In our Festival Mainstage we’ll be exploring histories of identity with festival newcomers Jordan Isadore, looking back at his upbringing through dance with you look good, bud, and Joe Kye, setting his grandfather’s history to a fusion of Jazz and Korean sounds in Love and Lineage.
From Seattle, we’ll be joined by artists inspired by experimental works of the past as strategies for modern resistance. Fox Whitney and his performers will meditate on an image of Yvonne Rainier’s landmark protest dance Trio A With Flags to present NOT TRIO A, an experimental performance blending dance, drag, and live music. Meanwhile, The Bonnies (Jenny Peterson and Kaitlin McCarthy) will get intimate with cucumbers in Picklehole, a dance-theater homage to the Czech New Wave film Daisies.
And finally, festival-favorite ILVS STRAUSS will return for the fourth time in Risk/Reward history to put on a green bunny mask and go down a musical rabbit hole with the help of dueling English/Spanish closed-captioning, in ñ (enye).
Beyond the Mainstage, we’re stuffing both time and space with more things to experience. PICA’s giant warehouse will be home to four different performative installations from a diverse set of Pacific Northwest artists. Silas Borgstrom Ruesler will give you a tour of their aquarium of sea-creature-genitalia, Claire Rigsby and India Roper-Moyes will invite you into their cocoon of yarn-bombed comfort, Sarah Vitak will show you the true anxiety beating at the heart of every story, and kelly langeslay will welcome you into a combined slumber party, memorial, and archive built into a shadowy corner of the warehouse.
We’re ecstatic to welcome back the Drag Theatre Workshop to Saturday and Sunday’s Happy Hour slot. Championing drag artists as writers and actors (beyond the four minutes they typically get to lipsync at a bar!), the Portland Drag Theatre Workshop offers project support, documentation, feedback, and an audience. Hosted and produced by Anthony Hudson (Carla Rossi) and Pepper Pepper, this two-day workshop will present a showcase of new pieces by Body Academics, Sterling Francis Kennedy & Silver DeBris, Taya Dixon (Ditzy Diamond), Pepper Pepper, and Anthony Hudson; as well as a new full-length work by headliner and Portland drag legend Honey Hart.
And Saturday night will see a special Risky and Rewarding LateR/R Night show, with Portland-favorite comedian Jason Rouse hosting a festival edition of his sketch show Shirts + Skins, alongside a one-night-only performance of Anne Zander‘s hit clown-comedy show Mother.
Julie Hammond will take over PICA’s secret Resource Room for a marathon reading by 7 renowned Portland actors of the 9+ hour long piece Hindsight 2020, featuring text written by over 20 artists during the course of the year 2020. There will be snacks! Come and go as you please during this open event!
FAQ:
– Whoa! Cool! How do I buy tickets??
Yeah! Cool! Go right here!
– Pickles?
YES. We’re partnering with MoonBrine pickles to make sure that there’s fermented pickle brine and cukes at the bar to satisfy all your pickly needs after watching The Bonnies’ antics.
– How can I help?
We always love volunteers to help with the bar, crowd flow, and setting up – email us at info@risk-reward.org to set up a shift. Come help us out!
– Tell me about your pricing?
It’s very important to us that we meet you where you’re at for tickets – hence our long-running Pay-What-You-Will model. We have to cap online sales at a minimum of $5 for arcane reasons, but we’ll take any amount (including 0) at the door. Just make sure you get in early – we’re always in danger of selling out!
– Do I have to come to ALL 9+ hours of Hindsight 2020?
Not at all! Audience is free to come and go, and the event is totally free and unticketed, so you can arrive whenever and leave whenever. (But you’ll stay for the Mainstage at the end, right?)
– I remember that it got really hot last year – will it be that hot again?
We have multiple plans in place to handle the heat in the spaces at this year’s festival, if the weather (and ever-warming world) serves that up again – we are hoping that the only thing this year that’ll be hot is the art.
– I want to know more about the performers!
Here’s a sneak peek of the deets!
– How do you pick your pieces?
Risk/Reward’s mission is to support artists who are pushing the boundaries of performance. Our Festival of New Performance begins with our call for applications from artists living, working, and creating in the Cascadia / Pacific Northwest region. This year, we received over 67 applications – more than double the number of applications we received in 2024. We convene a community curation panel of regional artists, curators, and tastemakers to read the applications and select the pieces that will become the core of our Festival of New Performance, the five performances of the Festival Mainstage. Even more applications were selected as installation, durational, and late-night additions to the festival. In total, we will present more than 35 Pacific Northwest performers across all of the programming in our jam-packed three-day festival.
Our panel this year included curators, actors, directors, performance-makers, and wonderful-weirdos from the Pacific Northwest. Our Portland contingent included choreographer Tahni Holt; Given Davis, a member of The Clown Mystics; devised-theater maker Ashley Hollingshead; and Portland Playhouse’s Producing Director (and recent Skidmore Prize winner) Charles Grant. From Seattle, we were joined by a choreographer and director with the Au Collective, Cheryl Delostrinos; as well as a member of last year’s festival with Drama Tops, Shane Donohue. We were also joined by PICA’s Curator of Performance, Erin Boberg Doughton, and its Production Manager, Molly Gardner, along with Risk/Reward’s own Katie Watkins and Festival Director James Mapes.
In selecting our panel this year, we prioritized a breadth of perspective, as well as a mix of experience with the Festival; Tahni, Given, Cheryl, and Shane have all performed in our Festival of New Performance in the past. The panelists worked collaboratively to pick some promising, fantastic proposals for contemporary performance out of the huge number of amazing applications. Together, they collectively determined our Mainstage line-up, and also contributed to deciding on the rest of the pieces we brought in. Our community curation process continues to be a vital aspect of our festival, ensuring that the development of new work is that much more open and includes less gate-keeping – which makes the work that much better.
– I have a less-frequently-asked question I would like to ask!
Get in touch at info@risk-reward.org!