#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
OPEN LAB | Abstraction Building with Quaba Venza Ernest
Quaba Venza Ernest. Photo by Fulani Hart.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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This movement workshop by 2026 AiR Quaba Venza Ernest explores improvised theatrical staging through scored improvisation, composition, and play. Beginning with somatic and proprioceptive practices, participants will cultivate awareness of their own bodies before collectively mapping the space and discovering relationships with one another. Together, we will create events by exploring symbolic weight, spatial relationships, dynamic tension, and the quiet beauty of natural occurrences.
Through simple compositional prompts and improvisational scores, we will investigate how stories emerge through presence rather than predetermined narrative, allowing meaning to arise from the relationships between bodies, objects, space, and time.
Open to movers of all backgrounds, this workshop invites participants to experiment, observe, and compose in real time, embracing curiosity and intuition as tools for theatrical world-building.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Quaba Venza Ernest is a Brooklyn-born, St. Lucian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work merges contemporary dance, theater, writing, and sound to create immersive performance worlds. His relationship to movement is deeply rooted in lineage, the conversation between past, present, and future—and in choreography as a way of carrying dreams across generations. He trained at Dance Theatre of Harlem, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance, and Springboard Danse Montréal. His choreography and films have been presented locally and internationally at venues and festivals including Triskelion Arts, Arts On Site, BAAD!, Jamaica Dance Festival, Making Moves Dance Festival Cinedanza, (Italy), Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Portugal), Dance Camera Istanbul, ADF’s Movies By Movers (2023), Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, and the 92Y Future Dance Festival. He is the founder of Venza Dance and Ernest Records, platforms through which he develops interdisciplinary work and supports the artistic community. His distinctions include the Works & Process Residency Artist (2026-2027), Center for Performance Research Resident Artist (2026), Dancing While Black Fellowship (2026), Pepatián/BAAD Dancing Futures Residency (2025), Chelsea Factory Summer Residency (2024), the Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), and the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts (2019).
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
OPEN STUDIOS | Mizuho Kappa, JoyBoy, and Miguel Miranda, curated by Stefanie Batten Bland
CLOSE UP by Nina Aladaro.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Stefanie Batten Bland brings together Mizuho Kappa, JoyBoy, and Miguel Miranda, three immersive artists exploring the audience/performer relationship within other spaces.
PROGRAM
Mizuho Kappa: A Dream of Larva: Diary
A Dream of Larva is a hybrid dance-theater work that explores the fragile psychological landscape between a mother and child. Within the confines of an intimate domestic world, routines, memories, desires, and fears begin to blur, revealing the invisible forces that shape their relationship. The section presented is the opening of the full work, where the inner worlds of both characters begin to emerge, tracing the emotional histories that lead them toward an increasingly unstable relationship.
Performers: Andrea Farley Shimota, Mizuho Kappa
JoyBoy: 5 Dancer Medley
Five dancers blast through space to a medley of eclectic pop music exploring the confrontational effort of intimacy. This piece includes the invitation of audience participation.
Performers: JoyBoy, Jess Smith, Sophia Mladineo, Miriam Hermina, Elinor Kleber Diggs
Miguel Miranda: Se Va
Se Va explores the tension between holding on and moving forwards. Set in a liminal space where time feels suspended, the performers navigate the lingering presence of what has already left. A single chair anchors the landscape, a silent witness to what remains and what cannot return.
Dancers: Andrea Murillo, Danielle Gutt, Mikaela Sinclair Brandon, and Mizuho Kappa
Music:Lágrimas do Céu by Carminho& Leaning Year by Nick Wales & Stereogamous
Costumes: Miguel Miranda
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Stefanie Batten Bland - (SBB) is a global award winning director/choreographer, who creates proscenium, cinematic and immersive worlds that answer the quest for belonging. 2025 NYSCA Artist, 2023 Dance Magazine cover artist, 2022 BAM NEXT WAVE commissioned artist, SBB was Raised in SoHo when it was led by artists. She interrogates contemporary and historical cultural symbolism – their categories of cultural identifiers and how these identities influence human relationships.
Producer/Director of THE LAST - PHARAOH, Artistic Director of Atelier SBB, Creative Casting & Movement Director for Life & Trust, SBB pioneered the methods which made her Performance-Identity liaison for Sleep No More, and the Artistic Director of the first immersive theatre summer intensive in the USA CONCRETE. She is Associate Professor at Montclair State University and researches boundaries of mixed reality art. @sbb_land.
Mizuho Kappa is a choreographer and performing artist originally from Osaka, Japan, with a degree in Entomology.
She has recently performed with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More NY, Peridance Contemporary Dance Company, Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, Ballet Collective, among others.
Her self-choreographed solo works have been presented at The Shed, La MaMa, Gene Frankel Theater, TheaterLab, The Brick, Ars Nova, NOoSPHERE ARTS and more.
She frequently collaborates with cross-disciplinary artists, including a neuroscience researcher, transmedia playwright, hybrid writer and puppet designer. These collaborative works have been showcased at the New Museum, New York Hall of Science, Open Source Gallery, Grace Exhibition Space, City University of Hong Kong, House of Yes, the Chocolate Factory and beyond.
Kappa is a commissioned choreographer for Peridance Contemporary Dance Company ‘25 Season, and a recipient of the GALLIM Moving Artist Residency '25, Mark Morris SharedSpace Residency '26 and Triskelion Art Split Bill '26.
Her choreographic voice is recognized for conveying narrative through raw expression, unexpected physicality, and striking surrealistic tableaux, described as “evoking and unhinged” by Brooklyn Magazine and “potent” by The New York Times.
JoyBoy is a Bessie award nominated interdisciplinary performing artist, writer, and educator based in Queens, NY who creates humorously surreal, confessional, and immersive performances to explore themes surrounding identity, power dynamics, and our emotional lives.
Miguel Miranda is a Peruvian choreographer and multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Entering through the doors of folkloric dance, he later continued into academic training at the Ballet Hispánico School of Dance. His practice emerges from the encounter between folkloric and contemporary dance forms as well as dance theater techniques. His work spans performance, choreography, and immersive creation, centering social reflection shaped by the search for belonging. He has performed as a company artist in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More NYC, Emursive’s Life and Trust, for Stefanie Batten Bland and has collaborated with Abarukas, among others.
His choreographic works have been presented at venues including the 92nd Street Y, New York City Center, the Ailey Citigroup Theater, the Martha Graham Studio Theater, the Mark O’Donnell Theater, and Battery Dance Festival, among others. Miguel holds a BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Montclair State University, where he was recognized with the Choreographic Excellence Award. His work includes commissions with the José Limón Dance Company’s Limón 2, McKoy Dance Project, Alessandra Corona Performing Works, and Tabula Rasa Dance Theater.
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.
OPEN STUDIOS | “not even tomorrow can deliver you from today”: Alex Patrick Dyck, Zora Jade Khiry, and Maxi Hawkeye Canion, curated by Keioui Keijaun Thomas
Photo by T. Roeschlein.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Keioui Keijaun Thomas curates OPEN STUDIOS: “not even tomorrow can deliver you from today”, asking “How can we come together to face this present moment?” Bringing together Alex Patrick Dyck, Zora Jade Khiry and Maxi Hawkeye Canion, three artist that are:
1. Bad Bitches.
2. Thinking about the body, ritual, communion, language, deliverance and perhaps, what healing can look like, taste like, sound like and feel like.
3. Black and Brown femmes tearing and building up tomorrow, because we must make tomorrow a possibility for girls like us today––delving into grief, joyous rupture and an anointment by the universe saying “bloom bloom bloom.”
PROGRAM
Alex Patrick Dyck: Chimaera (Invasive Species)
A ritual enacting a bodily state of becoming invasive species — a site of resilience, adaptation, and entanglement with land.
Zora Jade Khiry: VISCERAL ABSOLUTION
Artist and lit bitch, Zora Jade Khiry, merges her undisciplined practices of writing and DJing in a performance titled, VISCERAL ABSOLUTION, a sonic-poem on grief, heartbreak, death, longing, and lust.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Keioui Keijaun Thomas is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address the multifaceted realms of Black identity formation. Through a captivating fusion of voice, video, installation and sculpture. Thomas constructs immersive environments that blur the boundaries between the body, its surroundings, and its social meanings. Her work insists on the transformative power of Black life, reclaiming space, time, and nature as sites of possibility, resilience, and becoming. Thomas’s work emerges from an iterative process informed by her writing and performance; her practice is linguistic as much as it is bodily. Utilizing an array of materials such as hair, tape, water, latex, enamel and skin to create tableaus that are intricately intertwined with her own body. She reimagines what it means to be Black in nature, in movement, and in relaxation offering a counter-narrative to histories of extraction, erasure, and violence. Thomas is a 2026-27 Folger Institute Artistic Research Fellow, 2026 Watermill Center Baroness Nina von Maltzahn Fellow, 2023 Jerome Foundation Grant recipient, 2022 MAP Fund Awardee, the Inaugural Winner Queer|Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, and a 2018 Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze and Musée Magazine. She earned her MFA with the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Alex Patrick Dyck is an interdisciplinary artist working across sculpture, installation, performance, poetry, and book arts. Rooted in ecology and diasporic memory, Dyck’s practice explores queer identity, care, and the transmission of story across bodies, landscapes, and time. Their work grows from a long-standing impulse to gather, tend, and reconfigure what is at risk of being lost. Drawn to things deemed excessive, unruly, or unwanted – invasive species, weeds, hoarded and discarded objects – Dyck employs assemblage, altar-building, encasement, and performance in order to explore the human compulsion to preserve. They see art-making as a devotional act before the divine, imbued with the interlocking arms of desire and grief. They hold a BFA from Pratt Institute and are currently a dual MFA/MA candidate in Sculpture and Art History at Purchase College. They have exhibited, curated, published, and performed internationally since 2008. Their third collection of multimedia poetry, Butterflies Come Out at Night, was published by 1080PRESS in 2024. Dyck continues to tend to their roots in the Bay Area of California while living and working in New York’s Hudson Valley on occupied Munsee Lenape and Mohican land.
Zora Jade Khiry is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, performer, and DJ hailing from Central Florida. Her work covers vast swathes of genre and diaspora, weaving evocative sonic and poetic landscapes. Her prose, poetry, essays, and fiction combine lush imagery with historical and cultural analysis, wit, and sentimentality.
Maxi Hawkeye Canion, also known as final girl '98, is a Performance Artist based in Brooklyn, originally from El Paso, TX. She is a 2026-27 Mabou Mines Suite/Space Artist and 2025–26 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence. Her series of works present as radical fantasies, surreal disruptions, decomposing realities, and ruptures of “normalcy”. Piloted by personas known as “doom mascots”, she dissects the nuances of American class dynamics and labor, Trans-femininity, post-gender, and online culture's social and somatic impacts. Her process confronts humanity’s most grotesque aspects and offers experiential containers to process—all deeply supported by integral artistic collaborations. She has presented work at MoMA, Isabella Stewart Garner Museum, Pageant, Judson Memorial Church, New York Live Arts, Les Urbaines Festival (CH), Brooklyn Museum, La MaMa, Danspace Project, and Performance Space NY.
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.
@CPR | PVMNT: in interstitial spaces
Courtesy of PVMNT
Tickets
General Admission: $ 35 Artist Discount: $ 25 Patron Tickets: $ 75 All fees included
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Doors open at 7PM Performance at 7:30PM. Please join us for a post-show reception.
in interstitial spacesis a new presentation that combines original art and ambient music with the ever-evolving movement vocabulary that has come to define PVMNT and its artists.
CREDITS
Choreography: Chriss Kinsey, in collaboration with the performers.
Performers: Sophie Amsterdam, Ryan Bailey, Jelani Best, Chriss Kinsey, Madison Wada Liana Zhen-ai
Lighting Designer: Haley Miller
Technical Director: Joshua Groth
Associate Lighting Design: Joshua Groth
Projection Design: Haley Morgan Miller
Technical Direction: Joshua Groth
Set Design and Creation: Bishop Warner
Rehearsal Director: Dylan Contreras
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
PVMNT is a Brooklyn-based queer performance collective led by Chriss Kinsey. Born from the collision of backroom and proscenium, their work fuses movement and multidisciplinary collaboration into raw, immersive experiences—sweaty, emotionally charged, and wired with tension. Beyond live-performance, their universe collaborates with nightlife through PVMNT Radio: a filmed series pairing DJs and performance artists in one-take collaborations. PVMNT RADIO
Drawing from their collective experience in contemporary dance, performance art, music and underground queer culture, PVMNT has developed and produced work in many spaces across NYC and abroad with performances and commissions spanning festivals, galleries, conservatories, nightlife spaces, and concert stages. PVMNT.ART
SUPPORT
PVMNT is a non-profit dance organization which is primarily funded by contributions from individual donors like you. Tonight’s performance of in interstitial spaces is produced by Mary Cusano Amsterdam, Executive Director of PVMNT. If you wish to support the artists and work of PVMNT, please consider purchasing a Patron Ticket or donate here.
OPEN STUDIOS | Nature my boo, Nature my muse: Andrea Soto, Matt Rossi, and mun (Justin Wong), curated by Stephanie Acosta
Stephanie Acosta by Jessie Young.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Nature and the organic world inspires and instigates an evening of live works and conversation featuring Andrea Soto, Matt Rossi, and mun (Justin Wong), curated by Stephanie Acosta for CPR’s OPEN STUDIOS. Playing with scale, perspectives and approach, nature takes us into itself, embedded in and emboldened by the landscapes and layers that make up our world.
PROGRAM
Andrea Soto: NÉCTAR
Silly knowledge of a woman, the silhouette of a dream that looks up to the world as its mother.
To sit still at the top of the Sun and attempt to believe in every perfection. Morphing as a condition of survival, adapting as both an instinct and a negotiation. Move towards extraction, further away from perfection; surrender, as they say.
Matt Rossi: The Memory of Soil
The Memory of Soil is a collage of three short pieces of hybrid narrative writing representing early sketches for a longer meditation on the relationship between soil communities, migration and movement, ants, and deep time. Images of mosses, fungi, rhizomes, and tiny creatures are included as a bonus.
mun (Justin Wong): COBALT
COBALT is an intervention into a history of valuable objects. mun is joined by composer and performer Joey Chang.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist, archivist and curator, placing the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of their practice, questioning meaning-making and manufactured-limitations. Acosta blends performance with practice-based research in facilitated processes, creating fleeting performance works that challenge site, space, and perception, to bring about shared experiences. Acosta works extensively with unseen histories with both the AUNTS and Jo Andres Archives, and has presented works with and for Museum of Art and Design, MCA of Chicago, OutFest, Knockdown Center, Montpellier Danse Festival, LMCC, La Mama, and has long-time collaborations with many artists and curators including Miguel Gutierrez, Alexis Wilkinson, Isaac Pool, Alexa Grae and Yanira Castro. Recently Acosta made their MoMA debut as director of Lugar de Consuelo (Place of Solace), a play conceived by Naufus Ramirez-Figueroa and written by Wingston Gonzalez. Currently their interdisciplinary exploration Lichen Baby, It’s Me Moss, looks at multitudes in fracture through melodrama with recent residencies through MacDowell, Danspace and Triangle in NYC. stephanieacosta.org
Andrea Soto is a Mexican American movement artist from Juárez. Her practice moves through dance, physical theater, and embodied research. Working with the body as a visceral temple, she investigates memory, displacement, and the body’s entanglement with landscape and the non-human world.
