedal steel guitar, Laura Ortman showcases the wide range of her practice as a composer and visual artist.
Learn moreWater Will (in Melody) is a devised choreographic work for four performers, using melodrama as a point of departure. Wrestling with language and notions of 'the will,' this dystopian fantasy becomes a space for negotiating desire, imagination, and feelings of an encroaching end. Unfolding with playful inventiveness, a wet and cavernous landscape becomes host to a fiction that invites instability, recreation, and catastrophe.
Learn moreALL - a physical poem of protest investigates the individual and shared agency of choreography in social, political, and artistic spaces. An epic durational community performance, it considers the force of the protesting body and human mass through the meditative action of walking and running in circles.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab artists in residence for brief presentations about their current projects and practices over happy hour drinks!
Learn moreHolocene presents Fin de Cinema, a new live score of Marcel Camus’ 1959 film Black Orpheus, composed and performed by local musicians. “Winner of both the Academy Award for best foreign-language film and the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or, Marcel Camus’ Black Orpheus (Orfeu negro) brings the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the twentieth-century madness of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro. With its eye-popping photography and ravishing, epochal soundtrack, Black Orpheus was an international cultural event, and it kicked off the bossa nova craze that set hi-fis across America spinning.” - Criterion
Learn moreIn this workshop with TBA Opening Night artist Holland Andrews—whose experimental artistic practice spans composition, visual art, and performance using operatic and extended vocal technique—participants will explore guided meditation, vocal embodiment practice, performance, and collaboration.
Learn moreChoreographer Mia Habib has created a 50-person, community performance that examines and reflects the physical embodiment and witnessing of protest, demonstration, and critical mass. In conversation with Roya Amirsoleymani, PICA’s Artistic Director & Curator of Public Engagement, the artist discusses the development of the indoor and outdoor Portland iterations of this emergent, participatory, public intervention through its political, conceptual, and choreographic lenses.
Learn moreNOCHE LIBRE is a radical Latinx DJ collective of women creating space for Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities. We spin music that spans genres and geography from cumbia and quebradita to dancehall and perreo. We celebrate our family’s roots and rituals by carrying on the tradition of puro pinche pair.
Learn moreTBA:19 Opening Night Like a Villain (Holland Andrews) will be performing a night of expansive, ceremonial, extended-technique vocal compositions to draw in the opening of this year's TBA Festival.
Learn moreA convocation for all! Our inaugural and first-ever TBA Block Party BBQ is a chance for artists, audiences, neighbors, and staff to kick off the festival over a casual, celebratory meal, featuring legendary barbecue from Po'Shines. In years past, the Opening Night Dinner was a lovely but exclusive affair. Now celebrating the third year in our home on NE Hancock St., the Block Party BBQ is open to all, an accessible and welcoming shared meal—all are invited!
Learn moreCo-Presented with c3:initiative Cannupa Hanska Luger site specific performance at c3:initiative. AFRAID NOT performative action by artist Cannupa Hanska Luger will tie a physical line from the tools of ar-ti-fa-ct to their task.
Learn moreA Body in Places is the omnibus title of Eiko’s first solo project, which started with her revisiting post-nuclear disaster Fukushima and her twelve hour performance at Philadelphia Station in 2014. Its scale and modes of presentation vary radically and incorporate both performative and non-performative elements.
Learn moreJoin PICA’s Artistic Directors, Roya Amirsoleymani, Erin Boberg Doughton, and Kristan Kennedy for a final TBA:18 farewell. They’ll be a pancake brunch, Vic’s infamous Bloody Mary bar, and plenty of time for conversation and reflections about the past 10 days. Let’s bask in the last festival moments together.
Learn moreOne of the brightest voices on the Portland hip-hop scene is Alana Chenevert, aka The Last Artful, Dodgr. Her name is a nod to her hometown of Los Angeles, a pun on its baseball team, a reference to Oliver Twist, and it illustrates a life spent dodging bullets. Since arriving in Portland in 2013, she’s made the city her own and has quickly become a rising star. Press and fans have compared her to Chance the Rapper, Missy Elliott, and Dizzee Rascal with lyrics inspired by Sufjan Stevens. While we’re always sad to see the festival end, brilliant hip-hop delivered by a queer black woman is the perfect way to say ‘until next year.’
Learn moreTender Table is a series of stories about food, family, and identity told by femmes of color and nonbinary people of color. For each event, storytellers prepare a dish connected to the experiences they’ve shared. Audiences are invited to listen generously, spend time communally, and sample the food.
Learn moreTBA artists Andrew Schneider, Raquel André, and Alicia ayo Ohs employ contrasting styles of theatre performance but are equally interested in unanswerable questions about the human condition and our relationships to self, others, and modern culture. In radically different ways, these artists have also worked with local artists and non-artists to develop and perform their TBA pieces. This conversation will explore the artists’ distinct projects and processes as well as the overlaps in their practices. With Kate Bredeson and Peter Ksander, Reed College Theatre Faculty.
Learn moreTBA food vendors Big Elephant Kitchen, Mis Tacones, and Mija/Mija in discussion about the intersecting economies and politics of contemporary art, immigration, identity, and local food culture. Moderated by Jodie Cavalier, PICA Public Engagement Coordinator. Part of our refreshed TBA Food Program curated by Spencer Byrne-Seres. Lunch from local vendors will be for sale—come hungry!
Learn moreThis performance takes the form of a slow walk through a section of the city. All are welcome to participate. Please contact the TBA Box Office for any questions about or requests for mobility or accessibility accommodation. Audience will be asked to remove their shoes during parts of this performance. Please that this performance is not able to be ASL interpreted or have other accommodations for Deaf and Hard of Hearing audiences.
Learn moreThis workshop brings together different modes of making into our practices. Whether you're a movement-based artist, a playwright, a poet or a painter, we will look into our writing/journal/note taking practices and stretch them beyond the studio, canvas, page, and stage. We will process our creative forms via movement improvisation, conversation and embodied listening activities.
Learn moreJUDY is a queer, femme, and non-binary-centered party that materializes every last Saturday night of the month at a dive bar in Portland, Oregon. Run by queer women and exclusively featuring female identified, trans, and non-binary DJs, JUDY was started in 2014. Each month, JUDY features hand-drawn flyers of community members, party people, and over-the-top queens, with the ritual of crowning a new “Judy” at every party.
Learn moreBlurring the lines between fiction and reality, Awaiting Oblivion... follows the story of AO, an anonymous street artist who has tasked artists Tim Smith Stewart and Jeffrey Azevedo to create a performance that will share AO’s “temporary solutions” for existing within our collapsing empire. Inspired by creative processes developed by the '60’s Fluxus art movement, each “temporary solution” is a poem contained in a Flux-kit (a cigar box collaged with stenciled imagery and typewritten letters). We follow Tim, Jeffrey, and AO in a radical flurry of street art, secret messages, and performance scores in a poetic fight for survival.
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