Angela Mattox, Artistic Director, plans ahead like the seasoned professional she is:

Disposable Flask
Advil
Facial spritz
Mini Super glue (for shoe malfunctions)

Kate Merrill, Institutional Giving Manager, has her priorities straight:

Photo of my 3-month old Lily, to remind me that TBA is as easy as pie compared to my other job

Steve Reich Pandora play list, to blast on my headphones and keep me awake when writing grants during the day.

Helmy Membreño, Artist Services Coordinator, keeps it caffeinated:

Patrick Leonard, Communications Director, needs peace of mind that he’ll be fed and get to where he’s going without a hitch:

Replacement bike tubes
Patch kit
Bike pump (bad history with TBA flats)
That magic, early morning window of time before the other staff get in, to write the daily newsletter.
iPhone and camera
Morning coffee, staff lunches, and late-night beer garden snacks with my people.

Roya Amirsoleymani, Membership Coordinator and Office Manager, believes in the isotonic healing of coconut water:

Erin Boberg Doughton, Performing Arts Program Director, is resolutely practical:

All Festival, Front of House and tech staff contacts in my phone.
Phone charger.
Festival pass, driver’s license and keys on a lanyard so I don’t loose them.
A water bottle, nuts, string cheese, and crackers for eating on the fly.
A roll of quarters for quick meter plugging running around between venues.
EmergenC packets for warding off colds.
Hylands Calms Forte for stress and insomnia.
Little notebook and pencil for taking notes and making lists in the dark during performances.
Sweater, hat, and scarf for cold nights in the beer garden.

Casey Szot, Volunteer Coordinator, needs her wheels:

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!

Faustin Linyekula, Le Cargo. Photo: Agathe Poupenay.

Each year, we gather dozens of remarkable artists who work at the edges of contemporary practice, at the intersections of forms and styles and mediums. But just because the artists in the TBA Festival cross disciplines doesn’t mean that their work doesn’t have anything to offer the dance purists in our audience. If you’re looking for that virtuosic wonder of bodies moving on stage, look no further—we’ve got you covered with a whole roster of dancers and choreographers putting forward distinctive new voices.

Visionary butoh choreographer Kota Yamazaki will present (glowing), the lastest work by his Fluid Hug-Hug Company. Yamazki’s unique style seamlessly blends contemporary practice with traditional dance forms—in fact, his company’s mission is to promote the free and fluid exchange of diverse creative perspectives, hence their name. This work takes Yamazaki’s butoh background as a starting point for an investigation of both classical Japanese aesthetics and traditional African dances through a collaboration with artists from Senegal and Ethiopia. By turns fluid and energetic, you can expect a bold and graceful performance, a conversation in movement between practitioners from around the world. And, to further entice you to this one-night-only show, dancer Ryoji Sasamoto just received a Bessie nomination for his performance in the work!

Alongside Yamazaki, we also welcome back PICA alum Faustin Linyekula, a truly influential and powerful figure in contemporary dance. Hailing from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where he runs Studios Kabako in Kisangani, Linyekula’s practice uses dance and movement as a tool to address the complex and tragic histories of his home country. In this TBA performance—his first solo—Linyekula presents a particularly personal look at his youth in the Congo, venturing back to his earliest memories of dance and music as a young boy. Through personal narrative and his compelling choreography, Linyekula will investigate his very relationship with dance.

US-based, Zimbabwe-born choreographer Nora Chipaumire also explores the colonial legacies of Africa, albeit from a very different angle than Linyekula. As the recipient of the 2012 Alpert Award in Dance, she explained that, “My work as a dance maker has been largely about radicalizing the way the African body and art making is viewed at home and abroad.” In Miriam, Chipaumire creates her first character-driven dance to engage the various forces acting on women: the tensions of home and society, imperialist and racist pressures, and sexual objectification. Along with dancer/actress Okwui Okpokwasili, Chipaumire’s performance will showcase her strong, charismatic style in a new more theatrical format.

