#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 | Ecosomatic Movement with Joan Gutiérrez
Nopal En La Frente — Performance Still. Xoco Cemetery — Coyoacan, Mexico. 2023. Photo credit: Camille Lacadee.
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
RSVP
2026 AiR Joan Gutiérrez presents a movement workshop that embodies the life cycle of a flower, inviting participants into a ritual space of deep listening, imagination, and connection. Using meditation, bodywork, creative movement research, intentional breathing, storytelling, and ecosomatic ritual, the group will cultivate a felt sense of interconnectedness and pleasureful belonging, awakening intuitive intelligence and new pathways of expression.
This is a playful research space to move and slow down at once, to awaken sensation, feel deeply, and rediscover freedom in the body, not as performance but as presence. No experience necessary—only curiosity and a body ready to listen.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Joan Gutiérrez develops tactile, performative, and participatory works rooted in the desert landscapes of the Mexican-American borderlands where they were raised. Born in 1992, the year the Ciudad Juárez femicides began and Dr. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery was published, Gutiérrez situates an interdisciplinary practice within this charged socio-political terrain, engaging the body as a site of memory, resistance, and transformation across personal, collective, and ecological registers.
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 generative methods for engaging rupture and cultivating repair.
Though trained in psychology at Loyola University Chicago and holding a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Gutiérrez grounds the practice less in institutional frameworks than in sustained, embodied inquiry—studying independently with artists, somatic sex educators, and masters of Zen and butoh across Europe, Asia, and the Americas.
She currently lives, works, and practices at the Zen Center of New York City – Fire Lotus Temple in Brooklyn.
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 | DANIRO: “I TOOK THE NIGHT”
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
In the event that advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30PM.
DANIRO. Photo by Myles Loftin.
"I TOOK THE NIGHT" is a multidisciplinary 3 part performance work by DANIRO that explores the desires, emotions and imaginations of a woman of the night. Featuring original video, sonic works, imagery, and sculptures meant to transport you into her world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
DANIRO is a Multidisciplinary Artist, who consistently places a future centered focus on the voices of underrepresented communities that are the pulse of contemporary electronic music, art & culture. By reflecting the narratives of those living their lives in the societal margins, her work aims to capture a perspective not just close to home and heart, but one far too often overlooked by popular media. DANIRO's artistic practice at its root is based in her continued exploration of the human form, starting with her own body and narrative. She received her BFA focused in Film, Sculpture, & Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. DANIRO has shown work at The Museum of Modern Art, Mana Contemporary, The Lower Manhattan Cultural council, The Gene Siskle Theater, Golden Thread Gallery and more.
OPEN STAGE | Spring Movement: Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Margot Mae, and Rosalie Yu
Demetris Charalambous. Photo by Nicolas Karatzas.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, March 13 at 7 P.M.
Sat, March 14 at 7 P.M.
CPR’s long-running Spring 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 Spring Movement 2026: Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Margot Mae, and Rosalie Yu.
This year, for the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2025 and Spring Movement 2026, with each program presenting five short works. The Fall Movement 2025/Spring Movement 2026 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Shawn Escarciga, Dominica Greene, Amelia Heintzelman, and Muyassar Kurdi.
PROGRAM
Demetris Charalambous: GLIESER
GLIESER is an anthropological study, an auto-fictional dance theatre grounded in both Cypriot mythology and my personal invented cosmology. Drawing from my experience growing up in Cyprus, a country in the Levantine sea that has been under illegal occupation for the past 51 years, I am reflecting on borders and how they dictate the movement of a body desiring liberation. Through the use of scores, found objects and live cello, I build a live composition of contradictions, one where pleasure becomes a ritual for transcendence. This work reflects on my summers growing up in Cyprus, the realization of my queerness, fleeing the army when I was 18, crossing an illegal border in search of love through Grindr, and heartbreak under an incessantly searing sun. This liturgy of pleasure untangles my ancestral history from its colonial knots and, through a queer lens, reimagines the ancient practices and cosmologies lost.
Morgan Gregory: yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin
yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin is a performance-based work that seeks to understand the initiation of intimacy, shame, stimulation, and empathy for self between the crossroads of native spiritual worship and Eurocentric understandings of religion, specifically examining the afro-music subcultures of gospel and hip-hop. It questions how braggadocious-ness exists in communities of generational (monetary, spiritual, social, ecological) lack. In development, yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin examines, in a deeper context, the matriarchal role of Black women within the binary of realism and the metaphysical, as well as oral sources and histories of Black, Southern Christian religious communities, pulling from Gregory’s own experiences as an artist raised in southern Virginia. This piece will specifically utilize a cast of bodies with lineages from dance and theatre. Multimedia components and archives of southern Black churches will be featured, with a performance of live mixing/ looping samples of original worship sounds, trap/hip-hop, and synth.
