For the sixth year in a row, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) presents the Time-Based Arts (TBA) Festival, 11 frenzied days of performance, music, and visual art from around the world. This year’s exciting lineup is packed with a few returning favorites, a handful of must-sees, an unprecedented emphasis on Portland-specific work, and a few wild cards—one of the best things about TBA is that it’s often the shows that sound the strangest that end up being the most amazing, as anyone who saw last year’s six-hour-long staged reading of The Great Gatsby will attest.
While Mark Russell, guest artistic director of TBA, doesn’t identify any particular theme to this year’s festival (“A theme would bore me. Ask me after it’s over”), Performing Arts Program Director Erin Boberg Doughton notes that many of this year’s performers share an interest in audience manipulation, and in questioning the notion of “what entertainment means.” Thus the six-hour-long Quizoola!, during which audience members are free to come and go as they please, as actors ask one another—and improvise the answers to—2,000 pre-written questions; or Pichet Klunchun and Myself, a staged dialogue between avant-garde French choreographer Jérôme Bel and traditional Thai dancer Pichet Klunchun about their respective approaches to dance.
TBA has not been without its growing pains, and organizers seem to have heard and taken to heart criticisms of last year’s fest. The Works (TBA’s venue for late-night shows and schmoozing) was at the Wonder Ballroom last year, a largely unpopular choice that attendees complained lacked the spontaneous feel of years past. This time around, the Works will be held at Leftbank, N Broadway’s newly renovated Multi-Craft Plastics building, as are the festival’s visual art exhibits. Additionally, this year organizers aim to make it possible to see every show—and, by reducing the number of nights each show runs, hope to facilitate shared experiences among audience members. (Last year, it was virtually impossible to see everything, and longer show runs meant that it was less likely that folks on any given night had seen many of the same shows, making it harder to drunkenly argue about their merits at the Works.)
While cost is always an issue (many of us simply can’t afford to shell out $275 for a full festival pass), individual tickets are quite affordable, and Works shows are a reasonable $10 a night. Not to mention that all of the visual art programming is free, as are the opening and closing night events and many of the site-specific shows.
Keep reading for a full guide to all that TBA:08 has to offer, and don’t forget to check portlandmercury.com/tba for the Mercury‘s TBA blog, including full coverage of all the festival’s programming, a complete schedule, workshop information, interviews with participating artists, and more!
See
pica.org for tickets. Daniel Beaty