The opening moments of Friday night’s Oregon Painting Society show were dark. With the stage lights off, three women in shiny shirts and leotards crossed through the audience crowded onto the cement floor close to the stage. The three women took their places on the step leading up the stage and raised three brooms. Together they brought the brooms down with a “boom!” and from the stage voices spoke, “It’s a spiritual crisis.”

Slowly, lights came up and the crowd was able to see the spooky performance collective that is the 10-member Oregon Painting Society. What distinguishes this crew of art school kids who wear strange costumes and create collaborative experimental music performances from the hundreds of other Portland art school kids who wear crazy outfits and play dissonant music, too, is that Oregon Painting Society is defined by a profoundly serious quality. Their movements, music and recitation of words feel funny and spontaneous, but their performances are obviously carefully orchestrated and highly intentional. When the 10 young Portlanders donned witch hats and home-sewn white headscarves and formed a circle chanting, “Why must I be a teenager in love?” the effect was comic but startlingly spiritual.

• Homemade hats, interpretative dancers: essential.

Another moment of bizarre awe came midway through the work, when the Society knelt in pairs around three plants placed in the center of the stage. As soon as the performers touched the plants, it was revealed that the plants were not props or decoration but instruments themselves. Wired to amplifiers, the plants emanated sounds when the performers touched their leaves and stems. The electric, dissonant noises changing pitch and strength depending on the performer’s touch and the Washington High School auditorium resounded with sounds that can never be recreated, since they were audio artifacts of unique interactions.

For people disillusioned with Portland’s laid back, collaboration-oriented experimental performance scene, Oregon Painting Society is a refreshing reaffirmation that sincere innovation is always possible.

There was a simple, moving moment during PICA's TBA Festival this past Friday night at the Newmark Theatre. One that left the audience breathless.

It happened when PICA artistic director Cathy Edwards, in another of her graceful and understated pre-performance speeches, described the conditions under which dancemaker Raimund Hoghe's company entered the United States earlier in the month for this, their American debut.

Edwards described a process by which all six members of Hoghe's international company were admitted into the country for their much-anticipated debut — except for one, an Algerian-born performer, detained solely because of his country of origin. There was an audible gasp in the audience, and then: silence.

That Hoghe's work which followed this dramatic opening - the US premiere of his “Bolero Variations” - failed to captivate me as much as his company's story is due, in part, to the artist's own aim with the work. “Bolero Variations” offers much to like: the chance to hear legendary figure skating duo Torvill and Dean's legendary 1984 “Bolero” performance on ice (not once, but twice!), the opportunity to watch five unique and interesting movement artists do unique and interesting things with their hands and bodies. Maria Callas makes an aural cameo.

Erik Friendlander's Block Ice and Propane was not a show I was particularly excited to see. A cellist playing songs to accompany videos and photos from his childhood—it sounds pleasantly snoozy. The reality is far more beautiful, and more moving, than I'd anticipated. Friedlander's show is structured like a road trip, based on the trips his family would take every summer, as his photographer father hopped from gig to gig around the US. It's a nostalgic vision, and a relatable one—anyone who ever packed into the family car (or truck camper, in Friedlander's case) will remember the feeling of staring sleepily out the window, playing games with passing cars and with one's own perspective as the scenery passes by. Friedlander tells a few stories to supplement his songs, giving context to some of the snapshots, and his storytelling style is casual and conversational. It feels less like a rehearsed performance, and more like watching old home videos with a friend. When he picks up his cello, though, any sense of casualness slips away: Friendlander is an incredible cellist, his rapid fingerpicking and expressive sound perfectly accompanying videographer Bill Morrison's footage of clouds, flashing roadsides, and the endlessly unfolding highway. Every summer when I was a kid, my family took road trips back east to visit my parents' parents—I was surprised to find myself getting a little misty as Friedlander brought those trips back with perfect clarity, and a little relieved when the friend I saw the show with confessed she'd teared up a bit too. In a festival full of aggressively challenging and often impenetrable work, it was refreshing and moving to see a show that reflected, subtly yet directly, such a quintessentially American experience.