Her work spans genres and media, migrating between museums, galleries and performance spaces. She has performed at institutions and venues including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Marian Goodman Gallery, MSN Warsaw, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, UNTITLED Miami, Centre national de la Danae in Paris, and Women’s Project Theater, as well as in Judson Church and RZA’s Ballet Through Mud. Andrea’s work has brought her into dialogue with an expansive range of artists, including Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, John Jasperse, Julie Mehretu, Julie Tolentino, Yusha Marie-Sorzano, EYIBRA, Dimitri Chamblas, JOJO ABOT, Sam Wentz, Gerard & Kelly, Erick Benítez, Alexsa Durrans, and Annalee Traylor, among others.
She studied at the California Institute of the Arts and was honored with the Barbara Ensley Award from the Merce Cunningham Trust (2024). She works as a director and performer in New York, Los Angeles, and London.
Matthew Rossi is a writer, a performer, a cormorant, and a marsh creature. His work explores the anxious emotional space of the Anthropocene through stories about the lives of ignored and unobserved creatures, ghost landscapes, and the entanglements found within communities of soil. His work is published in Gigantic Worlds, NY Tyrant, Bennington Review, and he has received support from residencies through the Breadloaf Environmental Writers Workshop, the Eastern Frontier Foundation, and Playa. Matthew currently lives directly uphill from one of the former marshes of NYC.
mun (justin wong) is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and educator. he makes work that addresses the idea of "material cultural heritage": how things are made, how they flow around the world, and how, why and when they become designated as objects of value over time. he was a 2025 artist in residence at the pottery workshop in jingdezhen, china, and a 2026 merit scholar at the art students league of new york. he is a nyc public high school teaching artist, and has held administrative positions at the shed, foundation for contemporary arts, and the high line.
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.
@CPR | Samuel Humphreys: Terem
Courtesy of Samuel Humphreys.
Friday, October 2 at 7:30PM Saturday, October 3 at 7:30PM
General Admission $15 Supporting Admission $30
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Terem, a new dance work by choreographer Samuel Humphreys, lays out a pattern of enigmatically entwined relationships between three female figures, exploring the experience and costs of adapting to life within spaces of enclosure. Rooted in the classical modern dance vocabulary of Anna Sokolow and Isadora Duncan, Terem is an intricately layered exploration of self and other; memory and narrative; and the liberatory potential of pattern and movement. The run time for Terem is 35 minutes, followed by a talkback with the choreographer and dancers.
CREDITS
Choreography: Samuel Humphreys
Dancers: Hayley Rose Brasher, Ilana Ruth Cohen, and Margaret Mighty Oak Brackey
Dramaturgy: Rachel Herzog
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
SUPPORT
This work was in part developed through support from CPR's subsidized space rental program.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Samuel Humphreys has choreographed for Shadowbox Theatre, and performs with the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble, Isadora Duncan Dance Company, and New York Baroque Dance Company. He studied dance composition with Mary Anthony and Jim May, and has written music for the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group.
@CPR | Samuel Humphreys: Terem
Courtesy of Samuel Humphreys.
Friday, October 2 at 7:30PM Saturday, October 3 at 7:30PM
General Admission $15 Supporting Admission $30
Purchase Tickets
Terem, a new dance work by choreographer Samuel Humphreys, lays out a pattern of enigmatically entwined relationships between three female figures, exploring the experience and costs of adapting to life within spaces of enclosure. Rooted in the classical modern dance vocabulary of Anna Sokolow and Isadora Duncan, Terem is an intricately layered exploration of self and other; memory and narrative; and the liberatory potential of pattern and movement. The run time for Terem is 35 minutes, followed by a talkback with the choreographer and dancers.
CREDITS
Choreography: Samuel Humphreys
Dancers: Hayley Rose Brasher, Ilana Ruth Cohen, and Margaret Mighty Oak Brackey
Dramaturgy: Rachel Herzog
Music: Sergei Prokofiev
SUPPORT
This work was in part developed through support from CPR's subsidized space rental program.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Samuel Humphreys has choreographed for Shadowbox Theatre, and performs with the Sokolow Theatre/Dance Ensemble, Isadora Duncan Dance Company, and New York Baroque Dance Company. He studied dance composition with Mary Anthony and Jim May, and has written music for the Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama Group.
OPEN AiR | Erica Enriquez: MOVING COMPANY
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Erica Enriquez by Nathan Bajar.
“We found an apartment on Craigslist, spent sixty dollars on boxes, and we moved in together for the first time…”
Using packing materials as modular set items, props, and characters unto themselves, MOVING COMPANY by 2026 AiR Erica Enriquez explores how bodies and memories are carried through movement. How does one become moved? Brought to tears, brought to laughter, and repositioned in feeling? How can migration, both voluntary and involuntary, in both togetherness and collective anonymity, be bound with joy and reclamation between seemingly tattered seams and distant edges? Where does the light leak through the seams?
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Erica Enriquez (b. Newburgh, NY) is an artist based in Queens, NY. Erica received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts with a concentration in Expanded Practice: Sculpture in 2024. She is currently a resident at CPR - Center for Performance Research and a Performance AIRspace resident at Abrons Art Center. Her work considers sculpture, video, photography, painting, and sound as collaborators for performance. Erica has shared her work internationally, and is also the conductor of NYC’s No.1 Train Themed Rock Band CHOO CHOO, which is available on all music platforms. All aboard!
IG: @reeeqi |@choochooband
@CPR | Canzonieri Dance Collective: Fragmentation
Photo by Mat Gal of mgalflicks.
Sat, October 10 at 7:30 PM
Tickets: $30 General Admission $20 Student Admission
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Fragmentation is a story-book, with scenes of isolation, pain, abuse, and self-realization. Flipping through the pages is coming to terms with the reality of your environment, grieving what you are becoming, and starting the work to do all you can to break the cycle. Through a 30-minute dance performance, we are learning from the grief to prevent becoming a product of our environment and disrupt the pattern for ourselves. Comprising of six chapters, the dancers are narrating: “fear of isolation”, “fear of home”, “fear of going to sleep”, “exhaustion catching up”, “the breakdown”, and “how do we break the cycle?”.
Musical Collaborators: Miguel Granda, Kayla Gater, Noah Pagdanganan
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Canzonieri Dance Collective founded by MJ Canzonieri first debuted at the Spark Theatre Festival in NYC in the fall of 2024 with MJ's solo work 'Vexation'; from there, Canzonieri Dance Collective has performed across more venues in NYC, such as Dixon Place and Chain Theater. They have also performed at The Roxey Ballet River Dance Festival 2025, our own Canzonieri Dance Collective Choreographic Showcase hosted in November 2025 at Rutgers University, Art House FOCUS College Spotlight Showcase, Creative Performances Fast Forwards Series at Dixon Place Theater, and Hoboken Dance Festival 2026.
OPEN AiR | Valentina Baché: RANCHO: El porvenir
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Photo by Blue.
From childhood memories of a dog blinded by bloodlust and a family up in arms to protect their livestock emerges a lesson on a specific type of violence. Here, the border between self-defense and vengeance is unrecognizable; by witnessing, you are charged with the guilt of inaction. By intervening, you become what you swore to stop. Murderers and martyrs, all of us.
In this live performance by 2026 AiR Valentina Baché, time is warped into surreal and sacrificial truths. Enter this gaping beastly mouth, this void where hunger and nostalgia changes you. Witness a world where memory, violence, and transformation collide, and where the line between observer and participant disappears.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Valentina Baché was born into a cacophony of color and macaws, in the isolation of the Caribbean jungle in Playa del Carmen, México. They learned the language of movement before they learned to speak, taught by sea, dogs, and blood. At fifteen, they skipped high school to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock, later transferring to Hunter College, where they graduated in 2020. Since then, they have done everything in their power to love and share their art. In a lifelong battle against the imperialist soul, Valentina has found that love is the reason and that greed must be expelled from within each day. Through a spiritual devotion to dance as prayer, they explore the magic of nature and reveal the surreal ways in which we all contribute to cycles of harm. From this devotion, they have birthed a new technique, practice, and way of resisting. They spin because the divine is always spiraling, and they bark because the dog is a mirror reflecting our own malleability.They believe it is in the suppression of rage that energy becomes dangerous instead of transformative. Valentina is a multidisciplinary artist, a performer, textile artist, sculptor, and designer of beauty, violence, and truth, all at once.
OPEN STUDIOS | Sol Cabrini, Bao Nguyen, Karwaan Kotwal, curated by Anh Vo
Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Anh Vo invites Sol Cabrini, Bao Nguyen, and Karwaan Kotwal to CPR for an evening of performance exploring the desire for the incommensurable.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Together with Lumi Tan and maura nguyễn-donohue, they co-organize We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers (Performance Space New York, 2026), a large-scale program of residencies, performances, publication, and public events exploring contemporary performance in Vietnam.
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.
OPEN LAB | CARRYING DAT: thick circles & soft survival prep with Joy Norton
Photo by Orlando Asson @orlandoasson
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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2026 AiR Joy Norton presents a participatory OPEN LAB workshop developed in conjunction with her forthcoming work Reveries of the Sacred Floor: Plus One. Rooted in the belief that Black, queer, trans, and femme people must be the architects and protectors of their own futures, this lab draws from club culture, historic codes, Afrofuturism, and Afropessimism to gather around one question: if the world as we know it ends, who survives and how?
Together we will move through video, history, and past revolutions, excavating the tools our communities have always carried, the codes that have kept us alive, and the knowledge we pass through dance floors, back channels, and word of mouth. We will sit with the reality of collapse: what sustenance looks like, and what we can grow, gather, and protect. We will build emergency bags together, develop contingency plans with our people, and ask how our current sites of pleasure can become our most radical infrastructure.
We will practice regulating the nervous system as a communal act, learning that dependence on each other is a skill, and that skill is a politic.
Participants will leave with an understanding of emergency kits, tools for communal conflict resolution, and a seed for transforming their leisure and the club into something that pulls them closer to themselves, their community, and their survival.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joy Norton (she/they) is a Brooklyn based performance artist and movement instructor channeling Black femme resistance through time, endurance, and improv. Through performance, sound, choreography, sewing, and video, their work examines radical honesty, sensuality as sacred tool, and defiance as catalyst for resistance.
In 2025 they launched PPPleasure Pulse Studios (formerly Jeffery's Studio), transforming the space into an experimental dance venue with low-cost rentals for Brooklyn performance and sound artists. Like their vision for the studio, Norton transforms personal narrative into communal healing. Their pieces create portals where Black care and resistance merge, reflecting political urgencies while opening pathways to liberated futures.
Norton recently choreographed and directed ‘Reveries of Metanoia: who all gon be there’ at Abrons Arts Center and ‘Speaking Tongues’ at Judson Church. Recent performances include collaborations with Miles Greenberg at Farchou Gallery and Powerhouse Arts' inaugural performance, and with Monica Mirabile for Kunsthall Bergen, 3rd Festival Berlin, and Performance Space NY. They've led workshops and retreats across Puerto Rico and New York. Past residencies include New Dance Alliance, Movement Research Artists of Color, and Brooklyn Arts Exchange. Norton holds certifications in Liquid Motion Floorwork, Pilates via Power Pilates, and nutrition via NASM.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
Technical Residency: Diovanna Obafunmilayo (closed to the public)
The Technical Residency is closed to the public.
CPR welcomes Diovanna Obafunmilayo for a Fall 2026 Technical Residency, providing one uninterrupted week in CPR’s theater and access to a robust a/v inventory to play, experiment, and create. The residency will support her new work in development GODBODY, a ritual opera, an ancestral (re)birthday party, and a piece of spiritually charged dance theatre. Fusing elements of Hip Hop culture, Afro-cuban and Yoruba religious ceremony and philosophy, queer joy, live painting, comedy, and poetry, GODBODY tasks itself with the making of a body without shame. The body becomes a site of divinity and emotionality, and the processing of those emotions via Black spiritual technologies.
The technical residency will culminate in a preview of excerpts from the expanded version of GODBODY, experimenting with how light, audience interaction, and ritual participation can be further incorporated into the work.
The full production of GODBODY will be staged in Boston at The Theater Offensive from November 12-14, 2026.
Tickets and more information here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet.
Diovanna Obafunmilayo: GODBODY: a ritual opera [Ceremony 2] presented by CPR – Center for Performance Research as part of OPEN AiR, October 27, 2025. Image courtesy CPR. Photo by Jose Miranda.
OPEN LAB | GODBODY: Ritual Participation with Diovanna Obafunmilayo
Diovanna Obafunmilayo: GODBODY: a ritual opera [Ceremony 2] presented by CPR – Center for Performance Research as part of OPEN AiR, October 27, 2025. Image courtesy CPR. Photo by Jose Miranda.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Fall 2026 Randall Bourscheidt Technical Resident Diovanna Obafunmilayo presents participatory excerpts from her new work in development GODBODY, experimenting with how light and audience interaction can be further incorporated into the work. Fusing elements of Hip Hop culture, Afro-cuban and Yoruba religious ceremony, queer joy, live painting, comedy, and poetry, this interactive presentation will investigate questions such as:
How is an authentically ritualistic environment fostered in a theatre setting?
What does an audience need to be sufficiently educated on how to be in this ritual?
How do rituals that are initiatory, and thus exclusionary to the general public, include a public audience, and what are the implications of this framework?
The full production of GODBODY will be staged in Boston at The Theater Offensive from November 12-14, 2026.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
OPEN LAB | The Water Inside Our Bodies: Dancing Stillness and Silence with Yuki Kawahisa
Courtesy of Yuki Kawahisa
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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2026 AiR Yuki Kawahisa presents the second iteration of a participatory movement workshop that examines the beauty and narrative potential of stillness and silence. Incorporating elements of Noh Theater, Butoh, Noguchi Taiso, Tai Chi, movement improvisation and clowning, Kawahisa will engage participants in inclusive communication around movement and disability, challenging perceived limitations around “normal” movement in performance.
Participants with disabilities, mobility-limitations, and no prior dance experience are encouraged to register.
Both new and returning participants are welcome!
CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two single occupancy, all gender restrooms and one wheelchair-accessible restroom.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yuki Kawahisa, a native of Japan, based in New York for over two decades now, is a proud immigrant who earned the US Permanent Residency status through her work achievement in the field of performing arts. As an actor, performing artist, theatre creator, she has written/directed/choreographed her own theatrical work and has collaborated and devised pieces with others. Kawahisa works across disciplines with various artists, companies in New York and internationally.
Everything she creates is somewhat influenced by her Japanese origin, the beauty and richness of the culture, its esthetics, language, literature, traditions (and the coquettish, Kawaii culture also). Training background include: Noh (Kita style, Tokyo), Clowning (Sue Morrison), Balinese/Mask dance (Bali, Indonesia), Noguchi Taiso (Mari Osanai) and Butoh with numerous Japanese masters.
She often creates peculiar, darkly humorous and absurdly comical movement pieces with texts. She sees great beauty in stillness and silence. She dances still and tells stories with silence. And those are her uniqueness and strength, her signature style. Her work is a reflection of herself, closely intertwined to her identity as a minority/immigrant/woman living abroad. She creates to give herself a voice and the strength to voice it and be heard.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
OPEN AiR | Joan Gutiérrez: Surrendering to the Flowers
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Collage: Sweet Knead. Joan Gutiérrez 2026.
Photo: Mod Schwalbe. Brooklyn, NY 2026.
