Downtown, Pearl & NW

This fall, Portland welcomes an extraordinary celebration of classical ballet as PRIMA Ballet Gala brings together artists of the Grand Kyiv Ballet and international guest performers for one unforgettable night.

More than a performance, PRIMA Ballet Gala is a night of elevated artistry – where timeless classics meet contemporary expression, and the stage becomes a space of beauty, power, and emotion.

The program features iconic highlights from world-renowned ballets including Don Quixote, Spartacus, and The Dying Swan, alongside vibrant national dance such as the thrilling Hopak, set to music by legendary composers including Tchaikovsky.

Begin your evening on the red carpet, then step inside for a celebration of artistic excellence and international cultural connection.
Guests are warmly encouraged to attend in the evening attire, helping create an atmosphere of elegance worthy of this special occasion.

Join us for a rare opportunity to experience world-class dancers, timeless choreography, and a night filled with beauty and inspiration.

Seats are limited. Be part of PRIMA Ballet Gala — where ballet speaks from the heart.

On Sunday, November 1st, Oregon Koto-Kai, the Japanese Koto Music Society of Oregon, will present its 15th Annual Fall Concert. This year’s concert will feature traditional and modern koto ensemble pieces selected to honor the koto mastery and memory of the late Kazue Sawai. The music will be complemented by beautiful art on stage created by local artist Satoko Motouji.

Kazue Sawai cofounded the Sawai Koto Institute based in Tokyo, Japan with her husband, koto master and composer Tadao Sawai. Not only was she the instructor and mentor to our Artistic Director, Mitsuki Dazai, but her passion and innovative playing style was an inspiration to our entire group and koto players worldwide. Our program honors that legacy with traditional pieces signature to her repertoire and boundary-pushing compositions from the Sawai catalog.

London-born singer and songwriter SIENNA SPIRO announces the “My House” tour, including an extensive North American fall run followed by dates in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Europe.

Just last week, SIENNA released the official music video for her enthralling single “The Visitor.” Written and produced by SIENNA with Omer Fedi (SZA, Lil Nas X) and Michael Pollack (Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus), the song draws its power from a spellbinding vocal recorded in one take, lyrics that cut to the bone, and a 20-piece string orchestra led and arranged by Academy Award-winner Peter Rotter (Oppenheimer, The Last Repair Shop). While SIENNA’s poetry and the video nod to matters of the heart, by the song’s end, we sense that she’s singing about something more: a strong awareness of impermanence — of things ending and people leaving — that can quickly turn into paralyzing fear. That sentiment is the driving force behind the concept that powers Visitor, the album.

Of course, SIENNA is very much here to stay. Her music has amassed over 1.2 billion global streams so far and, in late March, she had a trio of singles climbing the Hot 100 all at once: “The Visitor” (which so far peaked at #43), heartwrenching UK Platinum smash “Die On This Hill” (#19), and the enduring “You Stole The Show” (#55). All three are set to appear on Visitor, which was executive produced by Fedi with additional production from an elite crew including Blake Slatkin, Yakob, and Pollack, plus composers like Larry Gold (Al Green, Silk Sonic) and Rotter. SIENNA and her hand-picked collaborators brought her vision to life in an array of legendary spaces like Electric Lady Studios in New York, Abbey Road Studios in London, and Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles.

Live Wire joins forces with the Portland Art Museum for an afternoon of roving performances ahead of an evening recording of the program. The event coincides with PAM's monthly Free First Thursday and the Portland Book Festival's expanded programming. Performers will include poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle.

Free pop-up performances will take place throughout the Museum’s galleries, giving visitors a chance to catch live performances and storytelling while moving through the PAM spaces. Completely free through PAM’s Free First Thursday general admission. Also, enjoy a fully seated, ticketed Live Wire taping hosted by Luke Burbank with announcer Elena Passarello, featuring a blend of interviews, comedy, and music performed live for the audience, then edited into an episode for broadcast to over 200 public radio stations nationwide.

