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On Nov. 3, PAM CUT (formerly the NW Film Center) will open the Tomorrow Theater, a gleaming film and new media center born from the ashes of the X-rated Oregon Theater on Southeast Division Street. And to kick off the theater’s Carte Blanche series, the organization has recruited none other than legendary Talking Heads frontman David Byrne.
Opening week, Byrne will take over the Tomorrow Theater with an interactive, Portland-themed presentation of his nonprofit online magazine Reasons to be Cheerful, followed by a screening of American Utopia, his collaboration with Spike Lee.
Byrne’s arrival will mark the end of a yearslong journey to create the Tomorrow Theater, which will allow PAM CUT to continue screening films while its usual auditorium, the Whitsell, is closed during the construction of the Portland Art Museum’s Rothko Pavilion.
“We are beyond thrilled to open the Tomorrow Theater, and to introduce audiences to all of the wild and wondrous things that storytelling can be,” said Amy Dotson, director of PAM CUT and curator of film and new media at the Portland Art Museum, in a press release. “We’re excited for artists to show off the capabilities of the theater and demonstrate what’s possible.”
Those artists will include Oscar-winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter (Black Panther), who will appear at the theater this January. Like Byrne, her event will be part of the Carte Blanche series, which PAM CUT says will invite “world-class artists and creative polymaths...to activate the theater in bold and interdisciplinary ways.”
“Like the creatives it will support, the Tomorrow Theater is a real shape-shifter,” Dotson said. “It’s simultaneously a cinema, a performance space, an experimentation hall, and a community gathering place, to feed those who are culturally curious and uncontainable!”
Tickets for the Tomorrow Theater go on sale Oct. 16. A full list of programming is available here.