The plans…

“I have been working with other artists on creating temporary architecture for PICA for years—ever since the creation of the Dada Ball bar, complete with a 30’ high nautilus enclosure of white gauzy diaper fabric. It’s been a long history of making cool things with little money, borrowed materials, and lots of committed artists.

This is the last year that PICA will use Washington High School for THE WORKS. It has been a comfortable, yet sprawling site to transform over the last few years. Each year we take a different approach. To me, when walking the site, there is one great space: the WHS front entry, which is a stunning perch with a canopy of trees and a view of Portland in the distance. Everything should be THERE: the TBA entry, the Beer Garden, and access to the WHS performances, with more focus, more energy, and maybe a little tension in one primary place.

Wayfinding. In a big way. Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

We needed to create some shelter, clarity of direction, identity, and containment. We needed to focus on the performances. We needed to move lots of people, accommodate casual dining, and a very big bar. And of course, it needs to be temporary, quick, and cheap.

Experientially, we’ve created a kind of threshold at several key points as you move through the site. These transitions mark the entry to the TBA Festival, the Beer Garden, and finally to the interior WHS performance venues. These thresholds are a symbolic beginning and end, a boundary, a point at which you step through the looking glass and suspend disbelief. Have fun. We hope organic and spontaneous things can happen with this convergence.”

Megan Holmes painting light boxes.

The awesome team at ADX setting up our portals.

ADX really rallied around TBA and built us our beautiful light box entry way.

Guildworks rigging their sky sails.

Guildworks sails at night. Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

The result… Photo: Mitchell Snyder.

A huge amount of thanks goes out to Ellen Fortin Design + Architecture, Makenna Lehrer, Megan Holmes, ADX, Guildworks, Bill Boese, Eco Productions, and all of the volunteers who made this year’s design for THE WORKS into a reality. We could not have done it without you!

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!

Scene from the beer garden at TBA:10. Photo: Wayne Bund.

Earlier this week, I was sitting on the Ecotrust roof with chefs Jason French (Ned Ludd), Naoko Tamura (Chef Naoko’s Bento Café), and a co-worker, watching them pick up small cups that I’d filled with different bite-sized leftovers from dinner the night before—buckwheat crepe, quick pickled cucumber, romano beans with shiso, and an aprium (apricot-plum)—and, with their eyes closed, shoot them back. They opened their eyes and searched small bingo boards looking for the ingredients they thought they’d tasted.

This was our trial run of Blind-Tasting Bingo, a game that Jason, Naoko, and Johanna Ware of Smallwares will each host during TBA:12. Each chef will prepare 15 “one-bite wonders,” as Jason has been calling them. Under the lights of the TBA beer garden, the 25 people who sign up will taste their way through, eyes closed, searching within their tongues and noses for clues to what in the world these chefs have concocted.

Blind-Tasting Bingo is one of several food experiences that PICA has added to the TBA WORKS this year. The most involved is a kitchen, built onsite, where a different chef will cook each night. Many visionary, talented Portland chefs have stepped up to prepare the kind of food you’d want to eat in the late-night TBA frenzy, featuring late-summer Oregon produce. (Full schedule below! Gosh it’s going to be good.) If you haven’t made it out to their brick and mortar restaurants, do not miss this chance to eat their food for beer garden prices. It would be a shame if you ate before coming–save room!

Gnocchi from Artigiano. They’ll be sharing local Italian tastes on Sunday the 9th.

I work for the non-profit Ecotrust, where we publish Edible Portland magazine. We worked with PICA to curate the blind-tastings, chefs, and even a Snack Office in the school’s principal’s office, where we are living out our school vending machine fantasies. (Ecotrust works with school districts, preschools, and child care centers to transform the ways students experience food—how cafeterias source ingredients, how teachers involve gardens and experiences on farms, and more.)

Food is a medium that engages all of our senses at once. Like art, it can be a way to weasel into and examine really complicated things, including the culture in which we live. We hope the food at TBA this year gives everyone an excuse to spend more time together, enjoying each other’s company, processing the things they’ve witnessed or been part of, and getting closer to the care and imagination that Portland’s chefs and farmers bring to our city.

