Hand2Mouth’s 2026 New2You Festival
Premiering, March 27th - April 4th, 2026
This year's theme is Body and Technology. .
“We look forward to sharing how our collective investigation into this theme will uncover untold stories, new ideas, and offer fresh perspectives on the complexity of identity and technological advances that affect how we present and see ourselves today.” ~ Michael Cavazos, Artistic Director
Venue:
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA)
15 NE Hancock Street, Portland Oregon, 97212
Artists: Trick Pony (Emily Laue, Adam Fleming, London Bauman)
Title: Soft Machine
Performance Dates: March 27th @ 7:30 pm. | April 2nd @ 7:30 pm
How do you program humanity? Soft Machine - a newly devised piece from Trick Pony Theatre - invites you to clock in at the latest big tech company, OptiMates™, and see just how an android gets its adenoids. The most advanced mechanical being ever is presented as the answer to all of our most unnecessary tasks such as learning new things, making friends, and falling in love. An interactive, absurd journey into Uncanny Valley where we strive to make machines more like humans and humans more like machines. Who knew outsourcing our soul in pursuit of optimization was funny?
@trickpony
Audience Notes: There will be some audience interaction and moments of low lighting
Artist: Rui Dun with design and direction by Rachel Zimmerman
Title: Mama's Emoji
Performance Dates: March 28th @ 3:00 pm | March 29th @ 7:30 pm
Mama’s Emoji begins with a death announcement delivered the modern way: a text from Mom. Bad news, worse emoji. From that tiny glowing screen, a one-person interactive performance was born, diving into the process of grief when family is separated by migration. When oceans separate generations and emotions go unread, what happens to mourning and to all the things left unsaid? Blending dark comedy with quiet devastation, Mama’s Emoji skewers emotional avoidance, inherited silence, and the theater of digital intimacy within Asian families. Does communication break down through technology, or does it expose how bad we’ve always been at it?
Artist: Pepper Pepper
Title: A Cyborg Sissy
Performance Dates: March 28th @ 7:30 pm | April 1st @ 7:30 pm
A Cyborg Sissy is a stream of consciousness questioning consciousness. A lecture about an uncertain future by the mythic Cyborg Sissy, a being who re-emerges in times of great disruption. Weaving together the problems and possibilities offered by Haraway, Burroughs, and P-Orridge (among others) the Cyborg Sissy considers what it means to have a body, a gender, and desire at the very beginning of an empire's end.
www.thepepperpepper.com/cyborgsissy
@thepepperpepper
Audience Notes:: Nudity, Strobe
Artist: Nathalie Owen FitzSimons
Title: The Surgery
Performance Dates: March 28th @ 7:30 pm | April 1st @ 7:30 pm
Nathalie Owen FitzSimons, the brilliant (unlicensed) medical mind, has created a Surgery that will change the world as we know it: Gender Confirmation Surgery for Cis people. For years, only trans people have experienced the joys of The Surgery- the multiple visits to a wide array of medical practitioners, the innumerable hoops of bureaucracy to jump through, the politicians actively attacking the right to receive any kind of medical care and claiming that you should be put in camps- finally, cis people get to experience it for themselves! One lucky audience member will have the privilege of receiving The Surgery in front of an audience! There will be a lot of blood! There will be live electronic music! There will be rigorous paperwork!
@weirdthingsforimaginarypeople
Audience Notes: Blood
Artists: Daye Thomas and Dylan Hankins
Title: The Parallax View
Performance Dates: March 31st @ 7:30 pm April 4th @ 7:30 pm
"The Parallax View" is a devised movement and sound performance by Dylan Hankins and Daye Thomas, inspired by Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave" and Slavoj Žižek’s philosophy of the split subject. Inside a fragile cardboard world of screens, lemons, and objects (or are they humans?), a man navigates digital solitude, modern masculinity, and synthetic intimacy. There is comfort in curated shadows. The cave is no longer underground. It is handheld. It is personalized. IT learns YOU.
If reality is only ever perspective, what happens when the version of yourself built to survive begins to replace the one that needs connection?
Artists: H2M’s Youth Devising Residency Ensemble
Title: Enter Your Prompt Here ____________
Performance Dates: March 29th @ 3:00 pm, April 3rd @ 2:30pm & 7:30 pm
The Show you are about to see is <Enter Your Prompt Here>
The Show you are about to see is <Not a Cautionary Tale>
The Show you are about to see is <Tools with no true application. Whatever happened to fucking? And. Maybe if I make this computer bleed I will feel human again.
An exploration on the long term use of AI on humanity~
Ensemble: Turner Cale, Athena Crane, Syla Edelman, Miles Franklin, Addie Grab, Aurelius Lillie, Molly May, Phoenix Nathoo, Mark Perez Siquina. Directed by: Jenni GreenMiller | Assistant Director; Orion Ellis. Costumes: Max Ratner. Hair&Makeup: Alex Quiggle
Artists: Nurys Herrerra
Title: System Check
Performance Dates: March 27th @ 7:30 pm, April 2nd @ 7:30 pm
System Check is a solo performance about what happens when the human body is examined, measured, and misunderstood by technology.
After entering a futuristic diagnostic room, a woman is guided through a series of automated tests designed to read her body as data by a virtual nurse who follows protocol perfectly. When the system encounters things it can’t fully process like personal history, missing parts, and emotion, it attempts to adjust how it communicates, trying different programmed ways of explaining what’s happening. None of them quite work.
Blending physical comedy, silence, and a growing sense of frustration, System Check explores the gap between efficiency and empathy and asks what we still need when the results are inconclusive.
Artists: Maia McCarthy
Title: Assessment Tools
Performance Dates: March 28th @ 3:00 pm & March 29th @ 7:30 pm
Determined to "do menopause right," our hero goes searching for an app for that. Not finding what they're looking for they embark on an adventure to create their own- what could go wrong?
Artists: Olga Kravtsova and Piper Francis
Title: KEEPERS
Performance Dates: March 31st @ 7:30 pm April 4th @ 7:30 pm
In a world where communication systems have collapsed, KEEPERS unfolds inside a lighthouse that still functions, though no one knows why. Rituals continue. Signals are sent. The response is uncertain.
Built through physical labor, repetition, and relational attention, the work uses minimal materials, with light and sound operating as active forces. Language surfaces only in fragments and never settles into explanation. KEEPERS invites audiences into quiet witnessing and shared listening, offering a space of vigilance where meaning is carried, tested, and held without promise of resolution.
https://www.keeperslife.com
@olga.s.kravtsova. @frankly.pipes
Audience Notes: This performance includes low-light conditions, use of a smoke machine, and moments of darkness. It may include brief moments of strobe lighting. No audience participation is required.