• Oliver Paul

Pan Pan Theatre's The Crumb Trail is a neurotic little piece of theater that finds sources of anxiety everywhere: in fairy tales, in food, and especially in the internet. Pan Pan takes Hansel and Gretel as its starting point, a cautionary tale about two children whose parents abandon them in the woods. The metaphorical woods of The Crumb Trail is the internet, its dangers made explicit here: Sex is everywhere, and not the sexy kind. There's no gingerbread house, but internet memes—the Star Wars kid flails, the cast of Peanuts singing "Hey Ya"—serve the same function, action as distracting, candy-coated enticements.

At the beginning of the show, the actors introduce themselves and explain what roles they'll be playing. "When I'm Gretel, I have built-in GPS," announces actress Aoife Duffin; Hansel, played by Bush Moukarzel, is quick to call bullshit. The aptly titled production picks its way over a terrain that splices fairy tales and YouTube videos, that explores creepy subtexts without ever losing its sense of humor. Most surprising of all, in fact, is how funny the show really is: just funny enough to make a cryptic modern day parable about the internet era completely palatable. In other words, this ensemble knows exactly what it's doing. Multiple laptops and projectors are integrated with deft use of shadow and sound; there's even a fuzzed out pop song about the limits of maternal love.

I'm reluctant to say too much about this show—much of the fun, as one of the actors points out, is heading into the darkness, not quite knowing what's going to happen. I will say, though, that of what I've seen so far at TBA, it's my favorite.

The Crumb Trail runs tonight through Saturday, 6:30 pm, details here.

• Jeff Busby

Steve (Simon Laherty) is deep in an existential crisis brought on by thoughts of losing his friend Gary (Sonia Tueben) to a routine knee operation. Unfortunately, his crisis is standing in the way of a major deal. Without Steve nothing will move forward, but he’d rather stand in Pioneer Square trying to work things out. For corporate bigwigs Alan (Jim Russell) and Carolyn (Genevieve Morris), who are on the other side of the deal, it’s a situation that will not do. They will pull out every trick of coercion they know to exploit the presumed vulnerability of their counterparts.

We are in Pioneer Square with them—a rapt audience in silver headphones—looking on. Passers-by glance up at us as we stare out at the bricks. Some even stop to see what we’re looking at, but we’re the only ones privy to this drama. We’re the only ones who can hear Steve and Gary as they discuss the dilemma. We’re the only ones who really know them. This is our private spectacle, and we in turn are a very public spectacle.

• Gabriel Bienzycki
• Zeke Keeble of locust

The intersection between modern dance and hip-hop can be hard to traverse without diluting the energy of both forms. Fortunately Amy O’Neal, Zeke Keeble, and their Seattle-based dance company locust have been able to combine the more lyrical aesthetics of modern movement with the dynamics of funky club dancing (to great effect) in their amazing hour-long performance, Crushed.

Above all else, Crushed is a highly entertaining dance performance. Using a physical vocabulary that draws from disciplines as diverse as pop n' lock and tango, choreographer Amy O’Neal leads the audience through a dream of night spaces, full of pushing, grasping, dance battles and the calculated sexuality of dance floor. Musician and co-creator Zeke Keeble, adds live rhythm and atmosphere, beat-boxing, programming and mixing taught intelligent dance music—heavy on the bass beat and tricked out with beeps and clicks.

But music and dance aren’t enough for locust, to add another layer of complexity the company takes full advantage of projected video that extends the depth of field beyond the stage. At one moment in Crushed a fuzzy video of dancers at the end of a long dark hallway comes into sharp relief onstage as O’Neal and her performers mimic the action on screen. That the movements between screen and stage aren’t completely synchronized causes an amazing elastic tension as background and foreground coalesce and fall apart again and again.

