For five years now, TBA (aka Portland Institute of Contemporary Art's Time-Based Art festival) has sent viewers scuttling from club to theater to gallery to warehouse and round again. Then at the end of the evening, everyone gathers in and around the Works, TBA's own (temporary) club, for eating, drinking, dancing, and conversation.
Provocative juxtapositions lurk below the surface of much of the festival: grafitti/gallery, street/stage, process/product. The Suicide Kings' In Spite of Everything casts the punch, power, and profanity characteristic of spoken word in the mold of a relatively conventional theatrical narrative. Individual texts address the experience of matters this culture addresses only reluctantly—the spiritual cost of minimum-wage labor, gang life, adolescent alienation, child sexual abuse and adult sexuality—in language of brutal beauty. Quite possibly, we viewers need the fragile container of the larger narrative—the police investigation of a high school shooting—and the piece's conventional staging to render its fearsome, fearful core bearable.
Though equally self-aware and self-referential, Reggie Watts' Disinformation inhabits the world of a very current, socially acceptable topic of discourse—ecological disaster. Sly non-sequiturs, a variety of voices and personas, ad spoofs, and crisp, spontaneous beat-boxing and b-girling create an entertaining, if not particularly challenging, performance.
Next up: Andrew Dickson's Sell Out and The Living Word Project: the break/s by Marc Bamuthi Jospeh, director of In Spite of Everything.
- Cerinda Survant
