#celebratethework
In response to the effects of COVID-19 on the dance and performance world, CPR will highlight and honor our spring season artists on the day of their scheduled performance. Stay tuned as artists share their processes, motivations, and media over the coming weeks and join us as we #celebratethework
Follow us online:
CPRNYC.org // @cprnyc
Postponed/Cancelled Events:
Performance Studio Open House: PSOH March 2020
New Voices in Live Performance: the corpus is exquisite, the equinox is vernal (ceev)
Spring Movement: CPR Spring Movement 2020
Performance Studio Open House: PSOH April 2020
Performance Studio Open House: PSOH May 2020
@CPR | Marija Krtolica: Parrhesia
Photo by Walter Wlodarczyk. Image courtesy Marija Krtolica.
Tickets: $10, $15, $20, sliding scale
Purchase Tickets
View the program.
Parrhesia is not a skill; it is something which is harder to define. It is a stance, a way of being which is akin to virtue, a mode of action.
– Foucault
Parrhesia: The Courage of Truth in Five Scenes — with psychoanalytic insights in the margins is a dance-theatre work which takes as its point of departure Michel Foucault’s lectures The Courage of Truth (1983/84) and the concept of parrhesia – saying, expressing everything, and telling the truth to power. The work engages the relationship between first, the silent action and speech; second, deliberate creation of spectacle (representation), and unconscious (repressed) expression.
The scenes revolve around five truth procedures: socratic wisdom, cynic’s homeless existence, labor protests, revolutionary consciousness, and art/criticism.
Choreographic concept in collaboration with the performers: Marija Krtolica
Performed by: Jason Ciaccio, Theresa Duhon, Julie Fotheringham, Emilee Lord, Alessandro Magania, and Despina Sophia Stamos
Videography: Charles Dennis
Textual sources: Foucault, Marx, Freud, Badiou, Didi-Huberman, and Peggy Phelan
@CPR | Screen Play: A “series” of “readings”
Image courtesy Catalina Alvarez.
Tickets: $15, $20, $25, sliding scale
Purchase Tickets
Proceeds go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Screen Play is a “series” of “readings” hosted by Catalina Alvarez, with work by Alvarez, Berisha Fareau, Paige Finley, Daniel Fishkin, Nicole Kugel, Samuel Lang Budin, Catarina Real, Ron Shalom, Femi Shonuga-Fleming and Ashley Yang-Thompson.
PROGRAM
Nicole Kugel: The Shrimple Life
An essay about experiencing nature through computers.
Ashley Yang-Thompson: MY ANUS (delivers ephemeral, anti-capitalist art every most day[s])
The (highly unprofessional) philosophical pedagogy of ash yang-thompson
(which is in a perpetual state of flux)
(because life resists comprehension)
(excerpt)
Catarina Real: Color
A book of poems and visual works.
Catalina Alvarez and Daniel Fishkin: Modos de Transporte: Bois de Rose
Modos de Transporte is a multilingual travel series. In the pilot episode, “Bois de Rose” the host takes a high speed rail train from Paris to Bordeaux and there discovers the studio of Jose Le Piez, builder of “abrassons,” a type of friction drum sculpted from trees that sings with the simple caress of a hand.
Femi Shonuga-Fleming: Thanks to the ground beneath my feet
A multimedia essay ritual
Samuel Lang Budin: Vicinity
A poem of dashed expectations on the apps.
Catalina Alvarez, w Berisha Fareau & Paige Finley + Minivan: App
A short story about phones with a movement performance featuring Minivan’s Everyone Gets it But Me (App Mix)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Catalina Alvarez is the director of the feature-length anthology documentary Sound Spring (2024). She heads the Art & Engagement program at Fordham University and currently lives in New York, NY.
Samuel Lang Budin was co-editor of their high school lit mag.
Daniel Fishkin’s ears are ringing. Composer of musical instruments. He is the only luthier that studied directly with the daxophone’s inventor, Hans Reichel; Daniel’s instruments have traveled the world, including Canada, California, Norway, Germany, France, Japan, Kazakhstan, and Australia. He is currently a PhD Candidate in Composition and Computer Music at the University of Virginia.
Nicole Kugel is a recent graduate of Columbia’s MFA in Creative Writing. Her work can be read in SKOO and LitHub. She is currently the Fiction Reader for The Hudson Review and working on a collection of short stories.
Catarina Real works in the intersection between artistic practice and theoretical research in the Literatura, Visual Arts and Pe, mostly working in long-term collaborative projects that address the question of how can we better live collectively. She is currently a PhD student in Cultural Studies at Minho University with a research that crosses art, love and capital.
Ron Shalom’s electropop drag spectacle, Minivan, features custom live-controlled lights, instructional dance, and original music. His sound sculptures are exhibited internationally, and he is often engaged as a producer, multi-instrumentalist, and composer for film and theater.
Femi Shonuga-Fleming is studying architecture at RISD and performs sonic rituals as Sadnoise.
Ash Yang-Thompson is the author of How to be the Worst Laziest Fattest Most Incontinent Piece-of-Shit in the world EVER (Bateau Press, 2021) and the chapbook Sky Mall (above/ground press, 2020), which was written collaboratively with Mikko Harvey. She almost won a Pushcart Prize for her poem White Fur Rug. She currently lives in Portland, OR.
OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement: chameckilerner, Cal Fish, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Alejandra Ramos, and Kat Sotelo
Kat Sotelo. Photo by Sarrah Danziger.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 6 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 7 at 7 P.M.
CPR’s long-running Fall Movement program is an opportunity for artists to present new, fully-produced work in dance, performance, and time-based art in a shared program, curated by an independent panel of artists through an open call. Artists are encouraged to submit work with experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and which embrace risk-taking and the unexpected.
Five artists working across and between live art disciplines were selected to present their work: chameckilerner, Cal Fish, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Alejandra Ramos, and Kat Sotelo.
The 2024 program was curated by a selection panel comprised of artists Ayano Elson, Nazareth Hassan, Kamikaze Jones, and Eleanor Kipping.
PROGRAM
chameckilerner: Untitled Still
Untitled Still echoes chameckilerner’s artistic origins from the 1990s as a dynamic duo. Seventeen years after EXIT, a seminal piece exploring closure, Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki embark on a journey of introspection and reinvention. This experimental dance documentary interweaves spoken word and choreography to delve into themes of intimacy, conflict, the process and consequences of becoming a “we”, and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Their collaboration, rooted in their shared histories of aging, migration, and cultural identity, serves as a testament to resilience and the transformative power of artistic exploration. Amidst the passage of time and in a new environment, they aim to explore human connections, where the evolving dynamics between two individuals mirror the universal journey of personal and artistic evolution.
Cal Fish: Pre-York River: Absorber Antenna
A solo performance exploring the body as absorber/container and antenna/conduit for sounds and memories, Pre-York River: Absorber Antenna is a series of carefully indexed choreographies enabled by sound sculptures that will share a collection of audio. The Dynamic Listening Instrument, FM radios and transmitters, and a towel with conductive thread to sense a body will be engaged by a score. Sonic fragments will echo NYC's intense flooding, offer visions of remediation, and share “watermark memories,” and deeply affective oral histories from Cal Fish’s interviewing practice. Using their body as a literal antenna and conduit, sharing site-specific body mapping of FM waves, electromagnetic fields, and zones of capacitive reactivity, movement and sound will be linked, sonic tasks will have choreographic consequences, and movements will have sonic repercussions.
Marcelline Mandeng Nken: Rush Hour Pt. 1
Rush Hour Pt. 1 is a movement phrase about the concept of liminality or the feeling of being "caught up in between." The main character is the vehicle of the train; themes of migration, displacement, and mobility are rest stops along the ride, offering reflections on the motives of colonialism. Journeying to a distant paradise or final frontier for enlightenment becomes a measure of conquest. The performance considers the tension that emerges from shuttling through space and time before you reach the final destination through the lens of Black feminine literary imagination. Movements enacted within a miniature train set are abstractions of passages from Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Audre Lorde's poem "Women on Trains." Both texts build metaphors around the train motif to illustrate dynamic shifts in relationships and the weight of responsibilities that arise as the trip unfolds, from the mundane to the cosmic.
Alejandra Ramos: She Died in a Guatemalan Sinkhole
In 2006 Zoila Molina was murdered in her home in Guatemala City. Her daughter, Paula Molina, was an undocumented immigrant living in the US and could not return to see her mother's body before her burial. She lived over 10 years without ever seeing her mother or her grave. “Where is her body? I have not seen it,” Paula says, “She breathes beneath the earth, and it is our job to free her.” She Died in a Guatemalan Sinkhole is a docufiction performance lecture by Alejandra Ramos about the passing of her grandmother, Zoila Molina, and her relationship with Ramos' mother, Paula Molina. The performance utilizes small archived photo blocks to recreate a tangible sequence of a family’s life in Guatemala City. Through live-feed projection and fictional narration, audiences witness a testimony of a daughter in search of her mother's body.
Kat Sotelo: XOXO (FILIPINO FUTURISM)
XOXO (FILIPINO FUTURISM) is a new movement, a manifesto. What if Filipinos we were able to move beyond relegated roles of subordination and service? What if we manipulate these roles to our advantage? Assimilation and camouflage have been mechanics of our survival in America. This work investigates/restructures these systems to uplift our visibility; to simultaneously reconnect with pre-colonial indigenous practices and carry these into our vast imagined futures. Using the Peep Show as a performative container in this reclamation of power, Kat Sotelo simulates a kaleidoscope of identities in erotic exchange as a tribute to her vessel and its predecessors – the ways in which her ancestors have been perceived, used, exoticized, erased. XOXO also pinpoints schisms between the homeland and the diaspora, evident in the heated debate over Filipino vs. Filipinx. Synthesizing personal video archives with movement, set design, and folk traditions, the work bridges generational and geographical gaps with discourse, intimacy, and absurdist panache.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
chameckilerner is a 30-year collaboration between Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, an interdisciplinary duo working in the intersection of dance and time-based media. Their work has been presented by The Kitchen, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, The Joyce, PS122, Central Park SummerStage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, Diverseworks, Jacob’s Pillow, and American Dance Festival. chameckilerner is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award, NEFA, NYFA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, and Rockefeller Map Fund, among others. Residencies include The Bogliasco Fellowship, Yaddo, The Rauschenberg Foundation, EMPAC, The Watermill Center, and Gibney’s Dance in Process Residency, among others.
Cal Fish is a cross-disciplinary artist from New York. Their work is multi-modal and immersive, often employing interactive sonic tools in soft and social sculpture. Cal performs regularly around NYC and has toured to share work all across North America and parts of Europe. Listening and archival practices, electromagnetic fields, flute, fm hijacking, songs, oral histories, up-cycled quilts, conductive thread, comfort objects, and magical kinesthetic tools combine to create environments for critical play, ecological awareness, and expanded perception. Graduating from Bard in 2018, Cal has since shared work at venues including Chaos Computer, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Currently Cal helps run the Living Gallery in Brooklyn where they regularly organize/host multimedia events, sews upcycled clothing in their home studio, and runs the phone line media label Call Waitn.
Born in Yaounde, Cameroon, Marcelline Mandeng Nken pairs curious objects with movement phrases to unpack dominant narrative structures and the societal conditions that produce them. Her practice is grounded in research, focusing on Greco-Egyptian mythologies and sociopolitical situations that address the semiotics of desire, ancestral knowledge systems as metadata, and the biological limits of human transfiguration. She recently completed her MFA from Yale School of Art and is a current Dance Research Fellow at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.
Alejandra Ramos is a Guatemalan / Mexican artist focusing on personal familial-based collaboration. She values the practice of consistent communication between herself and her family abroad – creating spontaneous dialogues and new histories. She uses writing, video, and photography to translate her family’s narratives relating to loss, migration, and separation. Alejandra was born and raised between the suburbs of Lehi, UT, and the endless deserts of Tucson, AZ. She is an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and values the necessity of community within and beyond educational institutions. Due to the limitation of distance, much of her collaboration with relatives occurs over a phone call where stories are exchanged and recorded. Working in a way where live bodies are not present with voice only recalls how the artist's family has always lived. To be an immigrant means leaving behind one's home and community where seemingly mundane interactions are no longer possible. As such, Alejandra embraces the fragmentation of oral storytelling that is built through myth and imaginative truth.
Kat Sotelo is a 1st generation Filipino American performance artist who received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a Concentration in Video/Film from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009. Her performances manifest as dance, theatrical productions, and social experiments – all framing the absurdity of life and desperate need for human connection. For over a decade, Sotelo has been professionally employed in the film industry where she decorates sets and manufactures realities on a commercial scale. These skills have sharpened her cinematic approach to stage fabrication – fusing gesture, character tropes, and set pieces to build realms in the threshold of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Her current work focuses on decolonization from the perspective of a Filipino femme. Exploring her body as a means of currency in the American social landscape, she scrutinizes her relationship to “whiteness” through acts of deep humor and sorrow. Sotelo currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement: chameckilerner, Cal Fish, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Alejandra Ramos, and Kat Sotelo
Kat Sotelo. Photo by Sarrah Danziger.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 6 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 7 at 7 P.M.
CPR’s long-running Fall Movement program is an opportunity for artists to present new, fully-produced work in dance, performance, and time-based art in a shared program, curated by an independent panel of artists through an open call. Artists are encouraged to submit work with experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and which embrace risk-taking and the unexpected.
Five artists working across and between live art disciplines were selected to present their work: chameckilerner, Cal Fish, Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Alejandra Ramos, and Kat Sotelo.
The 2024 program was curated by a selection panel comprised of artists Ayano Elson, Nazareth Hassan, Kamikaze Jones, and Eleanor Kipping.
PROGRAM
chameckilerner: Untitled Still
Untitled Still echoes chameckilerner’s artistic origins from the 1990s as a dynamic duo. Seventeen years after EXIT, a seminal piece exploring closure, Andrea Lerner and Rosane Chamecki embark on a journey of introspection and reinvention. This experimental dance documentary interweaves spoken word and choreography to delve into themes of intimacy, conflict, the process and consequences of becoming a “we”, and the cyclical nature of death and rebirth. Their collaboration, rooted in their shared histories of aging, migration, and cultural identity, serves as a testament to resilience and the transformative power of artistic exploration. Amidst the passage of time and in a new environment, they aim to explore human connections, where the evolving dynamics between two individuals mirror the universal journey of personal and artistic evolution.
Cal Fish: Pre-York River: Absorber Antenna
A solo performance exploring the body as absorber/container and antenna/conduit for sounds and memories, Pre-York River: Absorber Antenna is a series of carefully indexed choreographies enabled by sound sculptures that will share a collection of audio. The Dynamic Listening Instrument, FM radios and transmitters, and a towel with conductive thread to sense a body will be engaged by a score. Sonic fragments will echo NYC's intense flooding, offer visions of remediation, and share “watermark memories,” and deeply affective oral histories from Cal Fish’s interviewing practice. Using their body as a literal antenna and conduit, sharing site-specific body mapping of FM waves, electromagnetic fields, and zones of capacitive reactivity, movement and sound will be linked, sonic tasks will have choreographic consequences, and movements will have sonic repercussions.
Marcelline Mandeng Nken: Rush Hour Pt. 1
Rush Hour Pt. 1 is a movement phrase about the concept of liminality or the feeling of being "caught up in between." The main character is the vehicle of the train; themes of migration, displacement, and mobility are rest stops along the ride, offering reflections on the motives of colonialism. Journeying to a distant paradise or final frontier for enlightenment becomes a measure of conquest. The performance considers the tension that emerges from shuttling through space and time before you reach the final destination through the lens of Black feminine literary imagination. Movements enacted within a miniature train set are abstractions of passages from Zora Neale Hurston's novel "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and Audre Lorde's poem "Women on Trains." Both texts build metaphors around the train motif to illustrate dynamic shifts in relationships and the weight of responsibilities that arise as the trip unfolds, from the mundane to the cosmic.
Alejandra Ramos: She Died in a Guatemalan Sinkhole
In 2006 Zoila Molina was murdered in her home in Guatemala City. Her daughter, Paula Molina, was an undocumented immigrant living in the US and could not return to see her mother's body before her burial. She lived over 10 years without ever seeing her mother or her grave. “Where is her body? I have not seen it,” Paula says, “She breathes beneath the earth, and it is our job to free her.” She Died in a Guatemalan Sinkhole is a docufiction performance lecture by Alejandra Ramos about the passing of her grandmother, Zoila Molina, and her relationship with Ramos' mother, Paula Molina. The performance utilizes small archived photo blocks to recreate a tangible sequence of a family’s life in Guatemala City. Through live-feed projection and fictional narration, audiences witness a testimony of a daughter in search of her mother's body.
Kat Sotelo: XOXO (FILIPINO FUTURISM)
XOXO (FILIPINO FUTURISM) is a new movement, a manifesto. What if Filipinos we were able to move beyond relegated roles of subordination and service? What if we manipulate these roles to our advantage? Assimilation and camouflage have been mechanics of our survival in America. This work investigates/restructures these systems to uplift our visibility; to simultaneously reconnect with pre-colonial indigenous practices and carry these into our vast imagined futures. Using the Peep Show as a performative container in this reclamation of power, Kat Sotelo simulates a kaleidoscope of identities in erotic exchange as a tribute to her vessel and its predecessors – the ways in which her ancestors have been perceived, used, exoticized, erased. XOXO also pinpoints schisms between the homeland and the diaspora, evident in the heated debate over Filipino vs. Filipinx. Synthesizing personal video archives with movement, set design, and folk traditions, the work bridges generational and geographical gaps with discourse, intimacy, and absurdist panache.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
chameckilerner is a 30-year collaboration between Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner, an interdisciplinary duo working in the intersection of dance and time-based media. Their work has been presented by The Kitchen, The Chocolate Factory, Dance Theater Workshop, The Joyce, PS122, Central Park SummerStage, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Mass MoCA, Diverseworks, Jacob’s Pillow, and American Dance Festival. chameckilerner is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award, NEFA, NYFA, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, and Rockefeller Map Fund, among others. Residencies include The Bogliasco Fellowship, Yaddo, The Rauschenberg Foundation, EMPAC, The Watermill Center, and Gibney’s Dance in Process Residency, among others.