Visitors can take in the afternoon gallery pop-ups, the evening show, or both.

Join an evening of conversation, laughter, and stories of the human spirit featuring The Omnibus Project with John Roderick and a special guest. Presented by Papertrees Creative in partnership with the 2026 Portland Book Festival and Literary Arts. This event will be recorded. The Omnibus Project is a podcast founded in 2017 by Ken Jennings and John Roderick as a repository for the lesser-known stories of our collected human experience that, in the event of a cataclysm, may not survive to be retold. It is an effort to save our own Library of Alexandria to disk, a project to preserve not just what made us great but what made us human.

The show has diligently researched and compiled the knowledge around the knowledge, building a compendium not of obvious and commonly cited data—the Roman Empire and World War II are widely reported elsewhere—but of the esoteric and sublime wonders that might otherwise be lost.

John Roderick is a Seattle-based musician, writer, and podcaster celebrated for his sharp wit and distinctive voice. Beyond co-creating The Omnibus Project, he also co-hosts Roderick on the Line. His essays have appeared in Rolling Stone, Esquire, and Seattle Weekly, and he has published a book of short prose, Electric Aphorisms. Best known as the frontman of The Long Winters, Roderick will return with a highly anticipated new album soon.

Portland Art Museum invites the community to join a Free First Thursday event, offering free admission to the museum for all, plus a Live Wire event as part of the Literary Arts Portland Book Festival. Visitors can take in the afternoon gallery pop-ups, the evening show, or both!

4:30 – 6 p.m. — Free, pre-show, pop-up performances will take place throughout the Museum’s galleries. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle.

Free First Thursday tickets can be reserved online one week in advance and are also available at the door.

7 p.m. — Enjoy a fully seated, ticketed Live Wire taping hosted by Luke Burbank with announcer Elena Passarello, featuring a blend of interviews, comedy, and music performed live for the audience, then edited into an episode for broadcast to over 200 public radio stations nationwide. Performers are poet and rapper Dessa, bestselling children’s author Mac Barnett, Pulitzer Prize Finalist Ed Park, and Portland comedian Mx. Dahlia Belle. Doors will open at 6:30pm.

GA Tickets are $15. Preferred Seating is $40. Discounts available to Portland Book Festival passholders.

Dessa is a singer, rapper, and writer who fell in love with language as a toddler—and just never got over it. Now, she works in fields that traffic in words: she’s recorded rap bangers as part of the fiercely independent Doomtree collective, released a live album with the Grammy-winning Minnesota Orchestra; contributed to The New York Times and National Geographic Traveler; delivered a TED Talk on the intersection of romance and neuroscience that’s notched more than 4 million views; hosted 2 seasons of behavioral science podcast Deeply Human (BBC/American Public Media); and published a memoir recounting most of the above called My Own Devices (Penguin Random House).

Mac Barnett, the 2025–2026 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, is a New York Times bestselling author of stories for children. Mac’s books have won many prizes, including two Caldecott Honors, three New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Awards, three E. B. White Read Aloud Awards and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award, as well as several international prizes. He lives in Oakland, California. His latest book, illustrated by X. Fang, is Tom Nancy: The Sheep Who Swapped Brains with a Boy. From two of the most exciting picture book makers today comes a hilarious trickster tale and Freaky Friday switcheroo story: a sneaky, cheeky sheep named Tom Nancy has a brain swap proposal for an innocent farm boy named Felix that will change both of their lives forever. Laugh-out-loud, subversive, and totally unexpected.

Ed Park is the author of the novels Personal Days and Same Bed Different Dreams. He is a founding editor of The Believer, and has worked in newspapers, book publishing, and academia. His writing appears in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s Magazine, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. Profound, wily, and beautifully wrought, his new book Three Tenses: A Transmission from the Nineties is a meeting of memory and myth, confession and obfuscation, coalescing to offer a singular picture of creativity in action.