Surrendering to the Flowers by 2026 AiR Joan Gutiérrez conjures a cooking “show” where the body is both kitchen and altar. Seven somatic practices are alchemized into recipes whose ingredients are desire, memory, and the erotic wisdom stored in flesh and scar. Footage of Woman shaping earth into bowls, of cactus cut open and onions peeled to their cleanest layers, moves like running water alongside a mythological creature lost in maguey and swamp, narrated by a voice layering breath with the collective intimacy of wanting.
This is an invitation to pause. To stand on a single spot on earth long enough to listen for what voices, ancestral or still in body, might find us here.
Against a culture of restlessness, this work asks: what is it to bare-handedly caress our lostness? Can we allow ourselves to feel the warm spreading relief we were reaching for all along — that place, finally, to rest — before we are consumed by consumption?
This work moves through an initiation of allowing the body to be re-membered. A slow peeling away of the layers of skin that reveal the feral, wide-open eyes of our center. A reckoning with innocence, power, and the places we rarely are permitted to touch.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joan Gutiérrez develops tactile, performative, and participatory works rooted in the desert landscapes of the Mexican-American borderlands where she was raised. Born in 1992—the year the Ciudad Juárez femicides began and Dr. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was published—Gutiérrez situates their interdisciplinary practice within this charged socio-political terrain, engaging the body as a site of memory, resistance, and transformation: personal, collective, and planetary.
Rejecting the authority of specialization, Gutiérrez embraces the term Amateur as a radical, queered, and feminized position—one that privileges play, pleasure, and vulnerability as methodologies for transmuting rupture, both intimate and systemic.
Though trained in psychology at Loyola University Chicago and holding a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Gutiérrez’s practice is shaped less by institutional frameworks than by sustained, embodied inquiry—studying independently with artists, somatic sex educators, and masters of Zen and butoh across Europe, Asia, North and South America.
He is based between Chicago and Brooklyn.
OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement: Starla Edwards, Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon, Sierra Hendrix, jolie PADILLA, and Lu Yim
Jolie PADILLA by Daniel Madrid.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 4 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 5 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 for Fall Movement 2026: Starla Edwards, Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon, Sierra Hendrix, jolie PADILLA, and Lu Yim.
This year, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2026 and Spring Movement 2027, with each program presenting five short works. The Fall Movement 2026/Spring Movement 2027 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Malcolm-x Betts, Demetris Charalambous, Amanda Hameline, and Mette Loulou von Kohl.
PROGRAM
Starla Edwards: THICK SALT
THICK SALT is a choreographic work that investigates dismantling inherited religious frameworks that have become sedimented in the body. Rooted in memory and spirituality, it asks what it means to disrupt prescribed belief systems and reconfigure the relationship between spirit and body. From there, the work considers how memory and ritual take place outside of these structures. In performance, audiences encounter a shifting physical landscape moving through repetition, accumulation, and rupture. Built through sustained states and moments of physical interruption and release. A live and recorded soundscape, fragmented vocals, and salt material create an intimate environment of reflection. The body continuously breaks apart and reforms, tracing the process of shedding, reconditioning, and reformation.
Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon: Dirty
This will be an excerpt from the play Dirty, which centers on Tati, a young Black woman grieving multiple losses. The loss of her non-maternal grandmother, the disconnect from her body that leads to her having month-long menstrual bleeding, and the friendship break-up that occurs while she is deep in her grief.
The piece follows her as she digs, buries, and uncovers moments from her life and relationships. Dirt is not just a backdrop—it is the core dramaturgical material. It holds sound, memory, weight, and resistance. It swallows and reveals. The script begins with Tati digging, and Act 1 ends with her being buried and unburied—staged in a terrain of rich, breathing soil.
Sierra Hendrix: Rate
Rate is a performance that transforms a concussion‑rehabilitation tool into a live choreographic system. In physical therapy, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) tracking is used to guide athletes’ safe return to activity after traumatic brain injury by progressively increasing exertion and scaling it back when symptoms arise. In Rate, HRV tracking determines cycles of exertion and recovery as performers’ real‑time heart rate data is projected behind them. Movement qualities shift when heart rates surpass predetermined thresholds, producing a chance‑based score shaped by the body’s limits.
jolie PADILLA: Terms&Conditions
Terms&Conditions is an offering and performance. It zooms in through layers of live movement, projected video, sound, and spoken text. Movement builds to a point of saturation, seduction collapses into strain, control slips into vulnerability. Dance becomes a test on how to absorb and resist systems of value.
Terms&Conditions considers the body as both witness and commodity. It sits at the intersection of a life lived and a life documented asking, does self-expression become self production?
I learned to recognize myself through images —
The algorithm is a mirror, not a window —
Attention is a form of labor —
The work explores the tension between intimacy and commodification, investigating how value is extracted, owned, and displayed through signaling and consumption.
Lu Yim: SOS
SOS emerges in response to being sick in America. Looking at SpaceX as an engorged theater of destruction, it connects to the two subjects of the 2017 launch towards Mars, Musk’s personal Tesla “Roadster”, and “Starman”, a mannequin astronaut. SOS works with these two figures as two mirrors that tell the tale of how current violent structures disable us. A branch of Yim’s work Bottom Edge Air, SOS will feature two overlapping duets starting at different ends of a timeline. One begins in 2017, simulating pressure and speed from lift-off. These two performers negotiate lifting and dragging each other’s full-bodied deadweight through the theater. The other duet begins in our present, their bodies connected and barely moving, consumed by metal sickness and space weather. Both duets perform under the sound of the fan, and an original soundscape composed by Yim.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Starla Edwards (she/her) is a choreographer and performer based in New York City. Her work begins with the body as a site of memory, tracing what lingers, repeats, and shifts over time. Her current project, THICK SALT, began during her Spring 2025 residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and continues to explore sedimentation, spiritual inquiry, and accumulation. Edwards previously toured nationally with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and was part of the creation and premiere of I AM at Jacob’s Pillow. She is a dancer/collaborator with Misfits Dance Collective, a 2026 Artist in Residence at Peridance Center, and Rehearsal Lead, Artist and Repertory with McKoy Dance Project.
Angel Glasby is an Afro-Caribbean artist, beaming with southern charm. Their work has been presented by Triskelion Arts, Chez Bushwick, and The New School. They are proud to announce they have been selected as the 2027 Van Lier Fellow. A two-time FreshTracks Finalist, advisor and dramaturg for groundbreaking artists Julian Pairre, Dorchel Haqq, Thalia Sablon, and Maxi Hawkeye Canion.
“Born in Haiti, raised in Queens. I have my mother’s tongue and a New York accent.” Thalia Sablon is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, and artistic administrator with a love for collaborative and unconventional storytelling. She earned her MFA in Playwriting from Rutgers University in 2022. Her work explores themes of identity, anti-capitalism, Afro-surrealism, and intergenerational memory. Her work has been presented at The Tank, Conch Shell Productions, Third Culture Theatre, New Georges, and Rutgers University.
Sierra Hendrix is a movement and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NYC. She graduated magna cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts Advanced Degree Program in 2017. She is a former apprentice for GALLIM. After suffering from multiple brain injuries, her dance career has shifted to producing and choreographing her own work. Over the past 5 years, she has produced two evening-length performances in NYC. Her other choreography has been shown at Adams Theater, BASE: Experimental Arts + Space, Coffey Street Studios, Turnpark Art Space and more. Her films have been presented at Disco Riot’s Queer Mvmnt Festival, Men in Dance Festival, TUFF festival and more.
jolie PADILLA is an artist, thinker, and maker exploring how contemporary systems of attention shape intimacy, desire, and identity. Through movement, improvisation, and everyday materials, they create installations and participatory works that disrupt curated surfaces and invite reflection. Jolie has studied at ICI-CCN Montpellier with Thomas DeFrantz, Douglas Becker, Jennifer Nugent, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, holds a BFA in Dance from Bennington College, and has performed in works by Arien Wilkerson, Netta Yerushalmy and Sidra Bell.
Lu Yim is a trans-disciplinary choreographer and somatic movement facilitator. Yim is known for their work with experimental movement and sound, and their research processes exploring embodied disability. They use collaborative methods of making to articulate collective unknowns, specifically within queer, trans, and diasporic realms. Their work has been supported by The Chocolate Factory, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Velocity Dance Center, Movement Research, Pageant Space, A.I.R. Gallery, and Queer Art Inc. amongst others.
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2026/SPRING MOVEMENT 2027 PANELISTS
Malcolm-x Betts is a New York-based visual artist and dancer who believes art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His work investigates embodiment, liberation, Black imagination, and engages with the challenges imposed on the body. He is the resident curator at Judson Memorial Church and the founder of the curatorial platform ‘Black Aesthetics’, which is dedicated to enabling artistic freedom and making art accessible to all. As a dancer, he has performed in works by Snoogybox (Andy Kobilka), Nile Harris, Moriah Evans, and Alex Romania. His choreographic work has been presented and supported by venues including New York Live Arts; Movement Research; La MaMa Umbria; and Judson Common; amongst others.
Demetris Charalambous is an experimental choreographer, performer, and visual artist born and raised in Cyprus. Emerging from an invented cosmology, their work reinterprets the world around them through surreal, mythical, and absurd prisms, opening portals to new kaleidoscopic worlds. Demetris’s movement practice explores the spectrum of a body that oscillates between the primordial and the metaphysical. In doing so, it seeks access to ancient technologies within the body that disrupt contemporary forms of embodiment and resist assimilation.
Demetris’s work and collaborations have been presented at Judson Memorial Church, Mabou Mines, Center for Performance Research, Performance Space New York, Friedrichs Pontone Gallery and Sundays on Broadway, as well internationally at the Cyprus Choreography Platform and the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, among others. Demetris is a Fellowship Recipient at NYU Production Lab and Movement Research Artist in Residence 2026-2027.
Amanda Hameline is a choreographer, writer, projection designer, and producer. Her performances are existential musings on time and mortality. Rather than declare what you should do with the time you are given, she turns to archives, ephemera, and music to find evidence of how people previously contended with being alive. Her eyes are always drawn to footnotes or citations that might be deemed “wastes of time.” The supposedly trivial, frivolous, superfluous, and therefore decidedly feminine and domestic, become the focus of her research. She has presented evening-length work and split-bills in venues across New York City including Kestrels, Coffey Street Studio, 3AM Theater, CPR-Center for Performance Research, National Sawdust, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, and Martha Graham Studio Theater; in Berlin at Lake Studios and Cordillera; and in Miami at RAW Pop Up and The Moore Building. Her one-woman show Party Dish will be a part of the January 2027 Exponential Festival at Target Margin. She is also the co-founder of the multidisciplinary production company Amanda + James, which presents dance, theater, opera, music and everything in between and provides new work development programs for a broad range of artists. A+J's newest endeavor is a rehearsal studio for technology in performance in Astoria called The Relay Room. Hameline is also an independent fundraising and producing consultant with a focus on small to mid-sized nonprofits and individual artists. Current clients include Molière in the Park, Music from the Sole, Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, Rachna Nivas / Kathak Legacy Project, Anna Sperber, Leslie Cuyjet, and Abigail Levine.(www.amandahameline.com / www.amandaplusjames.com)
Born from the orange at the center before the new world came, Mette Loulou von Kohl is a performer, organizer, and cultural worker. They are a queer femme of Palestinian, Lebanese and Danish descent, raised across and in-between borders. Mette Loulou uses their art to challenge the settler-colonization of Palestine and in service of Palestinian self-determination and liberation. They locate the power to disrupt violent systems in multiplicity and therefore take an intentional multimedia approach to art-making. They found their first community as a socially-engaged artist through the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC and have received support as a Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident, MacDowell Colony Fellow, Zoukak Theater Resident Artist, and as a grant recipient from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. They have shared work across North America and Europe. They exist in two places at once.
OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement: Starla Edwards, Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon, Sierra Hendrix, jolie PADILLA, and Lu Yim
Jolie PADILLA by Daniel Madrid.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 4 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 5 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 for Fall Movement 2026: Starla Edwards, Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon, Sierra Hendrix, jolie PADILLA, and Lu Yim.
This year, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2026 and Spring Movement 2027, with each program presenting five short works. The Fall Movement 2026/Spring Movement 2027 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Malcolm-x Betts, Demetris Charalambous, Amanda Hameline, and Mette Loulou von Kohl.
PROGRAM
Starla Edwards: THICK SALT
THICK SALT is a choreographic work that investigates dismantling inherited religious frameworks that have become sedimented in the body. Rooted in memory and spirituality, it asks what it means to disrupt prescribed belief systems and reconfigure the relationship between spirit and body. From there, the work considers how memory and ritual take place outside of these structures. In performance, audiences encounter a shifting physical landscape moving through repetition, accumulation, and rupture. Built through sustained states and moments of physical interruption and release. A live and recorded soundscape, fragmented vocals, and salt material create an intimate environment of reflection. The body continuously breaks apart and reforms, tracing the process of shedding, reconditioning, and reformation.
Angel Glasby & Thalia Sablon: Dirty
This will be an excerpt from the play Dirty, which centers on Tati, a young Black woman grieving multiple losses. The loss of her non-maternal grandmother, the disconnect from her body that leads to her having month-long menstrual bleeding, and the friendship break-up that occurs while she is deep in her grief.
The piece follows her as she digs, buries, and uncovers moments from her life and relationships. Dirt is not just a backdrop—it is the core dramaturgical material. It holds sound, memory, weight, and resistance. It swallows and reveals. The script begins with Tati digging, and Act 1 ends with her being buried and unburied—staged in a terrain of rich, breathing soil.
Sierra Hendrix: Rate
Rate is a performance that transforms a concussion‑rehabilitation tool into a live choreographic system. In physical therapy, Heart Rate Variability (HRV) tracking is used to guide athletes’ safe return to activity after traumatic brain injury by progressively increasing exertion and scaling it back when symptoms arise. In Rate, HRV tracking determines cycles of exertion and recovery as performers’ real‑time heart rate data is projected behind them. Movement qualities shift when heart rates surpass predetermined thresholds, producing a chance‑based score shaped by the body’s limits.
jolie PADILLA: Terms&Conditions
Terms&Conditions is an offering and performance. It zooms in through layers of live movement, projected video, sound, and spoken text. Movement builds to a point of saturation, seduction collapses into strain, control slips into vulnerability. Dance becomes a test on how to absorb and resist systems of value.
Terms&Conditions considers the body as both witness and commodity. It sits at the intersection of a life lived and a life documented asking, does self-expression become self production?
I learned to recognize myself through images —
The algorithm is a mirror, not a window —
Attention is a form of labor —
The work explores the tension between intimacy and commodification, investigating how value is extracted, owned, and displayed through signaling and consumption.
Lu Yim: SOS
SOS emerges in response to being sick in America. Looking at SpaceX as an engorged theater of destruction, it connects to the two subjects of the 2017 launch towards Mars, Musk’s personal Tesla “Roadster”, and “Starman”, a mannequin astronaut. SOS works with these two figures as two mirrors that tell the tale of how current violent structures disable us. A branch of Yim’s work Bottom Edge Air, SOS will feature two overlapping duets starting at different ends of a timeline. One begins in 2017, simulating pressure and speed from lift-off. These two performers negotiate lifting and dragging each other’s full-bodied deadweight through the theater. The other duet begins in our present, their bodies connected and barely moving, consumed by metal sickness and space weather. Both duets perform under the sound of the fan, and an original soundscape composed by Yim.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Starla Edwards (she/her) is a choreographer and performer based in New York City. Her work begins with the body as a site of memory, tracing what lingers, repeats, and shifts over time. Her current project, THICK SALT, began during her Spring 2025 residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and continues to explore sedimentation, spiritual inquiry, and accumulation. Edwards previously toured nationally with Camille A. Brown & Dancers and was part of the creation and premiere of I AM at Jacob’s Pillow. She is a dancer/collaborator with Misfits Dance Collective, a 2026 Artist in Residence at Peridance Center, and Rehearsal Lead, Artist and Repertory with McKoy Dance Project.
