Thien-Kim Bui & Sumi Wu / PPGIS (Portland, OR): where is what we map

Sculpture

Cut/Paste by Thien-Kim Bui.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

“where is what we map” is a public participation geographic imagination sculpture. Welcomed by a tour guide to a 3-D raised relief model of an undetermined place, visitors are invited to contribute to this collage installation using maps, found items, memorabilia, and other ephemera, to mark and find their way.

BIO

Sumi Wu is an artist, sculptor, and theatrical designer. She has created numerous large-scale public and private art commissions throughout the Pacific Northwest. Her sculptural media include cast and handblown glass, fabricated and cast metals: stainless steel, bronze, and aluminum. Sumi maintains parallel careers in public art and theatrical design of sets, costumes, and props for dance, opera, and theatre. Her artwork is informed by the cooperative exploration of the workings of the human mind and heart that is possible in the performing arts.

Thien-Kim Bui is a geographer, PhD candidate in Earth, Environment and Society at Portland State University, and a senior fellow at the National Policy Consensus Center. In their work, Bui uses participatory mapping and other community-based methods to promote environmental engagement and study water governance and stewardship in the US West. Recently, their papercut map collage was selected for inclusion in “you are here: the journal of creative geography.”

CREDIT

Thien-Kim Bui: Lead Facilitator/Tour Guide; Sculptor
Sumi Wu: Lead Sculptor, Facilitator/Tour Guide

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Vlada Kremenović (Seattle, WA): Medusa

Dance

Pictured: Vlada Kremenović, photo by Fox Whitney

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Medusa is an absurdist, sensuous performance where six trans and queer performers inhabit the jellyfish life cycle. Through drifting bodies, immersive media, and original music, scientific allegory dissolves into humor, desire, and vulnerability—offering a tender, political reflection on sexuality, survival, and shared animal life.

BIO

Vlada Kremenović (she/her), aka Sasha Sobbing, is a tran* immigrant artist working in dance, video, performance, and arts administration. Originally from Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vlada has been making works in Seattle since 2017. She’s presented physical and virtual performances with her company CommonForm locally, as well as inter/nationally in Oregon, California, British Columbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. Vlada has collaborated with Fox Whitney since 2020 as a performer, video artist, director of photography, and vocalist, including for his upcoming Made in Seattle 2027 project, LOOK/OUT. She was a 2023 Seattle City Artist, and was awarded funding from 4Culture, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. 

Vlada founded CommonForm in 2019, to present works that are highly engaging, but not entertaining; rigorous, but not technical; political, but not contrived; approachable, but not simplified. Her work draws upon themes from queerness, immigration, nature, architecture, natural sciences, and history to create algorithmic movement installations in pursuit of the collective emergence of truth between performers and audiences through improvisational structures anchored in time and space. 

Descending from a long lineage of Bosnian peasants, Vlada’s art rejects the elitism of post-modernism while embracing its capacity for performer/audience autonomy, freedom from colonialist/classicist ideals, and creating containers for radical empathy.

She’s worked with Alice Gosti, Heather Kravas, Jordan Macintosh-Hougham, Noelle Price, Melissa Riker, Karin Stevens, Petra Zanki, and more. 

CREDIT

Performer/Creators
Vlada Kremenović – Choreography
Fox Whitney – Music
Jessica Jones – Lights/Projections
Tayler Tucker – Costume Design
Performers: Vlada Kremenović, Tayler Tucker, Lio Sainz-Jones, Will Courtney

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Kole Galbraith (Seattle, WA): Q’essápi kәsϚác’әc’ snk’әl’íp

Music, Film

Image courtesy of Kole Galbraith.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Influenced by interior Salish folklore and contemporary indigenous experience, Galbraith mixes materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and to uncover latent histories.

BIO

Kole Galbraith is a multi-disciplinary artist who focuses on sound, audio-visual, and found-object installation. Based in both Seattle, Washington, Galbraith has been active in the underground experimental music community for the past decade performing throughout the United States and Europe. Sonically his sonic studio compositions are informed by early 20th century French musique-concrète, metal, jazz and contemporary composition. Thematically, the compositions are influenced by interior Salish folklore, and contemporary indigenous experience. Galbraith mixes using materials found in nature with electronic techniques to uncover both latent sonic capabilities and to uncover latent histories. Galbraith has released albums on his own label, Obscure & Terrible, and other labels such as SIGE, Titania Tapes, Peyote Tapes and Krim Kram.

