On Saturday, PICA announced the lineup for TBA:09 at its TADA Gala. I think it'll be interesting to see how the festival differs under new Guest Artistic Director Cathy Edwards. I met Cathy last year while photographing her for PICA. As we chatted about TBA, she seemed to have a sharply focused approach to the role of curator—a dramatic departure from Mark Russell's much looser curatorial style. Under Cathy, this year's lineup has strong themes of technology and human interaction, and the associated fear as technology infringes on our privacy. Mark, on the other hand, was fond of saying he would "know" the theme of the festival once it was over.
Cathy is currently the Director of Programming for the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, CT. Prior to that she was Artistic Director of Dance Theater Workshop in New York, where The NY Times recognized her for supporting "provocative, experimental choreographers," and for "daring curatorial choices [that] showed her to be as creative and imaginative as many of the artists she booked."
I'm looking forward to the festival that Cathy, along with PICA's Performing Arts Program Director Erin Boberg Doughton and Visual Art Program Director Kristan Kennedy, have built. It promises to be an interesting and challenging September!
TBA:09 FESTIVAL ARTIST LINEUP
September 3–13, locations and venues to be announced, festival passes on sale now: 503.242.1419.
Performance
Amyo/tinyrage / too (Seattle) Dance
too is a dance/video performance and is the product of two and a half years of filming duets with 50 different people; shooting locations span six US states and three cities in Japan. too follows the fragmented and dreamlike events of two dancers (Amy O'Neal and Ellie Sandstrom) who encounter 50 other people duet style, but manage to miss each other while environments and people constantly change.
Back to Back Theatre / Small Metal Objects (Australia) Theatre
Small Metal Objects unfolds amid real pedestrian traffic in a specially sited environment, the plot unbeknownst to passers-by. On raised seating with individual sets of headphones, the audience is wired into an intensely personal drama as Gary and Steve, the kind of men who normally escape notice, play an inadvertent but pivotal role in an arranged drug transaction.
Erik Friedlander / Block Ice and Propane (New York) Music
A premier avant-garde cellist, Erik Friedlander plays a concert of idiosyncratic American roots music, creating a loose and meditative sound in which he uses his fingers as often as he uses the cello bow. Block Ice & Propane is a collection of solo cello tunes that evoke images of truck-stops, long, lonely highways, and stark panoramas. Lyrical, plain-spoken, and emotional, the project was inspired by memories of summers he spent as a child crossing the U.S. in a station wagon while his father Lee Friedlander photographed an American landscape both elegiac and workaday. Images from these trips and spoken stories from his father accompany Erik's stirring piece.
Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People / Last Meadow (New York) Dance
Last Meadow mines movements and texts from James Dean's three films to create a non-narrative patchwork that describes an America where the jig is up and the dream has died. The piece exploits the iconic and inherently misunderstood image of James Dean as a symbol of the ways in which we project unrealistic and outsized expectations onto each other and onto our identity as a nation. Performance artist and TBA Alum Neal Medlyn is creating music for Last Meadow and visual artist Paul Chan will serve as dramaturg. Last Meadow will have its world premiere at TBA:09 and is a co-commissioned project by PICA, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Flynn Center for the Arts.
Raimund Hoghe / Bolero Variations (Germany) Dance
Raimund Hoghe, a German choreographer, writer and for a decade dramaturg for Pina Bausch, explores ritual and minimalism in his performances, often drawing inspiration from well-known and archetypal pieces of music, in this case Maurice Ravel's Bolero. Instead of relying on the crescendo of the Ravel music to set the tone of the piece, he cycles through different examples of the bolero, from Eydie Gormé & Trio Los Panchos to Maria Callas to Benny Goodman to Tchaikovsky. He includes several interpretations of Ravel's Bolero, including a sound recording from the famous Torvill and Dean ice-dancing performance at the 1984 Olympics in Sarajevo (commentator remarks included-"Here comes the triple lutz!").
TBA:09 marks the U.S. premiere for Raimund Hoghe's company.