Kristan Kennedy, PICA’s Visual Art Curator, summed it up nicely:

“We know that all good parties wind up in the kitchen, so it feels fitting that for our tenth year of TBA we would build a communal space for people to celebrate, share, hang out, and eat! Chefs are time-based artists: they work in the moment to create something new, or elevated, or sustaining, or sculptural, or painterly, or performative, or surprising. But like every good performance or show, the magic only happens when the audience is present and participating, so my hope is the tables are full, the tastings are full, and we all get full on art.”

Please join us! Get something to eat.

THE WORKS BIERGARTEN
September 6, 10pm–2am: Boke Bowl
September 7, 7:30pm–2am: Grüner
September 8, 7:30pm–2am: The Woodsman Tavern
September 9, 10pm–2am: Artigiano
September 10–12, 7:30pm–2am: Via Tribunali
September 13, 10pm–2am: Portobello
September 14, 7:30pm–2am: Bunk Sandwiches
September 15, 7:30pm–2am: Nong’s Khao Man Gai

Entry to the TBA Biergarten is FREE and open to the public. Food and bars are CASH ONLY (ATMs on-site). Make time before the performances, or stay late (kitchen open nightly until 2 am).

BLIND TASTING BINGO
September 11, 8:30pm: Jason French (Ned Ludd)
September 12, 8:30pm: Naoko Tamura (Chef Naoko’s Bento Café)
September 14, 8:30pm: Johanna Ware (Smallwares)
Tickets: $25 (online or at the TBA Central Box Office at WHS)

THE SNACK OFFICE
Nightly, 10pm – midnight: Abby’s Table and Fifty Licks

Laurie Anderson. Photo: Lucie Jansch.

From street corners to late-night stages, TBA has filled Portland with avant garde composers and experimental musicians year after year. We’ve hosted improvisational marathons in a gallery window, comic beatboxers, pop cellists, a guitar “orchestra,” and a dance and music suite in public fountains. This year, we’ve invited a few legendary musicians, as well as a few young composers, spanning generations to show the range of contemporary sound art and music.

Perhaps the “grand dame” of contemporary music, Laurie Anderson returns to Portland to complete her trilogy of solo story works, which she presented with PICA in 2002 and 2006. Dirtday! finds Anderson back with her violin and her wry observations on modern life, reflecting on this past decade since 9/11. “Politicians are essentially story tellers,” says Anderson, “they describe the world as it is and also as they think it should be. As a fellow story teller, it seems like a really good time to think about how words can literally create the world.” Luckily for us, she tells these stories with considerable grace and stirring sounds.

Musician and curator Aki Onda returns to Portland with a line-up of legendary experimental sound artists from Japan in Voices & Echoes. With poet Gozo Yoshimasu, guitarist and turntablist Otomo Yoshihide, and sound artist Akio Suzuki, the night will span from improv to conceptual art to literature to performance. These three artists are legendary and seminal figures in the Japanese sound and music scenes, but few audiences in the States have ever had the chance to witness their work: Akio Suzuki has not performed in North American since a NYC performance in 1983, and Gozo Yoshimasu has never given a public performance in the United States, outside of small readings in universities and galleries. This rare concert is not-to-be-missed!

No, we haven’t resurrected John Cage for TBA (though maybe someday we’ll pull off a hologram concert á la Tupac), but his legacy is apparent in so many of the musicians we support. This being the Cage centennial, it’s fitting that we have a trio of projects by local musician Claudia Meza, all inspired by Cage-ian music theories. On the visual program, Meza presents Water at the White Box, an interactive tape collage/installation instrument wherein the viewer can play a series of water-based sound loops on hanging cassette players.

