With TBA:12, we’re especially proud of our global lineup—this year, PICA will welcome artists from a dozen different countries across Asia, Africa, North America and Europe. Think of it as an international tour of contemporary artistic practice. It’s a chance to find commonalities across borders and experience the regional differences of vernacular styles. By bringing this diversity of artists, TBA creates a unique dialogue between artists and a ground for future collaborations and installations to take root.

Of all of the work we’re bringing, we happen to have a strong cluster of projects from Africa. In presenting a few artists, we hope to avoid the “flattening” impulse of labeling an individual as a distinctly “African” artist, as though any one artist could speak for an entire continent. Africa is a broad continent, with myriad distinctions and cultures and practices, but so often there is a tendency to exoticize international projects and hold them up as capturing the spirit of a region. These artists we’re bringing are making vital, powerful projects that are based in their everyday experiences, but make an impact across cultures.

Zimbabwe-born and US-based choreographer Nora Chipaumire will present Miriam, her first foray into a more character-driven dance, along with the incredible dancer Okwui Okpokwasili.

Renowned dancer Faustin Linyekula returns to TBA after many years to present his first-ever solo performance, Le Cargo, Linyekula delves into his early memories of dance and music, continuing his powerful investigations of the Congo’s tumultuous and violent history.

The African projects continue onto the late-night stage of THE WORKS, with a unique inter-continental collaboration between Portland band BRAINSTORM, and a host of African musicians, both in the Sahel region of West Africa and here in Portland. Skype performances, YouTube covers, and more bring global pop music together online and IRL.

One such international collaboration actually connects our African projects with a large contingent of projects by renowned Japanese performers working across music, dance, and theater. It’s an interesting moment to consider the Japanese art scene—what does it mean to be making working post-Fukushima? How are artists reflecting on the concerns and experiences of their country? In (glowing), TBA alum Kota Yamazaki works through some of the seminal ideas of Japanese aesthetics by way of a long-running collaboration with artists from Senegal and Ethiopia.

Voices & Echoes sees the return of sound artist Aki Onda, who has curated a trio of influential experimental musicians from Japan. Akio Suzuki, Gozo Yoshimaso, and Otomi Yoshihide blend traditional and invented instruments with sound art, poetry, and striking performance.

Working in a similarly experimental vein, director Toshiki Okada has made a definitive mark on Japanese theater with his company chelfitsch. In Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech, his uniquely choreographed style of performance will be in full display—it’s theater that will appeal to dance lovers, and a wry take on contemporary Japanese office life.

Crossing the Pacific to North America, we’ll also be presenting an amazing young Mexican theater company, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, with two politically-minded “documentary” plays. Their works excavate Mexican social and political history through a blend of video and live performance, shedding light on this contemporary moment in the process.

But the international artists don’t just work on stage. Curated by Zvonimir Dobrovic of Queer New York International, Perforations presents a trio of Serbian and Croatian site-specific performance projects by Petra Kovacic, Biljana Kosmogina, and East Rodeo. Through the rooms and hallways of Washington High School, these three artists will present a satirical political campaign, a musical installation, and an abstract performance.

Within End Things, the visual art program at TBA, Italian artist Alex Cecchetti will lead a daily “relay” performance, Summer is not the prize of winter; French artist Isabelle Cornaro will create large-scale painted murals in the PICA offices derived from her films; and Dutch duo Van Brummelen & De Haan will present a filmic recreation of the famed Pergamon frieze, stolen from Turkey and residing in Berlin.

So many of these artists cross datelines, work with peers and collaborators from multiple countries, and reflect an increasingly global culture, while remaining indebted to their cultural differences. It’ll be a big TBA for anyone looking to discover new international ideas. I feel like I took a trip just writing about all of these projects!

After a few nights at the WORKS, it’s interesting to see the 40-and-over crowd mixed in with the art party scenesters. The evening promises to be easy on the ears: now married, both Dean and Britta were former members of Luna, Dean is the frontman for Galaxie 500, and Britta was the singing voice of super-glam cartoon superstar JEM. Yes, of JEM and the Holograms. Wow.