Young Jean Lee / The Shipment (New York) Theatre
The Shipment is the newest theater project by TBA:07 Artist Young Jean Lee. Lee is known for her brazen theatrical inventiveness, and The Shipment applies her signature style and acid wit to the black experience in America. In collaboration with an all-black cast, Lee has created a three-part theatre piece that is provocative, terrifyingly astute, and scabrously funny. The title is based on a rap song that is about a shipment of drugs but that also evokes the African slave trade.
The Shipment will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.
locust / Crushed (Seattle) Dance
Crushed is a dance/music/video performance work dealing with the idea of being blindsided. Dancers sing and musicians dance in this feverishly physical dissection of cause and effect. TBA:05 Alum locust returns to Portland with choreographer Amy O'Neal to present this very visceral and exciting new work.
Pan Pan Theatre / Crumb Trail (Ireland) Theatre, Dance
A deconstructed version of Hansel and Gretel, this experimental multi-media theatre piece addresses the anxiety inherent in serving up private lives for public consumption in the internet age. Wickedly funny and densely theatrical, Crumb Trail takes on everything from parent-child relationships to internet predators to the self-aware construction of our own identities. Replete with existential uncertainty and musical interludes, Crumb Trail is a beautifully complex and fast-paced piece of theatre for our time.
Crumb Trail will make its West Coast premiere at TBA:09.
Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods with Philipp Gehmacher/Mumbling Fish / Maybe Forever (Brussels, Belgium) Dance
Vampires struggle with eternity and loneliness. Human beings struggle with each other and with the fact that things are not forever. Everyone struggles with something, and fortunately there are songs that make us feel better about it all. Choreographers Meg Stuart and Philipp Gehmacher let their artistic worlds bleed into one another as they embody the demise of a relationship in Maybe Forever. Brussels-based composer/musician Niko Hafkenscheid joins them on stage, inviting them to waltz to lullabies and into promised lands. But under the velvet surface of sweet melancholy simmers the unexpressed and the embryonic.
Influential dance artist Meg Stuart-an American artist living between Brussels and Berlin-makes a rare U.S. appearance with this West Coast premiere.
Visual Art Exhibitions and Installations
on view through October, 2009. Admission to the Visual Art program is FREE.
Robert Boyd / Tomorrow People (New York) Video Installation
Tomorrow People is a synchronized two-channel video installation. The piece addresses issues of social paranoia and civil distrust in an era of questionable politics using excerpts from syndicated radio talk show hosts, international conspiracists, amateur documentary filmmakers, and the mysterious Commander X. Boyd represents a history of apocalyptic thought as a series of MTV-style music videos within a setting reminiscent of a discotheque.
Antoine Catala / (France + New York) Video Installation
Exploring video compression technologies, Antoine Catala utilizes distortion effects to create video installations that enlighten the medium's very own snags and glitches. In his digital diptychs, he enhances imperfections, renders errors, and highlights other visual malformations to generate complex faceted figures. In rethinking portraiture, he delivers haunted digital composites that move the face across the screen in halting, often painful transmutations of subjectivity. Developing a technique that distorts movement in its continuity, Catala has created a method for inputting data, and outputting distortion, a practice through which he becomes vulnerable to the technology he is manipulating.
Brody Condon / Without Sun (New York) Video, Performance
Named after the classic Chris Marker video Sans Soliel, Brody Condon's Without Sun is a 15-minute compilation of found internet video clips. Utilizing footage of teens experiencing the legal psychedelic drug Salvia divinorum, the sounds and images overlapping, Brody creates a pseudo-narrative utilizing focused on the exterior surface of the "projection of self" into visionary worlds. The clips, posted to YouTube and available worldwide, demonstrate the gap between lived experience of transcendental aims with its representation. For TBA:09 the piece will be installed as video and will also be staged as a live performance, acted out in word and movement by a local dancer and actor selected by the artist.
Sharon Hayes / (New York) Video, Performance
Blurring the lines between social intervention, political activism, and public spectacle, Hayes utilizes video, performance, and installation to orchestrate and document collective activity in the public domain. Informed by theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, her work investigates the relationship between history, politics, and speech and the process of individual and collective subject formation.