Out in the world, Meza continues her explorations of overlooked quotidian sounds through her Sonic City PDX project. She called upon a diverse mix of local musicians and composers to select their favorite “sonic sites” in town, crafting a digital walking map and audio tour with QR codes. While audiences are invited to wander and discover the sounds all week long, the project will culminate in special concert on September 15 of original compositions (by Meza, Daniel Menche, Luke Wyland of AU, Matt Carlson of Golden Retriever, Mary Sutton, Eric Mast of E*Rock, and more) inspired by the various locations. So grab your smartphone and head out!

Our late-night stages usually see the greatest concentration of musicians—party DJs, afropop, art rockers, and more—but avant-classical compositions are a relative rarity. Thanks to the Parenthetical Girls‘ knack for expansive and ambitious chamber pop, we’ll have some experimental sounds filling the WHS auditorium at THE WORKS. This evening of performances will draw their wide web of collaborators into the spotlight, featuring music by Golden Retriever, compositions by Jherek Bischoff performed by Classical Revolution PDX, and dance by choreographer Allie Hankins. It’s sure to be an idiosyncratic, lushly-textured performance.

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.

Design happens hand-in-hand with programming as our artistic staff make the first decisions about artists at the end of the previous year. Conversations begin early by looking at past books, programs for peer Festivals around the world, and the particular mix of artists coming to this next TBA. Once we’ve got a scope of the initial projects, we start contacting artists and writing text as early as February, working over the next few months through dozens of revisions, hundreds of emails, piles of printouts, and self-made dummy copies to nail down the exact details we want on each and every page. We design on a grand scale, imagining holographic covers, heat-sensitive inks, tear-out pages and so forth, before remembering that we work at a nonprofit, and reining in our hair-brained schemes a bit. But even if we can’t afford to make print every artist photo as a custom sticker, we still like to make sure that we throw in a few changes.

So, what came of this whole process for 2012? Well, when you pick up your book this year, you’ll probably notice that it feels different—that’s the uncoated paper stock we used. Why? So you can write on it. After years of dealing with smudged notes and marginalia in all our books, we made the change. So highlight your schedule, record that quote you wanted to remember from a talk, or jot down the number you got from the beer garden cutie. We’re so excited by your prospects that we gave you a whole “notes” spread in the back of the guide.

You also might have seen a new break-down of how we lay out the Festival projects. As an organization who supports the interdisciplinary explorations of artists, it seemed out-of-character to continue breaking our programs up into the divisions of ON STAGE/ON SIGHT/ON SCREEN/OUTSIDE, when those classifications rarely capture the works we present. After all, how many ON STAGE shows happened out in parks? How many ON SIGHT artists invited your participation beyond just observing? So it was high time we changed it up, to group projects more by their mode of presentation then their location or medium.

Short-run stage shows and performance-based projects became the PERFORMANCE section, longer-run gallery exhibits and visual installations make up VISUAL ART, late-night club-vibe shows round out THE WORKS, and contextual artist talks and workshops comprise the INSTITUTE.

For the VISUAL section, we featured big, bright, full-spread photos of each of the artists. Since most of the visual artists are developing new work for TBA through residencies and commissions, we thought it was best to foreground images of their work, and leave their polished statements for the exhibit catalogue to come.

In THE WORKS section, we tried to capture more of the energy of our late-night hub with  multiple photos for each night and colored pages. Nothing says “party” like yellow.

And the PERFORMANCE section looks the most like past years. Still, if you’re curious which way a project leans, we’ve called out the broad disciplines by which each artist identifies, noted on the upper right of each artist photo. To help you navigate between the Croatian performance projects and the Japanese music, the Mexican theater and the Congolese dance, we marked off handy little country codes in the top left of each artist page. TBA:12 is one of our most international years yet.  And, for those of you who’d like to go beyond the performances to learn about this year’s artists, we’ve called out all of the related workshops and talks directly on each artist page.

Finally, we splurged and included a bright magenta fold-out map on the back flap of the guidebook. Now, you’ll always know where to find us during the Festival!

Look how far we’ve come in 10 years…

Big Art Group, The People. Photo: Caden Manson.