Umber Majeed: Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love)
A multi-chapter animation that speaks to questions of nationalism, state propaganda and aesthetics, community, and self through speculative fiction. The narrative chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan, the first ‘Muslim nuclear state’. In developing this artwork, Majeed used state and familial archives to intersect specific historical moments, starting with the successful nuclear tests performed in the 1990’s to the conception/destruction of a military-state monument, Chaghi Monument Hill. The reading through the female (herself), allows for a queering and alternative historicizing of South Asia in an age of global nationalist uprisings.
Margot Mae: Sound Girls Gone Wild
Sound Girls Gone Wild is a celebration of labor and audio, a live documentary, and a pseudo-mythology arising from the choreographies of women working in audio - and people working generally - all brought together through the healing power of chicks and freaks singing songs and playing rock and roll. Microphones, speakers, cables, a death, a birth, the beginning, sirens, heavy metal (and more!) all swirl around the question "what if working people rise together?" Featuring Martita Abril, geo blake, Reverend Micah Busey, Makenna Finch, Sophie Glaesemann, Anaís Gomez, Rachel Keane, Margot Mae, and Kyra Tantau.
Rosalie Yu: Fascination is the Force which Enters the Eyes and Penetrates the Heart
Fascination is the Force which Enters the Eyes and Penetrates the Heart is an experiment in the relationship between simulation, artifice, and imagination. Through voice, sound, and the mind’s eye, this piece explores the material and psychic terrain of illusion and experience throughout history.
In collaboration with performing artist Stevie Knauss and sound artist Luke Santy. Costume design by Zachary Delamater.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Demetris Charalambous: All my life I’ve been island hopping. I was born and raised in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Levant. I grew up on the fringes of Nicosia, which is the last divided capital city in the world. In it there is a buffer zone – also known as the "Green Line” – which is a demilitarized no man's land that cuts straight through Nicosia's heart and across the whole island. I moved to New York, the city of islands, when I was nineteen. As an artist, my current favorite materials to work with are light and the body. Maybe it’s because the sun in Cyprus feels closer than anywhere else on Earth; I spent my summers growing up with a dry burning. I used to wish I could take the sun in my mouth and drown it out with saliva like a lozenge. I wanted that fiery cool breath.
Morgan Gregory (b. Richmond, Virginia) is a transdisciplinary performer/choreographer/… who focuses on reimagining Afro-diasporic imagery through a futurist lens. In her choreographic and performance work development, she constantly explores ancestral importance, and in this continuous effort of understanding, she dreams within intersectional identities. Morgan is a graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA program and was honored as a Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholar, majoring in African and African American Studies and Dance. Morgan has toured with Julien Creuzet/Ana Pi on a multi-disciplinary project, Algorithm Ocean True Blood Moves, to the Dakar Biennale, National Opera & Ballet, Brown University, and Performa Biennale. In 2024, she was named a recipient of the LiftOff Residency with New Dance Alliance, a fellow with The Performance Project-University Settlement, and a BAX Space Residency Grantee. Morgan will present research explorations of the Afrofuturist movement and a dance-focused film entitled Afrofuturism: The Black Body as an Immortal Canvas of Storytelling, Resistance, and Mysticism at the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD-St. Louis, Missouri), in November 2025. She has premiered performances at Mark Morris, Triskelion Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Arts on Site, University Settlement, and more, all of which range from proscenium-situated to community-centered cyphers and video installations.
Umber Majeed (b. New York, NY, 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed has presented her work in solo exhibitions at Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2025); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (2021); and the Rubber Factory, New York (2018). Majeed is a recipient of the HWP Fellowship from Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); the Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency from Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018); the Digital Earth Fellowship from Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19) and Technology Residency from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2020).
Margot Mae is an artist and technician working primarily in music, sound, movement, and event production. She works mostly in live audio, as well as video and lighting, at the Judson Church, Here Arts, Roulette, Littlefield, and is available for hire for performances, events, weddings, etc. Her performance work involves skateboarding, punk rock, improvisational scores for voice, instruments, and movement, making labor visible, and lectures on queer physics/science. Her main band is Lavender Tops, and she performs solo as Tomboy Margot.
Rosalie Yu: I am a Taipei-born artist based in Brooklyn. My practice spans video, installation, performance, and research-based processes. Recently, I have been drawing on escapist fantasies, bootleg aesthetics, and geopolitics as a way to reflect on personal histories and their entanglements with present and future worlds. I am a year 6 and 8 member at New Museum’s NEW INC (incubator for artists), in collaboration with Rhizome, and a tech resident at Pioneer Works in 2018. I am currently teaching at NYU Tisch’s ITP/IMA.