For TBA:09 Hayes will develop a new site specific piece which comments on the politics of love.
Jesse Hayward / (Portland, OR) Sculpture, Installation - PICA COMMISSION
Utilizing accumulation, repetition, and ritual, Jesse Hayward creates amorphous armatures out of canvas, plastic, metal, foam, or wood. These assembled forms are covered in ink, raw pigment, and glitter, softening and obscuring the original structure. Resulting in an uncanny use of color, space, and form that re-contextualizes the relationship between painterly and sculptural forms, his work often achieves a heightened sense of balanced chaos and foreshadows the instability and immateriality of future outcomes. The sculptural commingles with the painterly and the drawn, articulating a space wherein boundaries are blurred and the rhythms of color and form create new interpretations of our sacred beliefs and natural environments. Although Hayward engages the basic tropes of art-making, what finally emerges is something alien. The objects exist in a state of diminished hybridization, with multiple genres parasitically collapsing one another.
Johanna Ketola / The Walls Of My Hall (Finland) Video Installation
The Walls Of My Hall is a multi channel video installation, which refers to the human body as a place to exist, a structure, related to its built environment. The work happens in "selected reality" as bodies are at rest and suspended in motion, the surroundings that they inhabit and the furniture they sit upon is radically removed. Stark black, empty spaces still reflect what was once there- what has been erased. An audio soundtrack of live radio broadcast is pumped into the spaces by small radios, an echo of the present world colliding with these frozen people. Although dark and eerie, the piece also reflects a certain sense of humor, a moment of hope that we carry on even when we are represented in real or fictionalized space that is void of support.
Ketola's presentation at TBA:09 will be her United States debut.
Fawn Krieger / (New York) Installation, Video - PICA RESIDENCY + COMMISSION
Krieger will construct a national park as stageset. The structure takes its cues from UNESCO World Heritage sites, Lewis & Clark expeditions, museum dioramas, the Hudson River School, Superstudio, and America's post-war middle-class touristic pastime, the Cross Country trip. Inspired by the artist's own family cross-country trip in 1984, she presents us with an inside-out, indoor landscape-a built environment that asks which of our natures are not made? The sprawling plateau of faded and fleshy territories includes plush, upholstered hills, craggy cement valleys, and cliffs of fragmented cabinetry. With each modeled region, the "untouched" is retouched.
Kalup Linzy / (New York) Video, Performance - PICA RESIDENCY
Acting as director-actor and singer-songwriter, New York-based Kalup Linzy draws on a variety of American pop- and counter-culture genres, including soap operas and early video and performance art. Creating melancholic video narratives that are often frantic and schizophrenic, his storylines mime traditional melodramas while satirizing the medium. Routinely dressed in drag and often lip-synching to Kalup's wildly manipulated prerecorded vocal tracks, the characters interact to uncover the shrewd home truths about race, class, sex, love, family and stereotyping.
Ma Qiusha / From No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili (Beijing, China) Video
Ma Qiusha presents her diaristic video No.4 Pingyuanli to No.4 Tianqiaobeili a simple confessional, which explores the artists' conflict with both parental and societal pressures to be successful. Holding a razorblade on her tongue the artist tells short stories about her life as a young artist, she describes being compelled to strive for perfection, when her female sex has already been deemed "less-than." She talks about for love and affection companionship and understanding while living life as one of the millions of China's "only children". She wonders about her parent's approval and worries about her value to society as an artist and a daughter. Her speech is muddled and stunted by the cutting blade. The video is both psychological portrait and a performance document.
robbinschilds + A.L. Steiner / C.L.U.E. (New York) Performance/Installation
C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) is a collaboration between artists A.L. Steiner and robbinschilds (Layla Childs and Sonya Robbins), AJ Blandford, and Kinski. Like a living organism, C.L.U.E. adapts to the space it temporarily occupies. In this manifestation, it will take the form of site-specific performance, multichannel video installation, and video projection. The flexible nature of this project embraces multiple arrangements of its parts, allowing the environment to inform its presentation. Shifting shape while generating new elements is essential for C.L.U.E. and enables it to continually evolve, remaining a work permanently in progress.