September marks the exciting tenth anniversary of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time-Based Art Festival, and the first curated by Artistic Director Angela Mattox. Happening September 6–16, 2012, TBA is a convergence of contemporary performance and visual art in Portland, Oregon. The Festival presents dozens of emerging talents and legacy artists from around the world, and particularly champions those individuals who challenge traditional forms and work across mediums. TBA activates the city landscape with projects that bring artists and audiences into close proximity. Itinerant programs fill warehouses, theaters, and city streets with exhibits and performances, while a full schedule of workshops, talks, and late-night socializing offers outlets for the crowds to cross and mingle.

“As a curator, I love when mediums and styles collide,” says Mattox, “and the projects in this year’s Festival are firmly interdisciplinary, often moving between theater, video, movement, and music in a single piece. It is a reflection of current artist practices and of our own desire to have audiences move fluidly between these experiences.” But it is not just the profusion of forms that makes TBA such a uniquely contemporary platform; the Festival also focuses on presenting work that directly addresses the complexity of our current moment. TBA reflects on what it means to be human in today’s times, while also celebrating the creativity and imagination with which artists respond to our circumstances.

The performances this fall reflect both epic themes of democracy, community, and freedom of speech, as well as deeply personal issues around identity, home, and exile. Among the many ideas carried between works in the Festival, there is a strong through-line that looks at art as a mode for social and political activism. Keith Hennessy, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, and Laurie Anderson all present bold new projects that are informed by historical legacy and significant contemporary events. Mattox affirms that, “Art has an important role in advancing culture and reflecting our aspirations for society; TBA supports those artists making an impact in their communities with their work.”

“Given that TBA:12 is our tenth anniversary, I thought deeply about which artists PICA should present,” Mattox remarks. “I wanted to support a few alumni artists, whose work continues to challenge and inspire new audiences, but I also wanted to make sure to introduce new practitioners to Portland and build audiences for a new generation of artists.” PICA is committed to supporting artists over the arc of their professional trajectories by inviting audiences to deeply engage with their work and follow their careers as they develop. To that end, TBA welcomes back legacy artists including Laurie Anderson, Faustin Linyekula, Gob Squad, and Miguel Gutierrez, while presenting the first local engagements by Big Art Group, chelftisch, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, and Nora Chipaumire.

Nora Chipamuire, MIRIAM. Photo: Anotine Tempe.

Between these and other artists, the projects in this year’s Festival hail from Mexico, Japan, Croatia and Serbia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Germany, Zimbabwe, and across the US. “TBA is a unique platform for a diversity of practices and perspectives to thrive,” explains Mattox, “and I want to place Portland in a larger international cultural conversation.” These projects all introduce our local community to the richness of work being created around the globe, while also speaking to local concerns and realities. According to Mattox: “We like to say that TBA is a globally minded festival that is firmly grounded in Portland—the artists may live around the world, but their projects are only realized through the participation of Portland’s artists and audiences.”

Embodying this approach, TBA:12 features several projects that directly connect with locals in the very process of their creation. Big Art Group’s The People—Portland and Keith Hennessy’s Turbulence (a dance about the economy) will both be developed through residencies here in town this spring, and Ant Hampton & Tim Etchell’s The Quiet Volume—a site-specific performance in a public library—is only realized through the direct involvement of its two-person audience. These artists have thoughtfully re-considered the relationships between their art and its audiences; their works are emblematic of TBA as a Festival that reframes our daily experiences through the lens of today’s boldest artistic talents.

THE PROJECTS

BIG ART GROUP, THE PEOPLE—PORTLAND
THEATER/VIDEO, US
With their unmistakable brand of transgressive internet-age aesthetics, Big Art Group broaches themes of democracy, justice, and community in an outdoor spectacle of theater and large-scale video projection. Blending real-time film, live actors, and a video “chorus” of interviews with a cross-section of Portlanders, The People—Portland forms a census of the city at this moment and pushes the formal boundaries of theater and film.