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2025/SPRING MOVEMENT 2026 PANELISTS
Shawn Escarciga is a multidisciplinary artist, administrator, and connector existing somewhere between performance, comedy, the internet, and community-engaged work. Shawn explores themes of labor, class, and power, questioning value systems and hierarchies, and ways to balance being silly with tangible moves towards collective liberation.
Their work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces across New York City, the U.S., and internationally. Shawn is a recipient of a Franklin Furnace FUND grant and has done other cool stuff too.
They ran and organized the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund in 2020 which gave out nearly $250k in direct support to artists across the 5 boroughs. Their memes have been seen in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, in projects with What Would an HIV Doula Do?, at protests, galleries, and on the phones of f-slurs worldwide.
Shawn is currently the Development Director at Visual AIDS, an arts non-profit that supports artists living with HIV and the legacies of those lost to AIDS.
Dominica Greene is a movement-based conceptual artist, dancer, and facilitator residing on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people. She creates body and time-based multidisciplinary environments which interrogate cycles of life, death, and love. Harnessing the elements, spirit, and womanness into an existence rooted in love, community, and regeneration, her work seeks to reflect nature –human and otherwise– as a way of highlighting humanity, the stark similarities in our differences, and our inheritances as legacies.
Amelia Heintzelman is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has been supported by residencies, commissions, and grants through Center for Performance Research, Draftwork at Danspace Project, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Issue Project Room, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pageant, Snug Harbor, and UCross Foundation. She has worked as a performer for Juli Brandano Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Ayano Elson, Deborah Hay, evan ray suzuki and Alexa West. She is on teaching faculty at Movement Research and Pageant, and rarely/sometimes teaches Comedy Pilates. www.ameliakh.com
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.
OPEN STAGE | Spring Movement: Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Margot Mae, and Rosalie Yu
Demetris Charalambous. Photo by Nicolas Karatzas.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, March 13 at 7 P.M.
Sat, March 14 at 7 P.M.
CPR’s long-running Spring 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 Spring Movement 2026: Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Margot Mae, and Rosalie Yu.
This year, for the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2025 and Spring Movement 2026, with each program presenting five short works. The Fall Movement 2025/Spring Movement 2026 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Shawn Escarciga, Dominica Greene, Amelia Heintzelman, and Muyassar Kurdi.
PROGRAM
Demetris Charalambous: GLIESER
GLIESER is an anthropological study, an auto-fictional dance theatre grounded in both Cypriot mythology and my personal invented cosmology. Drawing from my experience growing up in Cyprus, a country in the Levantine sea that has been under illegal occupation for the past 51 years, I am reflecting on borders and how they dictate the movement of a body desiring liberation. Through the use of scores, found objects and live cello, I build a live composition of contradictions, one where pleasure becomes a ritual for transcendence. This work reflects on my summers growing up in Cyprus, the realization of my queerness, fleeing the army when I was 18, crossing an illegal border in search of love through Grindr, and heartbreak under an incessantly searing sun. This liturgy of pleasure untangles my ancestral history from its colonial knots and, through a queer lens, reimagines the ancient practices and cosmologies lost.
Morgan Gregory: yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin
yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin is a performance-based work that seeks to understand the initiation of intimacy, shame, stimulation, and empathy for self between the crossroads of native spiritual worship and Eurocentric understandings of religion, specifically examining the afro-music subcultures of gospel and hip-hop. It questions how braggadocious-ness exists in communities of generational (monetary, spiritual, social, ecological) lack. In development, yo yo rappin is a lifestyle you know what the fuck im sayin examines, in a deeper context, the matriarchal role of Black women within the binary of realism and the metaphysical, as well as oral sources and histories of Black, Southern Christian religious communities, pulling from Gregory’s own experiences as an artist raised in southern Virginia. This piece will specifically utilize a cast of bodies with linages from dance and theatre. Multimedia components and archives of southern Black churches will be featured, with a performance of live mixing/ looping samples of original worship sounds, trap/hip-hop, and synth.
Umber Majeed: Atomi Daamaki Wali Mohabbat (The Atomically Explosive Love)
A multi-chapter animation that speaks to questions of nationalism, state propaganda and aesthetics, community, and self through speculative fiction. The narrative chronicles the history of nuclear power in Pakistan, the first ‘Muslim nuclear state’. In developing this artwork, Majeed used state and familial archives to intersect specific historical moments, starting with the successful nuclear tests performed in the 1990’s to the conception/destruction of a military-state monument, Chaghi Monument Hill. The reading through the female (herself), allows for a queering and alternative historicizing of South Asia in an age of global nationalist uprisings.