As concept albums go, it is a beauty. The stark portraiture and artsy nostalgia of Warhol’s screen tests provide a distilled, but achingly poignant backdrop for Dean and Britta’s layered psychedelic surf lullabies.

Most interesting are the stories and commentary Dean and Britta dispense with studied indifference between songs: Edie Sedgwick cut her hair to look like Warhol and died of a barbiturate overdose at 28, Dennis Hopper was one of 13 people to buy a soup can prints at Warhol’s inaugural exhibition in Los Angeles; Billy Name covered his apartment with tinfoil and met Warhol at a hair-cutting party. Beautiful and tragic, the faces and music create an entrancing symmetry. Most beautiful, yes.

Act 1: Color Film 5 (Madison Brookshire) and Field Organ (Tashi Wada)
“The subject of the work is duration, with color as the medium through which we experience it.” – program guide, New Musics

A wall of color is the backdrop for two simultaneous reed organs. The color field almost imperceptibly shifts, meaning you can’t see the increments of change, just the change itself. As soon as you stop looking, everything is different. Wada’s two-organ duet produces a similar effect with an opposing approach; you hear every sustained note, both melodic and discordant, in real time. Because the musical progression is so fluid, however, the emotional responses generated can only be realized periodically. Brookshire and Wada’s works are a brilliant pair and together produce a realization about perception of time and visceral response that is greater than the sum of its parts. Something previously hidden becomes known: the liminal space between hearing/seeing and responding emotionally is suddenly visible.

Act 2: PART (Grouper)
Grouper’s “tape collage” matched with Flash Choir’s vocal instrumentation puts the central focus on the flickering images on the screen. The result is non-narrative (or at least non immediately so) and alternatively lulling and haunting. The staging, whether intentional or not, made the work somehow less accessible; if the use of tape is inherent to the work, it would be intriguing to make the process at least as visible as the choir.

Act 3: Mourning Youth (Claudia Meza)
“…if time passing can only be experienced and digested through memory…then ‘youth’ as a concept will always be mourned” – program guide, New Musics

Memory and reality collide in Meza’s non-mournful Mourning Youth. Powerful, charged images are slowed to iconic speed and paired visually with each other and sonically with taiko drumming and choral response. Meza’s collaboration with Portland Taiko, Flash Choir, Thomas Thorson, Chris Hackett and Allie Hankins is an evolving work; the movement portion was recently added and seemed less integrated than the other elements of what Meza calls a “wordless opera”. Reminiscent of a Greek drama/music video mashup, the performance is charged by searing visuals and heart-pounding sounds, describing the electric physicality and heightened perception of both experienced and remembered youth.

THERE’S NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT.
This September, PICA’s ninth-annual Time-Based Art Festival takes over Portland, Oregon, for an all-hours, city-wide happening of contemporary performance and visual art. The Festival gathers artists for morning workshops, expands the conversation with afternoon talks and salons, fills pop-up galleries with visual installations, and takes the stage until late in the night with experimental, genre-defying, live performances.

READ ON FOR THE FIRST ARTISTS OF THIS YEAR’S TBA FESTIVAL.

MORE DETAILS TO COME AT PICA.ORG.

Rude Mechs, The Method Gun, from Humana Festival of New American Plays,
2010, Actors Theatre of Louisville. Photo: Kathi Kacinski.

TBA ON STAGE presents performances by artists colliding the genres of dance, music, theatre, new media, and film to propel new ideas and new forms. ON STAGE is curated by TBA Festival Artistic Director Cathy Edwards, in collaboration with Erin Boberg Doughton, Performing Arts Program Director for PICA. In curating this year’s program, Edwards has said that she was interested in exploring the, “continuums of community to cult, of mentor to demagogue, and of art to propaganda.”

Kyle Abraham, The Radio Show [NEW YORK, DANCE]
Hailed as “the best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama” by Out Magazine, Abraham’s choreography investigates the effects of the abrupt discontinuation of a community radio station and the impact of Alzheimer’s on a family. Abraham’s score mixes recordings of classic soul and hip-hop with contemporary classical compositions by Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto.