Cal Fish is a cross-disciplinary artist from New York. Their work is multi-modal and immersive, often employing interactive sonic tools in soft and social sculpture. Cal performs regularly around NYC and has toured to share work all across North America and parts of Europe. Listening and archival practices, electromagnetic fields, flute, fm hijacking, songs, oral histories, up-cycled quilts, conductive thread, comfort objects, and magical kinesthetic tools combine to create environments for critical play, ecological awareness, and expanded perception. Graduating from Bard in 2018, Cal has since shared work at venues including Chaos Computer, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Brooklyn Academy of Music. Currently Cal helps run the Living Gallery in Brooklyn where they regularly organize/host multimedia events, sews upcycled clothing in their home studio, and runs the phone line media label Call Waitn.
Born in Yaounde, Cameroon, Marcelline Mandeng Nken pairs curious objects with movement phrases to unpack dominant narrative structures and the societal conditions that produce them. Her practice is grounded in research, focusing on Greco-Egyptian mythologies and sociopolitical situations that address the semiotics of desire, ancestral knowledge systems as metadata, and the biological limits of human transfiguration. She recently completed her MFA from Yale School of Art and is a current Dance Research Fellow at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library.
Alejandra Ramos is a Guatemalan / Mexican artist focusing on personal familial-based collaboration. She values the practice of consistent communication between herself and her family abroad – creating spontaneous dialogues and new histories. She uses writing, video, and photography to translate her family’s narratives relating to loss, migration, and separation. Alejandra was born and raised between the suburbs of Lehi, UT, and the endless deserts of Tucson, AZ. She is an MFA candidate at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and values the necessity of community within and beyond educational institutions. Due to the limitation of distance, much of her collaboration with relatives occurs over a phone call where stories are exchanged and recorded. Working in a way where live bodies are not present with voice only recalls how the artist's family has always lived. To be an immigrant means leaving behind one's home and community where seemingly mundane interactions are no longer possible. As such, Alejandra embraces the fragmentation of oral storytelling that is built through myth and imaginative truth.
Kat Sotelo is a 1st generation Filipino American performance artist who received her BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture with a Concentration in Video/Film from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2009. Her performances manifest as dance, theatrical productions, and social experiments – all framing the absurdity of life and desperate need for human connection. For over a decade, Sotelo has been professionally employed in the film industry where she decorates sets and manufactures realities on a commercial scale. These skills have sharpened her cinematic approach to stage fabrication – fusing gesture, character tropes, and set pieces to build realms in the threshold of the ordinary and the extraordinary. Her current work focuses on decolonization from the perspective of a Filipino femme. Exploring her body as a means of currency in the American social landscape, she scrutinizes her relationship to “whiteness” through acts of deep humor and sorrow. Sotelo currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.
@CPR | Set Into Motion: Six Artists Presented by Westlab + Gallery and Mono No Aware
Still from Raine Roberts: DOVE STONE. Courtesy MONO NO AWARE.
Tickets: free w/ RSVP
RSVP
*In the event that the program is sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7PM.
The films in Set Into Motion are the culmination of a year-long commission by Mono No Aware in collaboration with Westlab + Gallery. This commission invited six analog photographers who have previously exhibited work at Westlab + Gallery to extend their art practice into the realm of moving image, making films on 16mm for the first time.
Mono No Aware, in tandem with Westlab + Gallery, provided each commissioned artist with workshops introducing the Bolex Rex 5 Camera, support in developing film concepts, camera, film and equipment for shoot days, as well as a workshop on the 4-plate Steenbeck flatbed editing table for all of the artists to edit their projects by hand.
PROGRAM
Nyasia Pettway Rochelle (Petersburg, VA) & Christiane Nahu (New York, NY): ROXY
ROXY features a woman, blonde haired and brown eyed, who doesn’t know she’s dreaming. Escapism is her reality, her mind is the only place she feels comfortable enough to scream and cry in. This particular night, she sees a dream that isn’t her’s. Familiar sights of trees and buildings that feel like lost memories; a life she didn’t live but can see somehow. In color, at that, but she dreams in black and white. She sees the world for what it is, but she is lost in her mind, far from reality. The film explores the pieces of her she loves and hates; disorganized thoughts and memories, but beautiful nonetheless.
Kenzie King (Brooklyn, NY): Good Grieve
Good Grieve weaves together a portrait of grief, obsession, and nostalgia through imagery and objects that permeate our everyday lives.The film provides a symbolic landscape where the past intrudes upon the present in a looping rhythm of indelible imagery. Grief and memory take shape within the fleeting ephemera, as the familiar objects inexplicably evoke moments of pain. By revisiting these memories as intrusive images on loop, the objects in the film slowly shed the layers of narrative, leaning into the cyclical nature of grief in order to break free from it.
Annie Grey (Brooklyn, NY): Pretty Girls Always Smile
Gustavo Lopes (Brooklyn, NY): CATARINA
A short film that offers an intimate glimpse into the life of a Brazilian transwoman living in Brooklyn, NY in 2024. Through a series of vivid vignettes, the film paints a poignant portrait of Catarina's life as she asserts her right to exist. CATARINA invites viewers to reflect on the universal desire to belong and challenges us to empathize with the experiences of those navigating the intersections of identity in an ever-evolving world. Brazil has a grim track record when it comes to violence against LGBTQ+ people, with the highest number of murdered transgender individuals in the world. As a transwoman, Catarina's journey is particularly fraught with danger and adversity. This film serves as a reminder of the urgent need for unity and allyship in the pursuit of a more inclusive society. Catarina's determination to live authentically underscores the importance of embracing our shared humanity and the inherent dignity within us all.
Coco Villa (New York, NY): I Am Swimming With Zaza
What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late? You, and the You that I come from, and the You that occasionally stands in for me. Coco Villa presents I Am Swimming With Zaza, an ongoing intimacy between fact and the fantastical, real and imagined.
Raine Roberts (New York, NY): Dove Stone
Dove Stone is an experimental documentary/dance film juxtaposing the erosive tendencies of human behavior and the erosive nature of our environment. Color portion shot on location at Fort Tilden beach; Black and White portion shot in studio.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Catarina is a resilient and driven creative force within the film industry, having carved a unique niche as a filmmaker producing her own work. A Brazilian immigrant living in the United States for the past three years, she brings over 8 years of experience in film production and costume design, blending a distinct multicultural perspective with fresh, queer lenses.
Annie Grey is a queer nonbinary multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Their work is community-based and an ongoing conversation involving nature, a sociological exploration of fear and trauma, and questioning societal norms.
Kenzie King is a Brooklyn-based photographer and artist whose work explores themes of obsession, identity, and connection through film photography. Her work was featured in a solo exhibition at Westlab + Gallery, coinciding with the release of her debut book, Colder Than Cobalt, in 2023. In addition to her fine art practice, Kenzie works as a freelance photographer, specializing in fashion and portraiture.
Beginning his career in the world of fashion photography, Gustavo Lopes has since transitioned to focus on film photography and capturing narratives that shed light on important social issues. As a Brazilian immigrant living in New York for the past eight years, Gustavo brings a multicultural perspective to his work, highlighting diversity and inclusivity in every frame. He is particularly dedicated to amplifying the stories of the LGBTQ+ community, creating powerful images that foster empathy. Through his evocative photography, Gustavo continues to make an impact on the lives of those he captures and those who view his work.
Christiane Nahu is a budding actor, artist, and model based in New York and has been honing her acting skills at the Lee Strasberg Theater and Film Institute for the last two years. She is working on finding ways to blend her skills in acting, writing, photography, and performance art and bring about a perfect marriage of all her creative passions. Moving to the city has allowed her to challenge herself to grow in all these areas, and has provided her the means and connections to extend the range and reach of her talents. Her aim in all of her work is truth, individual and universal.
Raine Roberts is a Chicago-born, Brooklyn-based, photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist. Raine earned her BFA in Film Productions and BA in Communications from the University of Colorado at Boulder (2019). After working in documentary filmmaking, Raine went on to study at the International Center of Photography (2023). She has exhibited her works locally and internationally, in solo exhibitions with Westlab+Gallery and APStudioBk; group exhibitions with WORTHLESS STUDIOS, Haus Am See in Switzerland, VisualAIDS, and Brooklyn Film Camera. Her work has been published locally and internationally in MuséeMagazine, Este País, Bushwick Daily, and BK Reader. She was the most recent Photographer in Residence for the FREE FILM PROJECT -- leading free community-based workshops and developing her ongoing project. Raine is a member of the photography group SmallTable Collective.
Nyasia Pettway Rochelle (they/them) is a Black artist creating black and white film photography in Petersburg, Virginia. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Nyasia always had a love for creating art and taking pictures, but in the last two years or so, they would start to take self portraits and never look back. In this film, you’ll get to see their introduction to shooting on 16mm film, and how Nyasia took it as their chance to visually develop and beautify the story of a lost soul searching for spiritual connection.
Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian American dancer, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Tightly bound to identity, Villa leads an art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape. They utilize movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy, and build familial archives through self-portraiture and choreography. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the ocean, in the woods, in the dance studio, darkroom, design lab, film set and library, playfully creating by hand.
ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS
Shrey Mendiratta is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Ridgewood, Queens, born and [half-]raised in New Delhi, India. He is the owner and operator of Westlab + Gallery in Bushwick, and serves as the chief curator for their exhibition programming. Shrey has received several awards for his work, including the Queens Art Fund New Work Grant in 2021, the Roselyn Schneider Eisner Prize in 2018, and has served as a panelist with the Queens Art Council. With the support of MONO NO AWARE he completed and exhibited the film जान की ओर (Jaan Ki Or) in 2022, and has been an instructor with the organization since taking his first class in 2020. His work has shown at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Museum of Moving Image, Anthology Film Archives, Worth Ryder Art Gallery, Mono No Aware, and many DIY/non-institutional spaces around New York City and beyond.
WESTLAB + GALLERY is a color film lab and art gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Their exhibition programming aims to support, promote, and exhibit works by local artists who work primarily on film, and have been historically underrepresented in the arts. Westlab has shown several group and solo exhibitions, featuring works in photography, sculpture, video, and painting.
MONO NO AWARE is a cinema arts non-profit organization and learning lab based at 33 Flatbush Avenue in Downtown Brooklyn, New York. Established in 2007, MONO is a community of working individuals of commensurate interests concerning cinema, its histories, its practices, its technologies and its possibilities. This is a community broadly appreciative of the cinematic art-form and its variants spanning generations. MONO constitutes a haven and facility for the exploration, practice, exhibition, production and preservation of the cinematic arts. MONO receives year-round support from the New York State Council on the Arts, the support of the National Endowment for the Arts, Festival partners and patrons such as yourself. Learn more at MONONOAWAREFILM.COM
OPEN AiR | Sarah Rothberg: MEETINGS RESEARCH
Image by Sarah Rothberg.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
MEETINGS RESEARCH is a performance-experiment by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Sarah Rothberg which uses improvisation, conversation, and AI language models to (literally) reflect the present moment.
MEETINGS RESEARCH is an extension of Rothberg’s larger body of work MEETINGS which centers conversation as a creative act and plays with the emerging communication technologies that affect it.
Creative Technologist: Tommy Martinez
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sarah Rothberg creates playful, poetic, usually-a-bit-weird experiences that invite you to reconsider your relationships to the world around you. These take many forms ranging from installation to immersive experiences, performance, websites, video, writing, workshops, and experiments with technology. Rothberg’s work appears in a variety of contexts: at art exhibitions, in public google docs, on the screens in the NYC Subway system, or whispered into the void. Support for Rothberg’s work has come from organizations including: MoMA, CPR – Center for Performance Research, rhizome.org, bitforms gallery, MTA Arts&Design, CultureHub, and Gray Area. Rotherberg is an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU (Interactive Telecommunications Program), a member of Onassis ONX Studio, and a mentor/former-member at NEW INC, and is part of collaboratives: MORE&MORE UNLIMITED, which offers experiences for imagining changed worlds, and IS THIS THING ON? a post-web2 experiment in artist-driven livestreaming. Rothberg is a 2023-2024 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.
Tommy Martinez is an artist and programmer working primarily through research, sound, and code. He creates software and musical systems for the internet, embedded devices, and for live multichannel performance. Martinez has performed at MoMA PS1, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Fridman Gallery, and Pioneer Works. He has lectured on sound and electronic art at School for Poetic Computation, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.
@CPR | Mor Mendel: The Book of Love
Image courtesy Mor Mendel.
Tickets: $10
Purchase Tickets
The Book of Love is an interactive dance piece by performance artist and choreographer Mor Mendel. This work uses movement, music, poetry, and food to explore the subject of love in its many forms.
Love is one of the core commandments of Jewish teaching–the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” is considered by many to be the central lesson of the Hebrew Bible. And yet, love towards both ourselves and others can be difficult, especially in a world that feels divided. Thus, The Book of Love is also an exploration of love’s shadows: war, loss, hate, and revenge.
This piece further explores love through hospitality–particularly the welcoming that takes place through food. Alongside the performance, Chef Daniel Soskolne will join us to share tasty seasonal favorites, latkes and sfinge (Moroccan doughnuts eaten on Chanukah).
Together we will reimagine what is possible if we choose to truly see one another – to love the other as we love ourselves.
The Book of Love is produced by The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mor Mendel is a performance artist, choreographer, dance improviser, and educator, whose work explores who we are in our everyday life and movement that plays with imagination, intuition, and personal stories. For Mor, dance is the playground of poetry, of memories, relationships, music, and shared existence. Mendel’s teaching focuses on dance as an individual pathway to freedom inside ones’ body, creativity, and joy. Mendel earned her BA in Dance Theater in Tel Aviv as well as her Improvisation Mastery with dancer Ilanit Tadmor. In 2012, Mendel completed her Master’s in dance from Sarah Lawrence College. Over the years she has participated in numerous workshops and courses around dance, improvisation, and other somatic fields as well as university courses in psychology and creative therapies. In particular, Mendel has worked with Parkinson patients around personal liberation through movement. Mendel’s work has been performed at Tel Aviv galleries, Acco of Alternative Israeli Theater, Gowanus Arts Center, the 14th Street Y, Fridman Gallery, Brooklyn Studios For Dance, BAAD!, BAX, Movement Research at Judson Church, Pioneer Works, Collezione Maramotti (Italy), BigParadise, MOtiVE, CPR – Center for Performance Research, and in collaboration with artist Miriam Simun at New Museum (NY). Mendel is a mother of two curly boys.
Chef Daniel Soskolne was born in Jerusalem, Israel and began cooking in 2003, apprenticing in a restaurant on the island of Ischia, Italy. Following that, he worked in Spain, Australia, and then returned to cook in Israel. This formative period of making food around the world taught him cooking fundamentals that are now embedded in him. The signature aspect of Soskolne’s work is total respect for the ingredient. Simplicity and attention remain the backbone of his culinary approach. Now based in New York, Chef Daniel has combined his roots, values, intentions, and life’s work into LEV: a culinary duo project that focuses on site specific cooking events.
The Neighborhood: An Urban Center for Jewish Life is a Jewish community and cultural center in Brooklyn. We produce programs that raise up underrepresented perspectives and welcome the thousands of Brooklynites that have not yet found their Jewish home. We are creating a welcoming space that reflects the spirit of Brooklyn–future-thinking and deeply historical, iconoclastic, and sacred.
@CPR | Katie Orenstein Productions: Hamlet
Image by Danny Bristoll @dannybristoll. Photo & Creative Direction by Gino Bartolomi @ginobartolomi.
Tickets: $20, $30, $40, sliding scale
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 13 at 7PM
Sat, December 14 at 7PM
Katie Devin Orenstein directs Hamlet as you have never seen before, we promise. This Hamlet will be unusual, disturbing, horny, wacky, and most importantly, gay. Our company have been perfectly anti-type cast, expect the unexpected.
This production is an AEA approved showcase.
@CPR | Katie Orenstein Productions: Hamlet
Image by Danny Bristoll @dannybristoll. Photo & Creative Direction by Gino Bartolomi @ginobartolomi.
Tickets: $20, $30, $40, sliding scale
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 13 at 7PM
Sat, December 14 at 7PM
Katie Devin Orenstein directs Hamlet as you have never seen before, we promise. This Hamlet will be unusual, disturbing, horny, wacky, and most importantly, gay. Our company have been perfectly anti-type cast, expect the unexpected.
This production is an AEA approved showcase.
Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (Co-Presented with Live Artery | New York Live Arts)
Film still from Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (2024). Video by Peter Richards. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $25
Presenter Tickets: $15
Purchase Tickets
Saturday, January 11 at 6:30PM
Sunday, January 12 at 1PM & 5PM
Part film, part live performance, part social experiment, For All Your Life challenges audiences to meditate on the value of black life and black death. Specifically the value of the life, work, and death of choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. The performance itself is a “sales pitch,” one that culminates in a call to action: to invest in Cuyjet, by buying into her life insurance policy. (“What has more value than ‘saying her name’ when she’s dead? Investing in her life, today!”) The audience receives an opportunity to offer support, with real money, and “own” a piece of black life. An opportunity they can reckon with, invest in, or ignore.
This work rewrites a performative narrative tradition where artist serves the audience. Instead, Cuyjet’s pitch asks viewers to navigate the value of black life versus black death within their own sensibility, within what is real or fiction, authentic or snake oil, and decide if it is worth their money. The pitch, and its accompanying video presentation, teaches us about life insurance and its direct connection to slavery, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes reflection on how we regard life, especially the lives of people of color.
