What’s better than starting off with a bang?

 

For our 16th and biggest year yet, we wanted to kick things off properly.

 

Joining us again is Ryan Cross with his new musical project, Dark Reflector. Ryan has played Risk/Reward after-parties before, and is an old friend from long, long ago, when hand2mouth theatre shared an old, crumbling, soon-to-be-condemned building in Old Town with Fever Theatre. When Ryan reached out about sharing his deep-groove music with the festival, we jumped at the chance.

 

And joining Risk/Reward for the first time is Portland-favorite Jet Black Pearl!

 

We have personally seen Jet Black Pearl perform in warehouses and in the dusty, Oregon desert, but she’s also performed in big tops, prisons, living rooms, tunnels, gardens sheds, barges and ruins all over the world. She spent many years in France, and just when the French started to give her several French songwriter awards (Mais oui!), she moved to Portland, Oregon. Now she sings in French and English, but always with a Dutch accent. Get a ticket for Friday night and STICK AROUND – it’s gonna be good!

 

 

 

The Opening Night Party will start right after the conclusion of Friday’s Mainstage show, most likely around 9:15p, with Jet Black Pearl’s fantastic music. Dark Reflector will follow up and perform around 10p!

an occluded person clutches a stack of antique sheets, all different colors and patterns

 

We knew when we decided to go into PICA that we needed to fill some literal, physical space in their massive warehouse, so we turned to the first real Production Manager Risk/Reward has ever had. Back in 2010, Lyndsay was the Production and Event Manager at BodyVox, and ran the entire third year of the Risk/Reward Festival to a T. In the meantime, she’s turned to making art instead of managing art. She’s a member of the AFRU Collective, where she curated 2021’s Specimens show, as well as a Resident Artist with the Zymoglyphic Museum.

She’s currently working on a series of interactive installations and performances called Once in a Lifetime that explore how each of us would like to be remembered after we die, and how our answer to that question changes as we age. Dead People’s Sheets is the first installment in that series.

Constructed out of materials sourced directly from estate sales, Dead People’s Sheets will be a striking physical and emotional presence in the Warehouse space of the Festival. Without spoiling anything, the truth is that secrets and memories await in the out-of-time artifacts of the installation – and both interactive and performative aspects.

 

 

Once in a Lifetime: Dead People’s Sheets will be up for viewing through-out the Festival, and has a special performative element during the Friday night showing of the Festival Mainstage (starting at 7p).

Two dancers entwine with one another in a sunbeam inside an otherwise dark warehouse -

Photo by Adrian Hutapea

 

We are twinning (across two decades of age), sometime twining, and rocking into ways of seeking, dispersing and disappearing. We commit to residing here, inside the devotional rigour of dancing together.

 

Risk/Reward’s shift to PICA’s warehouse and annex theatre this year means we have the space and time to do some unconventional pieces, and we’re ecstatic that Tahni Holt and Emma Lutz-Higgins are going to be one of those. Pairing the rawness of the warehouse with “conventional” theatrical fixtures like a red curtain and lighting instruments, Twin Mash Rock will be a great bridge between the Drag Theatre Workshop and the Mainstage.

Intentionally constructed into sections, the audience is invited to stay for just one part or all of the piece. Maybe you’ll catch the first section on your way out to the nearby food carts, then see how it’s developed as you return, sated, for the evening? Maybe you stick around for the full time and marinate in the full evolution. Or maybe you catch a mere glimpse as you show up for the 7p show on Saturday and find it interesting enough that you stay after the Drag Theatre workshop on Sunday to see the full thing!

​​Emma Lutz-Higgins is a performer, choreographer and teacher residing in Portland, OR. Emma is interested in translation – how “The Dance,” an ever-present phenomena where dance is always happening, can be collected and shaped into an organized performance through research into the interiority of her dancers. It is through this concept that she begins every process. Tahni Holt was born and raised in what is now known as Portland, OR. Tahni has spent her adult life in service to dance, through performance, teachings, community gathering, on-going collaborations, somatic studies and building organizations. For Tahni, dance making is a way to imagine and question and reside in the liminal space, where unraveling is not a marker of failure but one of great power and intrigue.

 

Tahni and Emma will be performing their piece “TWIN MASH ROCK” in a special Site-Specific performance in the PICA warehouse. Catch it only twice:  June 22nd and 23rd, 6pm each evening (between the 2nd Annual Drag Workshop and the Festival Mainstage).

Two people in colorful costumes sip tea in a backyard

 

Drama Informed are two old friends and allies, Miau and Vera, creating space for themselves and others to further discover themselves.

