One of our goals with TBA is to always put local, emerging artists on the same stages as renowned, national and international artists. It’s so important to us that we present our city’s talent in front of all of the audiences and visiting presenters. Each year, TBA has launched artists to national attention, helping them secure gigs across the country and around the world with our peer organizations and festivals.  This year, we’ve got a whole new crop of home-town favorites, just waiting to be discovered by local audiences and visitors alike.

Claudia Meza seems to be everywhere at TBA this year. She’s running not one, but three related projects for the Festival: an interactive sonic collage of tape loops on casette players, a QR code walking tour of unnoticed sounds around the city, and a live concert of local musicians performing compositions in response to this sonic landscape. At the heart of all of these projects is a real love for the everyday sounds of life—the way in which water flows, echoes occur, or traffic rolls by—and the sounds of Portland. For her closing weekend concert, Meza has rallied a great crew of other local musicians and collaborators, including Luke Wyland of AU, Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever, E*Rock and more. Keep your ears open!

38 Things from Team Video on Vimeo.

Andrew Dickson is a familiar local face to long-time PICA audiences. His genuine and sweetly humorous solo performances take the form of well-known (and much beleaguered) presentation styles: seminars, motivational speaking, and the like. For his newest project, Dickson is turning to a more intimate mode of address—the personal life coach—and staging the whole process in a very public forum. Make no mistake: this is the real deal. Yes, it might be “on stage,” but Dickson is very sincere. You can catch more of his smooth stylings as a coach on another UrbanHonking blog, called ADVICE.

What do you like? from Mo Ritter on Vimeo.

In the visual program, multi-disciplinary artist Morgan Ritter has constructed an inter-connected installation in two locations: the galleries at Washington High School and the rooftop deck at PICA’s downtown space. For the project, Ritter marshaled a team of assistants on road trips to rural Oregon, which she dug clay from the earth, which she then pounded down and reconstituted into a malleable material. At WHS, she’ll present a room of “precarious” sculptures balanced on soft beanbag plinths that relate to a separate ceramic fountain form sputtering on the PICA deck. Her works create a dialogue between multiple sites (the galleries and the source of the clay) and multiple scales, investing still sculpture with vibrant force.

THE WORKS always sees our greatest concentration of local talents, from dance to music, to film, and beyond. This year is no exception. We welcome back the beloved Ten Tiny Dances, which will feature a slate of entirely new performances by artists who’ve never graced the small stage, including Carlos Gonzalez; Takahiro Yamamoto; Christi Denton, Renee Sills, and Heather Perkins; Nicole Olson, and Linda K. Johnson. Come out and see what this new corps of dancers achieves in the confines of just 4 x 4 feet!

Parenthetical Girls: The Common Touch from Parenthetical Girls on Vimeo.

TBA alumni Parenthetical Girls return with an expansive evening that charts their many collaborations and musical experimentations. For their performance, they’ll bring to the stage dance by Allie Hankins, music by Golden Retriever, compostions by Jherek Bischoff performed by Classical Revolution PDX, as well as their own brand of pop mischief. While it’s been years since they’ve performed at TBA (’08 to be precise), they’ve stayed close in touch, even filming this music video on the WHS stage during a recent TBA.

Grouper – Hold the Way from Weston Currie on Vimeo.

It seems that the running theme for all of these local artists, musicians, and performers is “collaboration.” I guess that’s just the Portland way. Well, as a native, born-and-bred organization, PICA follows suit, collaborating regularly with our friends and peers in-town. We’ve invited the wonderful folks at The Hollywood Theatre to curate a night at the works of expanded film and video; what they came up is called FUTURE CINEMA, a wide-ranging night of performance, music, and interactive movie-going. They’ll stage performances and videos by a group of “terrifying women” (with homegirls Kathleen Keogh, Alicia McDaid, Angela Fair, and Sarah Johnson among them); B-Movie Bingo of Hollywood cliches hosted by Wolf Choir; and film by Weston Currie featuring the music of Grouper (Liz Harris).

And sometimes, these collaborations span timezones and continents. Local indie-pop group BRAINSTORM has been working with Christopher Kirkley of micro-label Sahel Sounds on a series of collaborations with African musicians. Over the years, Kirkley has been traveling the continent as an amateur “ethnomusicologist,” collecting local cuts on cellphone SIM cards, and releasing albums with the musicians he meets. For TBA, they’ve tracked down the locally-based Somali group Iftin Band for a night of covers and jam sessions between Portland indie musicians, Portland African musicians, and African musicians from the continent via Skype and YouTube. Come out and dance and see how far our local community really extends!

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!