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High
Tide for Performing Arts In the past four years, Portland's Time Based Art Festival has established itself as the one of the world's finest showcases for genre-busting performers, invigorating our region with influences from around the world. Attending TBA is like entering a time machine that takes us to the future of art.
This year's TBA will be the first without PICA founder and Northwest native Kristy Edmunds, who's now running an even bigger festival in Melbourne. The festival could hardly have done better than this year's guest director. From 1983 to 2004, Mark Russell headed New York City's P.S. 122, the amazing cultural center that brought national attention to artists from Blue Man Group to John Leguizamo to Karen Finley. The 10-day festival launches Sept. 7 with a free outdoor guitar jam featuring dozens of Portland axe-wielders, but most of the musical events happen at The Works, an improvised performance/gathering space (this year in an eastside warehouse) that allows late night dancing, schmoozing and imbibing accompanied by Portland musicians, including Copy, music/film collective Small Sails and punk popsters 31 Knots. Other Works acts include Cynthia Hopkins' Gloria Deluxe in a cycle about a fading obscure pop singer, Brooklyn's Hew Humans minimalist sonic op art, the theater/hip hop/poetry/dance collective Universes and a host of gender benders, including drag comedians Sissyboy, Neal Medlyn, multimedia dance/music/sex poseurs Fleshtone and many more. Performance art has been a TBA mainstay, and this year the festival has booked the world's best-known performing artist, Laurie Anderson, to sing and tell stories in her "The End of the Moon." If you weren't one of the Eugeneans who saw that show in her sold-out appearance at The Shedd last year (see our online archive, www.eugeneweekly.com/2005/03/10/music.html) here's a second chance to catch her. TBA is also showing the concert film of her dazzling "Home of the Brave."
Portland's David Eckard takes art out of the museums and into the water with his suspended "mirror, lace and fire-adorned carriage" that floats down the Willamette and projects music to both shores. France's Philip Quesne invokes Dada, rocket chairs, myth, birdsong, rubber chickens and more in "The Itching of the Wings." Kiki & Herb (recently lauded in The New York Times) will bring their much-praised demented cross dressing camp cabaret. Jolly Ship the Whizbang presents a "musical pirate puppet sea saga." Other highlights: journalist hip hop poet Jerry Quickley's tales of Iraq embedding, Blinglab's homoerotic Lewis & Clark puppet parody and a Spalding Gray tribute. TBA has presented some of the most intriguing dance performances I've ever seen. This year's star is the legendary Deborah Hay, who established her reputation on New York's 1960s downtown scene before moving to Austin and igniting the dance scene there for the past generation. TBA features her "Mountain," a collaboration with three contemporary Northwest choreographers, and "Room," two solos Hay commissioned from Northwest dancer/choreographers Linda Austin and Tahni Holt. "Landing/Place," by another of America's most renowned choreographers, New York's Bebe Miller, uses motion capture technology, video, dance, digital animation and soundscapes to explore cultural dislocation. Seattle's Crispin Spaeth gives small audiences night vision goggles to experience the intimate space of her "Dark Room." TBA has long been a showcase for filmmakers, and I'm looking forward to Trevor Paglen and the Speculative Archive's delve into the CIA's notorious rendition program, which used unmarked "torture planes" to fly suspected terrorists to Syria and other inhumane places. Other film highlights: the Oregon Department of Kick-Ass's assemblage of filmic meditations on death and more personal works by Johanna Billing and Beth Campbell. One of the biggest names at this year's festival is Marina Abramovic, the Croatian performance artist whose challenging, sometimes disturbing works have electrified arts capitals for a generation. Her "Balkan Erotic Epic," a multichannel video installation, deals with how pagan traditions defined sexuality. Other video installations (some of them mobile or outdoors) include Theo Angell's "The Burn," depicting the 2003 devastation of an Oregon forest, works by British East-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas, Blanc & Bovee's "Desktop" and "Laptop" and Edie Tsong's "Telecommunity Portrait," Harrell Fletcher's "The American War" (Vietnam from the other side), Matthew Day Jackson's reconceived post apocalyptic mythology and other spectacles, including an evolving structural landscape of rice grains. Given that Edmunds and most of the other PICA honchas are visual artists and that PICA started as primarily an art gallery, it's a bit ironic that this will be the first year that TBA, under Russell — whose background is in avant garde theater — incorporates visual artists. It's another sign that TBA intends to maintain the restless attitude that's brought the festival, and Oregon art, to worldwide attention. We're lucky to have it happening just up the road. The best way to plan this year's saturation in the art of tomorrow is to start at www.pica.org/tba/tba06
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