[August 29th, 2007]

It's no secret that TBA is a bit of a gamble. Showing up to any given event during the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's orgiastic two-week performing-arts festival can be as risky as reaching into the hat at a '70s key party—and sometimes just as naughty. Sure, you might go "home" with a talented, unexpectedly thrilling young company (last year, Nature Theater of Oklahoma's hit Poetics: A Ballet Brut), but you could just as well end up in the back of a filthy El Camino, struggling to escape the advances of a mulleted bastard that never should have seen the light of day (i.e., Blinglab's The Untold Misadventures of Lewis and Clark). Don't worry—to minimize your chances of catching something unspeakable, we've subjected this year's performers to thorough background checks and divvied up a handful of the most promising by the performance-art niche they fill. And we even printed our picks early enough for you to get tickets. Now, go ahead and get busy. —Ben Waterhouse

The Fucking Creepy

Charlotte Vanden Eynde & Kurt Vanderdriessche, Map Me
Charlotte Vanden Eynde's geographic realm is bare skin—and lots of it. In Map Me, the young, Brussels-based dancemaker (a delicate, sky-blue-eyed alumna of Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker's PARTS school) investigates what makes a body human by manipulating it half to death. A full video of the hourlong performance (for, ahem, mature audiences only) is not available, but the snips we've spied play out like Body Worlds 3, but live. Created and performed with her partner, actor/installation artist Kurt Vanderdriessche, the duet plays with the ideas of self-image and relationships using the couple's own nude bodies as a palette for video projections, ink pens, duct tape and God knows what else. "I am fascinated by the suggestions that lie on the edge of cruelty and fright," Vanden Eynde told an Italian reporter a few years ago. "I love to work with them." She's not holdin' back. In one of Map Me's phantasmagoric scenes, a pair of hands sculpt the body in ways a yoga master never intended: As Charlotte's pale fingers knead and poke at Kurt's bare back, his skin seems to squish and flow like clay, forming new divots and hillocks, ravines and mountains; new, alien landscapes of flesh. It's at once beautiful, fascinating and somewhat frightening. And it's a land worth traveling to at least once. KELLY CLARKE. Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center. 8:30 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 7-8. 4:30 and 8:30 pm Sunday, Sept. 9. $15 members, $20 general. Mature audiences.

tEEth, Normal and Happy
Angelle Hebert is a Portland-based dancemaker of increasing strength and sophistication, and along with soundscape collaborator Phillip Kraft offers a new work, Normal and Happy, exploring that thin line between what you said and what you wanted to say—illustrated with Hebert's signature herky-jerky, animal-inspired movements. STEPHEN MARC BEAUDOIN. Portland Center for Performing Arts, Winningstad Theatre. 6:30 pm Monday-Wednesday, Sept. 10-12. $15 members, $20 general.

Arnold J. Kemp, Daydream Nation + SuperNatural
The PICA artist explores the political themes of the Dario Argento horror movie The Suspiria Version, in which a guy gets stuck in "a waking nightmare of the damned." Kemp also curates this group show by Portland-area artists working across a wide range of media, for which he asked his artists to interpret contemporary sociopolitical events in a way that reflects the nightmarish surreality of our times. According to the curator, viewers should expect work that is "obscure, paranormal, psychic, rare, spectral, superhuman, uncanny and unnatural." RICHARD SPEER. Pacific Northwest College of Art, Swigert Commons. 9 am-9 pm Sept. 6-29. Free.

The Inscrutably Political

Hand2Mouth Theatre, Repeat After Me
This eclectic Portland performance ensemble is making its TBA debut in style: Repeat After Me, which previewed for four weeks this spring at the Goldsmith Building, is a wild orgy of Americana through popular song, from "My Country 'Tis of Thee" to "Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue" by way of Neil Diamond and 2 Live Crew. The show grew out of Hand2Mouth director Jonathan Walters' fascination with our long history of blatantly nationalist music: "We realized that the same clichéd themes—homelessness, wandering, God's chosen country and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps—are prevalent in both rightist and more complex and interesting music, and that we could identify with them even when we hated the song. And that's when it got complicated." Over the past eight months of rehearsal, the show has found a more concrete focus: the nation at war. Not necessarily this war, or the last war, but the ever-present state of conflict that has defined America since its inception. Hand2Mouth isn't taking sides this time, either: "We've tried to use a lot of songs that are really [politically] ambiguous," Walters says. "We want the whole time to be a mixture of horror and delight." That sounds like America, all right. BW. Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center, 8:30 pm Tuesday-Friday, 4:30 and 8:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 11-15. $15 members, $20 general. Mature audiences.