Angel Glasby is an Afro-Caribbean artist, beaming with southern charm. Their work has been presented by Triskelion Arts, Chez Bushwick, and The New School. They are proud to announce they have been selected as the 2027 Van Lier Fellow. A two-time FreshTracks Finalist, advisor and dramaturg for groundbreaking artists Julian Pairre, Dorchel Haqq, Thalia Sablon, and Maxi Hawkeye Canion.
“Born in Haiti, raised in Queens. I have my mother’s tongue and a New York accent.” Thalia Sablon is a Brooklyn-based playwright, producer, and artistic administrator with a love for collaborative and unconventional storytelling. She earned her MFA in Playwriting from Rutgers University in 2022. Her work explores themes of identity, anti-capitalism, Afro-surrealism, and intergenerational memory. Her work has been presented at The Tank, Conch Shell Productions, Third Culture Theatre, New Georges, and Rutgers University.
Sierra Hendrix is a movement and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NYC. She graduated magna cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts Advanced Degree Program in 2017. She is a former apprentice for GALLIM. After suffering from multiple brain injuries, her dance career has shifted to producing and choreographing her own work. Over the past 5 years, she has produced two evening-length performances in NYC. Her other choreography has been shown at Adams Theater, BASE: Experimental Arts + Space, Coffey Street Studios, Turnpark Art Space and more. Her films have been presented at Disco Riot’s Queer Mvmnt Festival, Men in Dance Festival, TUFF festival and more.
jolie PADILLA is an artist, thinker, and maker exploring how contemporary systems of attention shape intimacy, desire, and identity. Through movement, improvisation, and everyday materials, they create installations and participatory works that disrupt curated surfaces and invite reflection. Jolie has studied at ICI-CCN Montpellier with Thomas DeFrantz, Douglas Becker, Jennifer Nugent, and Kameelah Janan Rasheed, holds a BFA in Dance from Bennington College, and has performed in works by Arien Wilkerson, Netta Yerushalmy and Sidra Bell.
Lu Yim is a trans-disciplinary choreographer and somatic movement facilitator. Yim is known for their work with experimental movement and sound, and their research processes exploring embodied disability. They use collaborative methods of making to articulate collective unknowns, specifically within queer, trans, and diasporic realms. Their work has been supported by The Chocolate Factory, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Velocity Dance Center, Movement Research, Pageant Space, A.I.R. Gallery, and Queer Art Inc. amongst others.
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2026/SPRING MOVEMENT 2027 PANELISTS
Malcolm-x Betts is a New York-based visual artist and dancer who believes art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His work investigates embodiment, liberation, Black imagination, and engages with the challenges imposed on the body. He is the resident curator at Judson Memorial Church and the founder of the curatorial platform ‘Black Aesthetics’, which is dedicated to enabling artistic freedom and making art accessible to all. As a dancer, he has performed in works by Snoogybox (Andy Kobilka), Nile Harris, Moriah Evans, and Alex Romania. His choreographic work has been presented and supported by venues including New York Live Arts; Movement Research; La MaMa Umbria; and Judson Common; amongst others.
Demetris Charalambous is an experimental choreographer, performer, and visual artist born and raised in Cyprus. Emerging from an invented cosmology, their work reinterprets the world around them through surreal, mythical, and absurd prisms, opening portals to new kaleidoscopic worlds. Demetris’s movement practice explores the spectrum of a body that oscillates between the primordial and the metaphysical. In doing so, it seeks access to ancient technologies within the body that disrupt contemporary forms of embodiment and resist assimilation.
Demetris’s work and collaborations have been presented at Judson Memorial Church, Mabou Mines, Center for Performance Research, Performance Space New York, Friedrichs Pontone Gallery and Sundays on Broadway, as well internationally at the Cyprus Choreography Platform and the Michael Cacoyannis Foundation in Athens, among others. Demetris is a Fellowship Recipient at NYU Production Lab and Movement Research Artist in Residence 2026-2027.
Amanda Hameline is a choreographer, writer, projection designer, and producer. Her performances are existential musings on time and mortality. Rather than declare what you should do with the time you are given, she turns to archives, ephemera, and music to find evidence of how people previously contended with being alive. Her eyes are always drawn to footnotes or citations that might be deemed “wastes of time.” The supposedly trivial, frivolous, superfluous, and therefore decidedly feminine and domestic, become the focus of her research. She has presented evening-length work and split-bills in venues across New York City including Kestrels, Coffey Street Studio, 3AM Theater, CPR-Center for Performance Research, National Sawdust, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, and Martha Graham Studio Theater; in Berlin at Lake Studios and Cordillera; and in Miami at RAW Pop Up and The Moore Building. Her one-woman show Party Dish will be a part of the January 2027 Exponential Festival at Target Margin. She is also the co-founder of the multidisciplinary production company Amanda + James, which presents dance, theater, opera, music and everything in between and provides new work development programs for a broad range of artists. A+J's newest endeavor is a rehearsal studio for technology in performance in Astoria called The Relay Room. Hameline is also an independent fundraising and producing consultant with a focus on small to mid-sized nonprofits and individual artists. Current clients include Molière in the Park, Music from the Sole, Reggie Wilson/Fist and Heel Performance Group, Rachna Nivas / Kathak Legacy Project, Anna Sperber, Leslie Cuyjet, and Abigail Levine.(www.amandahameline.com / www.amandaplusjames.com)
Born from the orange at the center before the new world came, Mette Loulou von Kohl is a performer, organizer, and cultural worker. They are a queer femme of Palestinian, Lebanese and Danish descent, raised across and in-between borders. Mette Loulou uses their art to challenge the settler-colonization of Palestine and in service of Palestinian self-determination and liberation. They locate the power to disrupt violent systems in multiplicity and therefore take an intentional multimedia approach to art-making. They found their first community as a socially-engaged artist through the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics’ EmergeNYC and have received support as a Jerome Foundation AIRspace Resident, MacDowell Colony Fellow, Zoukak Theater Resident Artist, and as a grant recipient from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture. They have shared work across North America and Europe. They exist in two places at once.
OPEN LAB | Objects and People with Nifemi Ogunro & Sacha Vega
Photo by Nadja Mogilewski
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
2026 Artist-in-Residence Nifemi Ogunro, in collaboration with Sacha Vega, presents a workshop that explores the hidden dynamics and emotional registers of the object to body relationship. Through movement-based prompts, personifications, and guided play, participants will investigate the secret energies, moods, and affects of various objects, engaging in improvisatory exercises with both found domestic items and interactive sculptures made by Ogunro.
All levels of movement experience are welcome.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nifemi Ogunro is a designer, sculptor and visual artist. In Ogunro's design practices, they use the body as a reference point to create objects. In their sculptural practice, they use bodies as an extension of objects. While wood is the material they build in, Ogunro draws inspiration from their life, their surroundings, and the mundane.
Sacha Vega is an artist who collages movement, poetics, and humor to examine the ideologies that train bodies to move.
She has presented work at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Westbeth Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum, FringeArts, PhilaMoCA, Baxter St x CCNY, and Pelham Art Center. In 2025, she directed two evening-length works at 3AM Theatre: 1-Way Mirror, choreographed by [REDACTED], and PINCH, a trio dance-theatre work exploring safety, control, and possibility.
Vega is a 2025–2026 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks artist and a 2026 Da Vinci Arts Alliance Collective Futures Fellow. She has participated in residencies and programs including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New Dance Alliance’s Satellite Program, LEIMAY Incubator, Wassaic Project. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she teaches media and performance courses.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
OPEN AiR | Quaba Venza Ernest: Radio Renmen
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Photo by Abigail Montes.
Radio Renmen is an interdisciplinary dance-theatre work conceived as a three-part performance series inspired by the mechanics of machines: Actuator, Transmission, and Operator. The work uses the radio as both a physical object and metaphor for communication, transmission, and distortion. Radio Renmen asks what happens when our relationships begin to function the same way as radio waves that carry invisible signals across great distances, yet every transmission risks interference, delay, or loss. As technology promises greater connection, we increasingly communicate through devices rather than with one another, relying on algorithms and computers to interpret our emotions, memories, and decisions. It asks what is lost when we stop listening to ourselves and each other, and whether authentic connection can survive in a world where every signal must pass through a machine before it reaches another human being.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Quaba Venza Ernest is a Brooklyn-born, St. Lucian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work merges contemporary dance, theater, writing, and sound to create immersive performance worlds. My relationship to movement is deeply rooted in lineage, the conversation between past, present, and future—and in choreography as a way of carrying dreams across generations. He trained at Dance Theatre of Harlem, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance, and Springboard Danse Montréal. His choreography and films have been presented locally and internationally at venues and festivals including Triskelion Arts, Arts On Site, BAAD!, Jamaica Dance Festival, Making Moves Dance Festival Cinedanza, (Italy), Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Portugal), Dance Camera Istanbul, ADF’s Movies By Movers (2023), Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, and the 92Y Future Dance Festival. He is the founder of Venza Dance and Ernest Records, platforms through which he develops interdisciplinary work and supports the artistic community. His distinctions include the Works & Process Residency Artist (2026-2027), Center for Performance Research Resident Artist (2026), Dancing While Black Fellowship (2026), Pepatián/BAAD Dancing Futures Residency (2025), Chelsea Factory Summer Residency (2024), the Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), and the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts (2019).
OPEN CALL: 2027 Artist-in-Residence Program
2025 AiR Latif Aska Ba with Sophie Frizzell. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
CPR - Center for Performance Research invites applications for the 2027 Artist-in-Residence Program. Click here to apply.
Application deadline: Monday, August 24, 2026 at 5:00 P.M. EST.
Email applications@cprnyc.org with questions.
CPR – Center for Performance Research invites eligible applicants to apply for its 2027 Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program. Please be sure to read through the residency description and criteria in its entirety before applying. We strongly recommend drafting narrative answers in a separate document.
ABOUT CPR'S ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM
CPR – Center for Performance Research’s year-long Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program seeks to support NYC-based artists working within various perspectives of contemporary dance, performance, and time-based art. In selecting its AiRs, CPR values experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and encourages risk-taking, interdisciplinarity, and the unexpected.
The year-long residency creates an open environment for experimentation, exploration, embodiment, and exchange, and will provide a cohort of six (6) artists with research and presentation opportunities, subsidized rehearsal space, curatorial and project support, and peer dialogue. The program is intended to nurture the individualized creative process, and prioritizes artists for whom the opportunity will make a major impact on the growth and evolution of their work and career.
Applications are solicited through an OPEN CALL, and AiRs are selected by an independent panel of artists, curators, and arts leaders. With this approach, CPR aspires to create a more accessible and equitable selection process, and to increase visibility, opportunities, and resources for a more diverse range of artists in the field.
CPR is committed to supporting artists from every background and maintains an expansive approach to performance practice. We strongly encourage BIPOC artists, LGBTQ+ artists, immigrant artists, artists with disabilities, and artists across generations to apply.
RESIDENCY DETAILS
Six NYC-based artists will be selected for a year-long residency from January to December 2027. AiRs will have opportunities for presentation, community engagement, and creative exchange through CPR’s curated Public Programs, and will receive curatorial support and feedback from CPR staff and fellow artists throughout the year.
In addition, each AiR receives:
*A $2,000 stipend.
*Advance access to CPR’s rehearsal booking calendar.
*20 free hours of rehearsal space for the residency cycle, and may book up to 150 subsidized rehearsal hours in either of CPR’s studios during the residency year, with priority booking January 2027 through February 2028.
*Additional artist fees and resources for CPR Public Programs, including access to technical equipment and production support.
AiRs will have the chance to present their work publicly through the following programs:
OPEN LAB, in which AiRs facilitate embodied workshops or feedback-generating performances organized around a central research question.
OPEN AiR, in which AiRs share their current practice and research. These programs may take a variety of forms – solo presentations of new work in development, multi-artist programs that offer space for dialogue between artists’ practices, and other formats that are responsive to each artist’s practice and ongoing research.
ELIGIBILITY
Eligible applicants have previously had their work publicly presented, and have not been selected as a CPR Artist-in-Residence in the last 5 years.
Individual artists, companies, collaboratives, or collectives may apply, but each applicant/application will be considered as a single residency.
The residency is exclusively for New York City-based artists. CPR cannot provide US visas, travel, accommodations, or other living expenses in connection with the residency. If you are an artist based in NYC but traveling or out of town for a majority of the residency cycle, please consider if the resources provided by this residency will best suit your practice.
Current undergraduate students are not eligible to apply.
CONSIDERATIONS FOR A COMPETITIVE APPLICATION:
Demonstrating a strong understanding and commitment to CPR's core values, including artistic practices which prioritize play, risk, experimentation, curiosity, new forms, modes of embodiment and presence, and urgency.
Understanding the scope of CPR's resources, and successfully demonstrating how they will be utilized throughout the residency cycle.
Identifying a central research question in your proposal that will be explored throughout the duration of your residency.
Illustrating how one's practice might be activated by CPR's OPEN LAB and OPEN AiR public programming formats.
Understanding that classical or traditional artforms will not be considered unless they are subverted or disrupted through modes of experimentation.
THE SPACE
CPR occupies a 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has two flexible studio spaces. The Large Studio is an 1,875 sq. ft., flexible rehearsal and performance space, outfitted with an LED theatrical lighting system, full-range sound, projection capabilities, and a sprung wood dance floor with white marley, and can seat up to 68 people. The Small Studio functions as a rehearsal studio, gallery, and meeting space, and features floor-to-ceiling storefront windows looking out onto the street, track lighting, and a sprung wood dance floor. CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two all gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible. A floor plan, images, and technical specifications can be found here.
SUPPORT
CPR's 2027 AiR Program is directly supported by Americans for the Arts National Arts Relief Fund, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Howard Gilman Foundation, IndieSpace, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
APPLICATION TIMELINE
Applications will be accepted until Monday, August 24, 2026 at 5:00pm EST. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notifications will be made in November 2026.
The panelists look forward to reviewing your application!Email us at applications@cprnyc.org with any questions.
@CPR | BARE Dance Company: Nocturnal Animals
Photo by Mike Esperanza.
Sat, August 22 at 7PM Sun, August 23 at 7PM
Tickets $20 Artists/Students: $15 (limited availability)
Purchase Tickets
BARE Dance Company shares an evening with guest artist Annalee Traylor and dancers. The company will premiere a new creation entitled Nocturnal Animals featuring choreographic direction and original music by Mike Esperanza.
CREDITS
Mike Esperanza and Annalee Traylor.
Choreography:
Mike Esperanza in collaboration with dancers.
Annalee Traylor in collaboration with dancers.
Performers:
BARE Dance Company: Megan Anderson, Sam Assemany, Alaina D’orazio, Casey Kitazumi, Erin Love, Lauren Metz, Avery Miller, Graziella Murdocca.
Annalee Traylor: Andrea Soto, Ian Spring, Kendall Ramirez, James Barrett, reh assistant Sky Poole.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
BARE Dance Company, founded in 2005, is a collective of multifaceted artists who collaborate to create dimensional, boundary-pushing work while embracing diverse lives that sustain and enrich our artistry. We believe that a thriving creative practice is rooted in a balance of movement, exploration, and lived experience, allowing us to bring depth, authenticity, and innovation to the stage and beyond.