Beyond solo performances Galbraith regularly performs together with Jason Lazar in the psy-jazz duo named “Coyote Teeth”. Additionally, Galbraith has worked with musicians including Lori Goldston, Greg Kelley, Jessika Kenney, Raven Chacon (Navajo), Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), Nathan Young (Delaware), Zach Rowden, AF Jones, Casey Adams, Cigvë, Chloe Alexandra Thompson (Cree), Patrick Wurzwallner, Maja Osojnik, morher and Noel Kennon. Next to his sound practice, Galbraith collaborates regularly with visual artist Sean Waple to create audio-visual installations. Galbraith is a member of the indigenous collective COUSIN, a descendant of the Arrow Lakes Band, and an enrolled member of the Peoria Tribe of Oklahoma.

CREDIT

Kole Galbraith – Audio and Video

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Marisa Conroy & Olivia Bratko (Portland, OR): Bird, I am

Performance Art, Theatre

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Marisa is a fucking bird. They came to this realization after leading an unsatisfactory life as a human. Working through an old phone switchboard, they broadcast their call, searching for connection, looking for another song like theirs.

BIO

Marisa Conroy (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, producer, and production manager. They translate inner narratives into tangible visual and auditory expressions through sound and video, merging the digital with the biological. Their performances serve as a platform to embody the plurality of the self, fostering communal self-reflection in the digital age. As a producer, production manager, and sound/video designer, Marisa has collaborated with jaamil olawale kosoko (Voncena’s Spell, chameleon), Sister Sylvester (The Eagle and the Tortoise, Drinking Brecht, Constantinopliad), Big Art Group (The Render, Broke House, Trouble), and Social Sciences Productions (Queer Fantasia). 

Olivia Bratko is a live artist whose work explores the fragmented and imperfect nature of our perception of reality and our (in)ability to know. Sometimes she makes comedy-focused work with elements of philosophy and performance art, and sometimes she makes performance art with elements of comedy. It’s all good fun and a bit twisted. She’s currently performing in the Compton Cafeteria Riot show, and premiering a new show “Trey” in San Francisco in July. She currently lives in San Francisco.

Cosette (Ettie) Pin is a multi-disciplinary designer, specializing in lighting, sound, projection, and scenic design for theatre and live performance. Their work has taken them across Canada, the United States, the UK, and over 20 additional countries globally, designing for several companies and venues of varying sizes and theatrical form. A graduate of the National Theatre School of Canada in Production Design and Technical Arts, Cosette is dedicated to producing innovative work by merging the technical and the artistic; the cerebral and the visceral. They are the Technical Director and Production Designer for Sasha Velour.

CREDIT

Marisa Conroy, Creator/Performer/Sound Design
Olivia Bratko, Creator/Performer/Director
Ettie Pin, Scenic/LX Consultant

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Jennifer Wright (Portland, OR): ASMR Triptych

Live Sound Installation

Photo of Jennifer Wright by Matias Brecher.

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

“ASMR Triptych” is an interactive solo performance that invites audiences to interact with the performer, co-creating a delicate, soothing soundscape environment as she cycles through slow-moving rituals in three magical costume-constructions, each made of a material with uniquely stress-relieving properties: bubble wrap, Velcro, and a profusion of tiny metal charms attached to a metal cage-dress.

BIO

Jennifer Wright, M.M., B.M., is a pianist, composer, interdisciplinary artist, performer, educator, producer, and instrument creator whose work investigates social and environmental issues through dynamic, multi-sensory sonic experiences. She teaches at Reed College and in her private studio in Portland, Oregon.

