Past
Canadian-based musician and sound artist, explores the intersection of noise, dissonance, and melody, fostering an approach to songcraft that is both physical and emotive. Marking Hecker’s Portland debut, this rare concert will be an immersive sensory experience that includes both recent and debut material.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local 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 discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreSamita Sinha and Tanya Tagaq join Reuben Roqueñi, Program Officer of Performing Arts at the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, to discuss aspects of voice, body, gender, colonial politics, and experimentation with traditional forms in their respective sound and vocal performances.
Learn moreSouth African dancer and choreographer Mamela Nyamza uses dance to access the deepest layers of the body, such as emotions, fears, and expectations. During this masterclass, she draws inspiration from the participants, working from the inside to the outside, guided by her and the participants' inner feelings. Part of the masterclass will be working with empty Cola cans, so every participant is asked to bring two cans. 2 hours, Intermediate/Advanced, Performance/Movement
Learn moreCRITICAL MASCARA "A Post-Realness Drag Ball" returns to the TBA stage with a much anticipated sequel evening of fabulousness and extravaganza. CRITICAL MASCARA features some of the Pacific Northwest's most courageous and raw talent all competing to win 666$ in a queer driven dance-off drag spectacular! The evening is hosted by, the one and only, Pepper Pepper with celebrity judges, features special guest performers, and wraps up with a raucous late-night dance party for all! Come dressed as your fiercest self!
Learn moreIn this concert for film, Inuit throat singer and famed tour de force vocalist, Tanya Tagaq reclaims the controversial 1922 silent film Nanook of the North. Tagaq’s innovative vocals and deep sense of Arctic life work to create a powerful soundscape of authentic emotion and pulsing breath against the backdrop of the film’s racially charged clichés. In Nanook, Tagaq’s haunting singing is joined by violinist Jesse Zubot, genius drummer Jean Martin, and Juno Award-winning composer Derek Charke’s original film score to frame the vintage semi-documentary of an Inuk family in a revealing contemporary light.
Learn moreOne of PICA's most popular year-round programs gets TBA treatment with five festival Field Guides facilitated by visiting and local 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 discussion; group viewing of a performance; and post-show conversation over food and drink. Online artist interviews and other media supplement learning and engagement. Anyone curious about contemporary art is welcome.
Learn moreVisiting choreographers Meryem Jazouli (Morocco) and Mamela Nyamza (South Africa) will discuss their respective creative practices, current projects, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and cultural outreach and engagement with their communities. Moderated by PICA's Artistic Director, Angela Mattox, with time for audience Q&A.
Learn moreFilipina choreographer Eisa Jocson joins Clare Croft, Assistant Professor of Dance Studies at the University of Michigan, to share insight into her artistic process and technique and the intersection of gender, labour, seduction politics, and social mobility in her TBA performances, Death of the Pole Dancer and Macho Dancer.
Learn moreDennis Scholl, Knight Foundation Vice President / Arts and well known art collector, talks about what today's audiences want from the arts. Dennis will give examples from Knight’s own engaging initiatives, including Random Acts of Culture, the Knight Arts Challenge and Community Supported Art (CSA). He will also discuss the challenge cultural institutions face in keeping pace with their audiences in the face of the digital revolution and changing demography.
Learn morePortland electronic music collective and record label Dropping Gems curates a night at The Works featuring London’s Little People, and crewmembers DJAO from Seattle and hometown stalwarts Philip Grass. The artists featured here are known for adding non-traditional live elements to their performances to create an immersive sonic journey. Expect a melting pot of intricate and lush synthesized soundscapes, taking traditional hip-hop melodies, and flipping them upside down.
Learn moreFrom pole dancing to macho dancing, choreographer Eisa Jocson investigates labour and representations of the dancing body in the service industry and exposes gender formation, seduction politics, and Filipino social mobility.
Learn morePICA's education and public engagement series, Field Guide helps audiences discover and feel more informed about contemporary performance. Through facilitated workshops with visiting and local faculty, focused explorations of artist's work, and connection with other festival-goers, Field Guide sessions include various combinations of pre-show workshops, social outings to performances, post-show conversations, and online interviews and media to more deeply contextualize the art and artists of our time.
Learn moreUnique' has generally come to mean 'slightly out of the ordinary,' but Samita Sinha's voice warrants the true meaning of the hackneyed accolade... mesmerizing. This is fusion… in the best sense: she effortlessly, seamlessly weaves [sounds] yet keeps their distinct flavors intact. —Time Out
Learn moreLos Angeles-based visual artist Jennifer West discusses her newest TBA:14 project, Flashlight Filmstrip Projections, and experimentation with the synesthetic, performative, and material qualities of film with Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator at PICA
Learn moreHere was a deeply intellectual experience of consciousness conveyed through physicality. Across the synapses between sensation and thought, the animal and the human, the ecological and illogical, the participants in Super Nature roared, howled, tingled, and leapt, flinging themselves over to feel out the distance and, for a moment, close the gap between the animal spirits and what it means to act naturally. — jkramer.net
Learn moreTHEESatisfaction are artists that blend elements of hip-hop, electronic, and dance. They’re positive energy. Black energy, black women leaping oceans and continents at a single bound. With positive strength of purpose. Even crowds with nary a right foot between them find the steps when faced with THEESat’s unorthodox but right-on-time rhythms. Synchronized, sinewy and sensuous, the regal Stas and Cat channel the higher, whipping like waves of space-borne radiation onstage, leaving a trail of glowing observers abuzz like Geiger counters. THEESatisfaction, the Queens Supreme. Bring yourself!
Learn moreGet a first look at our home for TBA:14 as we officially kick off the first night of the Festival with Opening Night Dinner. This year's dinner will be a nomadic block party, a "seed to plate" local meal crafted by Stacey Givens (The Side Yard Farm and The Nomadic Chef) with table vessels designed by Daniel Duford. Givens is a combination urban farmer and chef, working closely with other farmers, ranchers, and artists as collaborators and sourcing every element of the meal as locally as possible.
Learn moreOur inner host(ess) with the most(ess) has broken loose, blitzed on wine coolers, with a stack of O.G. Better Homes & Gardens to inspire the party–planning. For TBA, Team Delicious and our cocktail soul mates, Merit Badge, will bring back a bygone era when “entertaining” meant more than a kale salad.
Learn moreThe rhythm of a wave, a kaironic triangle, intuits another possible time.What goes unseen in time and how do we measure our own? Waves of history, what floats?
Learn moreMSHR presents a cybernetic system made up of hand-built analog synthesizers and digitally fabricated hieroglyphic sculptures. Light, sound, and shape are pulled through nested feedback eddies as the system unfolds. Visitors become part of the feedback cycle, steering its course through their intentional engagement and ambient presence.
Learn moreAs round as an apple, as deep as a cup is a group of projects, perhaps an exhibition, maybe a poem. The presentations are not odes to something… the artists may or may not be poets, but all of it is OF poetry. For sure the installations, performances, and publications produced will rely on poetics… the study of how different parts come together, contributing to the never-ending search for “subject.” I hope that the endeavor feels like this. Like a thing broken apart and then put together again in the mouth—made real by reading it out loud. The projects are meant to behave like the carefully chosen discordant words in a certain kind of poem. The kind of poem that is a problem to ponder.” —Kristan Kennedy
Learn more2014 Time-Based Art Festival
Learn moreCULTURE-HEALING. In this commissioned project, celebrated queer feminist artist Wynne Greenwood transforms the Cooley Gallery into a studio and performance space in order to re-engage her groundbreaking art band—Tracy + the Plastics—in relationship to her most recent experimental video, installation, and object-based works.
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