PICA's TBA: 3 interpreted shows

*

As a part of their annual TBA* Festival , PICA** presents three interpreted performances

*Time-Based Art

**Portland Institute for Creative Art

Sat 9/8 "Jack &"

Wed 9/12 "Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)"

Fri 9/14 "Album"

Sat 9/8 "Jack &"

at PORTLAND’5: WINNINGSTAD THEATRE  1111 SW Broadway, Portland OR

6:30 pm

tickets $20-25

JACK & is a stand-up routine turned sitcom baking fiasco that mingles cakes and kitchen disasters, recipes and remedies, jokes, and goldfish to paint the portrait of a dream interrupted and resumed. The comedy of errors is structured on social codes and training from prison reentry programs to debutante balls. The performance considers re-entry to society after prison, focusing not the time one has served but the measure of one’s dreaming that is given to the state.


“Jack” works the night shift at an industrial bakery. He returns home to bake a cake for his wife “Jill”; “Jack” ends up whirling through a dance—part dream, part ritual—re-entering his own internal life. The performance draws on aspirational class stories like those in The Honeymooners and Amos & Andy; the paintings of Agnes Martin, Ellen Gallagher and Ruth Azawa; tigers in Harlem; real and imagined entering society ceremonies like Cotillion balls; and markers of transition from John Canoe traditions, to the mirroring and mimicry found in African American dance pageantry of the late nineteenth Century.

Wed 9/12 "Unexploded Ordnances (UXO)"

at ARTISTS REPERTORY THEATRE  1515 SW Morrison St, Portland OR

7:30 pm

tickets $25-35

Combining a Dr. Strangelove-inspired performance with a daring forum for public conversation, Unexploded Ordnances (UXO) explores aging, anxiety, hidden desires, and how to look forward when the future is uncertain. Adopting the characters of a bombastic general and an ineffectual president, Peggy Shaw and Lois Weaver of the performance troupe Split Britches lace this interactive piece with playful urgency and lethargy, to encourage discussion about the political landscape. In the “Situation Room,” twelve audience members are invited to become a Council of Elders to discuss the global issues of the day, as the company weaves in satirical insights and humour. The two pioneering theatre-makers see undisturbed ordnances as a metaphor for the disregarded potential in elders, and hope to uncover buried resources in us all.

Founded in New York in 1980 with Deb Margolin, Split Britches continues with the duo and solo work of Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw which spans satirical, gender-bending performance, methods for public engagement, videography, digital and print media, explorations of aging and well-being, and iconic lesbian-feminist theatre.

Fri 9/14 "Album"

at PICA  15 NE Hancock St., Portland OR

8:30 pm

tickets $16-20

US WEST COAST PREMIERE ALBUM is a solo performance that unites text, song, and dance inside of the content of an album—a picture album, a song album, an autobiographical album, a herstorical album—and the work finds ways to be an archive, or altar, for Valencia’s body. Through factual, humorous, and grave observations, a frame of self-identification is established and charged with the task to preserve and perform a self herstory as an album in image and song. Valencia’s relationship to urbanity, vampires, love, and marginality arise with equal importance as she orbits the primary curiosity: Who will write herstory? ALBUM starts this process—so the author of Valencia’s herstory can have good notes.