Las Chicas del 3.5 Floppies
A bleak portrait of two women struggling to get by in the limbo of Mexico's underworld despite the realization that their lives are utterly meaningless, or maybe an anti-imperialist screed—it's hard to tell. The play's successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival won international acclaim for Luis Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio (abbreviated "Legom"), who sounds like a really fun guy. BW. Imago Theatre. 6:30 pm Friday-Monday, Sept. 7-10. $20 members, $25 general.

Andrew Dickson, Sell Out
The ex-Portlander demonstrates how he went from self-righteous hipster to Fortune 500 tool. Appropriately, he explains it with a PowerPoint presentation. Slide one: The bums will always lose. AARON MESH. Wieden & Kennedy Atrium. 6:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 8-9, and Thursday-Friday, Sept. 13-14. $15 members, $20 general.

William Kentridge, 9 Drawings for Projection
The Johannesburg artist turned his feelings about apartheid (he's against it) into stark charcoal sketches. Then he turned those pictures into a slate of short cartoons. AM. Whitsell Auditorium. 7 pm Sunday, Sept. 9, and Thursday, Sept. 13. $6 members, $7 general. Mature audiences.

The Uncomfortable Audience Participation

Mammalian Diving Reflex, Haircuts by Children
"The kids take it sooo seriously," says Darren O'Donnell. He should know. As the artistic director of Toronto-based Mammalian Diving Reflex, O'Donnell has created a piece of "relational art" involving sharp objects, small children and a whole lot of trust. "They're not the dangerous spazzes people tend to think they are," he says. While it's not exactly running with scissors, Haircuts is pretty damn close. That's because, after a little bit of training and a whole lot of encouragement, a group of local 10- to 12-year-olds are set loose on the mullets of willing participants, shears and clippers in hand, all in the name of art. With three "shows" under his belt, O'Donnell says that, while there have been a few "bizarre" botched jobs, there has yet to be an "accident" (i.e., severed ears or punctured scalps). Although he intended the piece to be "wild and crazy," O'Donnell has found it be anything but: "The kids want to do what the 'client' wants," he says. "It backs people into a really interesting corner, and you have to be cool, enlightened, relaxed and have a sense of humor about yourself. I think those are really important things to ask people to find within themselves." At least it's temporary—O'Donnell says he and his collaborators "always joke we should do tattoo or dentistry for kids, too." BYRON BECK. Location TBD. Call 224-7422 for an appointment. Noon-4 pm Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 8-9. Free.

Liz Haley, Polygraph
When a stranger hooks herself up to a polygraph and offers to satisfy the public's every curiosity, you should probably expect to learn more about the people asking the questions than about the stranger in question. Also, it's a surefire way for young Ms. Haley to develop a stalker. MATT KORFHAGE. Gerding Theater Lobby. 1-3 pm Thursday-Friday, Monday-Tuesday, Friday-Sunday, Sept. 6-7, 10-11, 14-15, 5-7 pm Saturday-Sunday, Wednesday-Thursday, Sept. 8-9, 12-13. Free.

Sincerely, John Head, Studio Sessions
Who among us can honestly say that they have not—at one time or another—dreamt of being in Foghat? Now Sincerely, John Head (whose previous projects include all kinds of white-trash/high-art combos) is making those dreams a reality.Studio Sessions lets participants record their favorite songs—well, only those from Foghat's seminal double-live album—and bask in the glow of thousands of imaginary screaming fans. CASEY JARMAN. Call 1-888-774-7456 for an appointment. Free.

Gary Wiseman, Tea Project
Local performance artist Gary Wiseman (half of the partnership behind Kitchen Sink PDX) recently garnered a mention in The New York Times for the color-themed tea parties he's organized in parks and on buses around the city. He'll be heading three parties during TBA. See pica.org for dress codes. BW. Various locations and times, see pica.org or teaproject33.org for details. Free-$3.

