Chelsea Petrakis/PICA This is one of those TBA performances that will make you irritated and possessive with your time. Confusion, frustration, and disorientation: you’re apt to feel all of those. But that’s the point. Last night was the second and final run of the piece Miriam. I saw it Friday, and I’m still trying to […]
Performance
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Life Coach: The Math Problem
photo by Lord Blakely, via The idea behind Andrew Dickson’s latest TBA offering—following his performances about how to be an eBay PowerSeller and how to sell out—is, on the surface, pretty gimmicky: Dickson acts as a life coach for someone. Participation is free for both the audience and the pre-selected coachees; in a setup that […]
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Miguel Gutierrez Tells and Shows in Heavens What Have I Done
Ian Douglas Miguel Guiterrez walks onto Washington High’s empty stage. “Hi,” he say. “Hi,” the audience dutifully responds. “So,” he says, “my piece has already started.” In his disarming new show Heavens What Have I Done, the New York-based Gutierrez invites the audience onstage to witness firsthand the anxiety, excitement, and inspiration that goes into […]
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Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol: Supertitles are the Worst!
I had two thoughts as I walked out of the premier TBA performance of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El Rumor del Incendio. The first: “well that was charming.” The second: “I want to watch that all over again and not pay one shred of attention to the supertitles.” This is not to say that supertitles […]
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Spectacle Vs. Substance: Big Art Group
So, full disclosure guys, I was pretty stoked to go see opening night of Big Art Group’s The People: Portland tonight. After interviewing both of the New York City based collective’s co-founders, Caden Manson and Jemma Nelson, I was fairly convinced that I was going to dig what they had to offer… Recorded interviews of […]
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Losing Control of the Language: The Quiet Volume
PICA About an hour before seeing The Quiet Volume, while flipping through the new David Foster Wallace biography Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story at Powell’s, I landed on a passage describing how Wallace’s ideas about language were influenced by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s early work characterized language as a rigidly logical system, […]
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TBA Starts Tonight!
The 10th annual Time-Based Art festival kicks off tonight with a performance of Big Art Group’s The People—Portland (a mashup of live theater, video, and footage from interviews with Portlanders, loosely based on the Oresteia)—followed by a free dance party at Washington High, and the opening of TBA’s visual art exhibits. I have it on […]
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Online Relationship Management
One of my favorite articles in this week’s TBA guide is “Online Relationship Management,” by local writer/artist Dylan Meconis. Dylan interviewed writer/artist Claire L. Evans—whom you might know from her work in YACHT—about a presentation Evans is giving at TBA. The interview discusses Evans’ ideas about how online relationships are measured and understood, and it’s […]
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Mike Daisey (Semi-) Live Blog
(Oh yeah: This whole business is being streamed live here, if you’re curious.) 2:23 pm—And here something pretty great happens: Mike Daisey loses his shit, breaking character and pushing himself back from his table, laughing hard for a long spell, his big chest shaking, he’s giddy and enthusiastic and looking—for the first time in like […]
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Rachid Ouramdane/L’A.: World Fair
I’m not going to lie; I had a hard time with this performance. I hardly know what to make of it. Sure, at times I could see themes of nationalism, political oppression, and maybe rebellion, but it was all so conceptual, I could not connect with any of it. As the audience trickled in to […]
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zoe I juniper, A Crack in Everything
PICA Press photo for A Crack in Everything Prior to the show last night, I caught zoe | juniper’s A Crack in Everything Installed. If you’ve seen it (it’s free), you’d probably agree, it’s totally bizarre and unnerving. There’s a series of women, standing in a line with tubetops on; their hair is up and […]
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Dean & Britta: 13 Most Beautiful
Hey demographic, you’re about my age, right? Which means we’re too young to remember Andy Warhol’s experimental art scene of the 60s but old enough to have died of an overdose by now if we’d been a part of it. And so it went for several of the silent Screen Tests subjects chosen by Dean […]