Past
Yellow Towel take its name from Dana Michel’s childhood habit of wearing a yellow towel to emulate blonde girls. Influenced by the aesthetics of fashion, queer culture, and comedy, Michel creates a richly textured and gut wrenching account of black culture stereotypes. Yellow Towel is a conceptual performance work that explores an abstracted marginal character in a performative ritual. This political, honest, and fearless work warrants attention as Michel questions socially ingrained constructions of normativity.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting 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 lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session, join Choreographer and Performance Artist Keith Hennessy in exploring the practice of Radhouane El Meddeb and his work Au temps où les arabes dansaient... Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn morePhilippe Quesne shares the unique artistic vision of innovative theatre lab Vivarium Studios and their TBA project, La Mélancolie des Dragons . With Kate Bredeson, Assoc. Professor of Theatre, Reed College.
Learn moreIn this workshop, we will create short, original solo performance works with built-in coping mechanisms for the inevitable accident of live performance. We will employ/practice inexperience, loopholes, Fibonacci, plagiarism, idiosyncrasies, performance scores, and anything else we want. Please bring one problematic object from your world. Theatre / Movement / Performance; All Levels.
Learn moreWelcome to the Neighborhood Live! expands the reach of the weekly radio broadcast bringing the very best from the northwest to the stage! DJ Klyph curates a night of Hip Hop featuring some of Portland’s finest.
Learn moreOpposing Forces utilizes tropes of contemporary performance to expose fears around the feminine in our culture through the hyper masculine dance style of Breaking. With curiosity, vulnerability, and power, five world-class B-Boys uncover binary perceptions of gender using a range of dance contexts: battling, commercial dance, and cyphering. Featuring Fever One of Rocksteady Crew, Brysen "Just Be" Angeles of Massive Monkees, Alfredo "Free" Vergara of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Mozes Lateef Sa'Leem of Circle of Fire/Soul Shifters, Michael O'Neal Jr of Beat Hippies/CHPT 1, an original score played live by WD4D, stage design by Ben Zamora, and lighting design by Amiya Brown.
Learn moreSeminal French director and TBA alum Philippe Quesne returns with the large-scale theater work La Mélancolie des dragons. Filled with Quesne’s disarming wit and hints of magical realism La Mélancolie is set amid a snowy landscape of classic rock and medieval recorders where a band of metalheads is on a quest to build an amusement park devoted to hard-rock. To create his works, Quesne employs a domino effect—the last scene of a work falls into the first scene of the next. La Melancolie was born at the end of his celebrated work L’Effet de Serge (TBA:08). With an ingenious hand for reinventing the conventions of theater, Quesne smartly constructs La Melancolie into a work that celebrates the absurd and finds the profound joy of friendship.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting 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 lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session, join Seattle-based dance, theatre, and performance critic Omar Willey in exploring artist Amy O'Neal's Opposing Forces. Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn moreGood Morning Evening Feelings with Dynasty Handbag (DH) is a live, conceptual, one-hour hybrid morning / late-night / children’s show for adults, hosted by everyone’s favorite no one, Dynasty Handbag.
Learn moreSeattle-based dance and theatre critic Omar Willey joins Amy O’Neal and collaborators to discuss Opposing Forces through the lenses of gender, race, hip hop, and aesthetic experiments with Breaking.
Learn moreBEACON SOUND brings to TBA:15 an experimental night of music featuring performances by Benoit Pioulard, Bardo:Basho, and Apartment Fox. Together these artists, occupy a different yet complimentary place near the nexus of experimental, electronic, and ambient music. The night will be tied up by DJs Liz Harris and Beacon Sound.
Learn moreIn this provocative performative lecture, renowned artist, curator, and educator Marc Bamuthi Joseph uses poem and image to catalog his arc from working on issues of environment in West Oakland to premiering a 6-week installation for Creative Time in New York City's Central Park. The 7-year journey in between describes an individual and collective prototype for uncovering narratives of black joy in these American hours of chaos. Along the way, Bamuthi will touch on the ethics of hip-hop generation organizing; as the true frontline organizers of the current Black Lives Matter movement are women, gender neutral, or queer, we are faced with the question of how the politics of the dance floor become inert when exposed to the politics of social liberation.
Learn moreFranco-Tunisian choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb illuminates cultural, historical, and aesthetic influences including complex explorations of gender, ethnicity, and the body. With Angela Mattox, Artistic Director, PICA.
Learn moreWe will focus on the performer’s presence in space when light (natural or artificial) designs or denies vision. A series of reflections will be initiated around the body and its relationship to memory. We will discuss the problem of translating the performer’s inner experience during research and development into something readable to the outside.
Learn moreDisoriented Comedy is the first-ever nationally-touring stand-up comedy showcase featuring the fresh voices of a (mostly) female, Asian American lineup. Since 2012, Disoriented Comedy has presented over 40 standup comedy and storytelling shows at independent theaters and clubs throughout the country. Beyond Asian American female-identified comics, Disoriented Comedy features up-and-coming talent of diverse races, sexuality, and gender rarely seen on mainstream comedy stages.
Learn moreFrench-Tunisian Choreographer Radhouane El Meddeb carefully observed his mother and his aunts preparing couscous and the national dishes served at his family’s gatherings from marriages to circumcisions to mourning rituals… In Je danse et vous en donne à bouffer, El Meddeb expresses his love of preparation, and the sensuality of food in a form of sacredness and performative sharing. In this performance, El Meddeb is immersed in his loves of dancing and cooking. Seated before his couscous maker, he performs and prepares couscous with generosity and poetry.
Learn morePreparation for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome attempts to prepare for the end of men. Simultaneously committed to conservation and archival efforts, Preparation for the Obsolescence works in the tradition of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and the performative lecture / demonstration format. Utilizing absurdist humor, web technology, a male gaze simulator, choreography, token cultural gestures, and MIT data points, this work both combats and stirs rumors about the implications of the Y chromosome's reputed demise.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artist and choreographer Alessandro Sciarroni sheds light on FOLK-S, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?, including its process, cultural context and tradition, and unique commitments to durational artist/audience experience. With choreographer Linda K. Johnson.
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artist Dawn Kasper (Whitney Biennial 2012) leads an interactive performance workshop exploring our physical and psychic engagement with space, time, movement, sound, objects, and states of mind. Artists of all disciplines are encouraged to participate. Performance; All Levels.
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 moreAkio Suzuki & Aki Onda "ke i te ki" American Tour is organized by ISSUE Project Room. The project is supported by the Asian Cultural Council.
Learn morePortland-based Lu Yim brings to TBA:15 a solo work of mourning and melancholia. From here they depart, measuring the distance within body, thought, language, and feeling; as portal / continent / object / subject / memory / tool. Actions of voice, sound and movement turn the internalized outward. This is not my body performing but where my body has gone suspended in a place where a question repeats.
Learn morePICA’s signature public engagement program continues to cross disciplines and explore new thematic territory with five Festival Field Guides facilitated by leading local and visiting 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 lively discussion; group viewing of a TBA performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. For this session join Tonya Lockyer, Artistic Director at Velocity Dance Center, in exploring artist Lucy Yim's practice and her performance of Devastation Melody. Online artist interviews and media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art welcome. Bring a friend!
Learn moreInterdisciplinary artists Dawn Kasper (NY), Jibade-Khalil Huffman (LA), and Lucy Yim (Portland) discuss formal and conceptual influences across their complex practices in performance, dance, writing, visual art, and poetry. With Erin Boberg Doughton, Performing Arts Program Director, PICA.
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