ANT HAMPTON & TIM ETCHELLS, THE QUIET VOLUME
THEATER, UK [US PREMIER]
A self-generated ‘automatic’ performance for two at a time, exploring the strange magic at the heart of reading. Taking cues from words both written and whispered through headphones, the two audience members/participants follow an unlikely path through a pile of books, as outlined by “autoteatro” pioneer Ant Hampton, and artist/writer Tim Etchells.

Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, Asalto al Agua Transparente. Photo: Juan Leduc.

LAGARTIJAS TIRADAS AL SOL, EL RUMOR DEL INCENDIO &
ASALTO AL AGUA TRANSPARENTE
THEATER, MEXICO [US PREMIER]
The young Mexican theater collective presents two politically-charged performances at TBA, blending documentary and drama. In El Rumor del Incendio, the company explores the history of their radical revolutionary forebears in 60s Mexico, reigniting the social critiques of an earlier generation. Asalto al Agua Transparente goes back even further in history, exploring the stark water issues of Lake Texcoco from the Aztec founding of Tenochitlan to the modern day Meixco-city.

MIGUEL GUTIERREZ, HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE
DANCE, US
One of the most provocative choreographers of the New York scene, Gutierrez weaves a rambling and comic monologue that unspools into a bold and ferocious dance. Set to music sung by renowned soprano Cecilia Bartoli, HEAVENS WHAT HAVE I DONE exposes the high personal stakes of artistic practice.

NORA CHIPAUMIRE, MIRIAM
DANCE, ZIMBABWE/US [WORLD PREMIER]
In MIRIAM, Zimbabwe-born, New York-based choreographer Nora Chipaumire creates a deeply personal dance featuring herself and dancer Okwui Okpokwasili. Taking her name from the mother of Jesus; the sister of Aaron and Moses; and the South African singer, activist, and icon Miriam Makeba, MIRIAM explores the tensions that women face between public expectations and private desires and the perfection and sacrifice of the feminine ideal.

KOTA YAMAZAKI/FLUID HUG-HUG, (GLOWING)
DANCE, JAPAN
Famed butoh choreographer Kota Yamazaki has collaborated with six dancers from Japan, Senegal, Ethiopia, and the US on a new performance that blends traditional and avant-garde forms from across cultures. The work evokes classical Japanese aesthetics and the subtle interplay of light and shadow, as inspired by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s famous essay “In Praise of Shadows.”

PERFORATIONS: NEW PERFORMANCE FROM THE BALKANS
PERFORMANCE, CROATIA/SERBIA
Zvonimir Dubrović, founder of Perforacije and Queer Zagreb Festivals, has selected an evening of site-specific performance art from some Croatia and Serbia’s most provocative young artists. Writer and multimedia artist Biljana Kosmogina, performer Petra, and experimental music duo East Rodeo explore the contemporary issues of Balkan life and reveal the latest generation of artists from the region.

SAM GREEN & YO LA TENGO,
THE LOVE SONG OF R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
FILM/MUSIC, US
A “live documentary” from filmmaker Sam Green exploring futurist, architect, engineer, and inventor Buckminster Fuller’s utopian vision of radical social change through a design revolution. With a live score from experimental indie band Yo La Tengo, the film draws inspiration equally from old travelogues, the Benshi tradition, and internet TEDtalks.

Gob Squad, Gob Squad’s Kitchen — You’ve Never Had it So Good. Photo: David Baltzer.

GOB SQUAD, GOB’S SQUAD’S KITCHEN — YOU’VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD
THEATER/FILM, GERMANY/UK
Gob Squad takes a trip back to the underground cinemas of New York to re-create Andy Warhol’s Kitchen (along with Eat, Sleep, and Screen Test), a film that somehow encapsulated all of the hedonistic experimental energy of the swinging sixties. Live actors cross in and out of the films and audience.