The princess of Portland comedy, best known for her breakout performance on the popular Netflix special Hannah Gadsby’s Gender Agenda, Mx. Dahlia Belle has been compared to a Swiss Army knife—different tools to extract sharpness, softness, vulnerability, hope, and wicked wit. She’s been declared one of “11 Trans Comedians… Funnier Than Dave Chappelle” by Out Magazine, repeatedly featured on NPR, and has written for Cosmopolitan Magazine, The Guardian, The Stranger, and Portland Mercury. Her live performances have included NW Black Comedy Festival, Upper Left Comedy Festival, SF Sketchfest, and an awkward conversation with John Waters and Piers Morgan. In the upcoming live taping of her comedy special Affirmed at Polaris Hall on November 22nd, Mx. Dahlia Belle delivers 60 new minutes of stand-up to celebrate and affirm being human in the modern world through a combination of the wholesome and mundane, anecdotes about house cats, liscivious foibles of the LGBT community, and an unapologetic account of her personal journey with gender-affirming care, all delivered with her trademark free form wit.

Free First Thursdays at the Museum and PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater aligns with the revitalization of the long-standing Portland art galleries’ tradition of opening their doors for openings, receptions, and events on the first Thursday of each month. In recent months art and culture organizations have joined to bring back this popular activity, including the Pacific Northwest College of Art and the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in the North Park Blocks.

Generous support provided by Art Bridges Foundation’s Access for All program.

Anthony Hudson reads from his new collection of performance works Lamp Black: Plays and Other Grievances at Portland Art Museum in the American Art gallery (Level 2, Room 211), paired with Moses Soyer, Girl with a Cigarette.

Followed by book signing at The Shop at PAM.

A major collection of performance works by artist and agitator Anthony Hudson.

Lamp Back: Plays and Other Grievances collects nearly a decade of work by Anthony Hudson, a queer Indigenous artist and agitator also known as Portland, Oregon’s premier drag clown, Carla Rossi. Whether fumbling with a lamp in a satirical takedown of land acknowledgments or confronting the history of redface in pop culture, Hudson alternates between Rossi’s cackling “ghost of white privilege” and more earnest, vulnerable confessionals as himself—all with a deep commitment to bitter humor and brutal honesty. In these performance works, a mixed-race Native boy plays a pilgrim in his kindergarten Thanksgiving pageant. A young artist recounts the racism in their favorite musical and the larger American theater system. A drag queen storytime goes disastrously wrong and calls for an exorcism with a plunger. Kate Bredeson’s unflinching introduction speaks to Hudson’s work through a cultural and historical lens and illuminates the importance of his project to filet the American Empire.

Derek Hough Dance for the Holidays is a joyous celebration of the most festive time of the year! With jingle bells and sleigh bells, holiday carols and cheer, Hough’s latest dance spectacular is a show-stopping event for the whole family. Fans will be thrilled and delighted as Hough and his cast of phenomenal dancers bring your favorite holiday tunes to life through dance, from the well-sung classics to modern pop hits, with the incredible choreography, exciting stage production and dance mastery audiences have come to expect. Creative team and Emmy winners, Napoleon and Tabitha Dumo, also known as NappyTabs (Jennifer Lopez’s ‘All I Have’, Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour, Grammys), co-create, direct and supervise choreography for the tour.

Hailed by France Musique as the new face of the classical guitar, Djibouti-born French guitarist Raphaël Feuillâtre regularly delights audiences and critics worldwide with his charismatic artistry, embracing everything from Baroque-period repertoire to compositions by trailblazing contemporary composers. His jaw-dropping precision, technical mastery, and creative vision make works from all time periods sound as if they were written yesterday–alive, heartfelt, and filled with color. Don’t miss a passionate evening of Latin music, including many of Feuillâtre’s own arrangements.