The seed for this work began after discovering that the insurance company, New York Life, once sold policies on the lives of slaves, and whose former tagline inspired this title. For All Your Life by design will last for all of Cuyjet’s life. A website (forallyourlife.com) serves both as an online archive of the life of the project, as well as a marketplace; a financial instrument where people can invest, allowing this project to exist beyond the performance, and “for all your life” too.
CREDITS
Created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet
Co-director and Dramaturgy: Sean Donovan
Stage Management: Randi Rivera
Stage Design: Neal Wilkinson
Lighting design: Amanda K. Ringger
Video and sound design: Max Ludlow
Co-producers: Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant
Film Credits
Director: Daniele Sarti
Assistant Camera: Max Nemhauser and Joe Kickbush
Audio: Will Scott
Assistant Set Design: Joseph Wolfslau
Make up: Jane Serenska
Production Management: Tess Dworman
Editing: Daniele Sarti, Leslie Cuyjet, and Tim Donovan
Sound Mix: dayae choi
Additional Performers: Tess Dworman, Jacque Betesh, Katrina Reed, and Jason Watt
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist and “a potent choreographic voice,” says the New York Times. For two decades, she has danced for and collaborated with a range of artists like David Gordon, Juliana F. May, Will Rawls, Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, Tere O’Connor, Niall Jones, Yanira Castro and many others. Cuyjet’s own work interrogates these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and includes movement, film, text, and theater. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, The Chocolate Factory, CPR – Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, Gibney, and The Shed; where her piece, Blur, garnered her second “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator in 2022. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists, Princeton Hodder Fellow, Movement Research Resident Artist, and MacDowell Fellow. Cuyjet has been supported by residencies at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Yaddo, Marble House Project, and New Dance Alliance. She is a published writer and the former co-editor of Critical Correspondence. Cuyjet graduated from the first cohort of Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program and holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois.
Sean Donovan is an actor, director, choreographer, dancer, and writer. His recent works include, Cabin at The Bushwick Starr, The Reception at HERE Arts, and 18 1/2 Minutes at JACK (in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin). He’s also been presented in The Under the Radar Festival, CUNY’s Prelude Festival, Incubator Arts Project, FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University, NYU, and others. Sean won a 2022 Lortel Award for his performance in Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. He was nominated for 2014 and 2017 BESSIE awards for Outstanding Performer. He’s worked with Taylor Mac, Lee Sunday Evans, Heather Christian, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, and many others. Recent credits include Bark of Millions at Sydney Opera House and BAM, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova, Thank You for Coming at BAM, Danspace Project and an international tour, Age & Beauty Part 2 at NYLA, and House/Divided at BAM. He co-wrote the web series Morning Chardonnay with Hannah Heller. Other Film/TV credits include Law and Order: Organized Crime, Feast of the Epiphany, and Laurence. He holds a BFA in Theatre from NYU. He teaches Movement and Choreography at NYU.
Max Ludlow is a British-American audio engineer, sound designer, and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He can often be found building sound systems, troubleshooting projectors, and hanging large objects from the ceiling at venues such as The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, and The Chocolate Factory, among others. A graduate of Purchase College, SUNY, with a BA in Anthropology and Media Studies, Max produces the Artists and Hackers podcast and coordinates the Audio Storytelling program at the Tribeca Festival. In his free time, he performs electronic music under the alias Windy 500 and conducts research on avant-garde, punk, and electronic art.
Amanda K. Ringger has been designing locally, nationally, and internationally for over 20 years with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Cynthia Oliver, Doug Elkins, Leslie Cuyjet, Molly Poerstel, Ivy Baldwin, Laura Peterson, Darrah Carr, Antonio Ramos, Alexandra Beller, Sean Donovan, and cakeface, among many others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard at HERE Arts Center.
Randi Rivera is a native New Yorker from the Bronx. She has been a freelance Stage Manager and Lighting Director since 2009, working both in NYC and on the road. A few favorite colleagues include Tina Satter & Half Straddle, Keigwin & Company, Dance Heginbotham, Harlem Stage, Faye Driscoll, Doug Elkins Choreography Etc, Sidra Bell Dance NY, The Chocolate Factory, Andrew Schneider, Ivy Baldwin, Cathy Weis, Gallim Dance, Sean Donovan, Phantom Limb Company, and Ballez. Rivera served as Associate Director for the Broadway run of Half Straddle’s Is This A Room in 2021. All of her work is for her family.
Neal Wilkinson is a set designer, production manager, and visual artist. His most recent set design was Hang Time by Zora Howard, which was premiered at the Flea last year. As a member of the Builders Association from 2003 to 2019, he designed works including House/Divided, Elements of OZ, and Strange Window, which have been presented by theater festivals internationally. Neal’s company Corps Liminis provides production management for theatrical productions, museums, and installations. Most recent projects include Here We Are, Sonic Sphere, and Tomas Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) at the SHED, the 2022 Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Joan Jonas retrospective at MoMA. As a multimedia artist, his new work Fight For America!, in which the events of January 6th, 2021 are re-played by audience members as a tabletop wargame, will be produced by The American Vicarious and premiere in 2025: [www.fightforamerica.games]
Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (Co-Presented with Live Artery | New York Live Arts)
Film still from Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (2024). Video by Peter Richards. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $25
Presenter Tickets: $15
Purchase Tickets
Saturday, January 11 at 6:30PM
Sunday, January 12 at 1PM & 5PM
Part film, part live performance, part social experiment, For All Your Life challenges audiences to meditate on the value of black life and black death. Specifically the value of the life, work, and death of choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. The performance itself is a “sales pitch,” one that culminates in a call to action: to invest in Cuyjet, by buying into her life insurance policy. (“What has more value than ‘saying her name’ when she’s dead? Investing in her life, today!”) The audience receives an opportunity to offer support, with real money, and “own” a piece of black life. An opportunity they can reckon with, invest in, or ignore.
This work rewrites a performative narrative tradition where artist serves the audience. Instead, Cuyjet’s pitch asks viewers to navigate the value of black life versus black death within their own sensibility, within what is real or fiction, authentic or snake oil, and decide if it is worth their money. The pitch, and its accompanying video presentation, teaches us about life insurance and its direct connection to slavery, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes reflection on how we regard life, especially the lives of people of color.
The seed for this work began after discovering that the insurance company, New York Life, once sold policies on the lives of slaves, and whose former tagline inspired this title. For All Your Life by design will last for all of Cuyjet’s life. A website (forallyourlife.com) serves both as an online archive of the life of the project, as well as a marketplace; a financial instrument where people can invest, allowing this project to exist beyond the performance, and “for all your life” too.
CREDITS
Created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet
Co-director and Dramaturgy: Sean Donovan
Stage Management: Randi Rivera
Stage Design: Neal Wilkinson
Lighting design: Amanda K. Ringger
Video and sound design: Max Ludlow
Co-producers: Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant
Film Credits
Director: Daniele Sarti
Assistant Camera: Max Nemhauser and Joe Kickbush
Audio: Will Scott
Assistant Set Design: Joseph Wolfslau
Make up: Jane Serenska
Production Management: Tess Dworman
Editing: Daniele Sarti, Leslie Cuyjet, and Tim Donovan
Sound Mix: dayae choi
Additional Performers: Tess Dworman, Jacque Betesh, Katrina Reed, and Jason Watt
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist and “a potent choreographic voice,” says the New York Times. For two decades, she has danced for and collaborated with a range of artists like David Gordon, Juliana F. May, Will Rawls, Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, Tere O’Connor, Niall Jones, Yanira Castro and many others. Cuyjet’s own work interrogates these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and includes movement, film, text, and theater. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, The Chocolate Factory, CPR – Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, Gibney, and The Shed; where her piece, Blur, garnered her second “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator in 2022. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists, Princeton Hodder Fellow, Movement Research Resident Artist, and MacDowell Fellow. Cuyjet has been supported by residencies at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Yaddo, Marble House Project, and New Dance Alliance. She is a published writer and the former co-editor of Critical Correspondence. Cuyjet graduated from the first cohort of Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program and holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois.
Sean Donovan is an actor, director, choreographer, dancer, and writer. His recent works include, Cabin at The Bushwick Starr, The Reception at HERE Arts, and 18 1/2 Minutes at JACK (in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin). He’s also been presented in The Under the Radar Festival, CUNY’s Prelude Festival, Incubator Arts Project, FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University, NYU, and others. Sean won a 2022 Lortel Award for his performance in Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. He was nominated for 2014 and 2017 BESSIE awards for Outstanding Performer. He’s worked with Taylor Mac, Lee Sunday Evans, Heather Christian, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, and many others. Recent credits include Bark of Millions at Sydney Opera House and BAM, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova, Thank You for Coming at BAM, Danspace Project and an international tour, Age & Beauty Part 2 at NYLA, and House/Divided at BAM. He co-wrote the web series Morning Chardonnay with Hannah Heller. Other Film/TV credits include Law and Order: Organized Crime, Feast of the Epiphany, and Laurence. He holds a BFA in Theatre from NYU. He teaches Movement and Choreography at NYU.
Max Ludlow is a British-American audio engineer, sound designer, and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He can often be found building sound systems, troubleshooting projectors, and hanging large objects from the ceiling at venues such as The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, and The Chocolate Factory, among others. A graduate of Purchase College, SUNY, with a BA in Anthropology and Media Studies, Max produces the Artists and Hackers podcast and coordinates the Audio Storytelling program at the Tribeca Festival. In his free time, he performs electronic music under the alias Windy 500 and conducts research on avant-garde, punk, and electronic art.
Amanda K. Ringger has been designing locally, nationally, and internationally for over 20 years with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Cynthia Oliver, Doug Elkins, Leslie Cuyjet, Molly Poerstel, Ivy Baldwin, Laura Peterson, Darrah Carr, Antonio Ramos, Alexandra Beller, Sean Donovan, and cakeface, among many others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard at HERE Arts Center.
Randi Rivera is a native New Yorker from the Bronx. She has been a freelance Stage Manager and Lighting Director since 2009, working both in NYC and on the road. A few favorite colleagues include Tina Satter & Half Straddle, Keigwin & Company, Dance Heginbotham, Harlem Stage, Faye Driscoll, Doug Elkins Choreography Etc, Sidra Bell Dance NY, The Chocolate Factory, Andrew Schneider, Ivy Baldwin, Cathy Weis, Gallim Dance, Sean Donovan, Phantom Limb Company, and Ballez. Rivera served as Associate Director for the Broadway run of Half Straddle’s Is This A Room in 2021. All of her work is for her family.
Neal Wilkinson is a set designer, production manager, and visual artist. His most recent set design was Hang Time by Zora Howard, which was premiered at the Flea last year. As a member of the Builders Association from 2003 to 2019, he designed works including House/Divided, Elements of OZ, and Strange Window, which have been presented by theater festivals internationally. Neal’s company Corps Liminis provides production management for theatrical productions, museums, and installations. Most recent projects include Here We Are, Sonic Sphere, and Tomas Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) at the SHED, the 2022 Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Joan Jonas retrospective at MoMA. As a multimedia artist, his new work Fight For America!, in which the events of January 6th, 2021 are re-played by audience members as a tabletop wargame, will be produced by The American Vicarious and premiere in 2025: [www.fightforamerica.games]
Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (Co-Presented with Live Artery | New York Live Arts)
Film still from Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life (2024). Video by Peter Richards. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $25
Presenter Tickets: $15
Purchase Tickets
Saturday, January 11 at 6:30PM
Sunday, January 12 at 1PM & 5PM
Part film, part live performance, part social experiment, For All Your Life challenges audiences to meditate on the value of black life and black death. Specifically the value of the life, work, and death of choreographer and artist Leslie Cuyjet. The performance itself is a “sales pitch,” one that culminates in a call to action: to invest in Cuyjet, by buying into her life insurance policy. (“What has more value than ‘saying her name’ when she’s dead? Investing in her life, today!”) The audience receives an opportunity to offer support, with real money, and “own” a piece of black life. An opportunity they can reckon with, invest in, or ignore.
This work rewrites a performative narrative tradition where artist serves the audience. Instead, Cuyjet’s pitch asks viewers to navigate the value of black life versus black death within their own sensibility, within what is real or fiction, authentic or snake oil, and decide if it is worth their money. The pitch, and its accompanying video presentation, teaches us about life insurance and its direct connection to slavery, highlights the way we respond to death, and provokes reflection on how we regard life, especially the lives of people of color.
The seed for this work began after discovering that the insurance company, New York Life, once sold policies on the lives of slaves, and whose former tagline inspired this title. For All Your Life by design will last for all of Cuyjet’s life. A website (forallyourlife.com) serves both as an online archive of the life of the project, as well as a marketplace; a financial instrument where people can invest, allowing this project to exist beyond the performance, and “for all your life” too.
CREDITS
Created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet
Co-director and Dramaturgy: Sean Donovan
Stage Management: Randi Rivera
Stage Design: Neal Wilkinson
Lighting design: Amanda K. Ringger
Video and sound design: Max Ludlow
Co-producers: Jennifer Castro Song and Sweat Variant
Film Credits
Director: Daniele Sarti
Assistant Camera: Max Nemhauser and Joe Kickbush
Audio: Will Scott
Assistant Set Design: Joseph Wolfslau
Make up: Jane Serenska
Production Management: Tess Dworman
Editing: Daniele Sarti, Leslie Cuyjet, and Tim Donovan
Sound Mix: dayae choi
Additional Performers: Tess Dworman, Jacque Betesh, Katrina Reed, and Jason Watt
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leslie Cuyjet is a performer, artist and “a potent choreographic voice,” says the New York Times. For two decades, she has danced for and collaborated with a range of artists like David Gordon, Juliana F. May, Will Rawls, Cynthia Oliver, Jane Comfort, Tere O’Connor, Niall Jones, Yanira Castro and many others. Cuyjet’s own work interrogates these experiences as a performer through the lens of the black body, and includes movement, film, text, and theater. Her work has been presented at The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, The Chocolate Factory, CPR – Center for Performance Research, SculptureCenter, Gibney, and The Shed; where her piece, Blur, garnered her second “Bessie” Award for Outstanding Choreographer/Creator in 2022. Recent honors include Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants for Artists, Princeton Hodder Fellow, Movement Research Resident Artist, and MacDowell Fellow. Cuyjet has been supported by residencies at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Yaddo, Marble House Project, and New Dance Alliance. She is a published writer and the former co-editor of Critical Correspondence. Cuyjet graduated from the first cohort of Goldman Sachs One Million Black Women: Black in Business program and holds a B.F.A. in Dance from the University of Illinois.
Sean Donovan is an actor, director, choreographer, dancer, and writer. His recent works include, Cabin at The Bushwick Starr, The Reception at HERE Arts, and 18 1/2 Minutes at JACK (in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin). He’s also been presented in The Under the Radar Festival, CUNY’s Prelude Festival, Incubator Arts Project, FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University, NYU, and others. Sean won a 2022 Lortel Award for his performance in Heather Christian’s Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova. He was nominated for 2014 and 2017 BESSIE awards for Outstanding Performer. He’s worked with Taylor Mac, Lee Sunday Evans, Heather Christian, Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, and many others. Recent credits include Bark of Millions at Sydney Opera House and BAM, The Trees at Playwrights Horizons, Oratorio for Living Things at Ars Nova, Thank You for Coming at BAM, Danspace Project and an international tour, Age & Beauty Part 2 at NYLA, and House/Divided at BAM. He co-wrote the web series Morning Chardonnay with Hannah Heller. Other Film/TV credits include Law and Order: Organized Crime, Feast of the Epiphany, and Laurence. He holds a BFA in Theatre from NYU. He teaches Movement and Choreography at NYU.
Max Ludlow is a British-American audio engineer, sound designer, and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, New York. He can often be found building sound systems, troubleshooting projectors, and hanging large objects from the ceiling at venues such as The Kitchen, Harlem Stage, and The Chocolate Factory, among others. A graduate of Purchase College, SUNY, with a BA in Anthropology and Media Studies, Max produces the Artists and Hackers podcast and coordinates the Audio Storytelling program at the Tribeca Festival. In his free time, he performs electronic music under the alias Windy 500 and conducts research on avant-garde, punk, and electronic art.
Amanda K. Ringger has been designing locally, nationally, and internationally for over 20 years with artists such as Faye Driscoll, Cynthia Oliver, Doug Elkins, Leslie Cuyjet, Molly Poerstel, Ivy Baldwin, Laura Peterson, Darrah Carr, Antonio Ramos, Alexandra Beller, Sean Donovan, and cakeface, among many others. She received a BA from Goucher College in Baltimore, MD and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. She is the recipient of a Bessie award for her collaboration on Faye Driscoll’s 837 Venice Boulevard at HERE Arts Center.
Randi Rivera is a native New Yorker from the Bronx. She has been a freelance Stage Manager and Lighting Director since 2009, working both in NYC and on the road. A few favorite colleagues include Tina Satter & Half Straddle, Keigwin & Company, Dance Heginbotham, Harlem Stage, Faye Driscoll, Doug Elkins Choreography Etc, Sidra Bell Dance NY, The Chocolate Factory, Andrew Schneider, Ivy Baldwin, Cathy Weis, Gallim Dance, Sean Donovan, Phantom Limb Company, and Ballez. Rivera served as Associate Director for the Broadway run of Half Straddle’s Is This A Room in 2021. All of her work is for her family.
Neal Wilkinson is a set designer, production manager, and visual artist. His most recent set design was Hang Time by Zora Howard, which was premiered at the Flea last year. As a member of the Builders Association from 2003 to 2019, he designed works including House/Divided, Elements of OZ, and Strange Window, which have been presented by theater festivals internationally. Neal’s company Corps Liminis provides production management for theatrical productions, museums, and installations. Most recent projects include Here We Are, Sonic Sphere, and Tomas Saraceno’s Particular Matter(s) at the SHED, the 2022 Lightscape at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and the Joan Jonas retrospective at MoMA. As a multimedia artist, his new work Fight For America!, in which the events of January 6th, 2021 are re-played by audience members as a tabletop wargame, will be produced by The American Vicarious and premiere in 2025: [www.fightforamerica.games]
Technical Residency: Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony (closed to the public)
Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony: Everything Fits in the Room (2017). Photo by Chiara Pagano. Courtesy the artists.