If you’re interested in dance and movement-based work, you shouldn’t limit yourself to the choreographers listed in the guidebook. Under the direction of playwright Toshiki Okada, Japanese theater company chelfitsch has pioneered a unique theatrical style that pairs colloquial everyday speech patterns with stylized, idiosyncratic movements. The text of Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech concerns the mundane interactions of millennial office workers, but presents this spare, humorous dialogue through a repetitive and exaggerated series of mis-matched gestures. The result of this juxtaposition is a distinct new approach to theater with a feeling more similar to contemporary dance. In other words, it’s a perfect TBA moment: discovering a parallel between artists working across continents and mediums.

TBA 11 Opening Night at the WORKS Vockah Redu and the Cru Photo by Wayne Bund

If you look-up festival in the dictionary, you will find variations of two definitions:

1. A day or time of religious or other celebration, marked by feasting, ceremonies, or other observances.

2. A period or program of festive activities, cultural events, or entertainment: a music festival.

Immediately I knew which definition the TBA Festival is more akin to for me. #1, without hesitation #1. I think I had this gut reaction because the experience of the TBA Festival definitely extends beyond the what  option 2 has to offer. Art is, for lack of a better word, the closest thing to my religion. Art is where I’ve seen and experienced a great deal of transformation, intellect and true consideration of others throughout my life. So when I think of the T:BA Festival, the work it supports, the dialogue it sparks and what it observes in celebration, #1 it is. I heard this sentiment repeated in conversations throughout the opening night party. People exhilarated by a gathering of “their people”, with all that implies, combined with the potential of new inspirations and knowledge. The first few days of the festival have continued to prove this true. Here is a snap shot of the celebrations, feasts and observances I’ve experienced so far.

Vockah Redu and the Cru – Three statements from their opening night performance have stuck with me: “Find what you love and do it – Art loves art – You are all so beautiful”. On the surface these may seem saccharin but lived with conviction they actually have quite serious ramifications. Vockah Redu and the Cru didn’t just perform these full-bodied sweaty electric truths for the audience to absorb by osmosis. They shot them directly into our hearts with conviction and deft. Good medicine and perfect mantras for the festival kick-off.

Also on opening night, installed in a WHS classroom were John Niekrasz and Josh Berger effectively engaged in what, for me, felt like displays of commitment to the practice of making and investigation. Niekrasz played the drums for 12 hours straight and Berger with delicate rigor penciled tiny x’s on paper. Opening Night was a frenzy of heat, over stimulation and conversations that ricocheted from person to person. It was not an evening of quiet contemplation, so I didn’t take in any other information about the works, which I now think were part of the Occupation/Preoccupation project, but at first take in the context of the fervor of opening night and with Evidence of Bricks on the brain these two brought to mind ideas of dedication to craft, the repetition of practice, endurance, and the risk/beauty/tension of potential break down.

The Method Gun by Rude Mechs – The Method Gun’s premise, in short, tells the tale of Rude Mechs’ research into 60’s/70’s experimental acting guru Stella Burden and her theatre company’s long-time dedication to her “dangerous” process after Burden’s unexplained disappearance. The stage is set with an effective attention to detail that continues into the script with theatre references heavily but skillfully planted throughout. The beginning section of The Method Gun could have used more editing down, with exception of the tiger. I fell in love with the tiger and craved its regular dosing of ridiculousness mixed with universal truths. The beginning section had an element of what felt like over explaining to the audience combined with a sometimes too campy style that was distracting. It kept me from jumping in without question and fully enjoying the ride. That is until the end. The end got succinct, vulnerable, inventive, and “dangerous”. Toward the end they let the action speak for itself and let the foundation laid finally do its job to a stunning and joyful end.

Namasya by Shantala Shivalingappa – Namasya is a combination of Shivalingappa’s own choreography combined with other works by important figures in her life such as her mother, classical Indian dancer Savitry Nair, and Pina Bausch. Although my tastes desired more from Namasya’s relationship to its music, as well as much less of the literal, I was engaged by its stripped down dedication to vocabulary. I was also struck by her ability to transform her whole self in the act of performance. There were moments when I found it refreshing to see a blank stage with nothing else but her trust in the form and power as a performer. No theatrics, no irony, no sarcasm, no hiding behind chaos or hipness… just a reverence to the execution of vocabulary.

Noelle Stiles

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.