Time of Your Life

This Thursday marks the beginning of Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's ninth Time-Based Art Festival, a 10-day rush of dance, theater, comedy, music, film, visual art and other assorted weirdness. There's far too much going on during the festival for any one person to consume—you can browse the whole, bewildering schedule at pica.org—so we've pulled together the events we're most excited by in this first weekend of TBA.

Bausch was felled by cancer two years ago, a blow to the performance world, but her imprint can be found in Namasya, a Sanskrit word meaning "reverence" and the name of the program Shivalingappa will offer here. It focuses on the commonalities, rather than the differences, in cultural styles and pays homage to Shivalingappa's teachers with dances choreographed by her mother, Bausch and Ushio Amagatsu, director of Japan's Sankai Juku butoh company and another of Shivalingappa's mentors. Shivalingappa begins the evening with classical Indian technique and works her way into the many influences that have shaped her choreographic style. She is a fluid, graceful dancer whose eloquent arm movements alone speak volumes about her worldly experience. HEATHER WISNER. Portland State University's Lincoln Performance Hall, 1620 SW Park Ave. 6:30 pm Friday, Sept 9. $20-$25.

The Radio Show

IMAGE: Steven Schreiber

Choreographer Kyle Abraham grew up in Pittsburgh listening to the city’s only urban contemporary radio station, WAMO. When the station went off the air in 2009, even though he had long since moved to New York, he mourned the loss. In The Radio Show, Abraham explores how the disappearance of such a vital institution affects a community and connects the station’s closure to his father’s struggle with Alzheimer’s. It’s a performance inspired by communication breakdowns, both cultural and personal. Accompanied by a collage of popular R&B and hip-hop songs, an original chamber score and snatches of human voices calling out through static, Abraham and his company, Abraham.In.Motion, mix the immediacy of street dancing with the polished elegance of the conservatory. It is the young company’s first full show, and has earned Abraham—described by Out magazine as “the best and brightest creative talent to emerge in New York City in the age of Obama”—a 2010 Bessie Award and accolades from The New York Times, which called the work “smart and self-aware, and luscious too.” It’s an emotional reminder that even when speech is taken away, whether by disease or the economy, the language of movement remains. MATTHEW SINGER. Winningstad Theatre, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway. 6:30 pm Friday-Sunday, Sept. 9-11. $20.

tEEth, Home Made
Since its founding in 2006, Portland's tEEth dance project has consistently been one of the most ambitious and interesting performance groups in the city—with various performances moving through bodily obsessions, unlikely contortions and movements, fabric tubes or vats of goo. But while previously discomfort and the shock of the new often seemed to be goals unto themselves, in Home Made artistic directors Angelle Hebert and Philip Kraft have used these same discomfiting tools in the service of a genuine, beautiful, emotionally fraught intimacy.

But each failure, frustration or moment of violence is also a genuine attempt at consummation, and this is where the piece finds its optimism, and also its genuine ability to move the viewer. After Home Made's initial performance in November of last year, WW called it one of the most powerful performance pieces to come out of Portland in recent memory; in the meantime, as it's toured the country, one can only think that the performance has refined its effects even further. MATTHEW KORFHAGE. The Mouth at Zoomtopia, 810 SE Belmont St. 6:30pm Saturday-Sunday, 8:30 pm Monday-Wednesday, Sept. 10-14. $20.

Beginning at 9 pm this Thursday, Friday and Saturday, the south sides of the Morrison Bridge piers will display video projections, visible from the Hawthorne Bridge, Waterfront Park and the Eastbank Esplanade, inspired by the structure's surprisingly beautiful hidden spaces and the remarkable people who make it work and keep it safe. The film features words and faces of engineers and other public employees who, as it turns out, are conscientious, eloquent and poetic stewards of these civic treasures. And all month, the Hawthorne Bridge will become a gargantuan sound sculpture, its varied vibrations processed and transformed into a striking sonic composition accessible via webcast and telephone call. Hopefully, we'll never cross a bridge again without appreciating what a compelling story it has to tell us. BRETT CAMPBELL. 9 pm Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 8-10. Free.

SEE IT: Tickets to all TBA performances may be purchased at PICA's box office on the campus of Washington High School, at the corner of Southeast Stark Street and 14th Avenue, by phone at 224-7422, or online at pica.org. Individual tickets are $5-$40, and festival passes of varying degrees of inclusivity cost between $45 and $250. 

WWeek 2015