The Technical Residency is closed to the public.
CPR welcomes Jen Rosenblit and Simone Aughterlony as Winter 2025 Technical Residents, and will provide one uninterrupted week in CPR’s theater and access to a robust a/v inventory to play, experiment, and create. The residency will support their new work in development, The Dumps, a performance surrounding architectural decay and ruinophilia, or the love of ruins. During the residency Rosenblit and Aughterlony will work with various stage, light, and sound collaborators, focusing on research and prototyping construction scaffolding as the skeleton material and the site for the live performance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Jen Rosenblit makes performances based in Berlin after many years in NYC surrounding architectures, bodies, text, and ideas concerned with problems that arise inside of agendas for togetherness. Rosenblit’s works lean toward the uncanny, locating ways of being together amidst (un) familiar and impossible contradictions. The methodology supports an expanse of meaning as it emerges between things and moves toward an unwinding and a possible collapse. Desire and sexuality linger as reoccurring points of departure without demanding a singular aesthetic or representation. Rosenblit is a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of a 2014 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award, a 2023 La Becque (Vevey, CH) artist in residence, and currently teaches at Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin. Rosenblit has collaborated with artists including Simone Aughterlony, Miguel Gutierrez, A.K. Burns, and Philipp Gehmacher in various capacities via performer, writer, creator, and director.
Simone Aughterlony is an independent artist based in Zurich and Berlin, working predominantly in dance, performance, and visual art contexts. They have been devising queer-spirited choreographic works over the last sixteen years, engaging with alternative forms of kinship inside their process, new constellations emerge as possibilities for reconfiguring a culture of togetherness that fosters both familiar and unknown quantities. Their works playfully compose with representation and its saturation, seeping into and embracing the phenomenology of mis-recognition and the absurd. Aughterlony approaches art making as a practice where they navigate the contradiction between the domination of desire alongside the agency of all elements. They regularly teach at academic institutions such as ZHdK - Zurich University of the Arts, Manufacture in Lausanne, and DAS Art Amsterdam, amongst others, as well as devising and facilitating laboratory formats and frames for sharing and producing knowledge. In 2020 together with Marc Streit they founded Imbricated Real, an independent structure for contemporary art practice.
@CPR | Kyoung eun Kang: Care Package VII
Kyoung eun Kang: Care Package IV, 2021. Photo by Rana Young.
Tickets: free w/ RSVP
RSVP
** In the event that tickets for this program are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7:00PM.
Care Package VII is a new iteration of Kyoung eun Kang’s continuously evolving performance series Care Package, which has been developing over the last 15 years. Together, the audience and the artist will explore a care package from her mother in South Korea. Through poetry, sound, movement, and participation, this performance invites the audience into the uniquely intimate relationship that has evolved between the artist and her mother over their period of long separation. As the piece unfolds, we'll unpack the notions of home, care, time, and distance.
Care Package VII is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyoung eun Kang is an interdisciplinary artist born in South Korea and based in New York. Her practice spans performance, video, photography, and installation. Bringing together her Korean heritage and immigrant experience in America, Kang's work transcends geographical and cultural boundaries to capture parallel lives, rituals, and emotions. Her pieces encourage an exchange of interest, curiosity, and empathy across socio-culturally imposed barriers to relationships, forging human connection in an ever-evolving world.
Kang has presented her work both internationally and throughout the United States, with exhibitions in galleries such as A.I.R. Gallery, Collar Works, NURTUREart, BRIC Project Room, and the ISCP project space in New York. Other exhibitions include the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C., the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Australia, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea. She has performed in venues across America, including the Queens Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, Arario Gallery, FiveMyles, and Essex Flowers in New York, along with The Momentary in Bentonville, AR.
Kang has received residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Smack Mellon, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, BRIC Media Arts, NARS Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the LES Studio Program, ISCP, and New York Foundation for the Arts, among others.
Kang holds a BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea, as well as an MFA from Parsons School of Design in New York.
OPEN STUDIOS | NEW INC Workshares: elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, Johanna Flato, Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan, and Trevor Van de Velde
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ. Photo by Thomas J. Logan. Courtesy of Institute for Electronic Arts (IEA).
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
** Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 6:30PM.
NEW INC, an incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology, organizes an evening of work-in-progress from its interdisciplinary cohort of artists, designers, technologists, futurists, and creative entrepreneurs, with presentations by elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, Johanna Flato, Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan, and Trevor Van de Velde. This OPEN STUDIOS at CPR is an extension of NEW INC’s monthly Workshares program, where cohort members receive feedback, exchange knowledge, cross-pollinate ideas, and ask for help – and the first time the public is invited to engage in these gatherings.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
PROGRAM
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ: Networked Gong Gathering
This collaborative sound-making workshop is inspired by a community gathering of gong ensembles throughout the SEA. While keeping the core of having rhythms distributed among participants, it focuses on collectively reconstructing sounds from different SEA sound cultures through networks using code.
Johanna Flato: Spatial Articulations with Tangle AR
Tangle AR App is an artist-built mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. Currently in beta, it aims to inject critical friction into this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and seed our tech-mediated environments with a more civic, intentional, and playful dimension.
Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan: Creative Coding Test Kitchen
Join Avneesh and Sumanth as they show off a new interactive audiovisual recipe! This talk/demo will show off an audiovisual work built with their new javascript libraries. They’ll explain what tooling gaps they’re trying to fill, and what new forms of art they hope enable for themselves and others.
Trevor Van de Velde: Hacking Grains
The universe is granular. Hacking Grains is a multidisciplinary performance project that reimagines the world being made of grains. This project explores the relationships between technology, ritual, and Asian futurity through amplified grains of rice. Individual grains become both sonic actuators and resonators. The sounds of rice dominate the space through custom-built synthesizers, speaker installations, and live performance.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ is a collaborative research-based group consisting of immigrant Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based artists, Kengchakaj–เก่งฉกาจ and Nitcha–ณิชชา. The collective delves into subversive storytelling by exploring non-hegemonic sounds and visual archives, historical research–decoding, and unlearning biases. elekhlekha’s work spans performing documents, multimedia, and technology centers to interrogate, experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities. elekhlekha is a Thai word that means dispersedly, chaos, all over, and non-direction to break free our practices from being labeled through a Western lens. In 2022, they were awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award. The artists have received grants and development funds from Rhizome, the Processing Foundation, and more for their projects. elekhlekha is Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellows, 2023–2024 AIR at CultureHub, and the NEW INC Y10 Art & Code track member.
Johanna Flato is a visual artist and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY and was born in San Antonio, TX. She investigates ways in which our sense of site — and in turn, locational belonging — is mediated and manipulated through language, technology, and gesture. She is the founder and developer of an augmented reality app called Tangle — a mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. Tangle makes site-based, real-time, mixed-reality ideation and collaboration possible. It aims to inject critical friction into this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and seed our tech-mediated environments with a more civic, intentional, and playful dimension. As an ongoing research thread, Johanna coined and iteratively re-works the notion of a "syn-site" (a term updating Robert Smithson's site/non-site construct for our contemporary extended realities).
Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan, spurred by their own adventures and challenges with making and sharing software-based multimedia art, want to build browser-based tools and software libraries that allow artists to more easily design, collaborate on, and share digital work. Avneesh Sarwate is a programmer, musician, visual artist, and improviser. His work focuses on using real time computer systems to enhance the gestural and impulsive elements of the creative process. A guitarist since childhood, “jamming” with computers has been a goal of his from the minute he started making art with them. Sumanth Srinivasan is an engineer, visual artist, writer, and musician. His work thus far has centered around digitizing human imperfections and playfulness in art, and the presentation of noise and degradation as an aesthetic.
Trevor Van de Velde is a composer, sound artist, instrument builder, and creative programmer based in NYC. Trevor's work focuses on exploring the relationship between technology, play, materiality, and hybridity through a combination of "hacked" electronics and live performance.
NEW INC was conceived of as a not-for-profit platform for furthering the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. Now in Year 11, NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses.
@CPR | Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama: Listen to Your Mother film premiere & performance
Anabella Lenzu. Photo by Todd Carroll. Courtesy the artist.
$10 students/seniors
$25 general admission
Purchase Tickets
Celebrate the 18th anniversary of Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama with the premiere of the 20-minute dance film Listen to Your Mother and an intimate performance by the artists.
Listen to Your Mother is a choreographic research project dedicated to the lives of women-identifying artists who are immigrant mothers living in New York City. The project seeks to capture these underrepresented women's stories to inspire dialogue, appreciation, and social support instead of the ongoing prejudice endured that is historically placed against mothers and women in the arts.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Since 2006, Anabella Lenzu/DanceDrama has presented 400 performances, created 15 choreographic works at 100 venues, produced 10 dance films presented in over 200 festivals both nationally and internationally. www.AnabellaLenzu.com
CREDITS
Director & Choreographer: Anabella Lenzu
Videographer, Editor, and Music Composition: Todd Carroll
Text: Anabella Lenzu & Jerzy Grotowski
Drawings: Anabella Lenzu
Performers: Anabella Lenzu & Fiamma Lenzu-Carroll
Additional Choreography: Isadora Duncan “Le Mere” (1921)
Music: Alexander Scriabin
Coach/ Reposition Isadora Duncan Repertory: Catherine Gallant
The dance film Listen to Your Mother is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and The Vermont Community Foundation.
The performance Listen to Your Mother was developed in part during the 2022 Parent Artist in Residency at Movement Research and Artist-in-Residency at Carroll Hall, Brooklyn, as well with grants from The Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, The Vermont Community Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Brooklyn Arts Council.
@CPR | Carmen Caceres / DanceAction: The Price is Right (De-Valued)
Carmen Caceres / DanceAction. Photo by Carmen Caceres. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $35, $30, $25 (sliding scale)
Artists/Students/Seniors: $15
Purchase Tickets
Friday, November 15 at 7:30 P.M.
Saturday, November 16 at 7:30 P.M.
The Price is Right (De-Valued) is a full-length interactive performance that reflects and explores the concept of devaluation and self-value in relation to labor, economics, and social justice. This work introduces the format of the famous TV show "The Price is Right" into an interactive experience where the audience will support four performers participating in a competition to determine the right price for various items. Scanning a QR code with their smartphones, the audience will connect to an online poll system where they will select the price or vote on the value of the items displayed. The participant who earns the most points will take home a surprising award!
Ultimately, this work offers a critical view on an issue affecting our systems of value in all aspects of life, including democracy, human labor, social stability, and health and wellness.
CREDITS
Choreography: Carmen Caceres (in collaboration with the dancers)
Dancers & Collaborators: John Trunfio, Maddie Barry, Shizu Higa, and Sofia Ameglio
Actor: RJ Sachdev
Costumes, Video Projections, and Design of Interactive Experience: Carmen Caceres
Music:
“Per un pugno di dollari #1 (A fistful of dollars #1),” “Per un pugno di dollari #2 (A fistful of dollars #2),” “Doppi giochi,” “Extrasensorial (The Link),” “Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Finale),” “Quasi morto (Almost dead),” “Per un pugno di dollari - Titoli (A fistful of dollars - Titles),” “Scambio di prigionieri,” “Musica sospesa,” “Alla ricerca dell'evaso,” “Cavalcata,” “Per un pugno di dollari - Finale (A fistful of dollars - Final),” “The Ecstacy of Gold” By Ennio Morricone
“The Price Is Right Theme (Live)” by The Session
“The Price Is Right - Game Show Theme” by TV Tunesters
“Ladies on the Loose” by Gary Combs
“Stayin’ Alive” by Bee Gees
Special Thanks: Kalyan Sayre and Larry Discenza
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Carmen Caceres is a dance artist originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been creating dance works in Argentina and NY since 2009. She has performed and presented work in renowned venues, including New York Live Arts, Judson Memorial Church, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, The Martha Graham Studio, Dixon Place, Green Space, Triskelion Arts Center, The Mark Morris Dance Center, The Center at West Park, and CPR – Center for Performance Research. In 2013, she founded DanceAction, a dance company that works as a creative platform to produce performing arts works in collaboration with musicians, dramaturges, and visual artists. She worked with artists such as Lisa Parra, Sarah Berges, Elia Mrak, and Jody Oberfelder as a performer and collaborator. Carmen received a BA in Dance and Education at SUNY Empire and deepened her studies in dance at the former Merce Cunningham Studio. She has also studied with renowned artists like David Zambrano, Shelley Senter, Robert Swinston, and Ashley Tuttle. In her native city, she graduated from the National School of Dance and studied Dance Composition at UNA. Carmen also works as a dance educator and consultant in different organizations in NYC.
DanceAction is a contemporary dance company based in New York, led by Argentinian dance artist Carmen Caceres. With a culturally diverse team of artists, we create educational opportunities and artistic experiences that foster collaboration and inclusion and promote critical thinking. Together, we develop performing arts works that reflect social realities that concern people, relationships, and social justice. Our primary purpose is to interpret these issues and use our works to propel change. DanceAction participated in numerous festivals and performance series in New York and abroad, including Take Root at Green Space, Under Exposed at Dixon Place, Women Center Stage Festival at Teatro SEA, Festival FIDCDMX in Mexico City, and Ticino in Danza in Switzerland. DanceAction has self-produced and presented several full-length works, such as BLINDSPOT (2019) at the Mark Morris Dance Center and Game Night (2015) at CPR – Center for Performance Research. DanceAction’s awards include the Brooklyn Arts Council Community Fund, the City Artist Corps, and the LMCC Creative Engagement Grant. DanceAction has been a resident artist at the Center at West Park between April 2021 and November 2022, developing and presenting their immersive experience Welcome to Imagi*Nation: The Trilogy (2022). Most recently, DanceAction premiered their latest interactive piece, The Price is Right (De-Valued) (2024), at the Evolution Festival at the Center at West Park.
Carmen Caceres/DanceAction is a fiscally sponsored member of New York Live Arts, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. To make a tax-deductible donation online, please follow this link: https://shorturl.at/9Gdhk.
@CPR | Carmen Caceres / DanceAction: The Price is Right (De-Valued)
Carmen Caceres / DanceAction. Photo by Carmen Caceres. Courtesy the artist.
General Admission: $35, $30, $25 (sliding scale)
Artists/Students/Seniors: $15
Purchase Tickets
Friday, November 15 at 7:30 P.M.
Saturday, November 16 at 7:30 P.M.
The Price is Right (De-Valued) is a full-length interactive performance that reflects and explores the concept of devaluation and self-value in relation to labor, economics, and social justice. This work introduces the format of the famous TV show "The Price is Right" into an interactive experience where the audience will support four performers participating in a competition to determine the right price for various items. Scanning a QR code with their smartphones, the audience will connect to an online poll system where they will select the price or vote on the value of the items displayed. The participant who earns the most points will take home a surprising award!
Ultimately, this work offers a critical view on an issue affecting our systems of value in all aspects of life, including democracy, human labor, social stability, and health and wellness.
CREDITS
Choreography: Carmen Caceres (in collaboration with the dancers)
Dancers & Collaborators: John Trunfio, Maddie Barry, Shizu Higa, and Sofia Ameglio
Actor: RJ Sachdev
Costumes, Video Projections, and Design of Interactive Experience: Carmen Caceres
Music:
“Per un pugno di dollari #1 (A fistful of dollars #1),” “Per un pugno di dollari #2 (A fistful of dollars #2),” “Doppi giochi,” “Extrasensorial (The Link),” “Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto (Finale),” “Quasi morto (Almost dead),” “Per un pugno di dollari - Titoli (A fistful of dollars - Titles),” “Scambio di prigionieri,” “Musica sospesa,” “Alla ricerca dell'evaso,” “Cavalcata,” “Per un pugno di dollari - Finale (A fistful of dollars - Final),” “The Ecstacy of Gold” By Ennio Morricone
“The Price Is Right Theme (Live)” by The Session
“The Price Is Right - Game Show Theme” by TV Tunesters
“Ladies on the Loose” by Gary Combs
“Stayin’ Alive” by Bee Gees
Special Thanks: Kalyan Sayre and Larry Discenza
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Carmen Caceres is a dance artist originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina. She has been creating dance works in Argentina and NY since 2009. She has performed and presented work in renowned venues, including New York Live Arts, Judson Memorial Church, Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, The Martha Graham Studio, Dixon Place, Green Space, Triskelion Arts Center, The Mark Morris Dance Center, The Center at West Park, and CPR – Center for Performance Research. In 2013, she founded DanceAction, a dance company that works as a creative platform to produce performing arts works in collaboration with musicians, dramaturges, and visual artists. She worked with artists such as Lisa Parra, Sarah Berges, Elia Mrak, and Jody Oberfelder as a performer and collaborator. Carmen received a BA in Dance and Education at SUNY Empire and deepened her studies in dance at the former Merce Cunningham Studio. She has also studied with renowned artists like David Zambrano, Shelley Senter, Robert Swinston, and Ashley Tuttle. In her native city, she graduated from the National School of Dance and studied Dance Composition at UNA. Carmen also works as a dance educator and consultant in different organizations in NYC.
DanceAction is a contemporary dance company based in New York, led by Argentinian dance artist Carmen Caceres. With a culturally diverse team of artists, we create educational opportunities and artistic experiences that foster collaboration and inclusion and promote critical thinking. Together, we develop performing arts works that reflect social realities that concern people, relationships, and social justice. Our primary purpose is to interpret these issues and use our works to propel change. DanceAction participated in numerous festivals and performance series in New York and abroad, including Take Root at Green Space, Under Exposed at Dixon Place, Women Center Stage Festival at Teatro SEA, Festival FIDCDMX in Mexico City, and Ticino in Danza in Switzerland. DanceAction has self-produced and presented several full-length works, such as BLINDSPOT (2019) at the Mark Morris Dance Center and Game Night (2015) at CPR – Center for Performance Research. DanceAction’s awards include the Brooklyn Arts Council Community Fund, the City Artist Corps, and the LMCC Creative Engagement Grant. DanceAction has been a resident artist at the Center at West Park between April 2021 and November 2022, developing and presenting their immersive experience Welcome to Imagi*Nation: The Trilogy (2022). Most recently, DanceAction premiered their latest interactive piece, The Price is Right (De-Valued) (2024), at the Evolution Festival at the Center at West Park.