Ethan Rose / Movements (Portland, OR) Installation
Movements, Ethan Rose's latest sound installation, consists of over one hundred altered music boxes carefully timed and methodically displayed across the gallery walls. The tinkering creates a sensation of a shifting texture, housed in a visually stimulating acoustic environment. Rose uniquely blends electronic devices with instruments of the past, including player pianos and carillons, creating sounds and compositions of new sonic possibility, rather than musical preservation.
Stephen Slappe / WE ARE LEGION (Portland, OR) Web Project
Using video, installation, drawing and printmaking, Slappe sifts through the epistemological wake of technology and popular culture. Drawing on sci-fi, vampire, and B-movies, along with Google street view and footage of rural Oregon, his video projections blend humor, absurdity, and anxiety in works that reflect upon the notion of home, transience, and physical and psychological escape. For TBA:09 Slappe creates a never-ending army of costumed children in a web project entitled WE ARE LEGION.
Slow Food Movement / Eat In Picnic (Portland, OR) Picnic
The members of Slow Food Portland-numbering over 500-are a diverse group of food enthusiasts with a curiosity about food traditions and heritage, local artisanal products, sustainable agriculture and the protection of the biodiversity of our local and global food sheds. Members include home and professional chefs, caterers, growers, vintners, restaurateurs, food educators, and lots of ordinary people and families that like to cook and eat and know where their food comes from. Join them in this special free Labor Day Picnic open to one and all.
Film/Performance
Daniel Barrow / Every Time I See Your Picture I Cry (Winnipeg, Canada) Film/ Performance
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Winnipeg-based artist Daniel Barrow uses obsolete technologies to present written, pictorial and cinematic narratives centering on the practices of drawing and collecting. Barrow's newest "manual animation" combines overhead projection with video, music, and live narration to tell the story of a garbage man with a vision to create an independent phone book chronicling the lives of each person in his city.
Hitoshi Toyoda / Nazuna and Spoonfulriver (New York/Tokyo) Film
co-presented with Cinema Project and NW Film Center
Hitoshi Toyoda is a self-taught photographer who has worked exclusively in the medium of slideshows for the past ten years. These slideshows are silent and consist of images taken in the course of his daily life. While the material is taken from the past, the presentation of one image after another appearing and disappearing places emphasis on the weight and value of present moment.
Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill / Between Us (Portland, OR) Performance, Video
Between Us is a performance-based outdoor video installation that examines the lines between private and public spaces, confidentiality and disclosure, voyeurism and exhibitionism. Set in a parking lot, the artists sit in a car and have a "private" conversation. The car is equipped with video cameras and microphones that transmit live video and audio feeds from inside the car. The videos are projected larger-than-life onto a nearby wall and the audio is amplified. The set-up resembles that of a drive-in theater. Unlike a traditional drive-in, however, the car in Between Us faces away from the projected image, converting the car into an imagined stage.
Tyler Wallace + Nicole Dill are completing their undergraduate work at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Danielle Goldman / Close Encounters: Contemporary Dance and Theories of Intimacy (New York) Lecture
Paying particular attention to the choreographers presenting work in the TBA:09 Festival, the lecture will explore connections between contemporary dance and theories of intimacy in philosophy, literature, and histories of photography. What happens when bodies, sensually complex and laden with history, encounter one another at close range?
Peter Kreider / The China Syndrome (New York) Lecture
In conjunction with the release of a catalog co-produced by PICA and the Douglas F. Cooley Gallery, Reed College, TBA:07 artist Kreider returns to Portland to talk about his participation in an exhibition in China and his experience having work fabricated and exhibited in the "world's workshop." Kreider takes us on a wild ride as he recounts his journey from start to finish. In the end a poignant story of an emerging art market, cross-cultural collaboration, folly, intrigue, near catastrophe and eventual triumph emerges.
What are you looking forward to at TBA:09?