 

Two people in colorful, stylish costumes sit in front of a leopard print background on a backyard deck

Drama Informed are a live electronic dance music duo from Portland, Oregon.

 

 

Drama Informed are two radical queers envisioning an empowered queer utopia together using an immersive sensory experience.

 

Vera (Krista Catwood) is a longtime Portland burlesque dancer, drag artist, stage performer, costume artist, and lead singer for PDX band, Ancient Heat. Miau (Amoxtli Reyes) is a transdisciplinary artist and musician with an MFA from Portland State. Returning Risk/Reward audiences may recognize Amo from ATOLE – we presented their performance of CANELA last August in Portland Center Stage’s studio theater. It’s awesome to be able to bring Vera and Miau in to finish out our Late Night Showcase!


Photos by Mason Rose and Drama Informed.

 

Vera and Miau will be performing their piece “Drama Informed” as part of the Late Night Showcase event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 22nd and 23rd, 10pm each night.

 

 

GET TICKETS!

A DJ stands at a table in front of a large projection of psychedelic illustrations and the word TRANSMUTE

Have you ever been to the ASStral plane? You know, the place to dream, the place to grow, the place to suck your toes until you blow? It’s a place of exploration, transportation, transmutation. Your desires, your fantasies, your big sticky icky wishes can come to life. On the ASStral plane, gorgeous gorgeous girls get their gorgeous gorgeous wings before they fly away. glitch_bitch wants to take you there.

Remember, there’s no shame on the ASStral plane.

 

 

This inventive and recursive video project is the perfect thing for our new Late Night Showcase – artistic, sexy, and weird as hell. Join us in the Warehouse to party on the ASStral plane!

 

Sarah Turner is a new media and video artist who creates large scale immersive environments and performances through analog media and creative coding. She engages in ritual and contemporary mythologies to augment reality through performative psycho spiritual activations. Turner is the Co-Founder of Mobile Projection Unit, which creates site specific installations around the Pacific Northwest & New York through outdoor projection mapping. Her work has been shown at Portland Art Museum, Wieden + Kennedy, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival, Portland International Film Festival, Athens Digital Arts Festival, Northwest Film Center, Spaceness Festival, Marfa Open Festival, Laboratory Residency and more. Turner received an MFA at Alfred University in Electronic Integrated Art.

 

Sarah Turner will be performing their piece “Fantasy Download” as part of the Late Night Showcase event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 22nd and 23rd, 10pm each night.

A naked figure stands in front of a river in an arid landscape, wearing a headdress of orange tulle atop a cow skull

One of the best parts of being at PICA and having both of their huge and excellent spaces is exactly that – having two spaces, right next to each other. Without spoiling exactly what will happen, we are very excited that the Trash Witch Trio is up for blending those two spaces together. Their part of the evening is going to start as the mainstage show is getting out, a long site-specific element that will culminate with the beginning of the 10pm Late Night Showcase. Combining film-making, performance, and ritual, this piece is going to deal with some heavy themes in some very novel ways, and it could only happen in its full glory in this larger, multi-venue festival format.

Crimson Ravarra, Mychelle Moritz, and Megita Denton aka The Trash Witch Trio are three multi-media artists who intertwine the contemporary, movement, fine arts, and time based mediums to evoke powerful social reverberations. Megita’s textile work will also be on view until August as part of Oregon Contemporary’s Biennial.

A figure stands in an arid grassland, green hills in the distance, facing away; they wear an outfit of pink and orange tulle, blowing in the wind

 

Trash Witch Trio will be performing their piece “Brujas de Basura” as part of the Late Night Showcase event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 22nd and 23rd, 10pm each night. (For the FULL experience, come to the 7pm mainstage event and stick around after!)

 

 

GET TICKETS!

A four panel comic of an artist visiting Portland.1: While walking down the street, they think: "I decide to go on a serious wander on my last day in Portland. This street is so nice." There are many plants along the sidewalk.
2: The artist is looking at a portrait. "I go to the museum and see the Frida Kahlo exhibit."
3: The artist is trying on stylish clothes. "I do all the Portland shopping: Bridge + Burn, Wildfang, Powell's, Floating World..."
4: The artist is sitting in a cafe. "I daydream about living here, on a hot beautiful sunny day while trying to imagine the rain." On their phone, they are "reading on a queer dating app that Ezra Furman is in town that night."

Comic by Jam Dyer. Spoiler: Jam lives in Portland now, Powell’s and Floating World worked their magic.

