PICA’s annual Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) draws artists from across the country and around the globe for a convergence of contemporary performance and visual art. Installations and live performances fill out theaters, temporary galleries, and unexpected public spaces throughout Portland, activating the city with art and energy. From morning workshops to afternoon salons and talks, to evening shows and late-night happenings, TBA is an all-hours forum for new ideas and experiences. More information and tickets on the PICA Website.
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ALESSANDRO SCIARRONI
FOLK-S, Will you still love me tomorrow? (US Premiere)
Photo: Andrea Macchia
Lincoln Performance Hall
1620 SW Park
Portland, OR 97201Fri, Sept 11, 8:30 PM
Sat, Sept 12, 8:30 PM
Lauded Italian choreographer and theatre director Alessandro Sciarroni is known for his stagings that marvel and works that straddle dance, performance art, and ritual anthropology. In FOLK-S, the Schuhplatter, a Bavarian folk dance, meaning “shoe batter”, is refined to its most essential form invoking a sense of playful experimentation and ritualized trance. Starting from an unceasing repeated sequence, the performance space becomes redefined, shifts, and the company transforms itself like ever-changing organic matter.FOLK-S invites us to take part in an extreme, perception-based experience centering on the multiple variations that a form can take to the point of its exhaustion. Through repetition, the folk material finds its clearest revelation by being geographically and culturally decontextualized. The folk and the popular wrestle until they fuse with the contemporary context.
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OKWUI OKPOKWASILI
Bronx Gothic
Photo: Ian Douglas
1914 SW Park Ave.
Portland, OR 97207
Sat, Sept 12, 8:30 PM
Sun, Sept 13, 8:30 PM
A solo creation at the intersection of theater, dance and visual art installation, Bronx Gothicgives palpable force to the charged relationship between two girls on the verge of adolescence in the 1980s—where Newports are bought in singles at corner bodegas, and sex saturated notes are passed in class. In a performance of psychic and physical collisions that threaten to break the body, it’s an unflinching look into the exquisite turbulence of one woman’s memory. Created in collaboration with designer / director Peter Born, Bronx Gothic draws inspiration from Victorian-era novels and West African griot storytelling to reveal an honest, dark and powerful tale of sexual awakening.
This performance is part of the TBA Festival Flight: Identity & the Body, which reflects a range of artists from diverse disciplines who work across dance/choreography and interdisciplinary performance to engage the embodied politics and poetics of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and their intersections.
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DYNASTY HANDBAG
Good Morning Evening Feelings
Photo: Paula Court
Disjecta
8371 N Interstate Ave
Portland OR 97217
Thu, Sept 17, 6:30 PM
Good 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. This inspirational hour is designed to help you navigate through the four basic terrible human feelings fear, anger, guilt, and shame that pop up throughout your day and try to kill you. Good Morning features an unpleasant, ineffective exercise routine with irate broadway star Mallory Stropplecalfs, a fear squelching cooking segment with famous lesbian chef Kristie Smoofs, a celebrity interview with Womanhood, and experimental commercial breaks. All this and much more, delivered by the hand of Handbag in a dirty lace gloved.
Co-presented by Portland Museum of Modern Art
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PHILIPPE QUESNE
La Mélancolie des dragons
Photo: Martin Argyroglo
Lincoln Performance Hall
1620 SW Park
Portland, OR 97201Thu, Sept 17, 8:30 PM
Fri, Sept 18, 8:30 PM
Seminal 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.
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DANA MICHEL
Yellow Towel
photo:Maxyme G. Delisle
Bodyvox Dance Center
1201 NW 17th Avenue Portland, OR 97209
Fri, Sept 18, 8:30 PM
Sat, Sept 19, 8:30 PM
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.
This performance is part of the TBA Festival Flight: Identity & the Body, which reflects a range of artists from diverse disciplines who work across dance/choreography and interdisciplinary performance to engage the embodied politics and poetics of race, ethnicity, gender, culture, and their intersections.
(source: PICA Website)
artaia-creativesinresidence on II INTERNATIONAL RESIDENTIAL WORKSHOP DIRECTED BY JOHN STRASBERG
bigart on Network Feedback request – entry from Julie Tolentino
Anonymous on Network Feedback request – entry from Julie Tolentino