“It was a delightful romp that melded innovation and fun.” - Rachel Levin, Explore Dance
“This is smart, affecting, technically accomplished work.” - Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times
Mike Esperanza is a multifaceted creative force, celebrated for his transformative contributions to the world of dance and choreography. With an innate ability to merge contemporary aesthetics with authentic storytelling, Mike has captivated audiences worldwide. His journey began in Los Angeles and currently in New York City, where he honed his craft, drawing inspiration from urban culture and the human experience. As an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and artistic director, Mike has choreographed for renowned educational programs and companies such as WhimW’him, Noble Motion, LACDC, Urbanity, Dark Circles Contemporary Dance, leaving an indelible mark on the dance landscape. Mike has presented on prestigious stages including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Sergerstrom Center for the Arts, McCalllum Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Salvatore Capezio Theater at Peridance, The Royal Conservatory in Cordoba, Spain, and the Australian Circus Festival. Mike’s work has been described as “bold, athletic movement and theatricality – the latter clearly the coming together of Esperanza’s many talents – the company epitomizes the dance of the new millennium: shape-shifting, vernacular-blending with a prescient focus on the brave new world in which we live.” ~ Jessica Abrams, Explore Dance. Mike recently danced for Ariana Grande at the 2024 Met Gala as well as her music video “Yes, and?”. Mike es currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Michigan University.
Annalee Traylor is a choreographer, director, and educator originally from Huntsville, Alabama. Her work blends dance, theater, sound, and stagecraft into tragicomic performances that create spaces for wonder, contradiction, and connection. Working collaboratively, she approaches creating as a practice of listening, guided by intuition and a curiosity about the mysteries that accompany being alive.
Traylor’s work has been commissioned and performed across the United States and abroad, reaching audiences in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Her work has been supported by The Goat Farm, Dance Lab NY, the UNCSA Choreographic Institute, Highways Performance Space, Kennesaw State University, The Dance Gallery Festival, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, and Emory University, where she served as the inaugural Emory Arts Fellow in Dance in 2023-24. She has created original works with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Terminus Modern Ballet Theater, Kit Modus, Texture Contemporary Ballet, and Periapsis Music and Dance, among others. Her evening-length dance theatre work, this thing is real, was one of ArtsATL's "Notable 9 in Dance" in 2024.
Traylor is a high school graduate of UNCSA and holds a BFA from Point Park University and an MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Western Michigan University.
@mikeesperanza
@baredanceco
@annalee_traylor
@CPR | BARE Dance Company: Nocturnal Animals
Photo by Mike Esperanza.
Sat, August 22 at 7PM Sun, August 23 at 7PM
Tickets $20 Artists/Students: $15 (limited availability)
Purchase Tickets
BARE Dance Company shares an evening with guest artist Annalee Traylor and dancers. The company will premiere a new creation entitled Nocturnal Animals featuring choreographic direction and original music by Mike Esperanza.
CREDITS
Mike Esperanza and Annalee Traylor.
Choreography:
Mike Esperanza in collaboration with dancers.
Annalee Traylor in collaboration with dancers.
Performers:
BARE Dance Company: Megan Anderson, Sam Assemany, Alaina D’orazio, Casey Kitazumi, Erin Love, Lauren Metz, Avery Miller, Graziella Murdocca.
Annalee Traylor: Andrea Soto, Ian Spring, Kendall Ramirez, James Barrett, reh assistant Sky Poole.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
BARE Dance Company, founded in 2005, is a collective of multifaceted artists who collaborate to create dimensional, boundary-pushing work while embracing diverse lives that sustain and enrich our artistry. We believe that a thriving creative practice is rooted in a balance of movement, exploration, and lived experience, allowing us to bring depth, authenticity, and innovation to the stage and beyond.
“It was a delightful romp that melded innovation and fun.” - Rachel Levin, Explore Dance
“This is smart, affecting, technically accomplished work.” - Michael Upchurch, Seattle Times
Mike Esperanza is a multifaceted creative force, celebrated for his transformative contributions to the world of dance and choreography. With an innate ability to merge contemporary aesthetics with authentic storytelling, Mike has captivated audiences worldwide. His journey began in Los Angeles and currently in New York City, where he honed his craft, drawing inspiration from urban culture and the human experience. As an accomplished dancer, choreographer, and artistic director, Mike has choreographed for renowned educational programs and companies such as WhimW’him, Noble Motion, LACDC, Urbanity, Dark Circles Contemporary Dance, leaving an indelible mark on the dance landscape. Mike has presented on prestigious stages including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Sergerstrom Center for the Arts, McCalllum Theatre, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, Salvatore Capezio Theater at Peridance, The Royal Conservatory in Cordoba, Spain, and the Australian Circus Festival. Mike’s work has been described as “bold, athletic movement and theatricality – the latter clearly the coming together of Esperanza’s many talents – the company epitomizes the dance of the new millennium: shape-shifting, vernacular-blending with a prescient focus on the brave new world in which we live.” ~ Jessica Abrams, Explore Dance. Mike recently danced for Ariana Grande at the 2024 Met Gala as well as her music video “Yes, and?”. Mike es currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Western Michigan University.
Annalee Traylor is a choreographer, director, and educator originally from Huntsville, Alabama. Her work blends dance, theater, sound, and stagecraft into tragicomic performances that create spaces for wonder, contradiction, and connection. Working collaboratively, she approaches creating as a practice of listening, guided by intuition and a curiosity about the mysteries that accompany being alive.
Traylor’s work has been commissioned and performed across the United States and abroad, reaching audiences in Los Angeles, New York City, Atlanta, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, Seattle, Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands. Her work has been supported by The Goat Farm, Dance Lab NY, the UNCSA Choreographic Institute, Highways Performance Space, Kennesaw State University, The Dance Gallery Festival, Callanwolde Fine Arts Center, and Emory University, where she served as the inaugural Emory Arts Fellow in Dance in 2023-24. She has created original works with Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company, Terminus Modern Ballet Theater, Kit Modus, Texture Contemporary Ballet, and Periapsis Music and Dance, among others. Her evening-length dance theatre work, this thing is real, was one of ArtsATL's "Notable 9 in Dance" in 2024.
Traylor is a high school graduate of UNCSA and holds a BFA from Point Park University and an MFA in Choreography from the California Institute of the Arts. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at Western Michigan University.
www.annaleetraylor.com | @annalee_traylor
@mikeesperanza
@baredanceco
@annalee_traylor
CPR SUMMER BREAK (studios and offices closed)
A Storm in Every Port by Kerosene Jones. Presented as part of OPEN STUDIOS curated by Kyle Dacuyan on October 11, 2023. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
CPR’s studios and administrative offices will be closed for an annual Summer Break from Monday, August 10 through Sunday, August 16, 2026.
All space rental requests that come into our inbox during this time will be answered in the order they were received after we return to the office on Monday, August 17.
All requests can be made by email to spacerentals@cprnyc.org, and you can check our Booking Calendar for availability.
Happy Summer from CPR!
@CPR | Not Bad! Dance Company: The Magic of Daily Life
Members of Not Bad! Dance Company.
Sat, July 25 at 6:30PM and 8PM
Tickets $10-$50
Purchase Tickets
Not Bad! Dance Company presents The Magic of Daily Life. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, this performance explores the spaces of home, both practical and imagined. Journeying through a metaphorical house and beyond, the dancers move through everyday spaces, changing seasons, and the passage of time, exploring memory, relationships, and belonging.
DANCERS
Amelia Abobo, Gabe Armijo, Emma Blair Brown, Liz Chacchia, Omar Etman, Sarah Harvey, Radha Patel, Emily Seligman, Julia Suklevski, Dianna Warren, Jina Yu.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Not Bad! Dance Company is a group of recreational adult ballet dancers who crossed paths at Peridance in an open-level class. The dancers come from a variety of backgrounds, but have found a “why” through ballet. The dancers became a tight-knit community and envisioned performances that highlighted their development in ballet technique, artistry, and creative expression.
With their premiere performance in July 2024 at Ailey Studios, Not Bad! Dance Company has since produced shows at The Joyce Theatre’s New York Center for Creativity & Dance and City Center, incorporating classical and contemporary ballet under the direction of Julia K. Gleich. This current performance comes at a time that commemorates the two-year anniversary of the company’s emergence into the public performing arts arena.
CREDITS
Julia K. Gleich has led Not Bad! Dance Company through three public performances, with this current performance being its fourth. Julia is a choreographer,founder and artistic director of Gleich Dances and co-founder of Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, curator of CounterPointe, an annual production based in Brooklyn, NYC that presents collaborations between women artists and choreographers to create an interdisciplinary performance surrounding the use of pointework, writer about dance, ballet pedagogy and ballet technique, teacher of higher education and is on faculty as an instructor at Peridance.
Through her classes at Peridance and in her work with Not Bad! Dance Company, Julia has provided the opportunity for adult dancers of all levels of experience and ability to immerse themselves in dance, allowing them to explore movement through their own choices and fostering an appreciation for how life in the classroom, studio, or stage translates to real-life applications.
The company is profoundly thankful to Julia for her dedication, expertise, and radiance. Her support of the dancer’s endeavors has made all the difference in the exploration of their individuality, confidence, and fostering bonds that go beyond the confines of the studio.
SUPPORT
Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, based in Cypress Hills/East New York, Brooklyn, is a 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization founded in 2004 in upstate NY and Bushwick, BK by curator Jason Andrew and choreographer Julia K. Gleich with a mission to create, promote, and present collaborations in the disciplines of the visual, literary, and the performing arts: connecting artists, choreographers, composers, writers, and other originating artists with venues and each other.
@CPR | Not Bad! Dance Company: The Magic of Daily Life
Members of Not Bad! Dance Company.
Sat, July 25 at 6:30PM and 8PM
Tickets $10-$50
Purchase Tickets
Not Bad! Dance Company presents The Magic of Daily Life. Inspired by Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, this performance explores the spaces of home, both practical and imagined. Journeying through a metaphorical house and beyond, the dancers move through everyday spaces, changing seasons, and the passage of time, exploring memory, relationships, and belonging.
DANCERS
Amelia Abobo, Gabe Armijo, Emma Blair Brown, Liz Chacchia, Omar Etman, Sarah Harvey, Radha Patel, Emily Seligman, Julia Suklevski, Dianna Warren, Jina Yu.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Not Bad! Dance Company is a group of recreational adult ballet dancers who crossed paths at Peridance in an open-level class. The dancers come from a variety of backgrounds, but have found a “why” through ballet. The dancers became a tight-knit community and envisioned performances that highlighted their development in ballet technique, artistry, and creative expression.
With their premiere performance in July 2024 at Ailey Studios, Not Bad! Dance Company has since produced shows at The Joyce Theatre’s New York Center for Creativity & Dance and City Center, incorporating classical and contemporary ballet under the direction of Julia K. Gleich. This current performance comes at a time that commemorates the two-year anniversary of the company’s emergence into the public performing arts arena.
CREDITS
Julia K. Gleich has led Not Bad! Dance Company through three public performances, with this current performance being its fourth. Julia is a choreographer,founder and artistic director of Gleich Dances and co-founder of Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, curator of CounterPointe, an annual production based in Brooklyn, NYC that presents collaborations between women artists and choreographers to create an interdisciplinary performance surrounding the use of pointework, writer about dance, ballet pedagogy and ballet technique, teacher of higher education and is on faculty as an instructor at Peridance.
Through her classes at Peridance and in her work with Not Bad! Dance Company, Julia has provided the opportunity for adult dancers of all levels of experience and ability to immerse themselves in dance, allowing them to explore movement through their own choices and fostering an appreciation for how life in the classroom, studio, or stage translates to real-life applications.
The company is profoundly thankful to Julia for her dedication, expertise, and radiance. Her support of the dancer’s endeavors has made all the difference in the exploration of their individuality, confidence, and fostering bonds that go beyond the confines of the studio.
SUPPORT
Norte Maar for Collaborative Projects in the Arts, based in Cypress Hills/East New York, Brooklyn, is a 501(c)3 non-profit arts organization founded in 2004 in upstate NY and Bushwick, BK by curator Jason Andrew and choreographer Julia K. Gleich with a mission to create, promote, and present collaborations in the disciplines of the visual, literary, and the performing arts: connecting artists, choreographers, composers, writers, and other originating artists with venues and each other.
@CPR | PVMNT: blue gossamr
Courtesy of PVMNT
Tickets
General Admission: $ 35 Artist Discount: $ 25 Patron Tickets: $ 75 All fees included
Purchase Tickets
PMVMT presents blue gossamr.
blue gossamr is the spiritual tissue that grows to protect the heart as the tension and disquiet of life passes through the interstitial spaces of the mind.
CREDITS PVMNT
Choreography: Chriss Kinsey in collaboration with performers.
Performers: Sophie Amsterdam, Ryan Bailey, Chriss Kinsey, Derek Lee, Madison Wada, Liana Zhen-ai.
Lighting Design: Haley Morgan Miller
Associate Lighting Design: Joshua Groth
Projection Design: Haley Morgan Miller
Technical Direction: Joshua Groth
Set Design and Creation: Bishop Warner
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
PVMNT is a Brooklyn-based queer performance collective led by Chriss Kinsey. Born from the collision of backroom and proscenium, their work fuses movement and multidisciplinary collaboration into raw, immersive experiences—sweaty, emotionally charged, and wired with tension. Beyond live-performance, their universe collaborates with nightlife through PVMNT Radio: a filmed series pairing DJs and performance artists in one-take collaborations. PVMNT RADIO
Drawing from their collective experience in contemporary dance, performance art, music and underground queer culture, PVMNT has developed and produced work in many spaces across NYC and abroad with performances and commissions spanning festivals, galleries, conservatories, nightlife spaces, and concert stages. PVMNT.ART
SUPPORT
PVMNT is a non-profit dance organization which is primarily funded by contributions from individual donors like you. Tonight’s performance of bluglossamr is produced by Mary Cusano Amsterdam, Executive Director of PVMNT. If you wish to support the artists and work of PVMNT, please consider purchasing a Patron Ticket or donate here.
2026 Spring Benefit: JOYRIDE
Speed Racing! Road Tripping! Thrill Seeking! & more!
Please join us at CPR – Center for Performance Research on Tuesday, June 16 for our 2026 Spring Benefit, which gathers artists and friends for an evening JOYRIDE with delightful detours, scenic highways, and high-octane action to celebrate CPR.
PROGRAM
7PM | Fuel, Hydration, Start Your Engines
8PM | Performances, Pitstops, Cruise Control
9PM | Drive-Thru Desserts, Deacceleration, Disembarking
Hosted by Designated Driver
Tiresias
Art Direction by
Kat Sotelo
Roadside Attractions by
Catherine Brookman
Das Besties
JoyBoy
Yiseul LeMieux
Diovanna Obafunmilayo
Kevin Peter He
Sleth
Kate Williams
& more hidden gems off the beaten path…!
View the Program
Light Bites and Libations! Food by Cozy Royale Drinks by Vine Wine, Zev Rovine Selections, Zakuska Vodka, Grimm Ales
Sweets by Settepani Bakery, 3rd Floor Brooklyn
Raffle Prizes
*Art by Jeanette Levy. *Tickets to BAM, New York City Ballet, and The New York Aquarium. *Merch from Unemployed Philosophers Guild.
