Past
Learn from last year's Critical Mascara Vogue winner and local vogue instructor Daniel Girón (aka Carbon Electra) as he breaks down the five (5) fundamentals of Vogue Femme: Hand Performance, Cat Walk, Duck Walk, Floor Work, and Spin Dip. This class is open to all levels of vogue enthusiasts who wish to take their fundamentals to the next level by adding the element of performance.
Learn moreImmediately following P-Orridge’s performance the dance floor will open up for an evening of celebration and music curated by Y.G.B.Portland. Bomba con Buya, a Chicago-based ensemble that aims to preserve and advance Bomba, Puerto Rico's oldest surviving dance form, will invigorate the audience with Buya (translated to mean good spirit in Taino, the language spoken among the island's indigenous population). Atlanta-based artist and DJ, Father Fannie, closes the evening with their set.
Learn moreIndustrial music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge inaugurates our 15th TBA festival in our new East Side home. P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, and performance and visual artist who has been regarded as a provocateur and an icon of the British avant-garde since the early 1970s. S/he’ll be opening the festival with a sonic and visual performance ritual that should not be missed.
Learn moreGet the first look at TBA:17 as we kick off the festival with our annual Opening Night Dinner. Enjoy a sneak peak of the festival by dining with local, national, and international artists and curators. This year's dinner by Field Day Feasts and Gatherings will have an elevated block party feel outside of our new home at 15 NE Hancock. This year's dinner will feature everything from this season's Pacific Northwest bounty. Join us to raise our glasses together to toast TBA:17 and new beginnings at PICA.
Learn moreJoin PICA for Hot House, a party with purpose. Our botanical garden awaits with magic, costumes, special guests, hosted cocktail bar, and many more surprises. For one night only, step into our eclectic greenhouse to dream big with us as we set down our roots in Northeast Portland. Help us continue to make the world safe for contemporary art!
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 moreDirect Path to Detour is a new dance work by Portland-based choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto. Grounded in the idea that a sense of who we are is rooted in our embodied experiences, this dance evokes mental and physical states at the intersection of value systems, social pressures, expectations, and personal experiences of four dancers, all of whom have an intimate relationship with bridging multiple societies by birth, residence, upbringing and/or religion. Direct Path to Detour envelops the performers in a poetic, visceral experience of resistance, surrender, sincerity, and fiction.
Learn moreSpend an evening with PICA’s Spring 2017 Creative Exchange Lab artists!
Learn morePICA is pleased to announce the seven artists who will be in residence from March 19 – April 6 through the Creative Exchange Lab. 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 moreImmerse yourself in an evening of art and celebration… in masks. Socialize amongst eight foot mirrored trees while basking in the glow of “The Sphere.” Cultural courtesans Helvetica Font, Flawless and special guest Pepper Pepper will Drag you through the evening’s layered narrative. Designers from Nike, Axiom, Set, & IDL have created large scale installations to transport you through an evening of fantasy. A special ritual performance by Holcombe Waller & Akela Jaffi will be followed by a live tribute to David Bowie. Portrait Experience by award-winning photographer Gia Goodrich. Beacon Sound & Perfect Health provide the soundtrack for the evening.
Learn moreJoin us at PICA’s downtown location, 415 SW 10th Ave., on December 13 beginning at 6:00 PM for our annual Precipice Fund award ceremony, where we toast to some of Portland’s most exciting new projects and ideas. Then, stick around for our annual winter social—there’ll be dancing to DJ sets from Shannon Funchess and DJ Klyph, cocktails, music, a "selfie serve" photo backdrop by Julia Calabrese, some delicious treats to warm your spirits, and (of course) you.
Learn moreSome of our favorite artists are creating exclusive limited edition garments to sell at our favorite West End shops during the weekend of December 2nd! Buy something for yourself, a holiday gift, enjoy seasonal refreshments, and know that your purchase goes to support PICA's mission.
Learn morePICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Ntsikelelo "Boyzie" Cekwana (Johannesburg) and keyon gaskin (Portland) exchange thoughts on making critically engaged dance, choreography, and performance that attends to questions of race and the persistence of colonialism and apartheid in artistic and cultural contexts. In conversation with Vivian Phillips of Seattle Theatre Group.