Margot Mae: Sound Girls Gone Wild
Sound Girls Gone Wild is a celebration of labor and audio, a live documentary, and a pseudo-mythology arising from the choreographies of women working in audio - and people working generally - all brought together through the healing power of chicks and freaks singing songs and playing rock and roll. Microphones, speakers, cables, a death, a birth, the beginning, sirens, heavy metal (and more!) all swirl around the question "what if working people rise together?" Featuring Martita Abril, geo blake, Reverend Micah Busey, Makenna Finch, Sophie Glaesemann, Anaís Gomez, Rachel Keane, Margot Mae, and Kyra Tantau.
Rosalie Yu: Fascination is the Force which Enters the Eyes and Penetrates the Heart
Fascination is the Force which Enters the Eyes and Penetrates the Heart is an experiment in the relationship between simulation, artifice, and imagination. Through voice, sound, and the mind’s eye, this piece explores the material and psychic terrain of illusion and experience throughout history.
In collaboration with performing artist Stevie Knauss and sound artist Luke Santy. Costume design by Zachary Delamater.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Demetris Charalambous: All my life I’ve been island hopping. I was born and raised in Cyprus, an island in the Mediterranean Levant. I grew up on the fringes of Nicosia, which is the last divided capital city in the world. In it there is a buffer zone – also known as the "Green Line” – which is a demilitarized no man's land that cuts straight through Nicosia's heart and across the whole island. I moved to New York, the city of islands, when I was nineteen. As an artist, my current favorite materials to work with are light and the body. Maybe it’s because the sun in Cyprus feels closer than anywhere else on Earth; I spent my summers growing up with a dry burning. I used to wish I could take the sun in my mouth and drown it out with saliva like a lozenge. I wanted that fiery cool breath.
Morgan Gregory (b. Richmond, Virginia) is a transdisciplinary performer/choreographer/… who focuses on reimagining Afro-diasporic imagery through a futurist lens. In her choreographic and performance work development, she constantly explores ancestral importance, and in this continuous effort of understanding, she dreams within intersectional identities. Morgan is a graduate of the Ailey/Fordham BFA program and was honored as a Denise Jefferson Memorial Scholar, majoring in African and African American Studies and Dance. Morgan has toured with Julien Creuzet/Ana Pi on a multi-disciplinary project, Algorithm Ocean True Blood Moves, to the Dakar Biennale, National Opera & Ballet, Brown University, and Performa Biennale. In 2024, she was named a recipient of the LiftOff Residency with New Dance Alliance, a fellow with The Performance Project-University Settlement, and a BAX Space Residency Grantee. Morgan will present research explorations of the Afrofuturist movement and a dance-focused film entitled Afrofuturism: The Black Body as an Immortal Canvas of Storytelling, Resistance, and Mysticism at the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD-St. Louis, Missouri), in November 2025. She has premiered performances at Mark Morris, Triskelion Arts, Movement Research at Judson Church, Arts on Site, University Settlement, and more, all of which range from proscenium-situated to community-centered cyphers and video installations.
Umber Majeed (b. New York, NY, 1989) is a multidisciplinary visual artist and educator. Her writing, performance, and animation work engage with familial archives to explore Pakistani state, urban, and digital infrastructure through a feminist lens. Majeed has presented her work in solo exhibitions at Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2025); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2022); 1708 Gallery, Richmond, Virginia (2021); and the Rubber Factory, New York (2018). Majeed is a recipient of the HWP Fellowship from Ashkal Alwan, Beirut, Lebanon (2017); the Refiguring Feminist Futures Web Residency from Akademie Schloss Solitude & ZKM, Germany (2018); the Digital Earth Fellowship from Hivos, the Netherlands (2018-19) and Technology Residency from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY (2020).
Margot Mae is an artist and technician working primarily in music, sound, movement, and event production. She works mostly in live audio, as well as video and lighting, at the Judson Church, Here Arts, Roulette, Littlefield, and is available for hire for performances, events, weddings, etc. Her performance work involves skateboarding, punk rock, improvisational scores for voice, instruments, and movement, making labor visible, and lectures on queer physics/science. Her main band is Lavender Tops, and she performs solo as Tomboy Margot.
Rosalie Yu: I am a Taipei-born artist based in Brooklyn. My practice spans video, installation, performance, and research-based processes. Recently, I have been drawing on escapist fantasies, bootleg aesthetics, and geopolitics as a way to reflect on personal histories and their entanglements with present and future worlds. I am a year 6 and 8 member at New Museum’s NEW INC (incubator for artists), in collaboration with Rhizome, and a tech resident at Pioneer Works in 2018. I am currently teaching at NYU Tisch’s ITP/IMA.
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2025/SPRING MOVEMENT 2026 PANELISTS
Shawn Escarciga is a multidisciplinary artist, administrator, and connector existing somewhere between performance, comedy, the internet, and community-engaged work. Shawn explores themes of labor, class, and power, questioning value systems and hierarchies, and ways to balance being silly with tangible moves towards collective liberation.