Locust is very adept at creating tension. It’s seen (and heard) again and again in the live accompaniment of Keeble. As he performs, he is able to react to the dancers movements, creating trippy electronic sound effects to match. The end result is that dancers seem electrically charged, sending up swishes of static as their limbs cut through the air.

I can’t presume to say what Crushed is about. Is it the final death vision of an insect? The coma dreams of a once club-hopping hipster? I’m not sure, and frankly it doesn’t matter to me—like all good entertainment Crushed is simply far too engaging to worry about a deeper meaning. Which is not to say that there isn’t one (I’m sure there is), I just don’t know if the performance would be improved by knowing it.

It’s good to see these TBA veterans returning, and you can bet I'll be have my ass in the seats anytime they come to town.

Let me ask you a question.

What was the last TBA Festival event that had one (and only one) idea in its head: to entertain the masses with frenzied song-and-dance enthusiasm, and send you home with a mile-wide grin?

None in recent memory come to mind, which makes Pink Martini and friends' Saturday night performance at the Oregon Zoo that much more of a treasure. “Oregon! Oregon!”, the rarely heard — and never before staged — mini-musical that was the centerpiece of this show, swept up the 4,000-plus audience into a Beaver Thumping frenzy never seen before at any TBA event.

The musical was only one-third of the 2-hour plus performance, but it was unquestionably the highlight. First commissioned and premiered on radio to celebrate Oregon's centennial birthday in 1959, radio artist Stan Freberg penned a delirious romp through the first 100 years of Oregon: one brief act each to mark the birth, 50th and 100th anniversaries of Oregon's statehood.

• Eric McNatt

When Hollywood legends die, they leave behind a body of work that’s almost more important to those left behind than the legend’s actual life story. The movies of Garbo, or Monroe, or whomever are almost like a magic trunk of forgotten costumes. They can be pulled out, dusted off, and inhabited for a time. The characters and emotions left there on the celluloid are like a band of sequins, and we can rest inside the sparkle until the final musical swell that marks the end of the film.

In Last Meadow, Miguel Gutierrez has used the work of James Dean as a starting point. He’s opened the trunk, pulled out the costumes, and taken a seam ripper to everything he could get his hands on. The resulting reassembled ensemble is at times ill-fitting, elegant, lyrical, ugly, and beautiful.

Over the course of the 90 minute Technicolored feat of endurance, Gutierrez and fellow performers Michelle Boule and Tarek Halaby push themselves to their physical limits as they scream, convulse, and dance through source material pulled from Dean’s East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause, and Giant.

• Paula Cort

I was admittedly tepid about playwright Young Jean Lee's 2007 TBA offering, Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, a show that seemed as though it was trying to push buttons I don't actually have. Her new show the The Shipment, in which the Korean American Lee set out to examine the African American experience, is an infinitely more cohesive and successful production—not merely button-pushing, but provocative, in the best sense of the word.

There are moments in Meg Stuart and Philip Gehmacher's "Maybe Forever" that you may never forget. The slow spread of Gehmacher's arms, sunward, as a soft guitar crescendoes. A wrenchingly expressive duet between the dancers that bubbles with a darkly sexual subtext.

Then there's the other 80 impenetrable minutes of this show.

The question is whether you're willing to stomach the long stretches of herky-jerky movement, tinkling softcore guitar—with unintellegiable lyrics sung on top (Niko Hafkenscheid, electric guitar/singer)—and pretentious pseudo-monologues that comprise the majority of this interminably long performance. I longed for a curtain to drop right around the 50-minute mark (I know because I checked my iPhone). My seat-mate dozed off 60 minutes in. At 70 minutes, the young men in front of us started giggling uncontrollably. The applause at the performance's end was likely the most tepid I've heard yet at TBA (and - OMG! - there were at least two lusty "boo's" in the mix).