TICKETS
$1000| MAXIMUM MILEAGE
$750| PASSENGER PRINCESS
$500| SPEED DEMON
$250| PIT CREW
$150| EASY RIDER
(for artists & arts workers)[limited]
Tickets are 100% tax-deductible, and include all food, drink, and merriment. All proceeds benefit CPR’s artists and programs – and the joyful act of experimentation and embodied practice.
If you can’t attend this year, you can make a tax-deductible donation to CPR via Zeffy.
BENEFIT COMMITTEE(in formation)
Samuel Akinloye Babajide*
Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar
Sidra Bell* Amy Cassello Yanira Castro Noah Chesnin* Alison Cuzzolino
Jonathan Gardenhire Nick Hockens*
John Jasperse*
Margaret Knowles
Tommy Kriegsmann & Shanta Thake Molly Kurzius
Natasha Logan Tamara McCaw*
Kathleen O’Connell* Alexandra Rosenberg
Amber Sasse*
Martha Sherman*
Megan Sprenger*
Janet Wong
*CPR Board of Directors
RAFFLE: $25 each or 5 for $100
Enter to win an artwork or prize donated by CPR artists and friends:
Jeanette Levy Blooming
Aug 2021 - oil on canvas - 22” x 17”
value: $700
BAM
2x tickets to the Fall 2026 Next Wave Festival or the 2027 Winter/Spring season from BAM.
value: $150
The New York Aquarium
4x tickets and Guided Shark Tour from The New York Aquarium at Coney Island. value: $350
Unemployed Philosophers Guild
Outer Space Merch, including Planet Plates, Moon hairpins, and more. value: $150
New York City Ballet
2x Tickets for the New York City Ballet’s upcoming 2026-27 season performances.
value: $400
Raffle tickets are $25 a piece or 5 for $100. Anyone can enter (even if you are not attending!), and you can enter as many times as you wish! The drawing will take place live at CPR’s Spring Benefit on June 16, and tickets will be drawn at random. Purchase 4 or more raffle tickets, and receive a limited-edition CPR tote bag!
Raffle tickets may be purchased online before 12PM on Tues, June 16, or during the Spring Benefit, via Zeffy.
Terms and restrictions:Raffle winners must arrange to pick up their prize at CPR’s offices in Brooklyn within 1 month of the drawing. Unfortunately, CPR cannot arrange shipping. Tote bags can be picked up at CPR on select dates, where you can also select your preferred color and size! Please note raffle tickets are NOT tax-deductible.
ADOPT A CHAIR
As a special addition to your evening of JOYRIDE, you can Adopt a Chair at CPR with an additional tax-deductible donation of $100. To commemorate your support, we’ll affix a plaque on your chair naming you as its benefactor, or dedicated to a loved one, friend, pet, place, or JOYRIDE of your choosing.
You can Adopt a Chair at checkout via Zeffy. You can complete this order form to confirm your dedication or email Jaclyn Biskup at jaclyn@cprnyc.org with the details.
Orders placed by June 1 will have their plaques affixed by the Spring Benefit, so that you may recline in your honorable passenger seat as we cruise the night away. While not required, we hope that you will continue to sustain your chair with a meaningful donation in subsequent years.
LOCATION AND ACCESSIBLITY
CPR – Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211
CPR is easily accessed by public transportation or car. For detailed directions, please visit www.cprnyc.org/contact-directions.
CPR is located on the ground floor in a fully accessible and ADA-compliant venue, with two single use all-gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible.
@CPR | Denisse Griselda Reyes and Melia Efstratis Chendo: Get on the Couch
Courtesy of Chendo and Reyes
Tickets
$20, $30, $40 Sliding Scale
Purchase Tickets
ABOUT
This performance stages the psychoanalytic session as a live, unstable encounter between two bodies shifting positions of authority and vulnerability. Drawing on psychoanalytic and performance theory, the session constructs an analytic space in which transference, projection, and free association are activated and made visible. Through role-play and improvised dialogue, the tension of the analytic duo is explored as a relational happening.
Chendo and Reyes experiment with camera feedback to further destabilize the fixed binary of the looking analyst/seen patient. A live video feed mirrors the session, emphasizing the role of delay and repetition in meaning-making. Together, Chendo and Reyes perform analysis as a mutual, contingent process rather than a unidirectional cure.
OPEN DOOR | Cameron Barnett: Ending Explained
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Sat, May 30 at 7:30 P.M.
Sun, May 31 at 2 P.M.
Photo by Effy Grey
Uh-oh, you got the ick! It’s not over yet, but it may as well be.
Dancing, discussing, and dread come pre-mixed in the wet bag of salad that is Ending Explained (it’s been sitting in the back of your fridge for about a month now). Created by Cameron Barnett in collaboration with Fiona Schlegel, the work lingers in the wasteland, the in-between, the waiting room, the hollow, the purgatory, the to-do list, the denial, the longest hallway in the world. It sounds unpleasant, true, but fear not—we’re here to entertain you until you’re ready to admit it’s over.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Cameron Barnett is a multi-faceted artist with interests in choreography, direction, dramatic writing, lighting design, sound design, and performance. His theater and dance works often take the form of nonlinear narratives that use movement as metaphor. Unexpected combinations of themes are made refreshingly accessible through patterns of repetition, mismatched genres, and character-driven action. Some of his recent projects include Must Come Down, an evening of dance and song; and The Girl and the Toymaker, a play with dance. Cameron is the Production and Facilities Manager at CPR – Center for Performance Research, and his work in lighting, sound, and stage management has also been seen at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Triskelion Arts, the Battery Dance Festival, Kestrels, and more. Cameron is originally from Indiana and now lives in Brooklyn.
Fiona Schlegel is a performer and arts administrator based in Brooklyn, NY. As an administrator, she has worked for STREB, Battery Dance, Ariel Rivka Dance, and Mark Morris Dance Group with roles in development, marketing, production, and operations. Fiona co-produces dance and theater works with Cameron Barnett. In their collaborative partnership, Fiona serves as administrative director, rehearsal director, associate choreographer, and performer. Their work has been presented by The Tank, CreateART, WAXworks, The Brick, and Kestrels. Fiona and Cameron’s most recent production, Must Come Down, an evening of dance and song, premiered in February 2025. She holds a BFA in Dance from Indiana University.
Ending Explained utilizes materials from Materials for the Arts (MFTA).
OPEN DOOR | Cameron Barnett: Ending Explained
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Sat, May 30 at 7:30 P.M.
Sun, May 31 at 2 P.M.
Photo by Effy Grey
Uh-oh, you got the ick! It’s not over yet, but it may as well be.
Dancing, discussing, and dread come pre-mixed in the wet bag of salad that is Ending Explained (it’s been sitting in the back of your fridge for about a month now). Created by Cameron Barnett in collaboration with Fiona Schlegel, the work lingers in the wasteland, the in-between, the waiting room, the hollow, the purgatory, the to-do list, the denial, the longest hallway in the world. It sounds unpleasant, true, but fear not—we’re here to entertain you until you’re ready to admit it’s over.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Cameron Barnett is a multi-faceted artist with interests in choreography, direction, dramatic writing, lighting design, sound design, and performance. His theater and dance works often take the form of nonlinear narratives that use movement as metaphor. Unexpected combinations of themes are made refreshingly accessible through patterns of repetition, mismatched genres, and character-driven action. Some of his recent projects include Must Come Down, an evening of dance and song; and The Girl and the Toymaker, a play with dance. Cameron is the Production and Facilities Manager at CPR – Center for Performance Research, and his work in lighting, sound, and stage management has also been seen at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Triskelion Arts, the Battery Dance Festival, Kestrels, and more. Cameron is originally from Indiana and now lives in Brooklyn.
Fiona Schlegel is a performer and arts administrator based in Brooklyn, NY. As an administrator, she has worked for STREB, Battery Dance, Ariel Rivka Dance, and Mark Morris Dance Group with roles in development, marketing, production, and operations. Fiona co-produces dance and theater works with Cameron Barnett. In their collaborative partnership, Fiona serves as administrative director, rehearsal director, associate choreographer, and performer. Their work has been presented by The Tank, CreateART, WAXworks, The Brick, and Kestrels. Fiona and Cameron’s most recent production, Must Come Down, an evening of dance and song, premiered in February 2025. She holds a BFA in Dance from Indiana University.
Ending Explained utilizes materials from Materials for the Arts (MFTA).
@CPR | Eryc Taylor Dance: Surveillance in Motion
Photo by MSY.NYC
Tickets
$20 General Admission
Purchase Tickets
ABOUT
Eryc Taylor Dance presents Surveillance in Motion. Surveillance in Motion (SiM) is an interactive dance incubator that examines surveillance, consent, and digital presence. Designed for New York City’s diverse artistic community and the general public, SiM integrates dance, technology, live streaming, and facilitated dialogue to examine how constant observation shapes artistic expression and personal agency. SiM addresses urgent questions surrounding technology, privacy, and authorship, inviting audiences into the creative process itself. ETD’s longstanding commitment to mentorship and community engagement ensures the project reaches both professional artists and underserved communities. This project is supported by DCLA/CDF funding, enabling ETD to provide a supported creative environment for research-driven, process-based work that sits at the intersection of dance, technology, and embodied data.
Featuring four new solos created under surveillance by Jonathan Royse Windham, Christina Rozanna, Summer Breeze, and Max Villegas. With original scores by Felix Herbst, McKinley Foster, Erik Ventrice, and Aiden Dumitruu, and projections by Kayla Laufer.
Surveillance in Motion (SiM) is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Eryc Taylor Dance is a nonprofit dance company dedicated to fostering community connections through diverse and inclusive artistic expression. Through movement, ETD addresses social and environmental issues, creates and presents original performances and dance films, offers master classes, and commissions new works. ETD supports emerging choreographers and curates workshops for underserved communities. ETD strives to inspire change and bring awareness to critical issues across NYC and beyond. Learn more at etd.nyc.
@CPR | LUMU Movement: Before I was an Egg I was a Chicken
Photo by David Rauch.
Tickets
$20 (Egg tier), $30 (Chicken tier), $40 (Giant Mother Chicken who is full of love and support tier)
Purchase Tickets
Fri, May 22 at 7 P.M.
Sat, May 23 at 7 P.M.
Before I was an Egg I was a Chicken is a look into how we view different versions of the self deeply informed by gender, transition, and absurdity. The term egg refers to those who are in a state of awakening/birth, as well as a term used among those in the trans community to refer to someone who is trans but has not yet realized. How many times do we need to be reborn to figure out what is right? How do we know when fear is secretly holding us back? Who has to die for answers to be revealed? We aim to answer these questions through tender chicken love and visceral cathartic movements. BOCK!
Director/choreographer: Lulu Munteanu.
Performers: Daisy Maass, Lex Casey, Mackenzie Nye, Meena Manoj.
Costume: Alicia Steeves, Chloe Brown, and cast.
This piece was made possible through the Greenspace D.I.G. Residency.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
LUMU Movement was founded by Lulu Munteanu in 2025 as a dance company that focuses on elevating trans and queer voices. Creating environments that aim to push towards performance that is punk, clown, visceral, and tender. Under LUMU, Lulu has created work for PhysfestNYC, Dance Parade, Greenspace (DIG Residency, Fertile Ground), Body Artifacts (Cathedral of St. John the Divine), Movement Research, and Slowshare. Lulu Munteanu is a Choreographer, clown, and creature who resides and makes work in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Seattle, Washington, Lulu also performs as a current and founding member of Gesture Theater, a trans led physical theater/clown company under the direction of Lou Sydel. She has also worked with companies in Seattle such as Spectrum Dance Theatre and Olympic Ballet Theatre.
@CPR | LUMU Movement: Before I was an Egg I was a Chicken
Photo by David Rauch.
Tickets
$20 (Egg tier), $30 (Chicken tier), $40 (Giant Mother Chicken who is full of love and support tier)
Purchase Tickets
Fri, May 22 at 7 P.M.
Sat, May 23 at 7 P.M.
Before I was an Egg I was a Chicken is a look into how we view different versions of the self deeply informed by gender, transition, and absurdity. The term egg refers to those who are in a state of awakening/birth, as well as a term used among those in the trans community to refer to someone who is trans but has not yet realized. How many times do we need to be reborn to figure out what is right? How do we know when fear is secretly holding us back? Who has to die for answers to be revealed? We aim to answer these questions through tender chicken love and visceral cathartic movements. BOCK!
Director/choreographer: Lulu Munteanu.
Performers: Daisy Maass, Lex Casey, Mackenzie Nye, Meena Manoj.
Costume: Alicia Steeves, Chloe Brown, and cast.
This piece was made possible through the Greenspace D.I.G. Residency.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
LUMU Movement was founded by Lulu Munteanu in 2025 as a dance company that focuses on elevating trans and queer voices. Creating environments that aim to push towards performance that is punk, clown, visceral, and tender. Under LUMU, Lulu has created work for PhysfestNYC, Dance Parade, Greenspace (DIG Residency, Fertile Ground), Body Artifacts (Cathedral of St. John the Divine), Movement Research, and Slowshare. Lulu Munteanu is a Choreographer, clown, and creature who resides and makes work in Brooklyn, NY. Originally from Seattle, Washington, Lulu also performs as a current and founding member of Gesture Theater, a trans led physical theater/clown company under the direction of Lou Sydel. She has also worked with companies in Seattle such as Spectrum Dance Theatre and Olympic Ballet Theatre.
OPEN LAB | ...Almost Right Away: Moving Company with Erica Enriquez
Peels - Photographed by Tif Ng
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
RSVP
2026 AiR Erica Enriquez presents a movement and language based workshop that invites audience participants to play with cardboard. What structures can be built, destroyed, flattened, filled, emptied or imagined by group motion? How can language be a generative mechanism for arriving at a movement beyond its initial meaning or purpose? How might material and language work in tandem with one another, guided by the subconscious connections drawn by audience participants?
Using the song The First Snow In Kokomo by Aretha Franklin as a portal, the workshop will be accompanied by the band Ube Boys, performing a set of improvisational music inspired by the lyrics “Applegate discovered a coronet, almost right away.” Participants will be supplied with a room full of cardboard boxes, packing tape and dollies, while collectively considering the expansive potential of the words “Almost” “Right” and “Away” …
This OPEN LAB serves as a deeper investigation into a performance by Enriquez entitled MOVING COMPANY.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Erica Enriquez (b. 1997, Newburgh NY) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Queens, NY. Erica received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019 and MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts with a concentration in Sculpture: Expanded Practice in 2024. Erica has shared her work and performed internationally in spaces such as MoMA PS1, the RISD museum, a handful of galleries in lower Manhattan, the St Moritz Film Festival in Switzerland, most of the 200 cap music venues in the Brooklyn, a black box theater in LES, a comedy club on St Marks, 2 wrestling rings, and a dumpster in her brother’s old apartment. Erica’s work has been featured in and reviewed by publications such as Artforum, The MODA Critical Review, Thrasher Magazine, Quartersnacks, Obscure Sound, and Wisteria Mag. She is also the proud conductor of New York City’s No.1 Train Themed Rock Band CHOO CHOO, which is available on all streaming platforms. All aboard!
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
OPEN CALL: Fall Movement 2026 / Spring Movement 2027
CPR - Center for Performance Research invites proposals for live performance works to be presented as part of Fall Movement 2026 on December 4 and 5, 2026 or Spring Movement 2027 on March 5 and 6, 2027.
Click here to apply.
Application deadline:
Monday, May 18 at 5:00 PM EST.
Please email applications@cprnyc.org with any questions.
