RISK/REWARD FESTIVAL 2026

My eyes do not know where to look as I step through the warehouse doors. The room is filled with a visual cacophony of art – a painter renders movement onto vinyl records, a bustling headphone-wearing crowd mingles throughout the space as two dancers perform to the silent soundtrack, and audience members strategically place pom poms on a large cardboard participatory sculpture project. Across the warehouse I step into the more conventional stage area to watch one of the sit-down performances. I am handed a program, with the words “We’re really glad you’re here.” 

Risk/Reward Festival 2026 is a true grab bag of artistic happenings, including performance installations and several staged shows. I’ve headed down to Portland for the day to watch this festival’s 18th year of presenting new works. Risk/Reward brings together artists from the Pacific Northwest, curated by a community panel. The artists, mostly from Portland, but also Vancouver (Sarah K. Finn) and Seattle (KG Galbreath and Vlada Kremenović)  performed throughout the large multi-use venue at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts. 

Starting off the day, I attend the matinee performance of Sarah K. Finn / In Spite Collective’s piece, The Right Thing To Be Doing. As proof that Risk/Reward is a platform for new ideas to incubate and develop further, Finn’s piece was originally a part of the 2024 festival and has now been expanded into a full-length show. This piece delights in the details through precise and imaginative use of objects and scale. It begins with the striking visual of a cargo ship worn as a headpiece, as Finn sways through space. This ship later transforms into their daydream desire of a polyamorous homestead, each shipping container upturns to reveal a scene: a barn with a tree, windmill, and resplendent geodesic dome. A flip of the light casts the silhouette of this idyllic scene against the backwall, and Finn brings their own shadow into the world, finally large enough to fit them. Scale is also at play when Finn invites a keynote speaker to the podium, at which point Finn sets up a three-inch podium, and turns the mic towards a literal mushroom. We wait in silence as the mushroom delivers their speech, a speech that either we can’t hear or that is happening in silence, as Finn’s fluent comprehension of the speech is indicated by their appreciative hmmming and nodding. Finn’s deadpan clown embodied persona engages us as they discover their body gestures relationship to the sound. Raising their hands in a “tada!” signals an applause track, spinning their finger from their head creates an echoing reverb. They explore the causes and effects of their movement, relishing and playing with control. We can sense that reality – for the performer or the character – is less in their control, as the sound fell out of sync, and the farmlife got folded back into the cargo crates, a passing ship, in the distance. 

Heading back to the lobby, there is an hour of performance installations before the Mainstage show. Behind curtains and nestled into the corner space, Jennifer Wright performs her ASMR Triptych, in which she wears and manipulates a series of sonic costumes. Wearing a metal netting of chimes and iridescent scales, she approaches us, inviting us to touch and poke her costume, which tinkles and chimes with sound. These sounds pair well with PDX-BER Moves’ Controlled Hallucination across the room. While I don’t have the silent disco headphones on, it is very silly to watch the silent version of the piece, as the dancers sing along to “Spice Up Your Life” and an automated dinosaur inflatable on wheels zooms by. In Thien-Kim Bui & Sumi Wu/PPGIS’s installation piece where is what we map, I am handed a paper map with the question “What’s the one thing that makes wherever you’ve lived, your home?” I am prompted to answer this question by contributing to their sculpture, adding to the layers of colorful pipe cleaners, cut out maps, glued googly eyes, the beginnings of a collectively dreamed home. 

Back in the theatre for the Mainstage, we sit down to watch five twenty minute pieces that include music, performance, dance, and projection.

Bird, I am by Marisa Conroy & Olivia Bratko is the perfect whisper of a narrative– just enough exposition, while leaving space for the poetics. A human bird – named Bird Marisa – volunteers at a call center that receives calls from humans and bird species alike. Depending on who is on the other line, Bird Marisa uses a variety of bird whistles and tape recordings to answer. They receive a series of calls from a person who is looking to connect. Across species and distance, and even in spite of a power outage that disconnects their call, these two lonely hearts find connection in a song they sing together, as Bratko strings cassette tape ribbons across the whole space. 

Sky Poole / Strange Enough Dance’s piece Boy explores gender identity as a non-binary pointe shoe-clad dancer. After a series of forced falls indicating struggle against expectations or labels, Poole drops to the ground, apologizing as they get back up, saying “I fall a lot in this piece.” Though the subsequent spoken section gives us some insight into their personal history, the piece does not need it. A video of an adolescent Poole dancing adagio in ballet class is projected behind them, as they dance again. With their taped chest now exposed, they dance more fully and integrated into themselves, articulating with full expression. It is nice to see the pointe shoes remain, as so often we fully reject the ballet structure to find the queerness of movement. I enjoyed seeing someone really dance in the full spectrum of their movement identity.

KG Galbreath’s piece Q’essápi kәsϚác’әc’ snk’әl’íp is an audio-visual performance layering field recordings and videos. The sound is intentionally overwhelming, and with my earplugs in, I am able to have enough buffer for my body to be immersed but not uncomfortable as the sounds and visuals move and interact. A blue sea, lit in magentas and violets. A brush-filled canyon, the ridge carving a jagged line across the sunlit sky. Two blinking circles stare out at us, approaching, double exposures revealing a coyote’s figure as it darts in and out of visibility. Time certainly passes, but I am so entranced in the coyote’s stare, that I could not tell you if it was night or day. 

Though separated by intermission, we are very well primed for Vlada Kremenović’s piece Medusa with live music by Fox Whitney. As we reenter the space, Kremenović, Tayler Tucker, Lio Sainz-Jones and Will Courtney radiate outward in a pulsating clump, their adjoined pelvises maintaining connection with one another. Their eyes closed, their bodies move as a single organism through sensation. Lighting by Jessica Jones plays with projected ripples across the stage, illuminating the iridescent costumes. Fans blow behind the scrim, creating a beautiful blue rippling effect across the background. The clump breaks apart and the dancers circle in sensual rotations, each person finding their own pleasurable extensions, pressing and sliding their bodies along the floor. As the piece shifts into the cathartic final hours at the club, exhaustion distills the movement into a trance.

If something can be chaotically unhinged and surgically precise at the same time, it is Kye Grant Kauffman’s piece TIMES SQUARE LAS VEGAS. They jump from scene to scene and song to song, sucking at the mother teat, swimming on their belly through a fog cloud, selling us the commercial razzle dazzle dream. They pray to Bellagio, wearing a shirt that says “Ask Me About My Implosion.” The boxing gloves come on for the big fight, and as they remove the gloves they unwrap a blue ribbon tied around their hands which transforms into ribbon dancing wands. We’ve finally arrived at the 8th wonder of the world, the Bellagio Fountain’s dancing water. Kauffman’s performance of their songs are dynamized through keenly timed physical beats, outlandish character choices, and the choreography implicit in the drum kit they activate with their body and drumsticks painted like magician’s wands.

“You don’t have to choose between pieces – you experience the night as a whole. You may not love everything. The next piece might be the one.” True to the festival’s claim, Risk/Reward had so many different types of pieces, across different aesthetics, topics, identities and artistic palettes, that whether or not you liked a particular piece, it is a thrilling ride to see so many different ways to express oneself! So many worlds can be built! And an abundance of art to be made!

Risk/Reward Festival occurred June 11-14, 2026 at PICA in Portland, OR. Programs for the festival can be viewed here: Mainstage Program, Sarah K. Finn Program, Festival Program. Featured photo by Jingzi Zhao.