Their work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces across New York City, the U.S., and internationally. Shawn is a recipient of a Franklin Furnace FUND grant and has done other cool stuff too.
They ran and organized the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund in 2020 which gave out nearly $250k in direct support to artists across the 5 boroughs. Their memes have been seen in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, in projects with What Would an HIV Doula Do?, at protests, galleries, and on the phones of f-slurs worldwide.
Shawn is currently the Development Director at Visual AIDS, an arts non-profit that supports artists living with HIV and the legacies of those lost to AIDS.
Dominica Greene is a movement-based conceptual artist, dancer, and facilitator residing on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people. She creates body and time-based multidisciplinary environments which interrogate cycles of life, death, and love. Harnessing the elements, spirit, and womanness into an existence rooted in love, community, and regeneration, her work seeks to reflect nature –human and otherwise– as a way of highlighting humanity, the stark similarities in our differences, and our inheritances as legacies.
Amelia Heintzelman is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has been supported by residencies, commissions, and grants through Center for Performance Research, Draftwork at Danspace Project, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Issue Project Room, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pageant, Snug Harbor, and UCross Foundation. She has worked as a performer for Juli Brandano Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Ayano Elson, Deborah Hay, evan ray suzuki and Alexa West. She is on teaching faculty at Movement Research and Pageant, and rarely/sometimes teaches Comedy Pilates. www.ameliakh.com
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.
OPEN STUDIOS | Itohan Edoloyi, Kate McGee, and Jacqueline Scaletta, curated by Ann Marie Dorr
Ann Marie Dorr. Photo by Megan Culton.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Theatermaker and playwright Ann Marie Dorr curates OPEN STUDIOS, thinking through how we can bring the outside or the inside-out parts of our practices to light. They have invited lighting designers Itohan Edoloyi, Kate McGee, and Jacqueline Scaletta to share works inspired by this notion, to see what kinds of conversations can emerge.
PROGRAM
Kate McGee: Title TBD
An attempt to document an ethnic cleansing as it unfolds using video game engines and audience participation.
Jacqueline Scaletta: Sublimation
A performance of desperation, exploring doom, the desire to dissolve, and the afterlife through sound, text, and light.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ann Marie Dorr is a theatermaker and playwright. Their work has been presented at The Exponential Festival, Life World, Atlantic Stage 2, NACL, The Brick, Soho Rep, and The Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX). Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab 17/19. Associated Artist of Target Margin Theater. Brooklyn College Playwriting MFA ‘25.
Kate McGee (Lighting Designer, she/her) is an Obie Award winning lighting designer, new media artist, and deviser of theater works. She recently concluded a years long world tour as Lighting Designer for Esperanza Spalding and off brand gods dance. Recent Off Broadway – Bowl EP (Vineyard Theater), The Beastiary (Ars Nova), I’m Revolting (Atlantic Theater Company), Snatch Adams, and Notes on Killing... (Soho Rep), The Hang (Here Arts), and Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey (La Mama). She was a 2022/2023 artist in residence at Soho Rep where she developed the VR piece Girl Mode, since seen at Fabric Arts Workshop and the ASU’s MIX Center. Kate devised and designed several pieces with Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey that have premiered in Europe and NYC, including while you were partying at Soho Rep and prottec//attac at the Deutschesschauspielhaus Hamburg. katemcgee.xyz
Jacqueline Scaletta is a Brooklyn-based lighting designer and performing artist. Her design work has appeared in New York at The Brick Theater, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Target Margin Theater, HERE Arts Center, Life World, 3 Dollar Bill, The Tank, MITU580, CultureLab LIC, Loading Dock Theater, Lenfest Center for the Arts, as well Le Mondo in Baltimore, MD. She is the technical supervisor of Brooklyn Art Haus in Williamsburg and a current board member of What Will the Neighbors Say? theater company. She cares about spectacle. jacscalettalighting.com | @jacqueline.scalett
@CPR | The R.E.A.C.H. Collective: Matriarch
The R.E.A.C.H. Collective and Seaux Fontenot
Tickets
$25 General Admission
Purchase Tickets
ABOUT
Matriarch is a full-length, two-act concert dance work that centers Black women and the roots they plant within families, lineages, and communities. Grounded in the belief that legacy lives in the body, Matriarch invites audiences to reflect on inheritance, memory, and what it means to be held—physically, emotionally, and spiritually—by those who came before us.
Blending original choreography, spoken word, and the voice of a guest choreographer, Matriarch weaves concert dance and storytelling to create an intimate, community-rooted experience. Movement serves as both archive and offering, revealing how Black women carry wisdom, grief, joy, and resilience across generations.
