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!

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).

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).

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!)

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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.

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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!