Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) turned 30 this year, making it both a millennial and the creator of the city’s shiniest experimental performance jewel, the Time-Based Art Festival (TBA). Returning September 4-14, this year’s fest brings a full-force two-weekend lineup packed with multimodal poetry, queer opera, and shape-shifting dance.
You’ll find programming at four venues—PICA’s cavernous Hancock headquarters, Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA), Winningstad Theatre, and Reed College—featuring a lineup that leans West Coast, with artists hailing from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles.
Earlier this year, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) withdrew PICA’s $30,000 project grant, funding which was earmarked for artists participating in TBA 2025. The loss underscores the precarity that experimental, artist-first organizations like PICA face. If we want risk-takers to keep showing work in our city, now’s the time to support them, yeah?
The festival’s September 6 talk with PICA’s Creative Exchange Lab (CXL) residency participants is worth a listen, and on September 14, Kye Alive’s buoyant Good Dang Weekend 2 will close up shop with a blast of a bingo game benefiting Elbow Room. Plenty is going down throughout the run—start here and see what grabs you.
Angelo Scott, Omni Rail
PNCA intermedia student and CXL resident artist Angelo Scott kicks off TBA with Omni Rail, a walk-through sound installation that transforms the college into an instrument. How, you understandably wonder? Designed from the 511 Building’s stairwells, railings, and cable system, the “ambisonic” project (read: immersive, surrounding the experiencer from all directions) conjures tones from the school’s architecture. In collaboration with choreographer Muffie Delgado Connelly, an ensemble will activate the instrument on opening night, sending tones echoing across the atrium, mezzanine, and balcony floors. (PNCA, 511 NW Broadway, performance Thur Sept 4 at 6 pm, on view through Sept 14, free)
San Cha, Inebria me
San Cha’s repeat TBA appearances, including the 2019 show that was famously so packed the Mercury’s Martha Daghlian couldn’t get inside, have cemented her as a fest favorite. The LA-based Mexican American musician and performance artist will return with the West Coast premiere of Inebria me, an experimental opera that queers the melodrama of telenovelas with live music, libretto, and alternative family structures. A trans and queer BIPOC team backs the genre-mashing performance, which merges ranchera, cumbia, mariachi, punk, and industrial. (Winningstad Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, performances Sept 5–6 at 8 pm, students/seniors $25, adults $35, true cost $50)
Justine A. Chambers, The Brutal Joy: A Lecture
If you caught Autumn Knight’s PICA performance NOTHING#15: a bed last October, you likely spotted Justine A. Chambers gliding through the warehouse on roller skates. In The Brutal Joy: A Lecture, the Vancouver, BC-based dancer-choreographer explores Black vernacular dance, fashion, and dandyism as living archives; she’ll weave family memories from the South Side of Chicago with reflections on ritual and improvisation, then lead the audience in the Electric Slide. (PICA, 15 NE Hancock, Sat Sept 6, 7:30 pm, sliding scale $10, $20, $50)
Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins, Horizon
TBA veteran Tahni Holt (Duet Love, 2014) joins forces with Emma Lutz-Higgins, who recently premiered her work Floor through Performance Works Northwest’s Alembic Residency, for Horizon. Shaped in collaboration with ambient composer Luke Wyland, artist Jess Perlitz, lighting designers Al Knight Blaine and James Mapes, costume designer Kim Smith Claudel, and dramaturg Kate Bredeson, the dance performance rests in the fuzzy conceptual territory of “becoming.” “Becoming a rock. Becoming a cloud. A sculpture becoming a body… A lightwave becoming a rainbow,” the show statement declares, asserting a wiggly spirit of loose identification and porous expression. (PICA, 15 NE Hancock, Sat Sept 6, 7:30 pm, sliding scale $10, $20, $50)
The Untitled Native Project: Live at PICA
In keeping with the hyperlocal spirit of this year’s TBA, The Untitled Native Project presents a live hybrid talk show centering Oregon history-sharing and contemporary Native perspectives. The show features artists from regional tribal communities—Amber Ball, Leland Butler, David Harrelson, Anthony Hudson, Trevino Brings Plenty, Woodrow Hunt, LaRonn Katchia, and Steph Littlebird—as well as Mvskoke artist Olivia Camfield and Hawaiian artist Kanani Miyamoto. Judging by the event’s cheeky use of Papyrus (“It sure is great being white males!”), expect irreverence. (PICA, 15 NE Hancock, Sun Sept 7, 7:30 pm, in-person or livestream, sliding scale $10, $20, $50, free for Indigenous audience members)
Dao Strom, Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs
Portland poet-artist and 2022 Oregon Book Award winner Dao Strom returns to TBA with another multimodal poetry experiment. (You might remember masking up for the release of her publication Instrument/Traveler’s Ode during the 2020 festival.) Strom’s new hybrid album and chapbook series Tender Revolutions/Yellow Songs reckons with “yellow subjectivities” and the layered terrain of diasporic identity. She’ll transform PICA’s annex with a visual poetry installation and two live performances, joined by Vietnamese women artist collective She Who Has No Master(s) and chamber ensemble Fear No Music for sets blending poetry and diasporic songs. (PICA Annex, 15 NE Hancock, Sept 12–13 6 pm, on view through Oct 4, sliding scale $20, $35, $50)
Lindsay Costello
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