TBA 2011: First news
Curator Cathy Edwards says “cults, demigods, proselytizing, and fracturing” are the themes for this year’s dynamic September festival of dance, music and, and uncategorizable performance and visual art.
Posted by: Randy Gragg on Mar 03, 2011 at 07:30AM
2 Comments
The first trickle of news about this year’s TBA festival arrived last week during conversations with curators Cathy Edwards, gearing up for her third and final year as guest curator, and Kristan Kennedy, visual arts curator. Both are still making the hard choices, but here’s a sneak peak at few things they have decided on:
One of the rising talents of the New York dance world, Kyle Abraham will present both his ensemble choreography and one of his celebrated solo works. Writing about his solo, "Brick,” at the Dance Theatre Workshop, New York Times critic Claudia La Rocco described his compelling mix of images from Kara Walker’s dynamic cutouts and 17th-century Japanese prints as offering “a swagger that paradoxically denied and laid bare a core of throbbing hurt.”
Edwards is also cuing French Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane’s “Ordinary Witness,” which PICA will bring on an American tour with the Wexner Center. “Rashid’s work is political—but not in the American sense,” says Edwards. “He doesn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. The work is deep and meditative and amazingly beautiful.”
Finally, Edwards plans to bring back a performer Portland has particularly embraced, Mike Daisey , to present his epic “All the Hours in the Day,” as the name suggests, 24 hours of straight performance. Daisey’s Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs wowed many audiences last year (though, it should be noted, some found it inspiring in moments, but also grating, self-indulgent, and long). Edwards is still figuring out exactly how PICA will present this round-the-clock endurance work. “It’s really a series of monologues specific to each hour of the day and linked globally,” says Edwards. “He follows an idea as it ricochets around the world.”
Since TBA’s visual arts exhibits are often installations developed specifically for the festival, Kennedy may know some of the artists, but what they’ll make is still vague. New Yorker Kate Gilmore, she says, will create something “about building and conquering something—endurance—strange logic and color.” Jesse Sugarmann , of the Springfield-based collective Ditch Projects will reportedly mount a piece “in which he uses air mattresses to topple cars—each one slowly blowing up and creating an anti-climatic crash.” And Patrick Rock, ringleader of the North Portland gallery Rocksbox has proposed “a new giant jump room—part carnival, part sculpture.”
Kennedy adds that she’s taking a chunk of inspiration from the idea of “a brick”—as both foundation and weapon—“the cobblestones pulled from the Paris streets in May of ’68.” Edwards says no theme has yet emerged for her, but “I’ve been thinking about cults, demigods, proselytizing, and fractioning—words like that.” Asked if TBA Central will still be the incredibly well-fitting Washington High School, Edwards and TBA communications director Patrick Leonard both held up crossed fingers. The full festival line-up will be announced at the Tada Ball, April 23.
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Anne, thanks for the link but I still don’t understand the term. What’s the meaning of time based art as say opposed to non-time based art. How would I know a piece of TBA if I saw it on the street? Why the terminology?
This bugs me every year when I read about it in the Oregonian. Is appears to be some sort of phrase that only hip people are to know.
Hi Jane,
Time-based art (as we at PICA use it for the Festival) is a really broad use of a really specific term. The phrase was first used in the 70s to talk about primarily visual art forms that used new media like televisions and video in the gallery, but it has since expanded to include a LOT of art forms. We use it quite broadly to encompass work that has a “time” component, which can really be stretched to include almost any performance, and a good deal of visual art. You’re quite right: in a sense, all art could be considered “time-based”, since there is always time involved in appreciating it (and we’ve even included painting and sculpture in TBA before!).
This year’s TBA Festival includes work that ranges from Shantala Shivalingappa’s traditional Indian dance to Mike Daisey’s 24-hour monologue to a very funny play by Rude Mechs to work that might be more stereotypically thought of as contemporary performance art, like Michael Reinsch’s “Gallery Walk,” where the artist dresses up as a gallery and walks around town reciting poetic compositions. There are also concerts and galleries and comedy and films. There’s nothing exclusive or “too hip” about TBA—we’re simply trying to bring to Portland some of the contemporary art that we find most interesting today,
And, when it comes down to it, we love our acronym! TBA has a great sense of possibility and expectation; to be announced… You never know what to expect. We hope you can join us at some of our shows this year and see for yourself!