Act I: Received
The first act explores perception, acceptance, and the ways in which we receive the world and one another. Through layered movement and narrative, Received examines how grief can surface in many forms—quiet, explosive, tender, unresolved—and how it shapes our understanding of self and lineage. This act asks audiences to sit with what has been passed down, both the visible and the unspoken, honoring the complexity of inheritance without rushing toward resolution.
Act II: I Know You
The second act shifts in tone and energy, using the full spectrum of emotion to move toward recognition and celebration. I Know You is rooted in clarity—not as a punishment, but as power. Here, the work embraces joy, release, humor, strength, and connection, affirming the beauty of being seen and known. The act culminates in a collective celebration of Black womanhood, community, and the freedom that comes with understanding one’s place within the lineage.
Together, the two acts create a journey from reflection to affirmation, from receiving to knowing. Matriarch is not only a performance—it is a communal experience that honors the past, acknowledges the present, and gestures toward a future shaped by clarity, care, and connection.
CREDITS
Performers: Sophia Addison, Najah Aldridge, Amira Davis, Adia Edmondson, Tyra Millines, Gryffin Tate, Darren Justice, Brianna Stennett, Paige Stewart, and Alyssa Wheeler
Choreography: Dominique M. Fontenot
SUPPORT
The R.E.A.C.H. Collective is a sponsored artist with The Performance Zone Inc (dba The Field), a not-for-profit, tax-exempt, 501(c)(3) organization serving the arts community. Contributions to The Field earmarked for The R.E.A.C.H. Collective are tax-deductible to the extent allowed by law. For more information about The Field contact: The Field, 228 Park Ave S, Suite 97217, New York, NY 10003, phone: 212-691-6969. A copy of our latest financial report may be obtained from The Field or from the Office of Attorney General, Charities Bureau, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.
OPEN LAB | Seething Spiral with Valentina Baché
Photo by Robin Michals.
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
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2026 AiR Valentina Baché presents a guided workshop of group and paired improvisational exercises that use movement and voice to build trust while encouraging confession, confrontation, and communion with strangers. Through escalating physicality and vocal intensity, participants will develop strategies to access states of raw honesty and heightened presence, culminating in a sustained spinning practice, with guidance on technique, balance, and managing nausea, inviting participants into a trance state that activates the vestibular system, increases adaptability, cognition, and spatial awareness, and offers a sense of physical exhilaration.
Framed through ancestral and spiritual perspectives on circularity and rotation, the spinning practice connects participants to natural cycles and collective flowstates, cleansing and recentering both the body and the shared space, and leaving participants grounded, present, and more deeply connected to their authentic selves and to one another.
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 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 | Latif Askia Ba and Sophie Frizzell: Dancing the Pause
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Latif Askia Ba. Photo by Tarek Dekkaki. Courtesy the artist.
Join CPR 2025 AiR Latif Askia Ba and dancer Sophie Frizzell for Dancing the Pause, an evening in the choreic period. In 2025, Latif published a second book of poetry, The Choreic Period, as part of his MFA Thesis. His poetry exclusively uses periods as punctuation to explore lyrical embodiments of disability. In this practice, the period takes on the possibility of multidirectionality and challenges normative ways of thinking about punctuation. More broadly, The Choreic Period asks, how do we pause? How does pausing relate to sense-making?
Thinking about questions of time, (multi)directionality, and what it means to use rhythm to “locate oneself”, Sophie explores how Latif’s poetry might be translated to movement. Together, they invite the audience to discover their own rhythm of being.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Latif Askia Ba is a poet from Brooklyn, NY. Dancing in and out of various forms, he tries again and again to realize the music of the disabled body-mind-universe. He’s a poetry editor at Big Score. His newest collection, The Choreic Period, was published by Milkweed Editions.
Sophie Frizzell is a dancer from Charleston, South Carolina. Formally trained in ballet, she resonates with works that find beauty in the mundane and humor in unexpected places. She received her B.A. in Religious Studies from Hunter College in 2024. Sophie is also a regular contributor for Culturebot, an online publication dedicated to long-form theater and dance review.
@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.
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.
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.
OPEN DOOR | Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González, curated by 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 utilizing various insects placed in jars from which we will absorb "energy food" 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 LAB | The Water Inside Our Bodies: Dancing Stillness and Silence with Yuki Kawahisa
Courtesy of Yuki Kawahisa
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
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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.
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 STUDIOS | Lineage Is a Verb: Siobhan Juanita Brown, Jolie Cloutier, and Jessica Ranville, curated by Ty Defoe
Courtesy of Ty Defoe
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Ty Defoe brings together Siobhan Juanita Brown, 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.