Carmen Caceres/DanceAction is a fiscally sponsored member of New York Live Arts, Inc., a non-profit, tax-exempt organization. To make a tax-deductible donation online, please follow this link: https://shorturl.at/9Gdhk.
OPEN STUDIOS | Avatar Lilith, Coco Villa, and Candi X, curated by cy x
Clay Cosmos. Photo by Carla Escareno. Courtesy Candi X.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
*Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 7:00 P.M.
Pleasure ceremonialist and dreamer cy x curates OPEN STUDIOS like they would Love Island, inviting freaky, intimate, and captivating work from friends they have work-crushes on. Emerging from their desire to support their friend’s traveling show where she fucks a flower in full eco-erotic fashion, cy invites friends and crushes Avatar Lilith, Coco Villa, and Candi X to share their work and practice in budding stages.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
PROGRAM
Avatar Lilith: INTRAFACE 001
INTRAFACE 001 is a work in progress exploring the transitional space between membranes – where one ends and another begins. Existing as a bodily extension of Avatar Lilith, and as a flesh and sinewed tethering point, INTRAFACE 001 is a hybrid instrument that produces sonic fragments created algorithmically through Artificial Intelligence, trained off of her digital DNA, creating a type of intimacy between Avatar, meat body, and interface. By giving this algorithmic alien-other a fetish body and presence, Avatar Lilith reimagines and reframes our relationship to intangible and incoherent technocratic byproducts and systems that are inherently obscured and designed for flattening and optimizing. INTRAFACE 001 explores the power dynamic between these entities by creating a physical encasement (INTRA-/inside, rather than INTER-/between), encircling, entrapping, and perhaps un-flattening.
Coco Villa: I Am Swimming With Zaza
I Am Swimming With Zaza is an ongoing intimacy between fact and the fantastical, real and imagined. As they circulate, slow-moving sculptural gestures and rhythmic shapes become more intertwined superseding juxtapositions of you and me, then and now, and here and there. What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late? The You, and you that I come from, and the You that occasionally stands in for me.
Performed by Benin Gardner and Coco Villa
Sound Mix by Taul Katz, featuring Las Nalgas de Venus by Quixosis, DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY by Saya Gray, and Macorina by Chavez’s Vargas
Candi X: R.I.P. ROSY
A bright and playful piece about aliveness, love, death, and celebration, R.I.P. ROSY follows the intimate romance between Clay and Rosy (man and flower) as their bond transforms with joy even as their physical forms change. Following clear instructions left by Rosy for her commemoration party, we are asked to get silly and deeply curious about what it means to be alive. Drawing from erotic ecology philosophies, our life/death/life cycles are invited into reflection. How may we use celebration as a way to confront grief and bring ourselves into action in these times when our aliveness is needed most?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Avatar Lilith is a multi-hyphenate artist that masquerades as an avatar using computer graphics, sound design, installations, and audiovisual performance. They seek to reject linearity and binary logic systems by existing in two or more places at once. Avatar Lilith hopes to encourage others to embrace playfulness, curiosity, and creativity by worldbuilding and embracing alternative logic systems and technologies as a critical practice through performance, installations, and research. Their work has been featured internationally in galleries and venues such as Acud Galerie (Berlin), Nunu Gallery (NYC), Basement (CPH), Stonewall Inn (NYC), and Ars Electronica (AUT).
Candi X is a performance and video artist, experience facilitator, producer, and director originally from the US currently based in Mexico City. Her work reflects deep research around the eco-erotic relationship between the human and natural world and expresses through brightly queer and colorful outputs. All of her works are equal parts accessible, embodied, intellectual, and silly – redefining the erotic by focusing on igniting the sensorial imagination. Through playful, body based experiences, performances, films, and practices she facilitates fun, connection, and curiosity that opens audiences up to new perspectives.
Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian-American dancer, interdisciplinary artist and educator from Queens, currently living in Brooklyn. Tightly bound to identity, Villa leads an interdisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape. Their work spans across disciplines of performance, fashion design, installation, photography, and film. They utilize material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy, and build familial archives. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the ocean, in the woods, in the dance studio, darkroom, design lab, and library, playfully creating by hand.
cy x is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized ephemera in the form of writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.
![OPEN AiR | x: this is not a cult I: THE COACH – Opening and Artist Talk [virtual]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac507656ff4f3028bdb444/1725317749262-AUFYAL7ZIU21RWZQ5S7F/20221025_dan_Christopher_Nunez_LL_000.jpg)
OPEN AiR | x: this is not a cult I: THE COACH – Opening and Artist Talk [virtual]
x. Photo by Larry Levanti.
Free with RSVP
RSVP
The digital gallery will remain on view through November 30, 2024.
As an extension of their work and research as a CPR 2023 Artist-in-Residence and their trilogy this is not a cult, x aka Saint Sir Coach presents an archive of mementos, materials, and media from their fictional cult Sky Dancers, Meta Angels, and Meme Fiends – internally known as THE FAMILY – in a digital gallery hosted on CPR’s website. Focused on the charming and relatable cult leader, Saint Sir Coach, this is not a cult I: THE COACH takes its digital audience on a journey of falling in love with Coach’s witty banter, pop culture references, energy readings, and motivational speeches. Coach is the hype person of your dreams and the primary cat parent of THE FAMILY’s golden child and mascot, the gray domestic shorthair called Avignon the Grey.
At the virtual opening on November 12, Coach will lead us on a tour of the gallery which will remain on view through November 30 with a sprawling archive of delicate cat whiskers, guided meditations, spiritually polytheistic words of affirmation, and more digital goodies that have led many professional and TikTok dancers alike to dedicate their lives to the Gospel of this satirical cult that’s not a cult.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
x aka Saint Sir Coach is a trans, conceptual artist and medium that uses sound healing as Social Practice. Dismantling and simultaneously utilizing our 11 years of education in theater, 25+ years in dance, and ambiguous training in visual art, a unique practice has been born. x has shared short films, installations, and dance works in Budapest, Detroit, Ithaca, and NYC. Selected accomplishments include: Creatives Rebuild New York Artist Employment Program, New Yorkers for Culture and Arts Advocate in Residence, CPR – Center for Performance Research Artist-in-Residence, AXIS Choreo-Lab Fellow, GALLIM Moving Artist Residency, Bronx Council on the Arts Bronx Cultural Visions Fund, and New Dance Alliance Performance Mix Festival 36 and LiftOff Residency. Our first solo show high functioning x.0. premiered in August 2022 in HERE Arts Center’s Sublet: CoOp Series.
@CPR | VALLETO's 10th anniversary presents ETERNAL BONDS
VALLETO: Eternal Bonds. Image courtesy the artist.
$30 General Admission
$20 Students
Purchase Tickets
Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9
6:30PM | Reception
7:30PM | Performance
Join VALLETO as they celebrate a decade of provocative and transformative dance with the grand finale of the Eternal Bonds trilogy. This landmark event not only commemorates their 10th year but also confronts the universal experience of grief through the lens of memory and joy, inviting audiences into a sacred space of communal healing and remembrance.
ETERNAL BONDS expands VALLETO’s company to ten dancers, each embodying the threads of collective memory that define who we are. This performance intertwines the abstract theatricality of Eternal Bonds.1 with the intimate revelations of Eternal Bonds.2, delving into the profound depths of memory, the echoes of joy, and the shadows of grief. Through narratives and utopian moments where grief is transformed into hope and mourning into celebration.
Please join VALLETO for a 10th Anniversary pre-show celebration at CPR starting at 6:30 P.M. each night of the performance.
Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9
6:30PM | Reception
7:30PM | Performance
CREDITS
Artistic Director/Concept: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez
Choreography: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez in collaboration with the dancers
Re-staging Assistant: Sheila Jackson
Rehearsal Director: Sheila Jackson
Co-producers: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez and Cali Ibarra
Costume Designer: Alba Garcia
Photographer/Filmmaker: Alba Garcia
Makeup and hair: Cassie Mills
Intern/assistant: Maris Krystosek
FEATURING:
Dancers: Abigail Linnemeyer (she/they), Alex Schmidt (she/her), Lindsay Jorgensen (she/her), Lucia Tozzi (she/her), Elisa Meyer (she/her), Ashton Atteberry (they/them), Isa Segall (she/they), Gracen Nelson (she/her), Katie LeHoty (she/her), and Sheila Jackson (she/her)
This season was co-produced and made possible by Valeria Y. Gonzalez and Cali Ibarra and the wonderful humans who have donated and keep believing in VALLETO.
About VALLETO
VALLETO is a contemporary and experimental dance theater company that focuses on creating thought-provoking choreographic work that create a sense of liveliness and excitement, leaving a lasting impact on its audiences and collaborators. VALLETO is a unique dance company and platform that brings together talented dancers from diverse backgrounds each season.
Over the years, VALLETO has evolved into a company dedicated to amplifying female-identifying and non-binary voices, creating inclusive spaces where these artists can thrive.
VALLETO is also comprised by the heal project, and tour biennial summer and winter intensives.
Mission
– Inspiration, connection, and empowerment through a safe and welcoming environment for dance artists
– Create compelling work for our audiences. Works that challenge systems of oppression and works that create a sense of liveliness and excitement for our audiences and collaborators.
– Amplifying female-identifying and non-binary voices, creating inclusive spaces where these artists can thrive.
@CPR | VALLETO's 10th anniversary presents ETERNAL BONDS
VALLETO: Eternal Bonds. Image courtesy the artist.
$30 General Admission
$20 Students
Purchase Tickets
Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9
6:30PM | Reception
7:30PM | Performance
Join VALLETO as they celebrate a decade of provocative and transformative dance with the grand finale of the Eternal Bonds trilogy. This landmark event not only commemorates their 10th year but also confronts the universal experience of grief through the lens of memory and joy, inviting audiences into a sacred space of communal healing and remembrance.
ETERNAL BONDS expands VALLETO’s company to ten dancers, each embodying the threads of collective memory that define who we are. This performance intertwines the abstract theatricality of Eternal Bonds.1 with the intimate revelations of Eternal Bonds.2, delving into the profound depths of memory, the echoes of joy, and the shadows of grief. Through narratives and utopian moments where grief is transformed into hope and mourning into celebration.
Please join VALLETO for a 10th Anniversary pre-show celebration at CPR starting at 6:30 P.M. each night of the performance.
Friday, November 8 and Saturday, November 9
6:30PM | Reception
7:30PM | Performance
CREDITS
Artistic Director/Concept: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez
Choreography: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez in collaboration with the dancers
Re-staging Assistant: Sheila Jackson
Rehearsal Director: Sheila Jackson
Co-producers: Valeria Yvette Gonzalez and Cali Ibarra
Costume Designer: Alba Garcia
Photographer/Filmmaker: Alba Garcia
Makeup and hair: Cassie Mills
Intern/assistant: Maris Krystosek
FEATURING:
Dancers: Abigail Linnemeyer (she/they), Alex Schmidt (she/her), Lindsay Jorgensen (she/her), Lucia Tozzi (she/her), Elisa Meyer (she/her), Ashton Atteberry (they/them), Isa Segall (she/they), Gracen Nelson (she/her), Katie LeHoty (she/her), and Sheila Jackson (she/her)
This season was co-produced and made possible by Valeria Y. Gonzalez and Cali Ibarra and the wonderful humans who have donated and keep believing in VALLETO.
About VALLETO
VALLETO is a contemporary and experimental dance theater company that focuses on creating thought-provoking choreographic work that create a sense of liveliness and excitement, leaving a lasting impact on its audiences and collaborators. VALLETO is a unique dance company and platform that brings together talented dancers from diverse backgrounds each season.
Over the years, VALLETO has evolved into a company dedicated to amplifying female-identifying and non-binary voices, creating inclusive spaces where these artists can thrive.
VALLETO is also comprised by the heal project, and tour biennial summer and winter intensives.
Mission
– Inspiration, connection, and empowerment through a safe and welcoming environment for dance artists
– Create compelling work for our audiences. Works that challenge systems of oppression and works that create a sense of liveliness and excitement for our audiences and collaborators.
– Amplifying female-identifying and non-binary voices, creating inclusive spaces where these artists can thrive.
@CPR | Leila Lois and Hussein Smko: When fire meets mountain
Leila Lois. Photo by David Slattery.
$15 artists and students
$20 general admission
Purchase Tickets
When fire meets mountain is a work in progress collaboration between Leila Lois and Hussein Smko, part remotely, part in the studio at CPR. They explore lived experience of diaspora, and themes of joy, loss, and connection.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Leila Lois is a dancer, choreographer, writer, and curator of Kurdish-Celtic origin based in Australia and New Zealand.
Hussein Smko is a Kurdish dancer, choreographer, and director with a career spanning 16+ years. His works have graced prestigious festivals and residencies, including the One Journey Festival, the Kennedy Center, Battery Dance Festival, CUNY Dance Initiative, Laguardia Performing Arts Center, Rough Draft, Bethany Art Center, the Watermill Center, Rockefeller Center (Pocantico), and the Chicago Cultural Center's Surviving the Long Wars. The Performance, a documentary directed by Alfredo Chiarappa and produced by Caterina Clireci, offers an in-depth look into Smko’s artistic journey. In 2019, he founded Project Tag, a dynamic dance theater company. Sarah, a physical theater piece created by Smko and creative director Khalil Ayed is set to premiere in 2025.
OPEN HOUSE | Election Night with Crackhead Barney
Free
RSVP encouraged
***This event is AT CAPACITY. Only those who have RSVP’d will gain entry. Please vote, stay safe, and take care of one another!
On Election Night, CPR will open its doors to screen the televised election returns in its theater, providing a space to be in community as this historic and consequential presidential election unfolds.
The evening will feature ‘live political commentary’ from performance artist, viral ambush interviewer, and political dilettante Crackhead Barney. Additional performances and activations throughout the night by Maho Ogawa, Bob Bellerue, The KLUTZ C🙂LT (Alex Romania, Stacy Lynn Smith, and Shane Jones), and Kris Lee will punctuate the drone of the endless news cycle, offering space for reflection, distraction, and care.
Bring a pillow, some snacks, and camp out at CPR amongst artists and friends.
The program also marks the culmination of Exorcism = Liberation, a public art project by Yanira Castro / a canary torsi on view in the window of CPR, with all three of the project’s banners and slogans on view.
For information about how, when, and where to vote, visit vote.gov.
Special thanks to Vine Wine and Creative Time.
View tonight’s program here.
PROGRAM
Crackhead Barney: Live Political Commentary
7:00 PM – 12:00 AM
Maho Ogawa: Japanese Tea and Ritual Room
7:30 PM and 11:30 PM
An introspective and immersive journey over Japanese tea, the Japanese Tea and Ritual Room immerses guests in a peaceful ambiance and meditative mindset as collective ritual – accepting our strength and tenderness in the community and envisioning the best for the US and the world. Performed by Maho Ogawa, Carolyn Hall, and Annie MingHao Wang.
Bob Bellerue: Physical Circuits
8:30 PM
A sonic improvisation including junk metal, bullhorn feedback, and resonating drums.
The KLUTZ C🙂LT (Alex Romania, Stacy Lynn Smith, Shane Jones): Triniverse
9:30 PM
The KLUTZ C🙂LT invites you to come on down to a relaxing noise retreat and join in multimedia chaos meditation as they lead the audience in summoning a new and exciting ending to The End.
Kris Lee: Doing my black job
10:30 PM
Yanira Castro / a canary torsi: Exorcism = Liberation
On view
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Crackhead Barney was born in Jamaica, Queens to strict religious parents who immigrated to America from Northern Nigeria. She was raised in a one bedroom apartment with her siblings in an era before wokeness and identity politics ruled the cultural landscape and was always taunted for her immigrant African roots and dark complexion. She studied Fine Arts and Media at Hunter College and was told her artwork wasn't shit. Rejected from museums and galleries, she decided to take matters into her own hands and use the streets of NYC as her canvas, painting pictures with her body across the landscape without the need to satisfy the desires of the cultural institutions. Her street performances garnered attention and she began to go viral all over the Internet with people reacting in confusion, laughter, anger, pity, concern, and all the other emotions available to humans. Rejecting any hierarchies that didn't feature her at the very pinnacle, she naturally was attracted to social media where she could form a universe centered on her performance art. She began a “Crackhead Barney and Friends” account on Instagram and TikTok where she’s developed a cult of personality supportive of her creative practice.
Bob Bellerue is a sound artist, experimental musician, sound/video curator, and A/V technician based in Ridgewood NY. Over the last 30+ years he has been involved in creating and presenting a wide range of sonic activities – experimental music, sound art, noise, junk metal percussion ensembles, soundtracks for dance / theater / video / performance art, and sound / video installations. Bob’s electronic sound work is focused on resonant feedback systems, using amplified instruments, objects, recordings, and spaces, in combination with electronics and software written in the Supercollider audio synthesis programming language.
Shane Jones is a musician whose work centers intentional dissonance as a natural phenomena, utilizing continuous glissando. Their anti-capitalistic visual art practice activates found objects into such things as cartoons, animation, nunchucks, cassette tapes, T-shirts, paintings, and sculpture. Shane has been in a bunch of different bands as well as having had stints as a farmer, a cook, a union organizer, and a factory worker/impromptu noise artist in a teddy bear sweatshop.
Kris Lee (she/they) is a New York-based dancer, performer, and home chef.
