Ant Hampton & Tim Etchells, The Quiet Volume. Photo: Lorena Fernandez.

Undoubtedly, part of what makes contemporary performance so compelling is the number of artists working outside of the confines of the theater. Whether performing in alternative spaces, like street corners and office buildings, or interacting directly with the audience both as volunteers and unwitting participants, these artists can realize projects unlike anything from a traditional company. Think about past TBA projects like Back to Back Theatre or Offsite Dance Project or Tim Crouch to name just a few artists from recent years. Each of these artists made us think differently about the spaces of art and the daily world we live in. If you’re one of those audience members who leaps at the chance to step on stage or catch a performance under a bridge, then you’re in good company for TBA. Read on for a few of this year’s projects that take art beyond the proscenium arch and—sometimes—out into the audience.

Local musician Claudia Meza approaches her project as a tool to turn audience attentions back onto the world around them. Riffing on John Cage’s theories of sound and the city, Meza has coordinated a walking tour of Portland’s sonic space, hand-picked by local musicians and composers. Follow a map around town to tune into the sounds we usually ignore, or pick up your smartphone when you stumble upon a QR code, placed at prime spots around the city. Wrapping up the project on the closing weekend of TBA, Meza will host a free outdoor concert in Industrial SE, featuring compositions inspired by the sounds of Portland.

Some of the hallmark projects of past TBA Festivals have been the ones that didn’t seem like performances at all! Through the Festival, PICA has hosted classic novel readings on city sidewalks, headphone performances in a public square, and urban tours of a Dutch city via Portland streets. This year, we’ve set our sights on the central library with a project by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells (a TBA:08 alum!). As a pioneer of what he calls “Autoteatro,” Hampton has staged a series of plays where the ticket-buyer is both audience and performer, thanks to a series of instructions delivered via headphone. In The Quiet Volume, two people at a time will enter the library, where they’ll be guided to a table with a stack of books. They’ll press play and begin to both perform and witness the simple, poetic story unfold.

Along the lines of last year’s Offsite Dance Project, Perforations will track a trio of projects through site-specific performances. Where Offsite focused on Japanese dance, Perforations highlights contemporary performance art from the Balkan states of Serbia and Croatia. Organized by Zvonimir Dobrovic, curator of Perforacije Festival in Zagreb and Queer New York International, the lineup features two performances by Petra Kovacic that draw attention to the audience/artist relationships on stage and in galleries, a satirical political campaign lead by Biljana Kosmogina, and an improvisational music installation/concert by East Rodeo. It will be a rare chance to catch the latest experiments from Eastern Europe and to see how these diverse artists respond to space and audience.

Portlander and Festival alum (’04 and ’07) Andrew Dickson has made a practice out of re-framing his day job as a performance project, somewhere in the vein of a professional development seminar. In the past, he has taught TBA audiences the secrets of eBay “power-selling” and offered an insider’s look at selling out and joining an advertising agency. Now, a few years down the road, Dickson is exploring a new path as a life coach and is training to counsel people in their decisions, big and small. For TBA, he’ll invite a select number of volunteers to put their coaching session on view, hosted like a seminar in a hotel conference room. It’s a performative event, but in Dickson’s hands, it won’t stray far from genuine and sincere counsel.

Provocative, award-winning choreographer Miguel Gutierrez typically performs on stage, but rarely seems limited by it. His powerful performances step into the audience (or pull them into the moment), to provoke strong emotions and explore, in his own words, “group identity and communal experience.” In HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE, Gutierrez invites the audience on stage and proceeds to deliver a disarmingly-simple monologue on his traveling, working life and the attendant insecurities and questions of being an artist. From this introduction, Gutierrez transfixes the audience as he launches into a bold solo dance.

Gob Squad is a wildly fun and inventive theater collective that splits time between Germany and the UK, creating projects that range from a late-night drama in a hotel room to a “blockbuster” film starring the city they’re in, filmed exactly one hour before the “performance” begins. For TBA, they’ve set themselves the odd task of re-creating Andy Warhol’s Factory films live on-stage. The audience enters the theater through the back-stage set and takes a seat on the other side of a movie theater for the action to unfold. Needless to say, everything that happens next is a bit of surprise, so we won’t give anything else away. Instead we’ll leave you with the company’s own words:

“We try and explore the point where theatre meets art, media and real life. As well as theatres and galleries, we place our work at the heart of urban life – in houses, shops, underground stations, car parks, hotels or directly on the street. Everyday life and magic, banality and utopia, reality and entertainment are all set on a collision course and the audience are often asked to step beyond their traditional role as passive spectators and bear witness to the results.”