Learn moreTaught by performers from Alessandro Sciarroni's UNTITLED_I will be there when you die workshop is for anyone who wishes to learn and practice fundamental juggling techniques and apply them to individual and group composition and sequence.
Learn moreIndie electronic musician and vocalist Shannon Funchess has had her feet firmly planted in the fertile underground scene for two and a half decades. Also a DJ and sometime dancer for the likes of The Knife, Funchess is a multidisciplinary performance artist with a gravitation toward the synthesis of dark, angular sound, and visual bisection.
Learn moreRinde Eckert has been writing, composing, performing, and directing evocative and haunting performance pieces and plays that have pushed at the edges of recognized theatrical form since the early 1980s. My Fools: A Life in Song combines song, dramatic monologues, lecture, and video from his archive. Beginning with a montage of visually striking moments from his shows across the decades, My Fools is a series of variations on a smart, slightly cock-eyed Everyman who begins his journey with a pure sense of mission and descends into the maelstrom.
Learn moreJunaid Sarieddeen is co-founder of Beirut’s Zoukak Theatre Company, founded in 2006 to develop an engaged professional theatre practice with a commitment to creativity as a form of resistance. Junaid will position Zoukak as a case study to illuminate the broader landscape of art and politics in Lebanon, sharing the origins of the company as a platform for contemporary performance and vehicle for social change, in a country lacking adequate public and cultural policy and haunted by cycles of ceaseless crisis.
Learn moreTBA Guest Scholar Maya Mikdashi (Dept of Women's & Gender Studies, Rutgers University) traces the history of the modern Lebanese state through an engagement with the archives of the country's high court. Ethnography of daily life at the courthouse is coupled with archival research in order to think more critically about mainstream Lebanese history and technologies of research, census taking, and the politics of identity.
Learn morePICA Creative Exchange Lab artists Dorothée Munyaneza (Rwanda/France) and Moya Michael (South Africa/Belgium), discuss their performance practices, political and personal influences, and transnational perspectives on working artistically between Europe and their native countries. In dialogue with Lili Chopra, Artistic Director, French Institute Alliance Française.
Learn moreChoreographer Alessandro Sciarroni returns to TBA with Untitled, featuring the nuanced repetition, gesture, and durational movement of professional jugglers against a live ambient soundscape. Esteemed Portland choreographer and TBA Guest Scholar Linda K. Johnson invites Sciarroni to unpack the conceptual and aesthetic influences on this meditative experimental work.
Learn moreEXPERIMENTAL WRITING: In this writing workshop we will in the dark automatic what is already cut the extra for our purposes the language image through a series of prompts, some poetic, some physical, some remembering, some riding. Instead of writing say knife, instead of writing say table bottom, instead of writing say record and transcribe. Gently together now. Open to anyone! If you think this workshop is probably not for you because you are not a writer then it is probably for you.
Learn moreDeep Under Ground (DUG) and Young Gifted & Brown (YGB) have been curating safe spaces for brown folks to congregate, express themselves, share stories, love one another, and move their bodies since early & mid-2015.
Learn moreItalian artist Alessandro Sciarroni returns to Portland with a performative reflection on the passing of time. Continuing his trilogy that began with Folk-s, will you still love me tomorrow (TBA:15), Sciarroni now focuses on another traditional artform comprised of repeated actions: juggling. By remixing the pacing and sequence of gravity-defying moves (under the leg, under the arm, above the head, etc.), there is an almost endless combination of patterns to explore. Each repetition abstracts the performers’ movements, opening the possibilities of seeing the larger picture: flight, failure, kinetic potential.
Learn moreWhere lies the boundary between the body and the machine? In an empty space, illuminated only with cold light, Geumhyung Jeong explores the potential of the human: the sensuality, power, and mutability of the body. In seven peculiar “duets” with mundane objects (ranging from household appliances to mannequins), Jeong bestows a bizarre and disconcerting life to the inanimate through an intense and risky interaction with her own body, Combining dance, puppetry, and a technical mastery of theatrical conventions, the result is a moving choreography of the body and mind, crossing the dividing line between the human and inhuman, hallucination and reality.
Learn more