Claude Wampler, Performance (Career Ender)
In N.Y. artist Claude Wampler's most recent pieces, she's been hopelessly blurring the lines between stage and crowd, static and performative, rehearsal and the main show. SPOILER ALERT: Some audience members will probably be planted as distractions, and others might even be you. Also, this isn't a career-ender, either. She lied. Good. MK. Gerding Theater. 6:30 and 8:30 pm Wednesday-Sunday, Sept. 12-16. $15 members, $20 general. Reservations required.

The Marathon Performance

Elevator Repair Service, Gatz
TBA's seen some endurance-testing performances over the past five years, but this one takes the cake: The New York-based performance group reads every last word in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby over the course of about six hours (with breaks). Don't let that scare you off, though. "Of course, we were very nervous about this before we did it for a real audience," says ERS artistic director John Collins, "[but] now that we've done it so many times, we realize that the only difficult part of the show is the first 20 minutes, before the action kicks in. After that, audiences tend to forget about time altogether." What's the draw? Gatz, which started out as a primitivist puppet show in 1999, has grown into a full-scale production with a cast of 13 (and no puppets), who play workers in an unidentified small office. One of them starts to read Gatsby, and their daily business operations slowly start to mimic the story. The show's been a terrific hit, receiving rave reviews in Minneapolis, Seattle and festivals around Europe—everywhere but ERS's home turf in New York, where the Fitzgerald estate won't allow the show to be performed lest it compete with another, more traditional Gatsby adaptation. Still not convinced? "Put it this way," Collins says: "We've done lots of hourlong shows over the last 16 years, and this is far and away our most popular and most acclaimed piece. That should say something." BW. Imago Theatre. 4-11:45 pm Friday, 3-10:45 pm Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 14-16. $25 members, $30 general.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma, No Dice
The latest production of the New York-based performance group whose Poetics: A Ballet Brut was the surprise hit of last year's festival, No Dice is a four-hour epic take on American dinner theater, complete with a ham-sandwich break. There's no script—the dialogue, culled from over 100 hours of interviews with ordinary people, is piped into the actors' ears through the iPods they wear throughout the performance. BW. Art Institute of Portland Open Space. 6:30 pm Tuesday-Sunday, Sept. 11-16. $20 members, $25 general.

Stan Shellabarger
Shellabarger is the sort of artist whose long-term projects often involve collecting butter wrappers and fingernail clippings. Lately, his performances have involved a lot of walking back and forth until he wears holes in the carpet. For TBA, he'll don chalk shoes to create lines in intersections and roads along East Burnside Street. Check up on his progress a couple times during the festival. BW. Time and place TBD. See pica.org for info. Sept. 14-16. Free.

The High Art of Hip-hop

Marc Bamuthi Joseph
It's comforting to know that African-American spoken-word performance exists outside of squeaky-clean commercial acts like Russell Simmons' Def Poetry Jam. At a moment when this vital art form hangs in the balance, visionary artists are needed. Enter Marc Bamuthi Joseph. A two-decade-plus performing career spanning Broadway ("Tap Dance Kid"), collaborations with Savion Glover and, yes, even a requisite appearance on the aforementioned Def Poetry Jam, performance artist Joseph has carved out a singular path as a noted artist in movement, music and verse. As part of TBA '07's festivalwide exploration of hip-hop culture's vast influence on contemporary performance, Joseph's multilayered, passionate and eloquent solo performance is sure to be a standout. SMB. Gerding Theater (Mainstage). 8:30 pm Friday-Sunday, Sept. 7-9. $15 members, $20 general.

The Suicide Kings, In Spite of Everything
This wildly popular San Francisco spoken-word troupe, who's performed everywhere from 60 Minutes to the San Quentin penitentiary, has taken its hip-hop theater project a step further with this brutal story about teen violence and school shootings, backed with a cello score by Sam Bass. BW. Winningstad Theatre. 6:30 pm Friday-Saturday, Sept. 7-8. $7 members, $10 general.

Lifesavas
In an era when many hip-hop outfits are trying to find the future through harder hooks or toothless collabos with flavor-of-the-month rock bands, Portland's Lifesavas are taking an old trick and making it new again: bringing the funk. The group's rich latest effort, Gutterfly, embraces hallmarks of the Who-era concept album and honors a rich tradition of independent black musicians without sounding trite or derivative. Lifesavas are truly doing their own thing, and it's putting Portland on the hip-hop map. CJ. The Works at Wonder Ballroom. 10:30 pm Friday, Sept. 7. $8 members, $10 general. 21+.

