TBA:22: Who and what to watch

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, September 6, 2022

The Time‐Based Art Festival opens this week (Sept. 8 to 18, various Portland locations), this time without its late-night social scene, but with plenty of avant garde performance on view.

We look at some of the artists who are playing TBA:22 in Portland, who may be worth a $150 pass, and check out our sidebar on Adrienne Truscott and her show “THIS” on page B4.

Takahiro Yamamoto

“NOTHINGBEING”

Portland-based movement artist Takahiro Yamamoto’s NOTHINGBEING gets its world premiere Sept. 9-11 at the PICA Annex (15 N.E. Hancock St.).

Developed in collaboration with Samita Sinha, David Thomson, and Anna Martine Whitehead, the dance piece uses three actors to embody the Japanese philosophical idea of nothingness.

According to PICA, which commissioned the piece with funding from the Japan Foundation and the National Performance Network, “This work will invite the viewers to ‘be’ in the space together as they witness the performers engaging in questions of not thinking, feeling, surrendering, transforming, conjuring, and forgetting.”

Erin Boberg Doughton, Artistic Director & Curator of Performance at PICA, told the Portland Tribune, “They’ve been exploring that in the studio through movement, through dialogue with each other, through singing and through design. It’s mostly a very abstract dance performance, but there is some vocalization and there’s a beautiful design by Jeff Forbes, who is a Portland-based lighting designer who’s worked with a number of dance companies.”

She said an earlier version of the work has already shown at PICA.

“One of the reasons we called the festival TBA is, not only to mean time-based art, but also to mean ‘to be announced.’ You’re going to see something that maybe you don’t know that much about yet, or hasn’t been seen before.”

PICA promises this performance will include flickering lights and sudden loud noise.

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko

The Hold

This Nigerian-American’s gallery exhibit kicks off with a free dance show and immersive experience that seeks to focus the idea of the hold of a ship, the storage space. (Performance 6 p.m. Sept. 10, free; exhibition Sept. 6-Oct.14, Pacific Northwest College of Art, 511 N.W. Broadway.)

The exhibit includes a multi-channel video installation based on an ongoing project that Kosoko has been developing called “Syllabus for Black Love.” Kosoko has done arts fellowships at MacDowell Fellow, Pew and Princeton, and is also a Red Bull Writing Fellow. Homework: read their book link)Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts (2022) :http://wendyssubway.com/publishing/titles/black-body-amnesia . Dress to impress, live video that will be recorded during the performance. Nial Harris and DJ Queen Drea also perform.

Garima Thakur

“Bioscope”

Meanwhile outside PNCA that evening is another free show, as Garima Thakur presents , one of those early 20th century boxes that uses a hand crank to show a short, low frame rate movie. (6 p.m. Sept. 10, outside PNCA, free.) Interested parties can kneel down to peep into the box at a five-channel video. New Delhi-born Thakur gives us an insight into bodily shame, using a format that has a long half-life in India.

Sasha Wortzel

“Dreams of Unknown Islands”

The same night at Reed College there is an opening for Sasha Wortzel’s show (Sept. 10-Nov. 20, Cooley Gallery, )The show has video and sculpture conjuring up five islands, with audio of voices reciting Kaddish. Also, shows five of her short films at the Hollywood Theater.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson and DB Amorin

“They Can Never Burn The Stars”

Chloe Alexandra Thompson and DB Amorin’s “They Can Never Burn The Stars” (9 p.m. Sept. 15, PICA, 15 N.E. Hancock St. sliding scale $5 upwards.) is a sound and light experience, curated by an Indigenous curatorial collective called Knowledge of Wounds. Non-Portland contributors hail from Australia and New York: Remote work is now common in this kind of artistic practice, as music and video make creation a global phenomenon, even for starving artists. TBA was always global and still is, on a smaller budget. This has the sub-bass tones to high-pitched sirens you normally pay extra for at TBA, but this is Five Dollar Thursday. Homework: and this word smoothie .

Sylvan Oswald

“High Winds”

Straight white males are always in short supply at TBA, but for lovers of westerns there is a show called “High Winds” by Sylvan Oswald, about a trans man. (Sept. 9 to 11, Winningstad Theatre, 111 S.W. Broadway.)

Oswald is a trans man, a playwright and the creator of the show. The character is also called High Winds and is portrayed performed by another trans male actor. PICA calls it “a performance text about a trans man whose insomnia sparks a fantastical search for his estranged half-brother through hallucinatory desert landscapes.”

Boberg Doughton explained: “Sometimes artists are making work that’s not about their identity, so in that case, we don’t forward that. We really have a super diverse festival where there are a lot of queer, trans, people of color, Indigenous folks. It’s something that we focus on because those artists have been left out of a lot of contemporary programming over the years. We’re a platform for supporting new voices, and it’s what our audiences want to see.”

NOTE: What used to be called the Works, a place for socializing and late-night shows, has been dropped out of audience fears of spreading COVID-19. “We’re really dipping our toes back into gathering, what it means to have social environments around the work and the festival,” said Boberg Doughton. There will, however, be a bar before and after each performance at PICA.