CHELFITSCH,
HOT PEPPER, AIR CONDITIONER, AND THE FAREWELL SPEECH
THEATER, JAPAN
Three vignettes track the absurd and mundane stories of a group of office employees in this stylized performance from the renowned Japanese theater company chelfitsch. With a unique choreography derived from everyday gestures, the company references the social and cultural characteristics of today’s Japan, not least of Tokyo, making distinctive mark on contemporary Japanese performance.

FAUSTIN LINYEKULA, LE CARGO
DANCE, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO [US PREMIER]
Legacy, forgetting, and memory form a confluence of forces in the work of choreographer Faustin Linyekula, whose performances are indelibly etched by the experiences of his home in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Linyekula bears witness through his dance to decades of war, terror, and fear, while also subverting the dominant image of contemporary Congo with one of resourcefulness and hope.

Faustin Linyekula, Le Cargo. Photo: Agathe Poupeney.

KEITH HENNESSY, TURBULENCE (A DANCE ABOUT THE ECONOMY)
DANCE, US [WORLD PREMIER]
Bay Area choreographer Keith Hennessy gathers an international ensemble cast to respond to the global economic crisis at the level of the dancing body. The work evolves through improvisation and collaboration; in Portland, a group of guest artists will join and de-stabilize the performance, offering new movements, images, and strategies that explore failure as practice, crisis as movement, and queer as tactic.

VOICES AND ECHOES FROM JAPAN
MUSIC, JAPAN
Acclaimed artist and musician Aki Onda has organized a rare concert from some of the pioneering forces of Japan’s avant-garde sound and music scene. Sound artist Akio Suzuki, experimental poet Gôzô Yoshimasu, and improvisatory guitarist/turntablist Otomo Yoshihide present a range of performances that cross between literature, sound art, music, and improvisation. Together, these ground-breaking artists will invite the audience to reconsider their relationship to sound and the act of listening.

LAURIE ANDERSON, DIRTDAY!
MUSIC/THEATER, US
In honor of the tenth anniversary of the TBA Festival, legendary musician and artist Laurie Anderson performs Dirtday!, the third and final of her groundbreaking solo story works. With signature wit and candor, Anderson engages with the politics of the Occupy movement, theories of evolution, families, history, and animals in this riotous and soulful collection of songs and stories.

VISUAL ART AT THE TBA FESTIVAL
Visual Art Curator Kristan Kennedy has gathered together a group of international artists for End Things, a series of projects and residencies that reflect on “things”—why we make them, why we keep them, and their place in our lives. With an irreverent attitude toward the delineations between mediums, the participating artists shift easily between forms and exist in multiple states at the same time. End Things is work made for the End Times, for an auspicious year such as 2012 when we ask, “But what does it all mean?” Featuring new commissions and residency projects from Alex Cecchetti (Italy), Isabelle Cornaro (France), Claudia Meza (US), Morgan Ritter (US), and Erika Vogt (US).

THE WORKS
TBA’s all-access, no-holds-barred, late-night social club returns for another year of exciting performance and music. From drag rap artists to toy-theater shows to a blacklight cooking demonstration, THE WORKS is a fertile stage for experimentation and raucous fun. Over beers and snacks from local food carts, it is the place to meet artists and other audiences and to debate and discuss all the art of the day. Including performances by Thu Tran & Food Party, Parenthetical Girls, BRAINSTORM, Alexis Blair Penney, David Commander, Laura Heit, CHRISTEENE, and more to be announced.

For more details, visit pica.org. Stay tuned for the full listings of all of the artist projects, visual installations, and THE WORKS. Pass sales begin online in June; individual tickets available in July.

evidenceofbricks.tumblr.com

Well, through our office conversations and the wisdom of the internet, we quickly discovered that bricks have far more than two sides. The tumblr, which originated as an exploration of a symbolic object, became a repository of all of the very literal instances of bricks in our culture, from revolution to fashion to pop culture to music to philosophy. And as the Festival draws nearer, we keep coming across more bricks in the news, in history, in the current London protests, in art, and in the peripheries. And with all of these bricks around us, our culture is built up and dismantled every day.