Upcoming
This is a work in progress of an interdisciplinary performance project that examines Sarai’s experiences of love as they are formed through risk, trust, memory, and cultural inheritance. Drawing from lived encounters and personal histories, this piece considers how intimacy can manifest in unconventional, high-stakes, and spiritually resonant forms. Situated at the intersection of dance, live action, and visual documentation, the project reflects on love as a series of embodied negotiations shaped by vulnerability, autonomy, and relational exchange.
Learn moreJoin us for a screening and conversation with Bebe Miller and Zoe Scofield. See work from their archives, hear about their processes, how their work was made, and what they think about it now. This is an opportunity to experience their pieces not otherwise available!
Learn moreIn this workshop, we can explore how we treat drawing, sculpture, sound, video projection, sets, costumes, and beyond as an equal material to dance/bodies moving in space.
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Past
Join us on Thursday, June 18 at 7 PM for the Oregon Premiere of Gasp!, a theatrical performance by Colin Self about queer ancestry, spiritual guidance, and the spirit of play.
Learn moreAllie Hankins’ By My Own Hand is a 5-Part series of performances that began in 2022, culminating with Part 5, which will be presented during PICA’s Time-Based Art Festival in September 2026. PICA will be hosting a series of free screenings of Parts 1–4 leading up to the live premiere. Please join us for the first screening on Monday, March 2, 2026, at 7:30 PM in PICA’s Annex. Allie Hankins and her collaborators will be in attendance.
Learn moreGet ready to get down at the TBA:25 closing party, Dirty Thirty. This high-energy blowout marks the last official night of the Festival, bringing together artists, audiences, and the entire TBA community for one unforgettable throwdown.
Learn moreHorizon is the perceived line where sky meets Earth—a locator in constant motion. Horizon is a dance.
Learn moreGood Dang Weekend is a fundraiser, dance party, and bingo event hosted by Kye Alive of Club Alive to benefit Elbow Room, a nonprofit community art studio and gallery space dedicated to supporting artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Learn moreOsten Cetto : Four Snakes is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, film, and tattoo’s relationship to body and shape, the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space. The performance is accompanied by a program of short films from Indigenous filmmakers.
Learn moreMycelium Dreams is an ongoing, durational dance cartography and interview project initiated in 2022 by Portland dance and interdisciplinary artist Linda K. Johnson. Archival in nature, the PASTfuture interview component of the project is intent on creating an inclusive, nonhierarchical oral record of the stories of artists in the Portland community who have committed their life’s work to the field of dance.
Learn moreGoner is a live, suspenseful choreography delving into the depths of psychological horror. Exploring alienation, migration, violence, and more, it crafts radical visual culture from a marginalized perspective and engages a new Black tradition of horror in live performance.
Learn morePart beer garden, party happy hour, and part afterparty, BEFORE & AFTER is an opportunity to come together with the TBA:24 community at PICA. These dedicated gatherings bookend the festival experience with a blend of celebration, conversation, and decompression, offering space to grab a drink or a bite before the first performance of the day, or cap off the evening after daily events have wrapped up. With a variety of food and drink options to explore, BEFORE & AFTER is more than a pit stop—it's a time to deepen your connections and extend the magic of TBA.
Learn moreTrue to the title, we’ll slowly share more information about each Time-Released program over the coming months. Read on to learn more.
Learn moreWill Rawls presents a new interdisciplinary work, [siccer], that addresses the relationship between blackness and image-making through a live performance accompanied by a video installation. Encompassing dance, photography, and sound, [siccer] experiments with stop-motion, a filmmaking technique in which subjects incrementally shift positions between photographs to produce the illusion of movement.
Learn moreNOTHINGBEING is a live performance project that investigates ways to embody the presence of nothingness and “being,” breathing spaces that we could easily dismiss and considering possibilities for the unfiltered self. Developed with the collaborators Samita Sinha, David Thomson, and Anna Martine Whitehead, this project addresses the notion of presence from multiple performative modalities such as moments of highly physical movement, a communal meditation, and internal activation of sensory memories.
