Rejoice! Diaspora Dance Theater Artistic Director and Choreographer Oluyinka Akinjiola; photo by Jingzi Zhao
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Election Anti-Party: Why Are We Showing These Pieces
Posted on September 13, 2024 by Katie Watkins
The Election Anti-Party Line Up!
Posted on September 3, 2024 by Katie Watkins
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Thank you!
Posted on July 9, 2024 by Katie Watkins
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Artist Profile: Drama Informed
Posted on June 10, 2024 by Katie Watkins
Drama Informed are two old friends and allies, Miau and Vera, creating space for themselves and others to further discover themselves.
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!
Artist Profile: Sarah Turner
Posted on by Katie Watkins
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.
Feedback Loop: The Zine Project
Posted on June 8, 2024 by Katie Watkins
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:
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.)
Comic by BB Andersson
Artist Profile: Olivia Camfield
Posted on June 5, 2024 by Katie Watkins
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
Artist Profile: Roman Norfleet
Posted on May 29, 2022 by Katie Watkins
Roman Norfleet & Be Present Art Group (Portland, OR): Death’s Door NOW!
Musical Performance
Through musical improvisation, Roman Norfleet creates space for reflection, healing, seeking and mystery.
PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS
Death’s Door NOW! is a musical performance piece exploring the concept of death and what comes after it. The compositions, visuals and wearable art of this piece express not only my personal journey, but what I’ve learned from others’ processes when it comes to dealing with and understanding death.
BIO
Roman Norfleet is a musical/visual artist originally hailing from Joliet, Illinois and has been surrounded by and involved in music and arts since a child. Over the last 12 years Roman has lived in Los Angeles, California and the DMV area expanding his art form and exploring different territories of music. Roman has released 2 devotional, mantra based projects and an instrumental (or beat tape) project. Now living in Portland, Oregon, Norfleet seeks to continue that artistic, expressive expansion by incorporating visual and performance art into his musical compositions to manifest creative spaces lead by the idea of “being present”.
CREDITS
Roman Norfleet: Performer, Musician
Brown Calvin: Musician
Jacque Hammond: Musician
VISIT ROMAN NORFLEET’S WEBSITE
VIEW AN EXCERPT OF THE PERFORMANCE
Artist Profile: Kate Duffly & Peter Ksander
Posted on by Katie Watkins
Kate Duffly & Peter Ksander (Portland, OR): Apoptosis
Performance
PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS
Taking inspiration from the stories of lost cosmonauts and the idea of the body as spaceship, the performance explores the act of sending messages into the void, listening for echoes, embracing cosmic loneliness, and finding beauty in the unknown.
BIOS
Kate Duffly is a scholar-director and community-based theatre artist with a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is Associate Professor of Theatre at Reed College in Portland, OR and is currently working on an edited collection that examines a broad array of performance practices rooted in community and explicitly engaged in negotiating difference and disruption. She is an artist who has worked with a range of community-based theater organizations, from Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles to Theatre Diaspora and Red Door in Portland, as well as the puppet companies Wise Fool and Lunatique Fantastique in San Francisco, and Bread and Puppet of Glover, VT.
Peter Ksander is a scenographer and media artist who’s stage design work has been presented both nationally and internationally. In 2006 he joined the curatorial board of the Ontological-Hysteric Incubator. In 2008 he won an Obie award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), and In 2014 he won a Bessie award for the visual design of This Was the End. Recent Portland credits include set designs for Beckett Women, Sweat, Arlington a love story, John, Our Ruined House, Teenage Dick, and Uncle Vanya. He holds a MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, is an Associate Professor at Reed College and is an associate company member with the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble.
CREDITS
Created by Kate Duffly and Peter Ksander
Artist Profile: Morivivi Theatre
Posted on June 2, 2021 by Katie Watkins
Artist Profile: Moriviví Theatre in collaboration with Hand2Mouth
Moriviví Theatre in collaboration with Hand2Mouth (Portland, OR): Distancias Digital devised theatre work
In a new cut of the full-length documentary-style digital devised theatre work, Moriviví Theatre and Hand2Mouth premiere a work that will speak to so many of us about our experiences during the pandemic of the last year and a half.
PERFORMANCE SYNOPSIS
Distancias is an exploration of the distance we have been experiencing during the pandemic. Through a series of vignettes, three Latinx artists explore feelings of isolation, separation anxiety, and loneliness while also traversing their longing for a homeland, a home-people, a communidad that is rooted in their cultura.
BIO
Giovanni Alva is a theatre artist who likes to tell stories and help others tell theirs. He holds a BA in theatre arts from Humboldt State University and has worked in Portland at Milagro, Portland Playhouse, Action/ Adventure, CoHo, Roosevelt High School, and Hand2Mouth. Robi Arce is an actor, director and physical theatre poet. Robi holds an MFA in Ensemble-Based Physical Theatre from Dell’Arte International. He has performed, toured, and lead workshops in Mexico, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. His work is diverse, from theaters to churches, plazas and schools, bringing theatrical and educational shows to all. Fueled by social justice and change, his passion is to create a physical, dynamic and poetic theatre that connects with people as sports connects with the fans. Michael Cavazos is a Queer Chicano theatre maker and visual artist. He is the author of the play “Gritos y Chismesitos” and co-author of “Chic and Sassy” and “Chic and Sassy: The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God.” Before moving to Portland, he was a member of the sketch comedy troupe Gender Offenders and performed on many New York City stages, including the Beechman Theatre, Cherry Lane Theatre, The Culture Project, and P.S.122. Michael directed and performed in the theatrical concert, “Universo,” for Hand2Mouth and has worked with Imago, Milagro, Crave, Profile and Portland Center Stage. He is a company member at Hand2Mouth and is co-directing the new musical “Bad World” with Crave. He is part of two cross-cultural theatre collaborations with companies in Egypt and France. His art was recently selected as part of RACC’s new public art collection: Capturing the Moment. Michael is one of five Oregon performing artists to receive the 2021 Oregon Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship for artists of outstanding talent, demonstrated ability and commitment to the creation of new work.
VISIT THE MORIVIVI THEATRE WEBSITE FIND OUT MORE ABOUT THE FULL-LENGTH PROJECT: DISTANCIAS