Fall Movement and Spring Movement provide an opportunity for artists to present new work in dance, performance, and time-based art in a shared program, curated by an independent panel of artists through an OPEN CALL.
CPR is soliciting applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, with each program presenting five short works. Fall Movement will be presented on Fri, December 4 and Sat, December 5, 2026, and Spring Movement will be presented on Fri, March 5 and Sat, March 6, 2027.
Individual artists, collectives, and companies may propose a live performance work that is 15-20 minutes in length. CPR encourages applicants to submit work with experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and work that values risk-taking and the unexpected.
Applicants must be available to share their proposed work in either the Fall Movement 2026 or Spring Movement 2027 program. CPR is committed to supporting artists from every background, at various stages of their artistic careers, and across generations, and maintains an expansive approach to performance.
We strongly encourage BIPOC artists, LGBTQ+ artists, immigrant artists, and artists with disabilities to apply. Please be sure to read through the program details and application criteria in its entirety before submitting your application. We strongly recommend drafting narrative responses in a separate document. Please email applications@cprnyc.org with any questions.
PROGRAM DETAILS
Fall Movement will take place at CPR on Fri, December 4 and Sat, December 5, 2026 at 7 PM. Spring Movement will take place at CPR on Fri, March 5 and Sat, March 6, 2027 at 7 PM. Five works will be presented in each “Movement” season, with each work presented on both evenings in an identical program. Each selected work will receive a 2-hour technical rehearsal with CPR production staff, 2 hours of complimentary rehearsal time in one of CPR's studios (based on availability), an honorarium of $350, and reimbursed production expenses (materials, transport, etc) up to $100.
ELIGIBILITY
Individual artists, collectives, or companies may apply, but each applicant/application will be considered as a unique project, and will receive a single honorarium of $350.
While Fall and Spring Movement are not limited to NYC-based artists, CPR cannot provide US visas, travel, accommodations, or other living expenses in connection with the presentation.
Current undergraduate students are not eligible to apply.
Artists who have been presented in Fall Movement or Spring Movement at CPR within the last 5 five years may not apply.
Applicants must be available for both Fall and Spring Movement dates.
Works featuring classical or traditional artforms that are not subverted or disrupted through modes of experimentation will not be considered.
A COMPETITIVE FALL/SPRING MOVEMENT APPLICATION WILL INCLUDE:
A strong understanding and demonstration of CPR's core values, including work that prioritizes play, risk, experimentation, curiosity, new forms, modes of embodiment and presence, and urgency.
A strong understanding of CPR's resources and time constraints.
A work description that conveys the importance and timeliness of presenting this work at CPR, answering the questions: Why is CPR the right fit for this particular project? How would the opportunity impact this stage of your career and practice?
THE SPACE
CPR occupies a 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has two flexible studio spaces. The Large Studio is an 1,875 sq. ft., flexible rehearsal and performance space, outfitted with an LED theatrical lighting system, full-range sound, projection capabilities, and a sprung wood dance floor with white marley, and tiered audience risers seating up to 68 people. The Small Studio functions as a rehearsal studio, gallery, and meeting space, and features floor-to-ceiling storefront windows looking out onto the street, track lighting, and a sprung wood dance floor. CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two all gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible. A floor plan, images, and technical specifications can be found here.
APPLICATION TIMELINE
Applications will be accepted until Monday, May 18, 2026, at 5:00pm EST.
We expect to send notifications in July 2026 and to announce both the Fall Movement 2026 and Spring Movement 2026 line-ups in August 2026 along with the announcement of CPR's 2026 Fall Season.
Please reach out to applications@cprnyc.org with any questions. The panel looks forward to reviewing your application!
@CPR | Julian Donahue: With Violets in Her Lap
Photo by Matthew Morrocco.
Tickets
$30 General Admission
Purchase Tickets
Thursday, May 14 at 7:30 PM Friday, May 15 at 7:30 PM
ABOUT
With Violets in Her Lap is a requiem in dance for the generation of queer people lost to AIDS and a celebration of their resistance in the face of an omnipresent existential threat. As a Gen Z queer man, I experience this loss as a void, a gap in the connection between my generation and our ancestors. Telling this story through dance is my embodied search for queer lineage. The AIDS crisis isn’t over, it lives on in the sustained fight for a cure, and accessible treatment; in communities that heteronormative society overlooks; and through the void in our queer ancestry.
CREDITS
Dancer: Julian Donahue. Choreography by Julian Donahue. Set Design by Rubeen Salem. Costume Consultation and Unitard Design by Reid Bartelme.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Julian Donahue is a choreographer and dancer based in Brooklyn. Julian danced with New York Theatre Ballet from 2018-2024, performing masterworks by Antony Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, José Limón and many others. Julian started dancing with Ellen Cornfield in October 2024. Julian also specializes in Baroque, Renaissance, and folk dance forms, performing with New York Baroque Dance Company, Boston Early Music Festival, and at Lincoln Center. Recently, Julian was awarded a 2025 Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. His choreography has been presented at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Tanglewood, Battery Dance Festival, Judson Church, Hofstra University, and more. Julian’s one man show With Violets in Her Lap premiered in April 2025 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Center. Many thanks to the Center for Performance Research for presenting the show and offering an accessible space fo dancers to present their work! Julian will present a program of experimental dances at Arts on Site June 11-14 2026. Visit juliandonahuedance.com for more information about future performances.
Rubeen Salem (b. 1997, San Francisco) is a New York–based multimedia artist working primarily in figurative surrealist painting. Salem creates visual prayers rooted in poetry and devotional symbolism.
Reid Bartelme is a freelance fashion and costume designer who lives and works in New York. Prior to designing he spent many years working as a dancer for companies throughout North America.
@CPR | Julian Donahue: With Violets in Her Lap
Photo by Matthew Morrocco.
Tickets
$30 General Admission
Purchase Tickets
Thursday, May 14 at 7:30 PM Friday, May 15 at 7:30 PM
ABOUT
With Violets in Her Lap is a requiem in dance for the generation of queer people lost to AIDS and a celebration of their resistance in the face of an omnipresent existential threat. As a Gen Z queer man, I experience this loss as a void, a gap in the connection between my generation and our ancestors. Telling this story through dance is my embodied search for queer lineage. The AIDS crisis isn’t over, it lives on in the sustained fight for a cure, and accessible treatment; in communities that heteronormative society overlooks; and through the void in our queer ancestry.
CREDITS
Dancer: Julian Donahue. Choreography by Julian Donahue. Set Design by Rubeen Salem. Costume Consultation and Unitard Design by Reid Bartelme.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Julian Donahue is a choreographer and dancer based in Brooklyn. Julian danced with New York Theatre Ballet from 2018-2024, performing masterworks by Antony Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Jerome Robbins, José Limón and many others. Julian started dancing with Ellen Cornfield in October 2024. Julian also specializes in Baroque, Renaissance, and folk dance forms, performing with New York Baroque Dance Company, Boston Early Music Festival, and at Lincoln Center. Recently, Julian was awarded a 2025 Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts. His choreography has been presented at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, Tanglewood, Battery Dance Festival, Judson Church, Hofstra University, and more. Julian’s one man show With Violets in Her Lap premiered in April 2025 at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Center. Many thanks to the Center for Performance Research for presenting the show and offering an accessible space fo dancers to present their work! Julian will present a program of experimental dances at Arts on Site June 11-14 2026. Visit juliandonahuedance.com for more information about future performances.
Rubeen Salem (b. 1997, San Francisco) is a New York–based multimedia artist working primarily in figurative surrealist painting. Salem creates visual prayers rooted in poetry and devotional symbolism.
Reid Bartelme is a freelance fashion and costume designer who lives and works in New York. Prior to designing he spent many years working as a dancer for companies throughout North America.
OPEN STUDIOS | Lineage Is a Verb: Dawn Avery, Jolie Cloutier, and Jessica Ranville, curated by Ty Defoe
Courtesy of Ty Defoe
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Ty Defoe brings together Dawn Avery, Jolie Cloutier, and Jessica Ranville, Indigenous women/non-binary artists across three generations in a shared space for making, remembering, and becoming. In honor of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Relatives (MMIR) week, the work centers presence over erasure—asking how Indigenous fem bodies carry knowledge, resist patriarchy, and practice survival through art. The evening presents a living conversation across time, where lineage is not inherited alone, but enacted in relation.
PROGRAM
Dawn Avery: Where is she?
In honor of MMIWG and their families
Composed by Dawn Ieri’hó:kwats Avery with participants. Directed by Ty Defoe
In this work, I am experimenting with intentionality in and of the land, space, change, connection, relationship, language, gratitude, blessings, remembrance, and condolence gifted in the form of performance art with video design by a woman of great intention, Kate Freer.
With a focus on Native Indigenous people and their language, it is inclusive to any participant who has a grandmother, mother, sister, woman, or auntie.
Women in the matrilineal, Haudenosaunee society and in many Indigenous nations, are honored as caregivers, caretakers, historians, clan mothers and leaders in governance, sacred keepers of moon and healing ceremonies, and medicine keepers. The respect is great.
Where Is She? honors the lives and families of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and is dedicated to those working to end this epidemic that has continued on Turtle Island for decades. A special thank you to CPR and curator, Ty Defoe for their continued work in bringing this to people’s attention.
Jolie Cloutier: Tomato Season
Tomato Season, written and performed by Jolie Cloutier, a member of Onondaga Nation's Wolf Clan, is the story of a young Native American woman navigating the complexities and possibilities of pregnancy in the contemporary United States, and the powerful possibility of bringing a life into today's world. The piece explores themes of generational trauma, religious trauma, motherhood, abortion, and the realization of not being ready for something you've always wanted. Cloutier tackles a heavy societal topic and presents it to the audience from an Indigenous lens, and tells a daunting story with hope, honesty, and self grace. Tomato Season is Cloutier's first writing project to be presented in front of an audience. Jolie is extremely grateful to share this story, and she would like to thank Ty Defoe, the folks at CPR, her partner Andrew, her friends who listened to her from the start, and her instructors at HB studio for encouraging her to tell her story.
Jessica Ranville: Martha in Space
This is a work-in-progress excerpt of a one-act play with music, featuring puppetry, projections and choreography. It follows the story of Martha, a journalist unmoored by grief, on assignment in outer space. There she encounters Mo, a war photographer-cum-astrophotographer on a personal mission of his own. Encouraging, cajoling, undermining and inspiring Martha is a Greek Chorus—at times her ancestors, her inner voice, the natural world—that follows her everywhere she goes... even to space.
Featuring Sonia Villani and Bradley Lewis.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ty Defoe is a citizen of the Anishinaabe and Oneida Nations and a Grammy Award–winning writer and interdisciplinary artist. A sovereign story trickster, Ty creates work at the intersection of performance, land-based practice, technology, and decolonial futurity. Their work moves fluidly between rural and urban communities, Broadway theaters, universities, and the metaverse, fostering relational, Indigenous-centered approaches to storytelling and cultural production. Ty is a recipient of fellowships and awards from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, MacDowell, Sundance Institute, the Pop Culture Collaborative’s Trans Futurist, and was named a 2026 United States Artist Fellow. Their creative practice is rooted in collaboration and care, often blending theater, music, movement, visual design, and emerging technologies to imagine Indigenous and decolonial futures. Ty’s writing has been published by Bloomsbury and in outlets including Casting a Movement, Thorny Locust, and Bloomsbury Publishing, and is currently working on Trans World, a play cycle commissioned by the Binger Center for New Theater at Yale.They hold degrees from the California Institute of the Arts (BFA), Goddard College (MFA), and New York University Tisch School of the Arts (MFA). Ty is a member of All My Relations Collective, Indigenous Direction, an Olga Denison Scholar at CMU, Professor of Practice at ASU, and is currently Writer-in-Residence at PACE. www.tydefoe.com
GRAMMY and NAMA nominated performer, composer, professor, Dawn Ieri’hó:kwats Avery has worked with musical luminaries Pavarotti, Sting, Nakai, and Shenandoah; composers Cage, Wuorinen, Glass, Chacon, Becenti and, Indigenous elders Jan Kahehti:io Longboat, Tom Sakokwen’ion:kwas Porter, Ray Ta’wente’se John, among others. Holding a place of peace, spirit, and passion, Dawn Avery draws from her devotion to sacred world traditions, including those from her own Kaniènkéha (Mohawk) heritage. Her music can be understood as a sonic journey of awareness.
Avery’s work has been performed at the National Museum of the American Indian, Lincoln and Kennedy Centers, throughout Europe, and at many Universities and Indigenous communities. She has been composing a series of orchestral works that serve as a musical acknowledgment to honor the Indigenous ancestors, legacy, and land upon which the ensembles perform and live. Grounded in the ancient history of the land through the vibration of sound, the performers are asked to recite the names of the nations who have and continue to live in that area today. Entitled Indian Territory with specific nation names, works have been performed by the Albany, Alexandria, Ancaster, and Williamsburg Symphony Orchestras, along with several chamber groups throughout Turtle Island.
Azica Records releasedseveral of her cello works played by Wilhelmina Smith Sweetgrass (2025) and has an upcoming recording of her chamber works performed by Salt Bay ChamberFest musicians; both produced by Judith Sherman and directed by Wilhelmina Smith. She has composed and recorded in a variety of styles on Okenti records that have won several Global Music Awards. Along with Mitchell and Tarrant, Avery composed music an Indigenous-based theatre project Ajijaak on Turtle Island; written and directed by Ty Defoe; Heather Henson’s (of the Jim Henson legacy) production.
Avery composed for the award-winning film Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native Mascots and won best composer in the Paris Women’s Film Festival (Iotsistokwaron:ion, performed by Duo Concertante). Two of her short operas, including Trials and Tears with libretto by Ty Defoe, will be performed at The Cooper Union in NYC on November 5, 2026.
Jolie Cloutier is a NYC based actor and writer. A member of Onondaga Nation (Wolf Clan) Jolie celebrates her Indigenous identity in every work of art. Jolie has appeared in a variety of Native American theater and film productions. Jolie is currently studying acting at HB Studio in their Uta Hagen Core Conservatory Program.
Jessica Ranville: Off-Broadway: Empire: The Musical New World Stages; Between Two Knees (u/s) PACNYC; Manahatta(u/s) The Public Theater, Stupid F*cking Bird(u/s) The Pearl Theater. Regional: Where We Belong Oregon Shakespeare Festival & Portland Center Stage, Men On Boats Baltimore Center Stage. Jessica is Red River Metis from Winnipeg, Manitoba. She has taught movement at Brooklyn College and has been a recurring teaching artist and resident artist at IRT Theater in Manhattan. MFA: The New School for Drama.
OPEN LAB | The Water Inside Our Bodies: Dancing Stillness and Silence with Yuki Kawahisa
Courtesy of Yuki Kawahisa
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
RSVP
Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30 PM.
2026 AiR Yuki Kawahisa presents a movement workshop that examines the beauty and narrative potential of stillness and silence. Incorporating elements of Noh Theater, Butoh, Noguchi Taiso, Tai Chi, movement improvisation and clowning, Kawahisa will engage participants in inclusive communication around movement and disability, challenging perceived limitations around “normal” movement in performance.
Participants with disabilities, mobility-limitations, and no prior dance experience are encouraged to register.
CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two single occupancy, all gender restrooms and one wheelchair-accessible restroom.
Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30 PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yuki Kawahisa, a native of Japan, based in New York for over two decades now, is a proud immigrant who earned the US Permanent Residency status through her work achievement in the field of performing arts. As an actor, performing artist, theatre creator, she has written/directed/choreographed her own theatrical work and has collaborated and devised pieces with others. Kawahisa works across disciplines with various artists, companies in New York and internationally.