The Cultural Spoof

Young Jean Lee, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven
Korean-born actress-writer-director Young Jean Lee is one part comic race-baiting provocateur (à la Dave Chappelle), one part chronicler-slash-commentator of societal ills, and too many parts to count theater artist of enormous promise. She's one of New York's hottest current non-commercial theater talents. Most playwrights start a script with an idea that moves them; Lee starts by fantasizing about the type of play that would make her physically ill to write. Then she makes herself write it. Such was the case with this conspicuously flowery-titled and joyfully self-knowing piece about "the Korean-American experience," which deconstructs ideas of self, identity and culture in script, song and dance. Songs of the Dragons also includes some pointed and riotously funny dialogue along the way: "Minorities have all the power—we can take the word "racism" and hurl it at people and demolish them. The wiliness of the Korean is beyond anything you could ever hope to imagine.... I promise you one thing: We will crush you!" SMB. Winningstad Theatre. 6:30 pm Friday-Sunday, Sept. 14-16. $20 members, $25 general. Mature audiences.

Larry Krone, In Concert
Think Brokeback Mountain meets Studio 54 and you just might begin to understand the work of this cross-dressing cowboy-cum-East Village performance artist. Yippee-Ki-Gay!!! BB. Someday Lounge. 8:30 pm Thursday-Saturday. Sept. 13-15. $7 members/$10 general. (included with admission to Holcombe Waller, see right). 21+.

Ina Diane Archer, The Lincoln Film Conspiracy
The Brooklyn director presents a 30-minute satire of film preservation in which we learn that extraterrestrials have been abducting black cinema. Aliens 1, American Film Institute 0. AM. Portland State University Autzen Gallery. 9 am-5 pm Monday-Friday, Sept. 6-Oct. 5. Free.

The Band So Indie It's Art

Anna Oxygen/Cloud Eye Control, An Evening at Ape Canyon
Local-grown performer Anna (Oxygen) Huff's self-dubbed "psychedelic aerobics" are already familiar to audiences here—that is, if anything about her solo performances could be said to be familiar. Amid jumpy, sampled pop, she exhorts audience members to dance along—do jumping jacks, shake like elephants—while singing in a voice that jukes between electroclash Sprechstimme, naive OlyWa musical theater and occasional breathy swoons à la Kate Bush. In the recently named Cloud Eye Control project, Oxygen considers herself lucky to have teamed up in the "majestic experiments" of animator Miwa Matreyek and director Chi-wang Yang, creating with them a series of hyper-operas, sweetly postmodern musical performance pieces that refuse to take themselves too seriously. In the most recent, a very live Ms. Oxygen interacts with projected visuals and obvious set pieces to enact Brechtian-style dramas in full Verfremdung. In "Final Space," a bunch of clones are forced to travel to the moon in a retro-future shuttle to save all of our dreams, whereas in "Subterranean Heart," intrepid jewel miners excavate a song from a woman's torso. Are you getting the idea? Rest assured: Any given evening at Ape Canyon is likely to be one to remember. MK. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Monday, Sept. 10. $8 members, $10 general.

Awesome, Here's What Happened
Will these Seattle-based indie darlings live up to their name? Here's What Happened, Awesome's new stage show featuring whales, secret libraries and explorers, sounds like it's going to be an indie-rock musical mashup of Moby-Dick meets the Decemberists. BB. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 8. $8 members, $10 general. 21+.

Holcombe Waller, Into the Dark Unkown: The Hope Chest
One part intellectual (he studied physics, then switched majors to studio art), one part spiritual (he hangs with Radical Faeries and is 95 percent vegan) and two parts political (he dissed Condi Rice on his album Troubled Times), the title for Waller's TBA show, Into the Dark Unknown: The Hope Chest, describes the space where this enigmatic, queer, sociopolitical pop singer-songwriter explores when he performs. BB. Someday Lounge. 8:30 pm Thursday-Saturday. Sept. 13-15. $7 members, $10 general. 21+ (included with admission to Larry Krone, see above).

Portland Cello Project
Sort of like MacGyver, but instead of paper clips and chewing gum they use cellos. Expect everything from Bach to Britney Spears, Strauss to Salt-N-Pepa. MK. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Tuesday, Sept. 11. $8 members, $10 general.