Learn moreLet 'im Move You is a series of works choreographed by jumatatu m. poe and Jermone Donte Beacham that stem from their decade-long research into J-Sette performance. Intervention brings together a group of Black dancers for a live outdoor performance work on sidewalks and in alleyways in historically or predominantly Black neighborhoods.
Learn moreRe-Sette the Stage brings together members of the Let ‘im Move You project with members from the Meet Me On Da Floor community in an exploration of the vastness of the Black queer majorette dance community.
Learn moreRe-Sette the Stage brings together members of the Let ‘im Move You project with members from the Meet Me On Da Floor community in an exploration of the vastness of the Black queer majorette dance community.
Learn moreIt is with joy and gratitude that we announce the launch of a new season of programming for Knowledge of Wounds 2021-22, and with it, the kindling of our evolving digital container, www.knowledge of wounds.com. In observance of the 2021 Solstice, we extend an invitation to join us by this virtual fireside for the unveiling of the full KoW 2021-22 program, a series of Indigenous-led events which will continue to unfold in this space over the course of an entire celestial year.
Learn morePDXBall presents The Back to School Kiki Ball, a thrilling competition that shows a glimpse of Portland's dynamic Kiki ballroom community. The Kiki ballroom scene is a subculture of the mainstream ballroom world and was created to practice walking or competing in the many ‘categories’ of the international ballroom arena. The theme "Back to School" will influence the decor, competitive categories, and attire of the participants. Spectators and first-time ball attendees are welcome to join in the fun by dressing to the theme. If it is your first time at a ball, you are highly encouraged to attend and cheer on the competitors who have trained for each category. Join us in celebrating a powerful and inspiring community that uplifts and centers queer and trans black, indigenous land, people of color.
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 ‘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 moreJ-Sette, also known as Bucking, is a performance style popular in the southern United States, practiced widely among majorettes and drill teams at historically Black colleges and universities, and also among teams of primarily queer men who compete in gay clubs and pride festivals. The workshop focuses on bombastic performance energy, complex relationships to rhythm and music, movement precision, group dynamics, and discovering joy in flesh and community. We will explore how the performance of J-Sette creates expectations around attention and accountability to a community, and how it positions leadership. All bodies are encouraged to participate, regardless of previous training or ability.
Learn moreWORLD PREMIERE: Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in one’s embodied experiences, Direct Path to Detour seeks to evoke various mental and physical states that arise at the intersection of multiple value systems, social pressure, expectation, personal experiences, and body memory. Some of those things are sometimes explicitly clear, but some are often unarticulated and uncertain. In this poetic investigation, a solo performer attempts to observe and hold all on the equal plane, believing that they can and should exist simultaneously without logic and rationale.
Learn moreAs part of our free and ongoing program, join PICA and Guest Facilitator Candace Kita for a small-group experience exploring the social, political, cultural, and aesthetic influences in Field GuideTakahiro Yamamoto’s Direct Path to Detour, in which the artist, as a queer Japanese immigrant to the US, examines the physical and emotional effects of clashing cultural values in a globalized society. Through pre- and post-show conversation and participation, we’ll discover key themes and ideas in the work while sharing our own thoughts and perspectives on the performance. All are welcome—no prior contemporary dance or performance experience required! Light refreshments will be served.
Learn moreTBA favorite Ten Tiny Dances (TTD) returns to the Festival this year! An experiment in confined space, TTD is dedicated to fostering inventive dance / performance art and providing an exhilarating performance experience for a diverse audience, all on a 4×4-foot stage. Since 2002, the small stage of TTD has been the crucible for an ever expanding catalogue of creation and performance: Over 300 artists, 24 engaging venues, and 9 cities across the country.
Learn moreThe annual favorite is back, featuring a lineup of artists that are entirely new to the small stage. Get a front-row seat and see how a host of national and international performers experiment with what’s possible within just 4 x 4 feet. New forms, new ideas, and a new generation of tiny projects—there’s really no telling what will happen when things get this small.
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