Maho Ogawa (水素co.) is a Japanese born multidisciplinary movement artist working in NY. She uses body, video, text, installation, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously. Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture. She crafts public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about "silence," providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community. Her aim is to empower erased cultures by dismantling oppressed body gestures and their context as choreography, fighting for cultural equality in nonviolent ways. Maho's works have been presented in Asia at Korea & Japan Dance Festival (Seoul), Za Koenji (Tokyo), Whenever Wherever Festival (Tokyo), and in the US including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at Judson Church, and CPR – Center for Performance Research to name a few. Ogawa has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and creation support from Culture Push, Emily Harvey Foundation, LEIMAY, and New Dance Alliance. She is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. www.suisoco.com @suisomaho
Carolyn Hall is a Bessie award winning freelance dancer/performer, historical marine ecologist, and scientific communication coach. She can often be found along shorelines hatching plans for creative public engagement projects around fish, water, and climate change. Some current engagements: Maho Ogawa’s Japanese Tea Ceremony series of performance investigations, the speculative future climate change project Sunk Shore with Clarinda Mac Low, and Carrie Ahern’s intimate performances examining female sexuality and society. Other hats: co-directs science communication programs for the American Fisheries Society, co-founder of Exact Communication, and Creative Programs Consultant for Genspace. Deep thanks to Maho and Annie for this continued journey together. carolynjhall.com
Annie MingHao Wang is a dancer/choreographer based in New York. She is a 2024 LMCC Manhattan Arts Grantee, a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, a 2024-2025 Topaz Arts Artist-in-Residence, and a 2024 Marble House Project Artist-in-Residence. She has also had residencies at LEIMAY, BRIC, and Atlantic Center for the Arts. Her work has been presented by Pioneers Go East Collective at Out-FRONT!, Movement Research at Judson Church, Leimay OUTSIGHT, Five Myles, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Exponential Festival, and BRIC. Annie is an active company member of Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group and also dances with Sugar Vendil, 水素co. (suisoco.), and Same As Sister. Much gratitude for Maho and Carolyn for their power and grounding energy in this work.
Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary performing artist, improviser, and filmmaker. Romania is a current Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2024 Djerassi resident artist, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, a 2023 CPR – Center for Performance Research AiR, and a 2018-2020 Movement Research AiR. Some of Romania’s current projects include co-directing the film RECKONING with Stacy Lynn Smith, the multidisciplinary opera Face Eaters (Chocolate Factory Theater, May 2024), co-directorship of the experimental documentary Patch the Sky with Five Colored Stones conceived by choreographer Daria Faïn, and a collaborative short film entitled Mira, Mira, Mira! with Daniela Fabrizi and the Re Hecho community in the LES. Romania has performed in various works by Kathy Westwater since 2013, and in works by artists Simone Forti, Éva Mag, Eddie Peake, Andy de Groat, and Catherine Galasso. As a video collaborator and designer, Romania has had video designs featured within works by Antonio Ramos, and has worked on film projects with Marin Media Labs, TAAMAS/Sarah Riggs, Trixie Films/Therese Shechter, Christopher Unpezverde Nuñez, Martita Abril, and Sarah White-Ayòn. Romania is excited about how experimentation in live performance may feed developing script based films and plays, which include a budding memoir, and character based extensions of previous work.
Stacy Lynn Smith is a neurodivergent, Black mixed-race performing artist and improviser, choreographer/director, filmmaker and Green Circle Keeper at Hidden Water, a restorative justice organization by and for those affected by childhood sexual abuse (CSA). Smith’s practice synthesizes various lineages of improvisational forms, somatics, experimental theater, and butoh alongside embodied trauma research. Smith creates, devises, improvises, and performs across disciplines and genres with an array of talented artists including: DeForrest Brown Jr., Anna Homler, Karen Bernard, Thaddeus O’Neil, Rakia Seaborn, Vangeline Theater (2008-2017), Michael Freeman, Saints of an Unnamed Country, Salome Asega, GENG, Donna Costello, Bradley Bailey, Michele Beck, Jasmine Hearn, mayfield brooks, Josephine Decker, and most recently with Kathy Westwater, Jill Sigman, Emily Johnson, Joan Jonas, Peter Born, and Okwui Okpokwasili. As Psychic Wormhole (with Alex Romania), recent work includes producing and choreographing Face Eaters at The Chocolate Factory Theater. Psychic Wormhole is working towards completing their debut film, RECKONING, a visceral abstract memoir which grapples with Smith’s experiences of CSA and Complex-PTSD. Smith is a 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, Glasshouse Art.Life.Lab 2024 AIR, a 2024 Djerassi AIR, and a 2025 Dance and Process (DAP) artist at The Kitchen.
OPEN AiR | Hans: Night Creatures
Hans. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
A new work by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Hans, Night Creatures is a love letter to all the men I have coiled my body around, to a love-hate relationship with New York, and to a constant wrestling match with a flamenco practice. A vespertine rumination of sexuality – from moonrise to sunrise – and the hunger, yearning, and fear that comes with being in love and lust of other male bodies. The work is also a technical exploration, having spent the residency year learning how to compose music using electronic, MIDI, and digital audio workspaces – composed while commuting through the vascular undergrounds of the NYC subway. The work is cradled by flamenco, using musical modes, movements, rhythms, melodies, and ideas, but deconstructs them to reflect a lived experience as a queer, fat-femme boy from the lush tropical fever-dream of Miami, living in NYC’s sticky, grimy, urban, angsty landscape. What does it feel like to dance House por Bulerias, move to the Fandangos of the L Train, and sing Tangos de Bushwick?
The performance will be followed by a conversation with Hans facilitated by leaders in the flamenco community on the nature of experimentation, orthodoxy, and framework of flamenco, and how it changes when it reflects non-Spanish folklore and experiences.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hans is a dancer and tattoo artist from Miami, FL with a practice focused on dance as visual art. They have shared work with audiences in Florida and held artistic residencies in NYC. Hans has also participated in projects by Katy Pyle’s Ballez, the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, Okwui Okpokwasili, and Peter Born. Hans describes himself and his work as the “gay lovechild of Frida Kahlo and Sailor Neptune’s lesbian love affair.”
@CPR | Qubit presents: Rama Gottfried, featuring PinkNoise
Image courtesy Qubit.
Tickets: $15/$25, sliding scale
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Qubit’s 2024 Innovator Lab artist-in-residence is the Zurich-based American composer Rama Gottfried. We’re teaming up with the PinkNoise ensemble, spending a week at CPR to workshop a variety of new pieces that involve video, puppetry, and costumes – promising to encompass the true spirit of a Halloween event. Qubit artistic director Alec Hall will join Rama to perform in several pieces, with costume design by Sally Rumble.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rama Gottfried's recent works aim to increase our sensitivity to the web of relations that connect humans and the other animate and inanimate entities that surround us. His pieces are conceived as scenographic worlds — bodies with voices that move and interact in physical and immaterial environments, constructed from the medias of acoustic and electronic instrumental performance, puppet-, object-, material-theater, live-cinema, and the site-specific performance context. Brought to life through the collaborative actions of human and nonhuman performers, the works attempt to absorb the audience and physical space, subtly expanding our awareness of detail. Born in New York in 1977, Rama grew up in Burlington, VT, where he began instrumental and electronic music training at an early age, and pursued visual art studies before shifting focus to music performance and composition. After moving to NYC in 2001, he joined Ensemble Pamplemousse, collaborating with the group from 2003-2013 on developing approaches to the merging of sound, installation, and performance arts. Rama's works have been featured at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival, MaerzMusik, SPOR, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, MATA, Klangwerkstatt, rainy days, and Ultima festivals, among others, and he has created sound installations for the Berliner Congress Center, Complice, Mino Washi Paper Museum, Stadtbad-Wedding, and the Pacific Basin Building.
PinkNoise is a New York-based chamber ensemble dedicated to musical improvisation and compositions in acoustic and electronic mediums. Their upcoming season includes appearances at the Kontrapunkt series in St. Gallen, Switzerland and as the Ensemble-in-Residence at the 2025 Music Biennale Zagreb in Croatia.
Qubit is a contemporary music and performance art initiative founded in 2010. Based in NYC, its principal mission is to foster the development of emergent voices by working with composers whose work has yet to reach wider audiences. We place a particular emphasis on the exploration of new technologies in performance practice, sonic aesthetics, and public engagement.
OPEN AiR | Leo Chang: Jeonmonori
Leo Chang. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Jeonmonori is an extension of a musical practice that 2024 Artist-in-Residence Leo Chang has been immersed in for the past six years, drawing on Korean folk musical practices and instruments as the basis for building new electronic instruments. The jeonmonori is an electronic adaptation of the sangmo, a hat with a long, spinning whip made of ribbon attached to its crown, which is worn and played during the sangmonori, a Korean folk tradition where the instrumentalist/performer plays and dances simultaneously with their percussion instrument. During his CPR residency, Chang created the jeonmonori by modifying a sangmo hat, replacing the spinning ribbon with a lightweight, mini microphone. While wearing the hat, he moves in the middle of four hanging gongs that are amplified with transducers. The act of the mic moving within the amplified gongs creates feedback between the transducers and the mic-ed hat-whip, resonating the gongs, while Chang’s position and the speed at which the whip is spinning, among other factors, determines musical variables of feedback such as pitch, rhythm, and dynamics.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Leo Chang is a Korean improviser, composer, and performer of experimental music. Born in Seoul, Leo lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai, until moving to the United States in 2011. His art is an act of homemaking inspired by various musical and ideological movements that have sought to question power dynamics and imagine egalitarian possibilities. His primary methods are free improvisation, written text, graphical notation, and electronic processing. Leo's projects have been presented and supported by the Vision Festival, Roulette Intermedium, Korea Foundation, Ostrava Days New Music Festival, New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, Brooklyn Arts Council, and EMPAC at Rensselaer, among others. He holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. www.listentoleo.com
OPEN LAB | What is your first memory of dirt?: Aural Archiving with Yanira Castro / a canary torsi
Photo courtesy a canary torsi.
Free, advance registration required
REGISTER for a 20-min time slot
On Eventbrite, please select the 1pm event, then press "Tickets," and select your desired 20-minute time slot at checkout.
With limited individual time slots available, we ask that you fully commit to the time that you register for. If you are not able to make it, please let us know as soon as possible so we can release the time to another participant. If all time slots are taken, please email info@cprnyc.org with the subject “Waiting List: Aural Archiving” and we will reach out if a time becomes available.
As part of Yanira Castro / a canary torsi’s multisite, multi-format public art project Exorcism = Liberation and in conjunction with the installation on view in the windows of CPR from September 25 through November 6, this aural archiving project will gather participants’ foundational memories of earth in an intimate, analog recording session. Responding to the prompt “What is your first memory of dirt?”, one of the project’s slogans and sound works that will be carried across the U.S. this fall on stickers, pins, lawn signs, and handmade banners during a critical American election season, participants will be guided through a private experience of listening, contemplation, and memory, recounting their first memories of dirt on a cassette tape recorder.
Participants will sign up for an individual 20-minute time slot and engage in an autonomous recording experience. Tea and cookies will be served.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yanira Castro's work is rooted in communal construction as a rehearsal for radical democracy. She is an interdisciplinary artist born in Borikén (Puerto Rico), living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn), and working at the intersection of communal practices, performance, installation, and interactive technology. Castro forms iterative, multimodal projects that center land, and the complexity of citizenship and governance in works activated and performed by the public. Since 2009, she’s created and performed with a team of collaborators as a canary torsi. Her recent work includes a performance manual for reckoning, Last Audience, a performance manual; a participatory podcast to rehearse for a collective future, Last Audience: a performance podcast; and a tea ritual created with four teens from NYC Girl Scouts Troop 6000 to enact the ingestion of home/land, TIERRA. Currently, Castro is developing her ongoing interdisciplinary work, I came here to weep, a collective exorcism for territorial possession. Castro has been commissioned and presented by The Chocolate Factory Theater, New York Live Arts, MCA Chicago, The Invisible Dog Art Center, SPACE Gallery, PICA, LMCC, The Bates Dance Festival and ICA/Boston. Her work has recently been supported by Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Dance, 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Art, Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, LMCC, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Marble House Project. She has received two New York Dance and Performance (aka Bessie) Awards for Outstanding Production.
OPEN LAB | Optimistic Voices: In Process with Juliana F. May (Co-Presented with Juliana F. May / MAYDANCE)
Juliana F. May. Photo by Chris Cameron.
Free with RSVP
RSVP
This group conversation facilitated by Lena Engelstein will center Juliana F. May’s choreographic process over the last 20 years as she embarks on her current work Optimistic Voices premiering in the fall of 2025. Inspired by May’s ongoing Art Group workshops which generate community around making, all are welcome and are invited to participate by listening, asking questions, and bringing their own issues surrounding creative process, autobiography, and performance and setting material.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.
Optimistic Voices is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
A Guggenheim and New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow, Juliana F. May has created ten evening length works since 2002 with commissions and encore performances from Dance Theater Workshop, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory Theater, American Realness, and Abrons Arts Center. May has been awarded grants and residencies through The MAP Fund, NYSCA, Jerome Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Gibney Dance In Process, and Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography. In 2002, May received her BA in Dance and Art History from Oberlin College, and, in 2012, she received an MFA in Choreography from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. May served as the Artistic Advisor for New York Live Arts' Fresh Tracks Residency Program from 2017-2019 and 2024-present and has been on faculty at Sarah Lawrence College since 2017.
Lena Engelstein is a dancer, performer, and choreographer. She is part of the interdisciplinary performance collective CHILD, headed by Lisa Fagan. Her work has been dubbed “The High Weird” by critics and lauded as “subtly campy and hilariously queer” by The Brooklyn Rail. Recent Choreography/Direction includes Deepe Darknesse at New York Live Arts’ Live Artery 2024 with collaborator Lisa Fagan and CHILD's 1-800-3592-113592 at Theater Mitu in March 2024. Recent performance credits include Alexa West, Barnett Cohen, Brendan Drake, Falcon Dance (company member, 2018-present), Isa Spector, Jo Warren, Owen Prum + Lili Dekker, Miguel Alejandro Castillo, and Third Rail Company’s Then She Fell (company member, 2019-2020). Engelstein currently choreographs for and performs with the band Lou Tides. She holds a BA in Mathematics from Colorado College and has taught at SUNY Brockport, Colorado Mesa University, Bard College, and The Field Center.
OPEN AiR | Endless Holes: Rebecca Patek, Alex Rodabaugh, and Anh Vo
Alex Rodabaugh. Photo by Res.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Tues, October 22 at 7 P.M.
Weds, October 23 at 7 P.M.
Endless Holes is a shared evening of new work in development by 2024 Artists-in-Residence Rebecca Patek, Alex Rodabaugh, and Anh Vo. Each work is a continuation of the artist’s research in multi-part or iterative performance projects: Rebecca Patek revisits Tough Titties, exploring depolarization, binary fatigue, and mystic shorelines; Alex Rodabaugh seeks to close their Break-Up Tunnel Vision Infinity project with a deep dive into nostalgia, cyberspace avatar puppetry, paranoia, and denial; and Anh Vo builds on their ongoing research into northern Vietnamese possession ritual, exploring the pussy as an energetic channel that can tune into the existential pain of others.
PROGRAM
Rebecca Patek: Tough Titties 2: View from the Other End
An offering towards the effort around depolarization. We are for and against each other, for or against objects, ideas, realities. The binary fatigue of thinking and feeling can lead us to venture further than we might otherwise travel. We seek a mystic shoreline that is spoken of, that is rumored, but can we find it? What do we have to lose? What do we have to do to get there? Can I get there? Can you? Can we? I have many questions clearly but basically I am trying and that's the best I can do.
Alex Rodabaugh: n-1
Looking for a path forward to close the Break-Up Tunnel Vision Infinity project and embrace the community that embraces me. The nth edition delves into the nostalgia that is colonizing our future, cyberspace avatar puppetry colliding with physical presence, and the paranoia or denial that arises from the perpetual threat of and participation in violence.
Anh Vo: pussy talks
pussy talks builds on Anh Vo's ongoing research into northern Vietnamese possession ritual, exploring the pussy as an energetic channel that can tune into the existential pain of others.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rebecca Patek has created over twenty original performances. Her work is an amalgamation of comedy, theater, and dance. She is a 2024 CPR Artist-in-Residence, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Fresh Tracks at New York Live Arts. Her work has been presented at MoMa PS1, The Kitchen, Impulstanz Vienna (Prix Jardin D’Europe Fan Award 2014), Museum of Arts and Design, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, BAX, Triple Canopy, Prelude Festival, Performance Mix Festival, and Dixon Place, among many others. As a performer, she was most recently thrilled to appear in work by Ryan Mcnamara, and can currently be caught honing her skills at open mics around NYC.
Alex Rodabaugh is a choreographer, dancer, and performer from Lima, OH (Shawnee territory), based in NYC (Lenapehoking). Alex's work has been shown at Movement Research at Judson Church, Draftworks at Danspace, Double Plus at Gibney, PRELUDE, American Realness, and Dance and Process at The Kitchen. Alex most recently performed in Rebecca Patek’s Tough Titties. Alex has performed in works by artists such as Moriah Evans, Simone Forti, Tess Dworman, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Doug LeCours, Derek Smith, and Bailey Williams, among others, including two Bessie Award-winning performances. Alex is also a Treasurer/Co-Founder of Dance Artists’ National Collective and a current Artist-in-Residence at CPR – Center for Performance Research. www.alexrodabaugh.work.
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in NYC, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).
View the Program
OPEN AiR | Endless Holes: Rebecca Patek, Alex Rodabaugh, and Anh Vo
Alex Rodabaugh. Photo by Res.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Tues, October 22 at 7 P.M.
Weds, October 23 at 7 P.M.
Endless Holes is a shared evening of new work in development by 2024 Artists-in-Residence Rebecca Patek, Alex Rodabaugh, and Anh Vo. Each work is a continuation of the artist’s research in multi-part or iterative performance projects: Rebecca Patek revisits Tough Titties, exploring depolarization, binary fatigue, and mystic shorelines; Alex Rodabaugh seeks to close their Break-Up Tunnel Vision Infinity project with a deep dive into nostalgia, cyberspace avatar puppetry, paranoia, and denial; and Anh Vo builds on their ongoing research into northern Vietnamese possession ritual, exploring the pussy as an energetic channel that can tune into the existential pain of others.