 

Feedback Loop

Here’s some insider info: this is a growth year for Risk/Reward. More artists, more time-slots, more space, all of that. But our hope is that the experience itself will be denser, too. So we’ve started a low-key program called Feedback Loop, where we invite artists to make art in response to the new art that our festival artists are making. One of our Feedback Loop projects is a zine made by some fantastic comickers that will get mailed out, physically, in the weeks following the festival. (Print’s not dead, y’all.)

 

The amazing artists that are going to be live-sketching and writing during this year’s Risk/Reward Festival are:

Liz Yerby

Jam Dyer

Joseph Maslov

BB Andersson

 

Come to the Festival and sign up for the snail-mail list to make sure you’ll get the Feedback Loop zine! (And if you’re a writer/illustrator who might be interested in contributing, drop us a line at info@risk-reward.org.)

A comic illustration of many musicians with instruments and microphones in a tight clump

Comic by BB Andersson

Photo by Avideh Saadatpajouh

 

A keynote speaker at an annual anthropocene conference presents her latest achievement — her metamorphosis into a mushroom.

Sarah Finn (she/they) is a multimedia artist who creates live performance, video, and film. Using surreal storytelling, video, physical performance, and puppetry, they make worlds where queer and regenerative futures emerge from modern ruins.

The phantasmagoric imagery that we’ve seen of Sarah’s work so far is (literally) wild. A cargo ship slips across the stage into the keynote speech; the mushroom grows before us at the lectern. A cityscape in miniature is projected to fill the back wall. We simultaneously have no idea of what to expect and have extremely high hopes for this particular transformation. Risk – into reward.

 

 

 

Sarah K. Finn will be performing their piece “Is this the right thing to be doing?” as part of the mainstage event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 21st through 23rd, 7pm each night.

 

 

GET TICKETS!

Photo by Erin O’Reilly

Seattle’s (self-professed) hottest postmodern, nightlife performance duo, Drama Tops is taking the interstate and coming down to blow us up.

Drama Tops is the artistic partnership of Elby Brosch and Shane Donohue. They began making work together five years ago with the “creation of a solo on two bodies”. The dynamic between their trans body and cis body has created beautiful moments of frustration, competition, tenderness, and comedy.

Here at Risk/Reward, we have an admitted soft spot for wacky props (hey-o, application hack!). Drama Tops are pushing that to the next level. Leather, cordage, ropes, the lights themselves – they are all going to get used. And by inflating so many of their props live, onstage, that just means that many more can fit into the car!

We are over-the-top excited to be presenting this piece, a highly-athletic dance that fuses absurdity with a deep questioning of identity and experience. DADS explores Shane and Elby’s relationships to their fathers, their complex thoughts on becoming dads, and their queer, male thoughts of “getting a Daddy” and “turning into a daddy”. In that context, “daddy” is said in a higher tone with a sassy smirk on their faces, as they reach for the next stage of their journey: becoming “ART DADDIES”.

 

 

The Drama Tops will be performing their piece “DADS” as part of the mainstage event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 21st through 23rd, 7pm each night.

 

 

GET TICKETS!

I’m speaking for everyone on our panel this year when I say we are very excited to be showing Olivia and Celeste Camfield’s new work for dance and film. The kinetic energy, deep roots, and transcendent UFO weirdness of the bits I’ve seen so far put this piece over the top in terms of my own personal anticipation.

Unwinding is a new multimedia performance from Mvskoke sisters Olivia and Celeste Camfield alongside collaborator Woodrow Hunt. Through movement as an offering, live music, and film, the performers explore the relations and abstractions between stories of the Alien, Mvskoke stories of beyond the stars, and themselves as family navigating space.

Olivia Camfield is a multimedia movement artist of the Muscogee Nation, born and raised in the Texas Hill Country. Their work finds connection of dance as body horror, tattooing as protection spells, and farming as Queer Indigenous Futurism. They have performed and choreographed dance for much of their career, their work includes themes of the Alien as kin, time traveling relatives, and Mvskoke lifeways in experimental forms.

Celeste Camfield is a mixed Muskogee artist living on the settled land of the Nʉmʉnʉʉ Sookobitʉ (Comanche), Ndé Kónitsąąíí Gokíyaa (Lipan Apache), Coahuiltecan, Tonkawa, and Jumanos peoples, currently known as Austin, TX. She works in the mediums of movement, film, and food.

Woodrow Hunt is an artist of Klamath, Modoc and Cherokee descent. His experimental work explores the functions and relationship between digital video and memory and the ways digital video can communicate issues related to the Native community.

 

 

 

Olivia Camfield will be performing their piece “UNWINDING” as part of the mainstage event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 21st through 23rd, 7pm each night.

 

 

GET TICKETS!

 

 

Olivia Camfield

 

Celeste Camfield