Kat Sotelo. Photo by Sarrah Danziger.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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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
Rush Hour 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.