Jennifer creates boundary-warping and transformative performative experiences. Her exuberantly experimental works meld diverse disciplines, narrative modes, and creative expressions into an adventurous and deeply intentional practice. Jennifer performs regularly as a solo and collaborative artist and has performed across the U.S.A., the U.K., Europe, and Cuba. Her many experimental instrument creations include the “Skeleton Piano” (a deconstructed piano that she plays from the inside out), the “Glass Piano” (a glass-rod instrument created from the remains of a Steinway grand incinerated in an antisemitic arson fire), “Arachne” (a gigantic, 160-foot-long web of tensioned steel cables) and her fleet of “Post-Apocalyptic Instruments”: a wild array of sound sculptures and installations built from trash, found objects, and industrial metal debris.

Her compositions have been performed at the 29th/31st Annual Festival de La Habana de Música Contemporánea in Cuba, on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud, the Fairbanks Summer Arts Festival, the 2020/2023 New Music Gathering Festivals, the Astoria Music Festival, March Music Moderne and Cascadia Composers concerts, the 2025 SubSuperior Festival in Duluth, MN, the Eugene Difficult Music Ensemble (EDME) 2023 New Music Festival and 2025 Ambient Ecology Festival, on KBOO, XRAY and KTCB radio, and on KGW TV and Cuban National TV. Since 2022, Jennifer has been Composer in Residence at Portland’s Zidell Shipyards, creating the ground-breaking “Break to Build” and “Long Strings” shows featuring site-specific sound installations that she built from over three tons of industrial debris.

Jennifer has collaborated with artists such as the Venerable Showers of Beauty Gamelan Orchestra, ProLab Dance, The Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, video artist Nanda D’Agostino, Heidi Duckler Dance NW, pianist Kathleen Supove, Ensemble Interactivo de la Habana, filmmaker Takafumi Uehara, aerialist Jordie Campbell, Agnieszka Laska Dancers, sculptor Melita Westerlund, 20 Digitus Piano Duo, textile artists Bonnie Meltzer and Ree Nancarrow, and the Delgani Quartet, among others.

 jenniferwrightpianostudio.com & skeletonpiano.com 

CREDIT

Jennifer Wright: composer, performer, costume designer

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PDX-BER Moves (Portland, OR): Controlled Hallucination

Dance, Theatre, Performance Art

Photo by Alenka Loesch

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

A roaming dance-theatre duet about ambiguity of memory and the surreal nature of our inner worlds.  

A journey of fantasy, nostalgia, and juxtaposition in the form of a dance-theatre duet. As the duet loops, each iteration redrafts the role of one or both performers (is that one now eating? sleeping?) or replaces them entirely (with a small dog? or ….?).

BIO

Suzanne Chi is a contemporary dancer, producer, and filmmaker, based in Portland, Oregon. Since 2005, she has worked with a wide range of independent artists, including Minh Tran, Carla Mann, Dawn Stoppiello, Tere Mathern, Rachel Slater, Lindsey Matheis, Franco Nieto, Tracey Durbin, and Tahni Holt. Suzanne’s choreography has been presented through Performance Works Northwest Alembic Residency, and her performances have showcased at White Bird Dance’s Uncaged Festival, Northwest New Works Festival at On the Boards, Velocity’s Bridge Project in Seattle, Theater im Pumpenhaus in Münster, Germany, and American Dance Abroad’s Spotlight Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. Suzanne co-directs Muddy Feet Dance with Rachel Slater and the Still Moving project with Carla Mann.

Website: https://www.muddyfeetdance.com/

Portland-based choreographer, performer, and teacher Carla Mann creates works for stage, alternative sites, installations, and film. Her choreography includes over 100 independent projects as well as works created for the Northwest Dance Project, Portland Taiko, Performance Works Northwest,  Muddy Feet Dance, Heidi Duckler Dance (Portland & Los Angeles), On the Boards (Seattle), and the Duncan Centre (Prague, Czech Republic) among others. Carla has performed with Oslund+Co/Dance, Minh Tran & Company, and Dance Gatherer, and in a multitude of independent projects. She serves as the Judy Massee Professor of Dance at Reed College and co-directs the Still Moving project with Suzanne Chi.