Kyle Abraham, Live! The Realest MC (in-development) [NEW YORK, DANCE]
Abraham’s newest solo performance spins off from the duality of Pinocchio’s plight to be a “real boy,” investigating gender roles in the black community and societal perspectives of the black man through hip hop and celebrity culture.

Andrew Dinwiddie, Get Mad at Sin ! [NEW YORK, THEATRE]
A one-man performance reanimating an out-of-print vinyl record of a sermon by the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, recorded live in 1971. Dinwiddie achieves perfect audio fidelity to the original record while reincarnating Swaggart’s carpet-pacing, pulpit-pounding performance.

Mike Daisey, All the Hours in the Day [NEW YORK, THEATRE, ONE-DAY ONLY]
For three years Daisey has been working on an insane project: a live twenty–four hour monologue, on the scale of War and Peace. Dreamed of as an epic story that shatters the framework of the theater, All the Hours in the Day will weave together massive narrative threads into an electric story about our humanity in this age…if all goes well.

Taylor Mac, Comparison is Violence: The Ziggy Stardust Meets Tiny Tim Songbook [NEW YORK, CABARET THEATRE]
Combining dramatic flair, searing satire, poignant honesty, and—of course—plenty of glitter, Mac arrives in a flourish of sequins with his newest show, in which he dissects the darker side of comparison while singing Tiny Tim songs and selections from David Bowie’s glam-rock classic, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust.

Offsite Dance Project [JAPAN, DANCE, NEW COMMISSION]
For this site-specific project, Offsite Dance returns to Portland and embeds three dynamic Japanese choreographers in the Central Eastside Industrial District, under bridges, off of loading docks, and in the neighborhood’s rapidly developing buildings. Featuring Yoko Higashino with Wayne Horovitz, Yukio Suzuki, and Ho Ho-Do.

Rachid Ouramdane, World Fair [FRANCE, EXPERIMENTAL DANCE]
A French choreographer of Algerian descent, Ouramdane’s latest solo asks, “What can authorities expect from a work of art? What are the marks left by political history on the body?” World Fair blends movement and video to present the body as a bank able to record, erase, or register different ingredients of modern reality and national identity.

Rude Mechs, The Method Gun [AUSTIN, TX, THEATRE]
The Method Gun explores the life and techniques of Stella Burden, the actor-training guru of the 60s and 70s, and creator of “The Approach” (often referred to as “the most dangerous acting technique in the world”). A play about the ecstasy and excesses of performing, the dangers of public intimacy, and the incompatibility of truth on stage and sanity in real life.

Dean & Britta, 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests [NEW YORK, MUSIC, FILM]
Between 1964 and 1966, Andy Warhol shot nearly 500 Screen Tests—beautiful and revealing 16mm film portraits of hundreds of different individuals, from the famous to the anonymous. Songwriters Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, formerly of the band Luna, will perform a live score of original compositions and covers for 13 of the films.

tEEth, Home Made [PORTLAND, EXPERIMENTAL DANCE]
Home Made mounts a daring exploration of the awkwardness of human beauty and the struggles of intimate negotiation. Choreographed by Angelle Hebert and scored by Phillip Kraft, Home Made explores the fine balance between tenderness and hostility, where playfulness becomes manipulation and exploration shades into aggression.

zoe | juniper, A Crack in Everything [SEATTLE, DANCE, COMMISSION]
Through 3-D animation projections, atmospheric installations and lighting, and Scofield’s compelling choreography, the piece meditates on the moments that divide people’s lives into linear experiences of time. Scofield creates a unique and intense contemporary dance language from a range of movement styles, performed by an ensemble of top-notch dancers.

Jesse Sugarmann, Red Storm Rising. Courtesy of the artist.

TBA ON SIGHT is a collection of installations, exhibitions, projections, and gatherings by visual artists, curated and organized by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator for PICA.

Evidence of Bricks: Work about the building up, but mostly tearing down, of institutions, societies, structures and ideas.

Claire Fontaine [FRANCE]
Claire Fontaine is a Paris-based collective, founded in 2004. After lifting her name from a popular brand of school notebooks, Claire Fontaine declared herself a “readymade artist” and began to elaborate a version of neo-conceptual art that often looks like other people’s work. Working in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text, her practice can be described as an ongoing interrogation of the political impotence and the crisis of singularity that seem to define contemporary art today.

