The People to Come is a project that has been on our radar for over a year and on our calendar for over six months. All week we have been preparing SPACE for the performance: building two huge platforms, hanging lights, suspending speakers from the ceiling, painting walls, and setting up our annex as an interactive archive. The People To Come will be a series of performances (taking place Saturday the 6th) that will be a kind of portrait of the Portland community based on the patterns, portraits, and tasks that we collectively create and submit to the ever-growing archive of submissions from past and future performances. The materials that Portlanders submit will be collected and shown to a dancer who will choose one and have 19 minutes to create a dance based on that specific submission. The People to Come is an ambitious and somewhat amorphous project that is difficult to define and hard to describe. It’s dance, it’s an instillation, its solo performances, it’s participatory, it’s specifically choreographed yet it is radically altered from that specific starting point. Below are some of the submissions that Portlanders have submitted so far. Tomorrow (First Friday) the archive will be open in our annex for people to explore and archivists will be on hand to take submissions from the public. Submissions will also be accepted during the performance.
If you can’t come in and submit in person tomorrow or Saturday, don’t worry you can submit here.