Some Cats From JapanAki Onda records pretty much everything. He pins memories like butterflies to tape, then remakes their sounds into compressed symphonies or chiming plaints. This time around he's brought friends from Japan who make music with magnets, lightsabers and the beating of their own hearts. What could possibly go wrong? MK. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Sunday, Sept. 16. $8 members, $10 general.

The Masters of Their Universe

Donna Uchizono, State of Heads & Leap to Tall
Some of you may remember Donna Uchizono from such previous TBA offerings as Butterflies from My Hand, in which a dancer falls to the floor after snipping the fabric that suspends her from the ceiling. The rest of you can get acquainted through two very different, but just as visually arresting, dances. One is State of Heads, which invokes a disconnected leadership and the restless wait for millennial disaster, as three quirky characters bobble along to the amplified white noise of whirring timepieces and shattering glass. The other is Leap to Tall, which is Uchizono's paean to the superhuman dance force that is Mikhail Baryshnikov, and just happens to feature the man himself. "It's a big 'just happens to,'" admits Uchizono, who envisioned Superman when she crafted this work based on Misha's famous leaping ability, not just across the world's ballet stages, but from Soviet ballet to the epicenter of modern dance. Here, Misha jumps, but he doesn't do it alone—he's supported by dancers Jodi Melnick and Hristoula Harakas. There are stylistic references to Misha's virtuoso past, but this Leap is really more about relationships. "I'm not showing him for what he's known for," Uchizono says. "What's the point?" HEATHER WISNER. Newmark Theatre. 8:30 pm Saturday-Sunday, Sept. 8-9. $20 members, $25 general. All ages.

Ten Tiny Dances

Mike Barber's kingdom may measure only 4 feet long by 4 feet wide, but the Portland choreographer can make new worlds out of a humble plywood square. Ten Tiny Dances is a 6-year-old dance series created to challenge movers to work within, well, really tiny confines, and everybody from Japan's Eiko & Koma to Oregon Ballet Theater's Christopher Stowell have created minute marvels for it. This year, Seattle's Zoe Scofield, PDX's Sojourn Theatre and, of course, Barber and his electric conspirator Cydney Wilkes, among others, take on the close-quarters challenge. Not to be missed. KC. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Saturday, Sept. 15. $8 members, $10 general. 21+.

Fred Frith, Zenna Parkens, Ikue Mori
Frith splits guitar into shivers and sparks, Parkins amps and warps the harp's expected placidity, and Mori's remade the laptop into a viable tool for percussive improvisation. But it's neither church of the avant-garde nor inchoate spectacle: This is the stuff that matters to music that matters. MK. The Works at Wonder. 10:30 pm Friday, Sept 14. $8 members, $10 general.

Time Based Art Basics

PICA's Time-Based Art Festival takes place in venues all across Portland on Thursday-Sunday, Sept. 6-16. Visit pica.org for info. Buy tickets and passes, make performance reservations, register for workshops and get details at TBA Central, 224 NW 13th Ave., 224-7422. Open noon-6 pm, Tuesday-Friday through Sept. 2; open 10 am-6 pm daily Sept. 3-16. TBA's after-hours HQ The Works will be at the Wonder Ballroom, 128 NE Russell St., 284-8686.

TBA passes—with varying levels of fest access ranging from $50-$500 for PICA members and $75-$500 for non-members—are available by calling 224-7422 or visiting TBA Central. The Works passes ($50 PICA members, $75 general) are also available at TBA Central. Individual TBA performance tickets range in price from free to $30. Purchase tix through ticketweb.com or at pica.org. Works tickets available 9 pm-midnight nightly at the Wonder Ballroom.

Venues

(see pica.org for a full list of TBA venues.)

Art Institute of Portland Open Space: 1125 NW Couch St.
Imago Theatre: 17 SE 8th Ave.
Interstate Firehouse Cultural Center: 5340 N Interstate Ave.
Northwest Neighborhood Cultural Center: 1819 NW Everett St.
Portland Center for the Performing Arts (Winningstad and Newmark Theatres): 1111 SW Broadway
Portland Center Stage Gerding Theater: 128 NW 11th Ave.
Portland State University Autzen Gallery: 724 SW Harrison St., Neuberger Hall, second floor.
Pacific Northwest College of Art: 1241 NW Johnson St.
Someday Lounge: 125 NW 5th Ave.
Wieden & Kennedy Atrium: 224 NW 13th Ave.
Whitsell Auditorium: 1219 SW Park Ave.