PROGRAM
Rebecca Patek: Tough Titties 2: View from the Other End
An offering towards the effort around depolarization. We are for and against each other, for or against objects, ideas, realities. The binary fatigue of thinking and feeling can lead us to venture further than we might otherwise travel. We seek a mystic shoreline that is spoken of, that is rumored, but can we find it? What do we have to lose? What do we have to do to get there? Can I get there? Can you? Can we? I have many questions clearly but basically I am trying and that's the best I can do.
Alex Rodabaugh: 🕳n-1🕳
Looking for a path forward to close the Break-Up Tunnel Vision Infinity project and embrace the community that embraces me. The nth edition delves into the nostalgia that is colonizing our future, cyberspace avatar puppetry colliding with physical presence, and the paranoia or denial that arises from the perpetual threat of and participation in violence.
Anh Vo: pussy talks
pussy talks builds on Anh Vo's ongoing research into northern Vietnamese possession ritual, exploring the pussy as an energetic channel that can tune into the existential pain of others.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rebecca Patek has created over twenty original performances. Her work is an amalgamation of comedy, theater, and dance. She is a 2024 CPR Artist-in-Residence, and was an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Fresh Tracks at New York Live Arts. Her work has been presented at MoMa PS1, The Kitchen, Impulstanz Vienna (Prix Jardin D’Europe Fan Award 2014), Museum of Arts and Design, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop, Movement Research at Judson Church, BAX, Triple Canopy, Prelude Festival, Performance Mix Festival, and Dixon Place, among many others. As a performer, she was most recently thrilled to appear in work by Ryan Mcnamara, and can currently be caught honing her skills at open mics around NYC.
Alex Rodabaugh is a choreographer, dancer, and performer from Lima, OH (Shawnee territory), based in NYC (Lenapehoking). Alex's work has been shown at Movement Research at Judson Church, Draftworks at Danspace, Double Plus at Gibney, PRELUDE, American Realness, and Dance and Process at The Kitchen. Alex most recently performed in Rebecca Patek’s Tough Titties. Alex has performed in works by artists such as Moriah Evans, Simone Forti, Tess Dworman, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Doug LeCours, Derek Smith, and Bailey Williams, among others, including two Bessie Award-winning performances. Alex is also a Treasurer/Co-Founder of Dance Artists’ National Collective and a current Artist-in-Residence at CPR – Center for Performance Research. www.alexrodabaugh.work.
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in NYC, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental dance, queer and feminist performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices. Their formal training is in Performance Studies, studying with theorists and practitioners at Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA).
View the Program
OPEN AiR | Ariana Speight: cocoon
Ariana Speight. Photo by Whitney Browne.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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cocoon is a new work in development by 2024 Artist-in-Residence Ariana Speight which journeys through metamorphosis defined as a transformative transition, and is a continual introduction to the inner workings of self through the shifting of form. With a multidimensional and interactive framework incorporating storytelling, [love] notes, questions/queries, movement, and stagnation, cocoon uncovers what hinders and what supports during the process of emergence.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ariana Speight is a contemporary dance artist invested in researching the curiosities of life through various mediums. Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, she has worked with a number of artists including Kayla Farrish, Joanna Kotze, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kyle Marshall, Anna Sperber, and Jessie Young. Her freelance journey has led her to perform at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Chelsea Factory, Coffey Street, Dancewave, Lincoln Center Hearst Plaza, New York Live Arts, PAGEANT, Roulette Intermedium, The Shed, The Space at Irondale, The Tank, Webster Hall, among other venues in New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. She is a BFA graduate from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and is a certified Yoga and Pilates instructor where she continues to nurture her teaching practice.
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@CPR | Container presents: Sophia Seiss w/ Wibke Storkan & Axine M: CARRIERS
Image courtesy Container NYC.
Tickets: $10
Purchase Tickets
CARRIERS explores themes of guilt, failure, and shame as embodied experiences passed down through generations, shaped by systemic shifts, crisis, or personal tragedies. Through a blend of choreography, language, and sound, it examines the tension between giving in and giving up in post-capitalistic instability of not quite falling through the cracks.
*** Quels sont ces corps, fatigués mais pas prêts de s'abandonner?
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sophia Seiss is a choreographer, dancer, and performer based both in Marseille and Berlin. Her work investigates in a constant research on how improvisation with sound, text and movement inform one another and prepare a body of honesty and fragility, tenderness and roughness. She has collaborated with with divers Artists in and outside of Europe such as Marina Abramovic, Katie Duck, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Pol Pi, and the choir Glossa. CARRIERS is an adaptation of her latest piece REST HERE. HOPE DO. that premiered in Montpellier, France in 2024.
Wibke Storkan is a freelance contemporary dancer, choreographer, dance facilitator, and dance/movement therapist based in Berlin. In her work, the human body, its relationships and communication play a central role. Different approaches and methods of bodywork interweave in her artistic research and therapeutic practice. She has collaborated in numerous projects, a.o. with Sasha Waltz & Guests, Stefan Kaegi / Rimini Protokoll, Theater Strahl, Saskia Oidtmann, Florian Bilbao, Yotam Peled, and Judith Sánchez Ruíz/JSR Company.
Axine M is the moniker of Maxine de las Pozas, a music artist residing in Brooklyn, NY, and a vessel for musical inquiries and creative impulses across multiple genres and sentiments, carving out a space for itself against the grain of the dystopian imaginary. Her recently released tape USUSUSESESERERER is a songwriterly exploration of interpersonal relationships under late-capitalism. Maxine currently is Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room, and a collective member and sound engineer for Chaos Computer.
ABOUT CONTAINER
Container NYC is a temporary, non-profit space in Chinatown, Manhattan, run by artists Anna Budniewski & Michael Dikta. container-nyc.com
OPEN STUDIOS | Amando Houser, Reed Rushes, and MTHR TRSA, curated by Alessandra Gómez
Amando Hauser. Photo by Maia Saavedra.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
*Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 7:00 P.M.
Organized by independent curator Alessandra Gómez, this program showcases three innovative performances that blend humor and critical social commentary, with each artist approaching their work through clowning, drag performance, or a combination of both—each form having its own distinct and rich history. Amando Houser’s DeliaDelia! is comedic performance inspired by the "witch hunt" against trans rights in America. Reed Rushes’ Twilight Zone is a drag king performance exploring birthing, domesticity, and consumption from a queer masculine perspective and MTHR TRSA’s I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY takes us on a conversational journey between inner demons, the MTA, and RuPaul. Together, these three artists illustrate how humor can serve as a powerful tool for social commentary in contemporary performance.
OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.
View the Program
PROGRAM
Amando Houser: DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch!
DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch! is a solo comedic clown hour inspired by the “witch hunt” on trans rights in America. DeliaDelia is a witch from the swamps who happens to be as nasty on the eyes as she is on the basketball court. On a quest to become a “real girl” and fit into the human world to play for a team. Will she finally get to display her talents and become the greatest of all time? Or be cursed forever and turned into a serpent?
Created and performed by Amando Houser
Directed by Kedian Keohan
Research and development support from Fisher Center LAB, the Fisher Center at Bard‘s residency and commissioning program.
Reed Rushes: Twilight Zone
As night falls the living room is cast in an unfamiliar hum blue. Darkness grows the TV light, which flickers brighter casting shadows that lick the living room floor, sofa, walls. Edges begin to take new forms, shifting. Half asleep, sound distorts. From the TV, from this room, (“things get strange at night”) from this half light, Stan’s world unfolds…
Twilight Zone takes inspiration from films that explore female hysteria and body horror. Channeling the voices of both hysterical women and rebel boy icons from classic Hollywood body horror thriller movies, Rushes presents a drag king performance that examines birthing, domesticity, and consumption from a queer masculine perspective. Using drag, abstract movement, and theatrical costumes made by Kate Williams Twilight Zone is a humorous, surprising and emotionally moving experience.
MTHR TRSA: I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY
I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY reflects the collective experience of those who feel like they can never slow down, no matter how desperately they need to. It’s a disorienting energy of modern life, where nothing feels tangible or secure, and every attempt to grasp onto something is met with uncertainty. The chaotic rhythm of NYC heightens this dissonance, making us question if we are in control, or simply SPIRALING. The struggle to hold onto anything — a routine, money, stability, trans healthcare — feels increasingly futile as everything slips through our fingers, evoking a sense of panic and helplessness.
As the line between pleasure and paranoia blurs, we ask ourselves, “Was that actually Molly we just took?” There is no relief, there is no finish line, and the J train is not coming. The overwhelming sense of burnout becomes palpable. The opinionated demons and insecurities begin to march into the room alongside the haunting voice of RuPaul and the allure of queer success. Just another impossible standard! A reminder of how even within queer spaces, the forces of capitalism and conformity press down upon us.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Alessandra Gómez is an independent curator based in New York. She recently served as a curator for Luna Luna, the world’s first art amusement park, originally created in 1987. Gómez was part of the core curatorial team for Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy and worked on the early development of new artist-designed rides, attractions, and games. From 2018–2023, she was part of The Shed’s founding curatorial team, where she developed over seventy-five visual arts and performance commissions during her tenure including shows by Shayne Oliver & Anonymous Club and Maxwell Alexandre. She currently serves as the guest curator for public art at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is working on a number of forthcoming curatorial projects, including one with NIKE.
Amando Houser is a trans-masculine clown and actor born and based in NYC. Following a sold-out run at The Brick, their solo show DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch! debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and will have its US premiere at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Off Broadway: Midnight Coleslaw! Tales From Beyond The Closet! (The Tank); Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken (Soho Rep). They have performed in and devised work at venues and variety nights around town as well as at The Signature, The Elysian, New York Theatre Workshop, Vox Populi Gallery, The Wild Project, JACK, and The Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College. Amando is a recent graduate of École Philippe Gaulier in France and has trained with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, and Julia Masli (ha ha ha ha ha ha).
Reed Rushes is a British-American performance artist living and working in Queens, NY. Rushes has a multimedia performance practice that centers queer fantasy. Combining drag, movement, video, found and self made objects Rushes’ performances unpick the hierarchical distinctions between human bodies, emotional affect and objecthood. Rushes graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Bard College New York (2022) and holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature and Performance with honors from Queen Mary University London (2015). They began their performance art practice in London's queer club and drag scene. Their work has now shown at Park Avenue Armory, Performance Space New York, CPR – Center for Performance Research, The Yard Theatre London, Rich Mix London, BOFFO, and Art Omi and has been supported through public funding by Arts Council England. They cofounded and curated Low Stakes Festival London and collectively run the performance residency at Otion Front Studio New York.
MTHR TRSA IS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST, PHOTOGRAPHER, CHOREOGRAPHER, STYLIST, DIRECTOR, MODEL, DJ, LAWYER, DOCTOR, SECURITY GUARD, THERAPIST, FREE LANCER, ACCOUNTANT, CHIEF & PROFESSIONAL COMPLAINER.
@CPR | Elise Kermani: Without Fame & other films
Film still from Elise Kermani: Without Fame (Antiklea) (2024). Courtesy the artist.
Tickets: $10
Purchase Tickets
Filmmaker Elise Kermani presents the New York premiere of her latest short performance film, Without Fame (Antiklea), as well as three of her earlier works including SAND - a migrating performance, Agamemnon’s Daughter, and JUSTICE.
The evening will conclude with a Q&A with the filmmaker and audience.
PROGRAM
Without Fame (Antiklea) (2024), 8 min
Without Fame (Antiklea) centers on a tragic figure who is often forgotten amidst talk of Homer’s Odyssey, Antiklea, the mother of Odysseus. Although she is technically a minor character when compared to her famous wandering son (Antiklea literally means ‘without fame’ in ancient Greek), she is living proof of how a mother’s life can diminish once her child goes away. The film was shot in Malibu, CA and produced by Illium Pictures in Los Angeles, with cinematography by Kaliya Warren and featuring actor Chivonne Michelle. In May 2024, Without Fame showed at the AGON International Archaeological Film Festival in Athens, Greece, and was one of 63 films from 24 countries selected from 1,250 submissions from 100 countries, and one of only two films selected from the US.
While Kermani’s film takes its inspiration from Book XI of Homer’s Odyssey (including voiceover in the original ancient Greek), the film honors the moments before and after Odysseus meets his mother in Hades — and when she is left alone. “What destiny brought you to the home of Death?” he asks her in the text. In a translation by Alexander Pope, Antiklea’s response is, “For thee, I lived — for absent, I expired!” “Without Fame” also features “Tzivaeri,” a traditional Greek song whose title translates to ‘my treasure,’ and whose inclusion is meant to be a call of adoration from a mother to her child. Kermani first heard the song on a trip to Greece 10 years ago, and knew she had to use it in a film.
Without Fame also combines aspects of modern life with these mythological proceedings. In making it, Kermani was thinking a lot about the increasing number of migrants who’ve perished on the shores of Greece after attempting perilous boat trips across the ocean. They're fleeing to Europe in hopes of finding a better life. But many of these people end up with no identities — they are buried as unknowns, and most families will never learn what happened to their loved ones. That is why Kermani chose to begin the film with Antiklea washed up on a desolate beach; she is so often forgotten, too.
SAND - a migrating performance (2019), 12 min
Choreography and performances by Kristina Isabelle. Shot along the southern shores of Lake Michigan, with four dancers and a puppet. Cinematography by Diana Quiñones Rivera.
Agamemnon’s Daughter (2016), 4 min
Choreography and solo performance by Laurel Jenkins, 4 mins. Shot in Malibu, CA. Cinematography by Alexander Chinnici.
JUSTICE (2028), 12 min
A site specific performance with musicians and dancers filmed in NYC's Riverside Park on the Summer Solstice, 2017. With choreography and performance by Christine Elmo. Cinematography by Kaliya Warren.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Elise Kermani, currently based out of Northwest Indiana, is Managing Director of the Dunes Arts Foundation, located in Michigan City, IN. She is also Adjunct Lecturer of Media Art at Empire State University in New York. Heavily influenced by European theatrical video art, Kermani is primarily interested in adapting classic material and crafting her own unique, modernized interpretations; her projects consistently feature strong elements of music and dance. Particularly prevalent in the work is the idea of collage; not necessarily two-dimensional collage, but the layering of time itself, expanding a story back into the past and also forward into the present. Using varying levels of sound and fragmented visuals to comprise diverse, experimental performance pieces, Kermani aims to evoke a trance-like state – hypnotizing and even submerging a viewer within a strange new world. The music (much of which is sound designed by Kermani herself) is post-modern, emerging as a kaleidoscope of noise, a comingling of every kind of sound imaginable.
@CPR | Mars Garcia presents: Transmorph
Mars Garcia and Alisya Razman (2024). Photo by Lauren Chiriboga.
Tickets $10
Purchase Tickets
Thursday, October 10 at 7:30PM
Saturday, October 12 at 7:30PM
[REDACTED] at birth
[Gagged by sticky labels and exhaustive heteronormativity] “Get out of your seat, label me baby, come on I’m waiting. Come closer honey and smell my green tuft of hair. Can’t you tell what I am?” [the green figure’s skin erodes] “Don’t take too long to decide, the show must go on.”
TW: gender violence, cissexism
Accessibility Note: performance includes invitation to come onto the stage space (optional).
Movement Director, Performer, Costume Designer: Mars Garcia
Sound Designer, Performer: Alexander Millar:
Production Assistant/Guest Performer: Mary Ann Odete
Crossfade
A collective sustains smokey repetition in this exploration of techno and contemporary movement.
TW: strobe lighting, loud music.
Choreography: Alisya Razman, Mars Garcia
Performance and Improvisation by: Nikkie Samreth, Celine Abdallah, Alisya Razman, Mars Garcia, and Lilah van Rens
Sound design: Ali Aoun-IRL
Costume design: Mars Garcia
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mars Garcia (they/them) is a genderqueer Mexican American mover, maker, and collaborator from unseated Acjachemen and Tongva lands (California). Their art is characterized by their family’s lineage of strong matriarchs and gatherings of gossip, cooking, and mending as sites of reuse, renewal, music, and social dance. Their collaborative creations have been presented at The Brick , Queensboro Dance Festival, The Tank/NYC, Pink Frog Cafe, Soapbox Gallery, parks across NYC, and at their self produced Harvesting artist festival (Fall 2020, Spring 2022). Gathering movement, improvisation, sewing, writing, scenic designs, and sarcasm, Mars explores how queerness, identity, and belonging informs our habits, interactions, and families. They have been a guest artist with companies such as Edisa Weeks/DELIRIOUS DANCES, Kai Hazelwood/Good Trouble Makers, and Marie de la Palme/Motion Tribe, and performed abroad at the Bagnolet Conservatoire Municipal de Danse (France), Institute of the Arts, Barcelona (Spain), and the ACUD Theater (Berlin, Germany). With a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mars currently works as a freelance dancer (The Joyce Theater, ISSUE Project Room, Baryshnikov Arts Center as a part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial), a GYROTONIC® instructor (Fluid Fitness), Stage Manager (Priestess of Twerk 2024), and Producer (Practice Progress; 7NMS | Marjani Forté & Everett Saunders; Good Trouble Makers; Neuronite 2024). For bookings: DM @marsgarcia_works
Alisya Razman (she/her) is a Brooklyn based artist from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. While pursuing her BFA in Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she studied contemporary dance and improvisation under Rashaun Mitchell, Pamela Pietro, and Jeremy Nelson. She performed works/processes by Merce Cunningham, Sidra Bell, Kate Wallich, Bill T. Jones, David Dorfman, and studied abroad in Berlin. Since graduating, she has danced professionally with UNA Productions, Helen Simoneau Danse, Dishman & Co Choreography, Cayleen Del Rosario, and Yang Sun while being a teaching artist at The Ailey School. She was commissioned to present work at the Ailey Citigroup Theater for the Professional Division program last spring. @alisyarazman
Alexander Millar (they/them) is a white queer nonbinary neurodivergent award-winning songwriter, composer, performer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist. They combine a BFA in Musical Arts and an MFA in Performance & Composition from California Institute of the Arts with over 28 years of professional experience in the music industry and over 13 years of teaching experience. As a creative researcher Alex investigates how the systems of white supremacy shape the popular music industry, both historically and presently. They are especially interested in how toxic individuality, a byproduct of capitalism and a core tenant of white supremacy, drives the narrative of how we speak, write, and think about the concept of “success” in popular music, specifically as it pertains to the myth of the “self made” artist/group. Alex has a deep commitment to democratizing access to knowledge and research, as well as re-contextualizing creative research outside of Academia. Therefore, their research is publicly available in the form of TikTok videos; to date they have over 200k followers who engage with their research and likely never would have encountered it if it were not available on a popular social media app.