This year, we’re looking at film as a tool, as a medium that moves beyond the movie screen to play a central role in contemporary performance and visual practice. The filmmakers we’ve selected for TBA don’t work with celluloid and digital files in the typical way, instead looking outside of the film world for collaborators and new ideas. Meanwhile, a whole host of our performing companies incorporate innovative, real-time video and other filmic devices. So, for audiences in love with the moving picture, let’s just say we’ve got you covered.

One of our biggest opening weekend (and opening night!) projects comes from New York’s Big Art Group, pioneers of what they’ve labeled “real-time film.” In The People–Portland, the company brings together footage recorded of Portland locals during their Spring residency with live video and performance, all projected in real time on the exterior of Washington High School. It’s a bold project exploring our ideas of democracy and community, with a unique, internet-age approach to digital media.

Gob Squad (an early PICA alum) take a similarly inventive approach to film, devising complex live-streamed performances that create pure theater magic, dazzling the audiences with the charm and wit beneath their technology. In Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it So Good), the company veils their live action behind a wall of screens, projecting their re-enactments of Warhol’s iconic 60s films in black-and-white. We won’t spoil the show, but suffice it to say, the company doesn’t completely hide behind the screens for long. The effect is wonderful.

In a very different exploration of historical documents, the Dutch artist duo Van Brummelen & De Haan re-create a controversial monument through 16mm film. Denied access to film the Pergamon frieze in Berlin (which had been “expropriated” from Turkey in the 1880s), the artists re-constructed the sculpture through hundreds of text-book photos. It’s film and photography as renegade archaeology.   In a time when film technologies are so rapidly changing, it is perhaps fitting that so many of the film-based projects take an interest in the past. Bay Area filmmaker Sam Green has looked back in time to one of the most future-minded figures ever: the visionary architect, inventor, and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller. Along with indie icons Yo La Tengo, Green will stage The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a “live documentary” with a band-driven soundtrack and in-person narration about Fuller’s relentless pursuit of a better tomorrow.

While these projects all concern ideas and visions and projections on a grand scale, many of our TBA film events are rather more intimate. On THE WORKS stage, two innovative animator/puppeteers bring their charming, miniature performances to life through video projection. David Commander will perform In Flight, his biting analysis of contemporary media saturation and apathy, while Laura Heit will create diminutive worlds atop matchbox stages. Also lined up for THE WORKS, is a night of FUTURE CINEMA, curated by our friends at The Hollywood Theatre. With live performances by a group of “Terrifying Women,” some B-Movie Bingo of cult film clichés, and a new collaboration between Liz Harris (Grouper) and director Weston Currie, the night will be a far cry from the usual movie theater fare.

And in the visual program, Isabelle Cornaro approaches film as one of the many multi-valent tools of her practice. Much of Cornaro’s output exists in a sort of feedback loop of similar items and subjects reflected and re-reflected through different mediums. She sculpts architectural spaces, builds installations based on landscape paintings, and films her airbrushed paintings, only to then re-paint select frames of the resulting films. The ethereal results speak lovingly to process and medium, rather than overt subject matter; they are films and paintings about film and painting. So skip the multiplex and experience a new take on film in an age when our lives often seem to exist on screen.

I started the my annual trip to NY  happily trapped in South Brooklyn, where snow plows feared to tread and where there wasn’t a Q train or a loaf of bread available for four days. At least my sister was there to lighten the mood.

When I did make it into the city, all of the galleries were still closed from the storm. Luckily, the Housing Works Authority Thrift Shop was open, because there I found two books that I expect will change my life forever. One was about Miss Piggy and her private collection, the “Kermitage.” See her here in a fetching Mondrian inspired frock:

And then there was  “Northwest Originals: Oregon Women and Their Art,” published in the 80s. It was great to see Christine Bourdette, Nanda D’Agostino, Laura Ross Paul and others at the beginnings of their auspicious careers. The glamor shots accompanying each artist bio inspired me to embrace my frizzy hair and gave me a historical reference other than Sally Jessy Raphael for current Northwest Original,  Krystal South‘s new glasses.

While waiting for my colleagues from PICA and around the world  to join me in New York for the Under the Radar Festival, I took a trip out to New Jersey to visit the studio of former Portlander, Derek Franklin. It is only three months into his time as a MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers, and the walls and flat files were full of really good work. Who needs Chelsea when Newark is killing it?

Then it was off to Philadelphia, where I had both the Mutter and Mummer museums on my itinerary. I knew that I had a week of overwhelming art viewing ahead, so I focused on the weird and wild. The Mutter gives new meaning to the phrase “fresh eyes,” and it was the perfect place to re-frame my brain for some intense looking-at and thinking-about art.