Everything she creates is somewhat influenced by her Japanese origin, the beauty and richness of the culture, its esthetics, language, literature, traditions (and the coquettish, Kawaii culture also). Training background include: Noh (Kita style, Tokyo), Clowning (Sue Morrison), Balinese/Mask dance (Bali, Indonesia), Noguchi Taiso (Mari Osanai) and Butoh with numerous Japanese masters.
She often creates peculiar, darkly humorous and absurdly comical movement pieces with texts. She sees great beauty in stillness and silence. She dances still and tells stories with silence. And those are her uniqueness and strength, her signature style. Her work is a reflection of herself, closely intertwined to her identity as a minority/immigrant/woman living abroad. She creates to give herself a voice and the strength to voice it and be heard.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.
@CPR | The New Georges Jam in JAMboree 2026!
Courtesy of New Georges
Tickets
Free General Admission
RSVP HERE
Fri, May 1 at 7 P.M.
Sat, May 2 at 7 P.M.
Are you ready to Jam?! It’s time to JAMboree! New Georges’ artist-led, collaboration-based performance gym presents an evening of brand-new work: proof-of-concept experiments that demonstrate the vision and ambition each team has for their collaborative project. In other words: excerpts of Jam-generated works heading out for a test drive! The Jam is an artistic community in which members forge relationships with deep impact on work and careers. New Jam members are selected every two years in an open application process–new cycle upcoming, watch for that application!
CREDITS
2024-26 Jam co-facilitators: Thalia Sablon, Dina Vovsi, Deepali Mattoo Gupta Zeer
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Founded in 1992, New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director/Producer; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Executive Director/Producer) advocates for an intergenerational ecosystem of exuberant theatrical minds, furthering fierce new works along with long-term wellbeing, expanding aesthetic boundaries and gender equity in tandem. A pivotal home and launchpad for now three generations of artists, our impact reaches every corner of the culture. www.newgeorges.org
@CPR | The New Georges Jam in JAMboree 2026!
Courtesy of New Georges
Tickets
Free General Admission
RSVP HERE
Fri, May 1 at 7 P.M.
Sat, May 2 at 7 P.M.
Are you ready to Jam?! It’s time to JAMboree! New Georges’ artist-led, collaboration-based performance gym presents an evening of brand-new work: proof-of-concept experiments that demonstrate the vision and ambition each team has for their collaborative project. In other words: excerpts of Jam-generated works heading out for a test drive! The Jam is an artistic community in which members forge relationships with deep impact on work and careers. New Jam members are selected every two years in an open application process–new cycle upcoming, watch for that application!
CREDITS
2024-26 Jam co-facilitators: Thalia Sablon, Dina Vovsi, Deepali Mattoo Gupta Zeer
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Founded in 1992, New Georges (Susan Bernfield, Artistic Director/Producer; Jaynie Saunders Tiller, Executive Director/Producer) advocates for an intergenerational ecosystem of exuberant theatrical minds, furthering fierce new works along with long-term wellbeing, expanding aesthetic boundaries and gender equity in tandem. A pivotal home and launchpad for now three generations of artists, our impact reaches every corner of the culture. www.newgeorges.org
OPEN DOOR | The Stage Protects Us: WORDS TO MELT ICE
Courtesy Solidarity Organizing Initiative.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Inspired by Words to Melt ICE, an online anthology of creative works of dissent against ICE, join us for an afternoon of select pieces from the anthology and a community open mic. Bring your words, your pens, your rage to what will be an event of healing and collective resistance. Co-hosted by playwrights Amalia Oliva Rojas and Christin Eve Cato. Proceeds will support deportation relief efforts.
View the program.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
The Stage Protects Us is a citywide initiative uniting two powerful ecosystems: frontline organizers working to protect immigrant New Yorkers, and a broad network of New York City performing artists ready to take action. We believe artists have a specific role to play in mobilizing and amplifying resistance to inhumane immigration policy by providing resources, tools, and training for the performing arts community to support the urgent work of frontline migrant justice organizers.
@CPR | FSU Arts in NYC Senior Capstone Showing: Kaleido
Photo credit: Lily Frazier & Cate Calvert
By invitation only.
For more information, please contact Hannah Schwadron, Arts in NYC Director, at hschwadron@fsu.edu.
Sat, April 25 at 7 P.M.
Works by: Mad Aldana-Gray, Cate Calvert, Yuki Colombo, Lily Frazier, Nailah Lee, Maddie Luzarraga, Yasmeen Masanti, Anna Paterson, and Aria Walker.
Arts in NYC proudly presents Kaleido, a collection of works created by the Spring 2026 cohort of Florida State University’s MFA, BFA, and BA students. Drawing from a combination of personal history and the New York arts landscape, these performers unveil their discoveries through diverse forms such as movement, film, and music. These journeys of art collide together to create an immersive and kaleidoscopic experience.
Kaleido embodies multifaceted vision that is consistently shifting. As each dancer shares their work, they will shift the spectrum of the audience’s experience – refracting emotion and perspective through a living kaleidoscope in motion. As these dancers wrap up their semester with a celebration of accomplishments, they move forward in the world following the motto of the late FSU School of Dance Chair, Dr. Nancy Smith Fichter (1930 - 2024): “Do it with love.”
Mentored by Arts in NYC teaching faculty Marilyn Maywald Yahel.
Special thanks to Program Director Hannah Schwadron and Program Manager Ashley Pierre-Louis.
OPEN DOOR | Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González, curated by Blake Paskal, Visual AIDS
Performance documentation from Pocahontas Revised by Tesora Garcia. Courtesy the artist.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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In this participatory performance and engagement, artists Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González come together to build an evening that questions our physical and spiritual nourishment inside of extractive, colonial systems. How does the process of communing in physical space allow us to envision new systems through curiosity and empathy towards each other? How can we plant the seeds within ourselves to imagine differently? As artists who hold embodied and nuanced relationships to health and wellness through the experiences of transness and/or living with HIV, Garcia and Gonzáles will prompt us to examine our collective power and potential. Tesora Garcia will lead a ceremony in which we will absorb "energy food" from an insect guide for purposes of healing and self-transformation. After the performance ceremony concludes, we will share a communal food moment led by Zacarías González that reflects on food sovereignty and its denial to communities deemed as other. Together, the artists will provide a meditative and intentional space for collective healing and exploration.
This event is organized by Center for Performance Research and Blake Paskal, Programs Director of Visual AIDS, an organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV-positive artists, and preserving legacies during the ongoing AIDS epidemic.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Tesora Garcia (she/her) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator whose work investigates how structural violence patterns bodies, dreams, and belief systems. Drawing from migration politics, queer theory, and non-Western esoterica, her projects prototype alternative ways of sensing, belonging, and being.
Garcia has worked with lens-based media for more than a decade, spanning analog film, digital cinema, performance, and experimental video. Her recent projects, including Pocahontas Revised and Collagen Cult, have been exhibited nationally across the U.S. Her work often merges performance and moving image with ritual poetics, situating marginalized bodies as conduits of resilience and prophecy. As an HIV-positive Indigenous trans woman, Garcia approaches artmaking as a practice of survival and revelation.
She is currently Associate Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Zacarías González is a transdisciplinary artist in NYC whose participatory practice uses food as a container for collective inquiry, collaborative authorship, and the building of networks of care. Working at the intersection of documentary, participatory art, and pedagogical resistance, González creates conditions for gathering and relationality that emerge through shared space, communal eating, and learning together. Through their ongoing project "Carry," González uses deployable mobile structures—kitchen carts and garden carts designed in collaboration for public space activation. These objects function as tools, sites of pedagogy, and performance, becoming part of the work itself rather than merely supporting it. By extending communal practice into public spaces, the work resists permanence while building resilient networks of care and imagination.
Their work focuses on long-term projects: 吃了吗 | Have you eaten? with migrant sex workers; "The Future of Food" with Creative Time; EARTH LIFE at the Institute for Public Architecture; and Auxilio Space, a community-based food center supporting queer, Black, trans, and Indigenous communities and individuals living with HIV/AIDS. Work has been supported by Creative Time, The Storefront for Art and Architecture, MoMA PS1, Pioneer Works, and Socrates Sculpture Park. They are a Visiting Lecturer at SVA and The New School.
OPEN AiR | Yiseul LeMieux: Die Cute
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Courtesy of Yiseul LeMieux.
Die Cute is a performance that uses cuteness to gently disarm people and guide them through grief in a way that is both playful and deeply empathetic. 2026 Technical Resident Yiseul LeMieux frames the work around an imagined funeral, inviting the audience to accompany her through elements such as procession, eulogy, and celebration. A bunny choir, a caring and quietly humorous pastor figure, and moments for audience participation create a space where tenderness and absurdity can coexist. The project stems from the belief that when death and grief are avoided, harm grows. By inviting people to face death in community and with laughter, Die Cute opens space for comfort and reflection, encouraging audiences to consider their own fears, losses, and mortality through lighthearted action and shared presence.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yiseul LeMieux is a Korean-born artist based in New York City. Her work spans multiple media, blending vivid narratives and alternative realities. She emphasizes audience engagement and community feedback, rejecting traditional boundaries between media, artist, and audience. Her creative vision explores a global network of interchangeability—where the artist, human, animal, or object holds equal value. This ethos allows her to explore limitless potential in herself and the world.
Technical Residency: Yiseul LeMieux (closed to the public)
YouAreCarrot. Photo by Masson LeMieux
The Technical Residency is closed to the public.
CPR welcomes Yiseul LeMieux for a Spring 2026 Technical Residency, providing one uninterrupted week in CPR’s theater and access to a robust a/v inventory to play, experiment, and create. The residency will support her new work in development Die Cute, a performance that uses cuteness to gently disarm people and guide them through grief in a way that is both playful and deeply empathetic. LeMieux frames the work around an imagined funeral, inviting the audience to accompany her through elements such as procession, eulogy, and celebration. A bunny choir, a caring and quietly humorous pastor figure, and moments for audience participation create a space where tenderness and absurdity can coexist. The project stems from the belief that when death and grief are avoided, harm grows. By inviting people to face death in community and with laughter, Die Cute opens space for comfort and reflection, encouraging audiences to consider their own fears, losses, and mortality through lighthearted action and shared presence.
The Technical Residency will culminate in an OPEN AiR presentation of Die Cute at CPR on April 19, 2026. Tickets and more information here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yiseul LeMieux is a Korean-born artist based in New York City. Her work spans multiple media, blending vivid narratives and alternative realities. She emphasizes audience engagement and community feedback, rejecting traditional boundaries between media, artist, and audience. Her creative vision explores a global network of interchangeability—where the artist, human, animal, or object holds equal value. This ethos allows her to explore limitless potential in herself and the world.
@CPR | Jay Reinier: Wave Collapse
Photo by Jay Reinier.
Tickets
$15, $30 Sliding Scale
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When does computation overflow into being? Wave Collapse, by multimedia artist Jay Reinier, explores technology pushed to the brink, spilling into climate change and system failure. The piece integrates immersive projections, live-processed voice, and interactive digital instruments. Concrete poetry combines with cyberpunk in a tapestry of conflicting fragments, telling a story of hubristic science and machine intelligence in a time of rupture and regeneration.
The performance is presented as part of Reinier's thesis project for the Performance & Interactive Media Arts MFA at Brooklyn College. Featured performers include brynn asha walker and ari glenn mombrea. Additional visuals and sound design by Jack Hamill and brynn asha walker.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Jay Reinier is an experimental vocalist, media artist, and coder. They create software systems, generative instruments and interactive digital art, spanning live performance, websites, and multimedia installations. Born in the San Francisco Bay Area, Reinier investigates the rapid growth of technology and its effects on the environment. Their work draws from posthumanist theory to expand into animal and machine subjectivities. Reinier is a 2024-25 student fellow at Social Practice CUNY, and their performances have been featured at Harvestworks, LiveCodeNYC, and Millennium Film Workshop. They also perform livecode functions as j.palindrome, and work in production at Center for Performance Research and other NYC venues.
@CPR | Kyle Carr Scheurich: true ribs, rawhide
Photo by Hannah Mayfield.
Tickets
$20, $25, $30 Sliding Scale (Suggested Price $30)
Purchase Tickets
Fri, April 10 at 7:30 P.M.
Sat, April 11 at 7:30 P.M.
true ribs, rawhide is a solo dance/theatre show both created by and performed by artist Kyle Carr Scheurich. Stripping his image of his own features, the artist creates an abstract figure that becomes a vehicle for physical language, giving the audience the opportunity to project onto said figure. We are invited to follow this figure during an excerpt of a much longer journey. It becomes about the being in between. Between violence and tenderness, between exposing and hiding, between tension and letting go, between transit and stasis, between a memory and the present.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle Carr Scheurich was born in 1992 in New York. In 2010 he graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts. During his time at LaGuardia High School he also studied at Manhattan Youth Ballet under the direction of Francois Perron. He graduated from The Juilliard School under the direction of Lawrence Rhodes, and joined Batsheva – the young Ensemble in 2014. Kyle joined Batsheva Dance Company in 2016-2021, with Ohad Nahirin acting as both artistic director and house choreographer. Kyle has performed with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) for the stage premiere of Bobbi Jene Smith’s & Or Schreiber’s ‘Broken Theatre’. In 2025 Kyle served as assistant director for AMOC’s ‘Rome is Falling’, premiered at Alice Tully Hall.
Currently Kyle performs in various works, under the direction of choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, co-founder of P.OR.K (Portugal). Kyle is a teacher of the Gaga movement language and works as a stager/rehearsal director for Ohad Nahirin at universities and dance companies around the world. Kyle is also an Ilan Lev Method practitioner & musician.
@CPR | Kyle Carr Scheurich: true ribs, rawhide
Photo by Hannah Mayfield.
Tickets
$20, $25, $30 Sliding Scale (Suggested Price $30)
Purchase Tickets
Fri, April 10 at 7:30 P.M.
Sat, April 11 at 7:30 P.M.
true ribs, rawhide is a solo dance/theatre show both created by and performed by artist Kyle Carr Scheurich. Stripping his image of his own features, the artist creates an abstract figure that becomes a vehicle for physical language, giving the audience the opportunity to project onto said figure. We are invited to follow this figure during an excerpt of a much longer journey. It becomes about the being in between. Between violence and tenderness, between exposing and hiding, between tension and letting go, between transit and stasis, between a memory and the present.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle Carr Scheurich was born in 1992 in New York. In 2010 he graduated from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and the Performing Arts. During his time at LaGuardia High School he also studied at Manhattan Youth Ballet under the direction of Francois Perron. He graduated from The Juilliard School under the direction of Lawrence Rhodes, and joined Batsheva – the young Ensemble in 2014. Kyle joined Batsheva Dance Company in 2016-2021, with Ohad Nahirin acting as both artistic director and house choreographer. Kyle has performed with AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) for the stage premiere of Bobbi Jene Smith’s & Or Schreiber’s ‘Broken Theatre’. In 2025 Kyle served as assistant director for AMOC’s ‘Rome is Falling’, premiered at Alice Tully Hall.
Currently Kyle performs in various works, under the direction of choreographer Marlene Monteiro Freitas, co-founder of P.OR.K (Portugal). Kyle is a teacher of the Gaga movement language and works as a stager/rehearsal director for Ohad Nahirin at universities and dance companies around the world. Kyle is also an Ilan Lev Method practitioner & musician.