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!)

GET TICKETS!

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!

Here’s a little peek under the Risk/Reward production hood: we hold off on setting an order for the mainstage show until we’ve seen all the pieces in technical rehearsals. These are new works, y’all – we’ve got to see them before we can craft the program! But when we heard about how the Clown Mystics are planning on ending their one-of-a-kind, magically-insane piece, we figured (99% certainty) that we’d be putting them as the last piece in the program. No spoilers – you’ll just have to come and see!

The Clown Mystics are Given Davis, Urks Io, and Zai Outlaw, and are dedicated to the art of ritual performance through the absurdity and play of the clown. With their application, the Clown Mystics endeared themselves to our panel with their deep knowledge of commedia and clown scholarship – as well as the sheer madness they promised to bring to the stage.

Their performance in the mainstage show will be a part of an on-going work, Seers of the Savant Garde, and is going to involve a festival parade of fools, a wheel of chaotic fortune, and a Chaplin-esque ode to the power of the moon. The stage will be stuffed with musical instruments, traditional clown props, and occult artifacts, and the Tarot itself will guide the performance – it may not be the same from night to night!

Thus, the Clown Mystics are truly the avatar of Risk/Reward, in the best possible way.

The Clown Mystics will be performing their piece “SEERS OF THE SAVANT GARDE” as part of the mainstage event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 21st through 23rd, 7pm each night.

GET TICKETS!

Paul Susi has been making The Great Minotaur for a long time.

In what he calls “a living digression”, he covers emergency homeless shelters in Portland, the inescapable labyrinth of immigrant identity, and confronting the monstrousness of being. In it, he draws from his whole identity, his work, and his research into Portland’s checkered past.

I first saw Paul perform a one-person show in the old Action-Adventure space, just off the then-new Orange Line MAX tracks. Each time a train came by, the sound of its horn barely muffled by the roll-up garage door of the former auto-mechanics room, Paul stopped in the middle of his line and bellowed back “I’M GETTING TO IT, JUST HOLD ON”. That performance ended with Paul slicing a wineskin open over his head, sacrificing and cleansing and rebirthing himself each night. I am so excited to see where The Great Minotaur will take us.

More on Paul:

Paul Susi (he/him) is a theater artist, an educator, a writer, social services professional, and an activist, born and raised in Portland, Oregon. As an actor, he has appeared onstage with the NW Classical Theatre Collaborative, Anon It Moves / String House, Shaking the Tree Studios, Push Leg, The Forgery, Island Stage Left, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, Vermont Stage Company, Teatro Solo/Boom Arts, as well as in self-produced, original work. In 2018-2019, Paul toured “An Iliad” to over 30 prisons, community centers, places of worship, and theaters throughout Oregon with NW Classical Theatre Collaborative and singer/songwriter Anna Fritz.

For five years, Paul specialized in managing new emergency homeless shelters for Transition Projects, with experience in opening and / or closing 6 different shelter programs during that time. Paul currently serves as a Conversation Project Facilitator for Oregon Humanities, and as a Peer Resource Navigator for Portland Street Medicine. He is working on a project commemorating Chee Gong, a migrant worker wrongfully hanged for a murder he didn’t commit in 1889, and buried in an unmarked grave at the historic Lone Fir Cemetery (this project made possible by the generous support of the Oregon Community Foundation). More info at www.paulsusi.wordpress.com.

Paul Susi will be performing his piece “THE GREAT MINOTAUR” as part of the mainstage event of our 2024 Festival of New Performance – June 21st through 23rd, 7pm each night.

GET TICKETS!

Thanks to Mikey Mann for the rad map of all the separate spaces in this year’s festival!

And we’re doing something special this year for Opening Night. Make sure you stay after the 7p Festival show on Friday for a MYSTERY MUSICAL GUEST, followed by the awesome sounds of Ryan Cross / Dark Reflector!

Interested in Volunteering?