Finally, my PICA peeps were here in town, and Patrick Leonard (Communications Director, PICA) Scott McEachern (Development Associate, PICA) and I formed a field trip trio, running from museum to gallery to hole-in-the-wall hand-pulled noodle joint each day before meeting up with the rest of the PICA staff in the evening for performances. Here are the highlights:

I think the guards at the Whitney were getting tired of trying to stop me from taking photographs of this painting from Paul Thek’s retrospective. On my fifth visit to the show, I still felt the overwhelming desire to cry. With one crystal tear in each eye, I took one last, longing look at the life of an artist, undervalued during his time  and unbelievably relevant to artists working right now.

Bob Nickas’s Annual Looking Back at White Columns did not disappoint. I almost ripped this Chris Vasell off the wall; I wanted it for my own show that I would be installing at PNCA’s Feldman Gallery the day I returned from the East Coast.

We hit Ruby Sky Stiler’s opening at Derek Eller, where she had a modest but compelling group of relief carvings with geometric patterns, further breaking apart the already fragile picture plane.

On the train from someplace to someplace else, I was struck by this ad, boasting classes in “Law and Ethics in the Art Market.” This ad space—usually reserved for Dr. Zizmor, the “subway dermatologist“—now seems to be harnessing the growing interest in all things Miami Art Basel.

At Green Naftali, the Richard Artschwager’s still look good to me, especially this one called Untitled (Black Beauty). It makes me think about horses, which makes me think of the first 20 minutes of the movie Black Stallion.

In other semi-related news; did anyone else hear that Jay Sanders, formerly of Green Naftali and Portland, will be one of the next curators for the Whitney Biennial? I am over the moon! Congrats Jay! And to the haters who think a former gallery director can’t be objective: don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Also from the show Filmschoenheit at Greene Naftali was this painting, which makes me terribly nervous, and therefore I love it.

Hands up! Raise the roof! That is the reaction we all had when we saw these goofy and subversive ceramics by Sean Bluechel at Nicole Klagsbrun. Everything we’d seen in the city up until this moment had seemed so serious, but this pulled the heart strings in a new way. Or rather, it gathered them in its hands and went, “snip, snip.” Totally disarming. HOORAH! Officially my new favorite.

Despite the snow having melted down to nice, surmountable hills, most of the galleries were totally unprepared for their openings that night; shipments had been delayed, employees were still stranded in the outer boroughs. As we walked through Chelsea in the late, late afternoon, it did not look good. Everyone was still hanging and the clock was tick-tocking. So it was a surprise to walk into Luhring Augustine and see it so pristine and austere with giant paintings hanging proud.

This Josh Smith has my mouth watering, but not as much as…

…this delicate marrow in a heavenly bowl of soup from Hung Ry.

After a long day of hoofing it all over town, we met some old friends at La MaMa to see a much-anticipated show by Gob Squad.

One of my very first PICA experiences was a Gob Squad show, when I was a lowly volunteer, who earned tickets by scraping fish guts off of a warehouse floor for one of the Dada Balls. BOY WAS IT WORTH IT! I have been dreaming of seeing this British/German collective again for more than a DECADE!

As one of the many offerings at the Under the Radar Festival curated by Mark Russell, (PICA’s former Artistic Director), Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You Never Had it So Good), was a sweet exploration of Andy Warhol’s films. Was it worth the wait? Yes. I won’t say more in the hope you will see it yourself someday soon.

Later still we made our way to the edge of the Bowery to the Abrons Art Center for Brave New Girl, the latest installment in Neal Medlyn’s teen dream-driven performances, and part of an exciting new showcase called American Realness. It was
hard to figure out where the Britney/Hannah/Neal began and end and we felt lucky to have seen ...HERS A QUEEN, his first installment, at TBA:10. The cuddle party scene gave us important context.

OK, where am I? I don’t know either. The days are blending into each other, each show and each bowl of delicious Chinese soup forming a brackish mixture of meaning. I will end here on my last day with the crew, when we saw Ohad Meromi’s installation at Art In General, which combined constructivist architectural assemblages with other transformative sources to form a playground for the revolutionary.

We then climbed the staircases and set off alarms at the New Museum. On the third floor, we rested to read and collect all of the printed ephemera scattered around like yesterday’s news.

And then, standing in front of Lizzie Fitch’s sculpture Pangea, I had one of those great moments in which I could look back and remember the nucleus of a good idea, formed in a bomb shelter in Portland, Oregon, and see it realized years later in a even better and bigger way.

I was anxious to get home and everything was making me think of Portland, where I hoped that crates filled with paintings would be waiting for me at the Feldman. Israel Lund will need to find the perfect house plant to accompany Elena Pankova’s paintings, and Morgan Ritter and the rest of the Feldman Preps will have to gingerly unpack and hang the new show. Oh wait, there they are. Hi guys! Here is to the new year and new shows.

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