Kate Gilmore [NEW YORK]
In Kate Gilmore’s art, she devises strenuous, physical propositions without clear, purposeful outcomes. Whether kicking and climbing out of a drywall column, stacking shelves with paint-filled pots, or maintaining her balance atop a pile of marble being sledge-hammered from beneath her, Gilmore’s actions assert a dogged persistence, dark humor, and a stark sense of risk.

Anna Gray & Ryan Wilson Paulsen, Don’t Worry We’ll Fix It [PORTLAND]
The Fix It office will both produce the publication September, a daily art historical broadside specially produced for TBA:11, and be an active space where the artists will work onsite to correct, revise and compile errata from previous editions of the paper.

Cristina Lucas, Europleasure International LTD. TOUCH AND GO [SPAIN]
Incorporating irony and humor into her work, Cristina Lucas focuses on the irrationality of human actions and ethics within contemporary aesthetics. Lucas’ video makes a sly commentary on the diaspora of Western factories to the Third World, through an encounter with one such British company, Europleasure International LTD.

Ohad Meromi, Rehearsal Sculpture, Act II: Consumption [NEW YORK]
Inspired by the pragmatic idealism of the Kibbutz and Russian avant-garde theatre, Meromi creates an architecture for action, in which visitors are invited to form their own troupe to interpret and perform scenes from his Stage Exercises for Smokers and Non-Smokers.

Patrick Rock, Oscar’s Delirium Tremens [PORTLAND]
A hot pink, elephant-shaped, forced-air-inflated, viewer-interactive jump-room of the monumental scale usually reserved for historical statues and public art. Oscar’s Delirium Tremens disrupts our balance, implicating everyone in its experiential abandon and the woozy sense that the world continues spinning out of control, even after stepping off the ride.

Halsey Rodman, Towards the Possibility of Existing in Three Places at Once [NEW YORK]
A sculptor and painter, Rodman’s installations use different forms of near-identical objects, creating a sense that despite their concrete physicality, something about them remains unresolved and unfixed. While the elements exist simultaneously in space, their differences expose the passage of time in their creation and in the audience’s regard.

Jesse Sugarmann, Lido (The Pride is Back) [SPRINGFIELD, OR]
Sugarmann’s automotive performances are elegant pile-ups. His vehicular actions engage the car accident as an inadvertent monument, a spectacle of trauma, and a point of social exchange. Positioning three Chrysler minivans atop 42 inflatable airbeds, Sugarmann creates a slow-motion wreck.

Mona Vatamanu & Florin Tudor, Rite of Spring [ROMANIA/SWITZERLAND]
Living in Bucharest, Romania, Vatamanu & Tudor examine the sea change in social and economic systems following the decline of Communism in Eastern Europe. In Rite of Spring, as children set drifts of poplar fluff aflame in the street gutters, the artists create a symbol of “Lost Boys” innocence in the face of Capitalism’s failed promise.

Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries [SOUTH KOREA]
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES was founded in Seoul by Young-hae Chang, C.E.O., and Marc Voge, C.I.O. Their quick-cut, text-based flash animations pair catchy, percussive scores with original narratives that tell sharp, captivating, and politically-charged stories of modern urban life and society on the web.

Whoop Dee Doo [KANSAS CITY, MISSOURI]
Whoop Dee Doo is a kid-friendly faux public access television show featuring performances and live audience participation. With skits, contests, musicians, and local talent, the program is inspired by television shows such as The Carol Burnett Show, Pee Wee’s Playhouse, Mr. Wizard, The Gong Show, American Bandstand, Soul Train, Double Dare, and You Can’t Do that on Television.

MORE ARTISTS TO BE ANNOUNCED, INCLUDING ADDITIONAL ON STAGE PERFORMERS, THE PROJECTS OF THE OUTSIDE PUBLIC HAPPENING PROGRAM, THE WORKS LATE NIGHT STAGE, AND TBA INSTITUTE WORKSHOPS, SALONS, AND LECTURES.

MORE DETAILS TO COME AT PICA.ORG.