Nikkie Samreth (they/them) is a first generation Cambodian-Chinese multidisciplinary artist originally from Dallas, TX. They have a BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and studied at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. They also graduated Summa Cum Laude at SUNY FIT with a Bachelor of Science in International Trade & Marketing and a triple minor in Economics, Creative Technology, and Ethics & Sustainability. Post-college, Nikkie worked as a professional dancer/performer/model in various music videos, campaigns, films, and performance projects with companies such as The Feath3r Theory, Company XIV, HBO Max, Vogue, Vogue Runway, Universal Music Group, and other artists. Throughout Nikkie’s career they have had the opportunity to perform works by Merce Cunningham, Anton Lachky, Raja Feather Kelly, Aszure Barton, and many others. Along with their professional career, Nikkie has supplemented their artistry with new skills such as cello, boxing, skateboarding, archery, acting, and other interests to reshape their perspective of dance and choreography. @highblush
Celine Abdallah (she/her) is a Lebanese-American dance artist based in NYC, whose sensory-based movement combines the history of her Arab roots with a playfulness that roots into the present. She received her BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Celine has performed in original works by choreographers such as Yin Yue, Christina Robson, Molissa Fenley, Davide Di Pretoro, Ambika Raina, Isa Spector, and Iliana Penichet-Ramirez. Beyond the stage, she is featured in music videos and live sets by artists such as Yaeji, Frawley, and Dania. As a Choreographer and Movement Director, Celine has collaborated with filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Saleem Gondal, and Mike Klubeck. With her experience in stage and film, coupled with her interdisciplinary dance background, she hopes to continue exploring the boundlessness of storytelling.
Lilah van Rens, born and raised in New York City, pursued her undergraduate studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Dance. Continuing her education, Lilah earned her graduate degree in Dance/Movement Psychotherapy from Sarah Lawrence College, where she explored the intersection of movement, mind-body integration and mental health.
Ali (IRL) is a Bushwick-based DJ who draws sonic inspiration from their time spent between Detroit and Brooklyn, as well as his Lebanese heritage. No genre is off limits, prioritizing range over cohesion. His recurring event series’ Transmission and Lunar Tides express this mentality by connecting local talent and out-of-town guests through intimate settings.
@CPR | Mars Garcia presents: Transmorph
Mars Garcia and Alisya Razman (2024). Photo by Lauren Chiriboga.
Tickets $10
Purchase Tickets
Thursday, October 10 at 7:30PM
Saturday, October 12 at 7:30PM
[REDACTED] at birth
[Gagged by sticky labels and exhaustive heteronormativity] “Get out of your seat, label me baby, come on I’m waiting. Come closer honey and smell my green tuft of hair. Can’t you tell what I am?” [the green figure’s skin erodes] “Don’t take too long to decide, the show must go on.”
TW: gender violence, cissexism
Accessibility Note: performance includes invitation to come onto the stage space (optional).
Movement Director, Performer, Costume Designer: Mars Garcia
Sound Designer, Performer: Alexander Millar:
Production Assistant/Guest Performer: Mary Ann Odete
Crossfade
A collective sustains smokey repetition in this exploration of techno and contemporary movement.
TW: strobe lighting, loud music.
Choreography: Alisya Razman, Mars Garcia
Performance and Improvisation by: Nikkie Samreth, Celine Abdallah, Alisya Razman, Mars Garcia, and Lilah van Rens
Sound design: Ali Aoun-IRL
Costume design: Mars Garcia
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Mars Garcia (they/them) is a genderqueer Mexican American mover, maker, and collaborator from unseated Acjachemen and Tongva lands (California). Their art is characterized by their family’s lineage of strong matriarchs and gatherings of gossip, cooking, and mending as sites of reuse, renewal, music, and social dance. Their collaborative creations have been presented at The Brick , Queensboro Dance Festival, The Tank/NYC, Pink Frog Cafe, Soapbox Gallery, parks across NYC, and at their self produced Harvesting artist festival (Fall 2020, Spring 2022). Gathering movement, improvisation, sewing, writing, scenic designs, and sarcasm, Mars explores how queerness, identity, and belonging informs our habits, interactions, and families. They have been a guest artist with companies such as Edisa Weeks/DELIRIOUS DANCES, Kai Hazelwood/Good Trouble Makers, and Marie de la Palme/Motion Tribe, and performed abroad at the Bagnolet Conservatoire Municipal de Danse (France), Institute of the Arts, Barcelona (Spain), and the ACUD Theater (Berlin, Germany). With a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Mars currently works as a freelance dancer (The Joyce Theater, ISSUE Project Room, Baryshnikov Arts Center as a part of the Merce Cunningham Centennial), a GYROTONIC® instructor (Fluid Fitness), Stage Manager (Priestess of Twerk 2024), and Producer (Practice Progress; 7NMS | Marjani Forté & Everett Saunders; Good Trouble Makers; Neuronite 2024). For bookings: DM @marsgarcia_works
Alisya Razman (she/her) is a Brooklyn based artist from Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. While pursuing her BFA in Dance at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, she studied contemporary dance and improvisation under Rashaun Mitchell, Pamela Pietro, and Jeremy Nelson. She performed works/processes by Merce Cunningham, Sidra Bell, Kate Wallich, Bill T. Jones, David Dorfman, and studied abroad in Berlin. Since graduating, she has danced professionally with UNA Productions, Helen Simoneau Danse, Dishman & Co Choreography, Cayleen Del Rosario, and Yang Sun while being a teaching artist at The Ailey School. She was commissioned to present work at the Ailey Citigroup Theater for the Professional Division program last spring. @alisyarazman
Alexander Millar (they/them) is a white queer nonbinary neurodivergent award-winning songwriter, composer, performer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist. They combine a BFA in Musical Arts and an MFA in Performance & Composition from California Institute of the Arts with over 28 years of professional experience in the music industry and over 13 years of teaching experience. As a creative researcher Alex investigates how the systems of white supremacy shape the popular music industry, both historically and presently. They are especially interested in how toxic individuality, a byproduct of capitalism and a core tenant of white supremacy, drives the narrative of how we speak, write, and think about the concept of “success” in popular music, specifically as it pertains to the myth of the “self made” artist/group. Alex has a deep commitment to democratizing access to knowledge and research, as well as re-contextualizing creative research outside of Academia. Therefore, their research is publicly available in the form of TikTok videos; to date they have over 200k followers who engage with their research and likely never would have encountered it if it were not available on a popular social media app.
Nikkie Samreth (they/them) is a first generation Cambodian-Chinese multidisciplinary artist originally from Dallas, TX. They have a BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts and studied at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance. They also graduated Summa Cum Laude at SUNY FIT with a Bachelor of Science in International Trade & Marketing and a triple minor in Economics, Creative Technology, and Ethics & Sustainability. Post-college, Nikkie worked as a professional dancer/performer/model in various music videos, campaigns, films, and performance projects with companies such as The Feath3r Theory, Company XIV, HBO Max, Vogue, Vogue Runway, Universal Music Group, and other artists. Throughout Nikkie’s career they have had the opportunity to perform works by Merce Cunningham, Anton Lachky, Raja Feather Kelly, Aszure Barton, and many others. Along with their professional career, Nikkie has supplemented their artistry with new skills such as cello, boxing, skateboarding, archery, acting, and other interests to reshape their perspective of dance and choreography. @highblush
Celine Abdallah (she/her) is a Lebanese-American dance artist based in NYC, whose sensory-based movement combines the history of her Arab roots with a playfulness that roots into the present. She received her BFA in Dance from NYU Tisch School of the Arts. Celine has performed in original works by choreographers such as Yin Yue, Christina Robson, Molissa Fenley, Davide Di Pretoro, Ambika Raina, Isa Spector, and Iliana Penichet-Ramirez. Beyond the stage, she is featured in music videos and live sets by artists such as Yaeji, Frawley, and Dania. As a Choreographer and Movement Director, Celine has collaborated with filmmakers Emily May Jampel, Saleem Gondal, and Mike Klubeck. With her experience in stage and film, coupled with her interdisciplinary dance background, she hopes to continue exploring the boundlessness of storytelling.
Lilah van Rens, born and raised in New York City, pursued her undergraduate studies at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, receiving a BFA in Dance. Continuing her education, Lilah earned her graduate degree in Dance/Movement Psychotherapy from Sarah Lawrence College, where she explored the intersection of movement, mind-body integration and mental health.
Ali (IRL) is a Bushwick-based DJ who draws sonic inspiration from their time spent between Detroit and Brooklyn, as well as his Lebanese heritage. No genre is off limits, prioritizing range over cohesion. His recurring event series’ Transmission and Lunar Tides express this mentality by connecting local talent and out-of-town guests through intimate settings.
![OPEN LAB | Sympoietic Breath with agustine zegers [virtual]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac507656ff4f3028bdb444/1722964369239-S4L9L4LLUVMO7YANGV82/agustine%2B-%2Bcrop.jpg)
OPEN LAB | Sympoietic Breath with agustine zegers [virtual]
Photo courtesy agustine zegers.
Free with RSVP
RSVP
Facilitated by olfactory artist agustine zegers, Sympoietic Breath invites a deeper awareness of how smells reveal our embeddedness in systems of ecological collapse and emergence. With one inhale, our body awakens to an incorporated cosmos. Ancient molecular exchanges, traces of industry, traces of plant breath, and traces of decaying life all transit through the pleura of our lungs. Odorant molecules also join in, entering the continuous lubricated movement of our breaths. These smelly compounds reveal the ever-enfolding complexities of air, allowing us to decode its composition through our olfactory bulbs and opening us up to intelligences at the scale of the invisible. As such, our sense of smell – animated by the breath – can be activated as a collaborative sensemaking tool for an ever-shifting planet.
Participants will be introduced to ecological and olfactory terminology and will be guided through an olfactive exercise to help us put collaborative breathing and smelling into practice.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.
This program will take place virtually via Zoom. Auto-generated captions will be available.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
agustine zegers (b. Santiago, Chile) is an olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. Their work has scented and been exhibited across the Global North and South at venues such as Prairie, Chicago (2024); 52 Walker, New York (2024); the Chilean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice (2022); Lagos, CDMX (2020); Galería Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo (2018); and Galería Metropolitana, Santiago (2015).
![OPEN LAB | DIGITAL ARCHIVE with Ariana Speight [virtual]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac507656ff4f3028bdb444/1724346921984-QMIGDLH4QFZXI78DP6IF/CPR.jpg)
OPEN LAB | DIGITAL ARCHIVE with Ariana Speight [virtual]
Ariana Speight. Photo courtesy the artist.
Free with RSVP
RSVP
As an extension of 2024 Artist-in-Residence Ariana Speight’s research for their new work cocoon which will be presented in development as part of OPEN AiR on October 20, DIGITAL ARCHIVE will be a gathering of sharing and processing data, memory, and content that has shaped us. During this generative workshop, participants will build a written archive through dialogue and note-taking, documenting noteworthy movies, television, and music. Together we embrace the rough edges, the crispy bits that make us unique. What brought you here? How did you get here? Where is home for you? Are you home?
Storytelling. Processing through dialogue. Loss of history. Nostalgia. Connection. Coming together to share stories. Kiki if you will. Memory. Sentimentality. Focusing on content. Keeping track. Making memories. Reminiscing. Restoration. [tldr]
Participants are encouraged to bring any comforts you may need. Take breaks. Zoom in, zone out. Camera on, camera off. Come as you are. Tangents are welcome with resources and support available.
References include: Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Claudia Pinkola Estés, Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, Spongebob Squarepants, and many more.
OPEN LAB invites artists and scholars to facilitate theoretical discussions and embodied workshops, providing a platform for practice-based inquiry and creative exchange.
This program will take place virtually via Zoom. Auto-generated captions will be available.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ariana Speight is a contemporary dance artist invested in researching the curiosities of life through various mediums. Originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Brooklyn, she has worked with a number of artists including Kayla Farrish, Joanna Kotze, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Kyle Marshall, Anna Sperber, and Jessie Young. Her freelance journey has led her to perform at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), Chelsea Factory, Coffey Street, Dancewave, Lincoln Center Hearst Plaza, New York Live Arts, PAGEANT, Roulette Intermedium, The Shed, The Space at Irondale, The Tank, Webster Hall, among other venues in New York, Florida, and Pennsylvania. She is a BFA graduate from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and is a certified Yoga and Pilates instructor where she continues to nurture her teaching practice.
@CPR | Rovaco Dance Party 2024
Rovaco Dance Party 2023. Photo by Steven Pisano Photography. Courtesy Rovaco Dance Company.
Advance General Admission: $35
Advance Artists/Students: $25 (limited availability)
At-the-Door: $40
Donor Ticket: $50
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In the event that the program is sold out, an in-person wait list for the 6PM performance will open at 5PM.
PROGRAM
5:00 PM | Doors Open + Social Hour
6:00 PM | Music, Performances, Dance Party
Rovaco Dance Company presents their sixth annual Rovaco Dance Party. This evening of live music, dance, theater, and cultural exchange begins with an informal social hour inspired by Indian hospitality traditions. Guests are served delectable Indian snacks prepared by Chef Ashmita Biswas alongside complimentary Lunar Hard Seltzers, an award-winning Asian American brand. After the social, transition into the theater for live music and dance performances, curated and MC’ed by Rovaco Artistic Director Rohan Bhargava. The evening ends with a DJ dance party for all!
CREDITS
Rovaco Dance Artists
Choreography: Rohan Bhargava in collaboration with dancers
Performers: Nico Gonzales, Devika Chandnani, Siddharth Dutta, Karma Chuki, Isabele Rosso, and Jihyun Kim
Resident Dramaturg & Script Consultant: Mahima Saigal
Resident Composer: Saúl Guanipa
Guest Artists
Viola: Dudley Raine IV
Ghazals & Guitar: Ria Modak
DJ: Cameron McKinney/DJ KAZVMA
Chef: Ashmita Biswas
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Rovaco Dance Company was founded in New York City in 2015 by Artistic Director Rohan Bhargava. Over the years, the company has produced a unique form of narrative dance-theater, which blends floorwork, release, ballet, bollywood, street jazz, bhangra, and contemporary partnering into one fluid whole, in multimedia collaboration with designers and composers. Repertory has been presented by Provincetown Dance Festival, Dance NYC, Battery Dance Festival, Rhythmically Speaking, Little Island NYC, and Create:Art. The company has been a Resident Artist at Dancewave, the James Jay Dudley Luce Foundation, and the CUNY Dance Initiative at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center. Commissions have come from Mannes School of Music, Mare Nostrum Elements, Making Moves Dance Festival, and The Dance Gallery Festival.
SUPPORT
Rovaco Dance Party is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. In-kind donations have been provided by Lunar Seltzer, an award-winning craft hard seltzer made with real fruit from Asia. Baraat by Rovaco Dance Company is supported by the NYU Artist Development Program for Dance and The Choreography Pilot Program 2024 of Danse Mirage Foundation, Inc.
General donations to Rovaco Dance Company can be made through Fractured Atlas and are fully tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. If you are unable to attend the event but would like to support, you can make an online donation HERE.
@CPR | Janel Schultz: PORTALS: a journey through dreams
Image by Janel Schultz.
Tickets: $20
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Traveling through portals, the puppet and puppeteer enter and experience various dreams, observing fragments of daily life, altered realities, nightmares, and imagination. An immersive puppet performance with live-puppetry, live-feed camera, projections, and a musical score by EEVRI.
PORTALS: a journey through dreams is a proud recipient of a 2024 Workshop Grant from The Jim Henson Foundation, and is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization.
@CPR | Lydia Winsor Brindamour: fracture
Image courtesy Lydia Winsor Brindamour.
Tickets: $10
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fracture is a multimedia installation that explores the experience of trauma, inspired by the artist’s own recovery from a life-threatening brain hemorrhage 10 years ago. Through visual, sonic and sculptural components, the concept of “fracture” serves as a metaphor for the physical, psychological and emotional effects of a life-altering injury. The work explores an alienation from one’s own body, the journey of coming back into one’s self, and the sense of discovery that can come through the process of healing.
The installation will be on view between 5pm and 8pm.
@CPR | Pamela Vail and Jennifer Kayle: RE-PAIR
Image courtesy Pamela Vail and Jennifer Kayle.
Tickets: $12, $18, $25 (sliding scale)
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RE-PAIR dances our aging and our resilience, what dissolves and what persists. With a synergy rooted in 30+ years of collaboration, this evening of works by Pamela Vail and Jennifer Kayle RE-PAIRS their signature humor and strength of craft.
In the opening work, they improvise with longtime New York collaborators Anna Adams Stark, Lena Lauer, Stephanie Miracle, Edward Rice, Maurice Watson, Donnell Williams, and musician Jason Palamara. The closing work, a ritual of re-making, features new-to-New York dancers Alyssa Alber, Ellie Daley, Maggie Steimel, and Zoe Miller.