Website: https://filmfreeway.com/CarlaMann

Press: https://stanceondance.com/2014/11/20/ready-anything-interview-carla-mann/

Scott Jennings is a British-born professional dancer, performer, maker and teacher based in Berlin, Germany. Since 2009, he has been working widely in the field of contemporary dance and live theatre. As a performer and collaborator, Scott has worked with Lloyd Newson (DV8 Physical Theatre), Dimitris Papaioannou, Robert Wilson, Alexandra Waierstall, Alan Lucien Øyen, Maxine Doyle and Matthew Bourne, to name a few. From 2012-18 Scott was a member of Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch, performing Bausch’s eclectic repertoire worldwide, as well as being involved in two new creations for the company.  A passionate teacher and mentor, Scott has been developing and facilitating classes, workshops and seminars since 2017. He is a regular guest teacher at schools, arts institutions and festivals in and around Europe.

Website: https://scott-jennings.com/

Reel: https://vimeo.com/1156940166

Olivia Ancona is an international, multi-disciplinary dance artist who collaborates with independent choreographers and artists on creating new works. Raised in Portland, Oregon and based in Berlin, Germany, Olivia has worked with a multitude of choreographers and institutions, including Ohad Naharin’s Batsheva, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s Eastman, Royal Swedish Ballet, Tanztheater Wuppertal | Pina Bausch, and Sharon Eyal’s company S-E-V (formerly L-E-V), Sasha Waltz, Roy Assaf, Johan Inger, Bryan Arias, Alexandra Waierstall, among others. From 2019-2022, she was the creative assistant and performer for Alan Lucien Øyen’s, Winter guests. Olivia’s work as mentor, stager and coach, includes staging Sharon Eyal’s work for companies throughout Europe, and serving as movement coach, dancer and actor on the 2018 film Suspiria. Olivia’s teaching is rooted in 10 years of  teaching Gaga, the movement language curated by Ohad Naharin, bringing her knowledge of movement, performance, and creativity to all kinds of people to over forty institutions world-wide.

Website: https://www.oliviaancona.com/about

Reel: https://vimeo.com/1158407608

CREDIT

Suzanne Chi: Co-creator/performer/choreographer/costume, set, sound design
Carla Mann: Co-creator/performer/choreographer/costume, set, sound design
Scott Jennings: Co-creator/choreographer/sound design
Olivia Ancona: Co-creator/choreographer

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Kye Grant (Portland, OR): TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS

Theatre, Music, Dance

Alembic Artists in Performance June 26-29, 2025 Performance Works NorthWest Portland, Oregon © Chelsea Petrakis

PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS

Come get the best. The world’s largest place inside a place inside a place inside a place— just 2 blocks west of Paradise! Bigger hotels, bigger gaming floors, bigger pools, bigger buffets, bigger fountains. Come see what you’ve been missing. TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS changes everything. And isn’t it time for everything to change?

BIO

Kye Grant is a Portland-based performer whose work has been described as “Madonna meets Hey Arnold meets Michael Alig meets Grace Jones meets infinity.” They are best known for their 9+ year musical performance persona, Jennifer Vanilla, an exploration of identity fantasy through live interactive performance, experiential conceptual events, dance ensembles, music videos, radio shows, DJ sets, a T-shirt line, a monthly neighborhood variety show and NYC public access television program, and original musical releases “harkening the sparkling precision of Ann Steel, the growling tenacity of Laurie Anderson and the wispy tenderness of Shelley Duvall in Faerie Tale Theatre” (René Kladzyk). 

Spanning music, dance, vocal experimentation, participatory public projects, and collaborative social art, their work has taken the form of an open-invitation dance company in a dying Portland mall, performance interventions in Times Square, a pedestrian parade with fifth grade crossing guards, a durational dance performance inside a 6×6’ gallery, an Only Child support group, and a community newspaper about Lloyd Center Mall. They currently host and produce the genre-fluid queer + trans performance party CLUB ALIVE, which brings together Portland DJs, musical acts, dancers, interactive group experiments, live interviews, and a ritualistic mosh pit for an experimental talk show-slash-transcendent rave.

Grant spent 10 years as a vocalist, keyboardist, guitarist, and cowriter in NYC pop band Ava Luna, during which the group released seven records and toured internationally opening for Sharon Van Etten, Toro y Moi, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, John Spencer Blues Explosion, Cornelius, and Mr. Twin Sister.

www.kyealive.club  IG: instagram.com/kyealive.com

CREDIT

Kye Grant – Creator and Performer

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