Feb 6-8 || In Preparation for Disappearances to Come

In Preparation for Disappearances to Come is a music/dance collaboration.
It is a machine to practice remembering and forgetting.
It is an occasion for us to slyly, if futilely, enact strategies to sidestep the inevitability of our own future dissolution and the ephemerality of performance.
It is a prompt to consider how our lives and works will dissolve, replenishing the cultural compost that nourishes the future, even as we ourselves are forgotten.

Choreography and performance by Linda Austin in collaboration with dancers Allie Hankins and Danielle Ross. 
Music composed and performed live by Chris Cochrane (guitar) and Kevin Bud Jones (electronics.)
Lighting by Jeff Forbes.

Presented by Performance Works NorthWest/Linda Austin Dance, with the support of PICA’s SPACE Program and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant

Other collaborators and related events

ARTIST TALK:
Nan Curtis, visual artist and death doula, will join Linda Austin and Amanda Leigh Evans in an artist talk after Friday’s performance, moderated by Lucy Cotter.

WORKSHOP:
Amanda Leigh Evans
When I Die: A Will Writing Workshop
Saturday 4pm at PICA
Join us for a free, practical-yet-playful performative will writing workshop led by artist Amanda Leigh Evans. Workshop participants will draft, discuss, witness, and sign their own legally valid* wills using a poetic template created by the artist. In addition to indicating who you want to inherit your stuff, Evans’ When I Die Will Template holds space to reflect on who you are, how you want to live your life, and the legacy you want to leave behind.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Linda Austin, director and co-founder of Performance Works NW in Portland, Oregon, deploys movement, sound, objects, text, and visuals to create non-linear, poetic dance and performance works. Austin has presented at venues and festivals such as Danspace Project, Performance Space 122, On the Boards’ NW New Works, and PICA’s TBA Festival. She is the recipient of the 2017 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Merce Cunningham Award and RACC’s 2014 Fellowship in Performing Arts, as well as fellowships from the Oregon Arts Commission and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She relishes her past, present, and future collaborations with fellow dance, sound, and visual artists, too numerous to name.
pwnw-pdx.org/linda-austin-dance/

Allie Hankins is a dancer, performance maker, and sound artist. She is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a studio and creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists. In 2014, Allie co-inititated Physical Education, a Queer performance research cooperative, with Lu Yim, keyon gaskin, and Takahiro Yamamoto. Physical Education hosts reading groups and lectures, curates festivals, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently, Allie has danced for Milka Djordjevich (LA), Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis), and Linda Austin (PDX). Her work has been presented in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, and Cork, Ireland.
alliehankins.com.

Danielle Ross is a choreographer, performer, and scholar. Her latest work, Lineage (Solo) investigates how the ghostly traces of past people and dance practices show up in her moving body. Her work has been supported by Regional Arts and Culture Council, Oregon Arts Commission, PICA, N.E.W., Velocity Dance Center, and Trillium Arts.  Invested in interdisciplinary collaboration, Ross co-founded the performance series Pure Surface with poet Stacey Tran, was on the board of the Creative Music Guild, and currently runs the multidisciplinary series Public Nature with JP Jenkins.  
daniellerossperformance.com

Chris Cochrane is a Brooklyn-based musician guitarist improviser noise maker collaborator and composer. Chris has worked with many musicians including Zeena Parkins, Marc Ribot, Stew and Eszter Balint. He has performed at various International music festivals and has composed music for dance and theater for Ishmael Houston-Jones, Dennis Cooper, Nayland Blake, Neil Greenberg, and Circus Amok. He was in the bands No Safety and Curlew, and is currently works in several music projects: Excavation with John Thayer, Nick Jozwiak and Shoko Nagai, Alphawhore with Gordon Beeferman and Kevin Shea, The Chutneys with Fast Forward and Gelsey Bell and Lampshade with Viv Corringham and Miguel Fransconi, Butt Dial with Sulynn Hago and Marlon Cherry and Seagull Brian with Nick Didkovsky and Mark Howell. Chris recently collaborated on creating a score with Kevin Bud Jones for Jim Hubbard’s Film Nostalgia which was shown as part of the AIDS memorial programming on November 19, 2023.

A native Philadelphian, Kevin Bud Jones has lived in NYC since 1975. While working as a cinematographer, he also designed lights for music, dance, and theater, and composed music for film and stage productions. Since the 80’s Kevin has performed as part of the downtown music scene on guitar, synths, and electronics with Dog Eat Dog, Airport Seven and later Collapsible Shoulder, with Chris Cochrane, Kato Hideki, and Brian Chase. In 2018 he created music for a pair of concerts by Antonio Ramos and the Gang Bangers dance company, and in 2022, co-composed a score with Chris Cochrane for Linda Austin’s first sketch towards In Preparation for Disappearances to Come. 2023 brought Kevin and Chris together again to create a soundtrack for the film Nostalgia by Jim Hubbard, which premiered at the LGBT Community Center in NYC as part of a NY Aids Memorial Project arts program. Their score was performed live at The Center. 

Nan Curtis’ practice is interdisciplinary and installation-based, mining site, home and personal narrative to reframe what can be considered mundane, and funny, in life. Curtis received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati & BA from the College of Wooster, OH. Major exhibitions include DiverseWorks, Houston; Tacoma Art Museum; Mira Costa College, San Diego; ConsolidatedWorks, Seattle; Linfield College, OR; AnyTime Dept, Cincinnati, OH; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA), Elizabeth Leach Gallery, Reed College, WilliamsonKnight/Holding Contemporary, 1430Contemporary, NINE, The Art Gym, Sator Projects in Portland and Scalehouse Gallery in Bend, OR. Nan received the prestigious Bonnie Bronson Fellowship in 2011. She has attended residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Joshua Tree, CA, Mira Costa College, OCAC & Caldera. Her work has been featured in ArtForum, ArtWeek, The Oregonian, Seattle Stranger, Willamette Week & Portland Monthly. Her work is in the collections of the Portland Art Museum, Sarah Miller Meigs, Linda Hutchins and John Montague, MK Guth and Greg Landry, Reed College & Joan and John Shipley. She was the Director/Curator of the Feldman Gallery at Pacific Northwest College of Art, faculty & the Chair of Studio Arts for over 25 years. Currently, Nan has a robust studio practice, is a practicing Death Doula and works at Hopewell House in Portland OR.
https://www.nancurtis.com

Amanda Leigh Evans is an artist interested in individual and collective relationships with land, time and community. She creates research-driven ceramic objects, performance, print and digital media, public art, and long-term collaborative systems that investigate social and ecological interdependence. Evans’ work oscillates between self-contained bodies of work for traditional art spaces and multi-year, site-specific collaborative projects created with dozens of community partners. Evans holds an MFA in Art and Social Practice from Portland State University and a Post-Bacc in Ceramics from Cal State Long Beach. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.