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
Siobhan Juanita Brown (Keesuty8ee Elm) is a citizen of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe from Roxbury, MA, and lives on her ancestral homelands on the southern coast of Cape Cod. She holds a BFA in Performing Arts and African American Studies from Emerson College and is a graduate of the A.R.T. Institute for Advanced Theater Training at Harvard University. Her performance credits include The America Play (A.R.T.), The Emancipation of Valet de Chambre (Cleveland Play House), American Dreams: Lost and Found (The Acting Company), Medea and Antony and Cleopatra (Actors’ Shakespeare Project), and Funnyhouse of a Negro (Brandeis Theatre Company), as well as multiple seasons with Commonwealth Shakespeare Company. Siobhan is a playwright and arts educator. Her play A Piece of Silver is based on recorded conversations with her Mashpee Wampanoag and African American grandmothers. She has worked in arts education leadership at Citi Performing Arts Center and Actors’ Shakespeare Project. A student of the Wôpanâak language since 2005, she was a language apprentice and founding teaching team member of Weetumuw Katnuhtôhtâkamuq, the first Wôpanâak language immersion school, and is Montessori certified (ages 3–6). She co-founded Nutahkeemun Artist Collective and is a member of the Wampanoag Nation Singers and Dancers recently premiered We Are The Land.
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 | ...Almost Right Away: Moving Company with Erica Enriquez
Peels - Photographed by Tif Ng
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
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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 an acoustic trio performing a set of 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 DOOR | Cameron Barnett: Ending Explained
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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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.
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.
OPEN STUDIOS | Garrett Allen, Matthew Jamal, and Liana Zhen-ai, curated by Nazareth Hassan
Nazareth Hassan. Photo by Alexander Mejía/Bergamot.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!
Director and performance artist Garrett Allen, composer Matthew Jamal, and choreographer Liana Zhen-ai are all artists who have an active relationship with shame in their performances. They achieve striking balance between taming and succumbing to trauma, while demonstrating the fragility of ego and its subsequent death. This is where hope is born, as these artists offer us a space to process what often remains repressed. Multidisciplinary theater maker Nazareth Hassan has curated artists who explore shame as a social emotion, in which the performance of self becomes dissociative.
PROGRAM
Garrett Allen: rewild
rewild is an embodied experiment in undoing. Shedding and returning. Confronting fear and unleashing instinct. Freedom lives in letting go and letting loose.
Featuring music by SAINTCLAIR.
Matthew Jamal: Skipping Service
A reflection on gender, family and religion performed through use of cello, voice and electronics.
Liana Zhen-ai: disaster whore
disaster whore is a dance theater lullaby for catastrophists, rubberneckers, and anyone who lives more readily in fantasy. Performed by Liana Zhen-ai, Felix Bryan, Marcus Sarjeant, and Luca Devlyn Sierra, and featuring dramaturgy by Sam Morreale, disaster whore worries about a life spent waiting for tragedy to strike, and the possibility of finding pleasure in the anticipation.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Nazareth Hassan is a writer, director & musician. Performance and theater works include Practice at Playwrights Horizons, Bowl EP at The Vineyard Theater, Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, Security Theater at Judson Memorial Church, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their 2nd book, Slow mania, was published in 2025 by Futurepoem. In 2022-2023, they were the dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London. They are currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. They were a 2023–25 Jerome Hill artist fellow and the 2024-25 Tow Playwright in Residence at The Vineyard Theatre. www.nazarethhassan.com
Garrett Allen is a performance artist and director. Their interdisciplinary practice employs liveness, embodied inquiry, and conceptual experimentation to produce impermanent, excavating, and synergistic experiences. Performance works include would you mind? could you? can I ask? is it possible? (HERE Arts Center), CRASH CONSCIOUSNESS (Public Assistants), BODY100 (Prelude Festival), BLK MLK/blackmilk (Spectrum NYC), and We Were All Rooting For You (Flamboyan Theater). They could list more projects, residencies, or credentials. They are unsure what this gives you. Something. Or maybe nothing. They are ruminating on beauties and brutalities of being. What do you think? Are you feeling it? The beauty? The brutality? Would you tell them? Would you tell me?
Matthew Jamal is a New York–based performance artist and composer whose interdisciplinary practice merges sound, movement, and visual mediums. From the ages of 14-18, he was primarily a street performer improvising through use of live looping and double bass in Washington DC and New York. Now, their career includes collaborations with Madonna, Benjamin Clementine, Obongjayar, J’Nai Bridges, Jason Moran, and Jacob Jonas The Company. As a composer and producer Jamal’s credits include works by Annahstasia, Cleo Reed, and Cktrl. His work has been featured at major events such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Free Arts, the Gucci Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and covered by the likes of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Notion Magazine. Rejecting genre as a limiting label, Jamal describes his music as queer, fluid and non-conforming. He holds a BM in Classical and Jazz Double Bass Performance from the Manhattan School of Music.
Liana Zhen-ai is an interdisciplinary artist and dancer from Los Angeles, CA. Liana’s work uses the lenses of new materialism and object-oriented ontology to interrogate shame, nature, and narrative. Her dancing has been featured in Vogue US, NOWNESS, Dance Art Journal and Face Magazine. She is currently a touring artist with Holly Blakey's Lo, set to premiere at ICA London in July 2026. Liana's writing has appeared in IMPULSE Magazine, Naya Magazine, CultureBot, and Dance Art Journal, and she has guest lectured at NYU and Marymount Manhattan College, presenting on disability and modification as glitch; the troubled boundaries of body and environment in dance; and defining choreographies of the global south.
Felix Bryan is a Brooklyn-based artist, born and raised in Boulder, Colorado. felix’s work and collaborations have been presented at Fridman Gallery, QUEER NOISE Festival, The Rooted Space, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s Professional Program, and on film. His choreographic practice centers nonlinearity, trans embodiment, and experiential storytelling. As a freelance artist, felix has performed works by artists including Sidra Bell, Katherine Maxwell, Bill T. Jones, Johannes Wieland, Robyn Mineko Williams, Jenna Riegel, Rena Butler, and Peter Chu. Currently, felix dances with Sidra Bell Dance New York and HIVEWILD.
Marcus Sarjeant is a 25 year old freelance dancer based in Brooklyn. In 2022 he graduated Summa Cum Laude from SUNY Purchase with a BFA in Dance. He has performed the works of choreographers such as Annamari Keskinen, Connie Shiau, Kayla Farrish, Hofesh Shechter, and Johannes Wieland, in addition to many New York based companies. He most currently is a member of Le Ballet Fou, Verbal Animal, and Eni Artist Collective.
@CPR | ARESPHERE and BODYSONNET: Filling the Shell
Photographer: Audrey Chou
Assistant: Lingyi
Tickets
$15, $25, $30 Sliding Scale
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Moving across generations, Filling the Shell traces fragmented memories, inherited emotions, and embodied histories. The work unfolds through a hybrid performance language that merges choreographic research with interactive technologies, sound, and visual environments. Rooted in experimentation, Filling the Shell exists as an evolving research project. Through iterative processes of movement exploration, sensory feedback, and technological intervention, ARESPHERE X BODYSONNET seeks to examine how identity is shaped, lost, and reassembled within and beyond the body with the continuous development of the evening length piece.
The production length is 75 minutes
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Director & Movement Director: Audrey Chou
Producer: Audrey Chou
Projection Designer: Audrey Chou
Sound Designer: Helen Hong & Audrey Chou
Set Designer: Ant Ma
Set Assistant: Chia-yuan Chuang
Technical Director: Steven Brenman
Costume Designer: Van Anh Le
Costume Design Assistant: Giang Luu
Accessory Designer: Song Kim
Creative Technology – Controller Integration
Fabrication: Cassidy Chen
Interaction Development: Audrey Chou
Production Support: CPR rep
Lighting Designer: Yiyuan Li
Choreographer & Creative Supervisor: BODYSONNET: Moscelyne Parke Harrison & Mio Ishikawa
Dancers: Quaba Venza Ernest, Dava Huesca, Andrea Farley Shimota, Bret Yamanaka, Steve Bangerter, Moscelyne ParkeHarrison, Mio Ishikawa
Performer: Juliette Kenn de Balinthazy
Marketing & Design: Audrey Chou
Photographer: Audrey Chou
BTS Photographer: Lingyi
Full Production: ARESPHERE
Ticketing & Front of House: CPR Crew
ABOUT BODYSONNET
Founded in 2019, BODYSONNET is a company based in New York committed to making site responsive work on an international scale. Led by Co-Founders Moscelyne ParkeHarrison (Artistic Director), Mio Ishikawa (Associate Artistic Director), and Sean Lammer (Creative Consultant), BODYSONNET initiates projects that center dance to yield works that are highly physical and unique to the communities with which we engage. Our work demonstrates the intersection of movement with many mediums and enacts zero waste consciousness through collaboration with local artists and institutions. We redefine the viewer’s experience by developing innovative work that reinforces our shared humanity.
ABOUT ARESPHERE
ARESPHERE is a 360 real-time performance and interactive experience production studio specialize in time-based media and immersive production.
Founded in 2022, ARESPHERE aims to partner with emerging B2B Founders by BIPOC Creatives for international production across mediums of fashion, film, creative tech, dance, fine arts, sound, and media.
@CPR | Mackenzie Thomas: I SAID WHAT I SAID
Tickets
$15 General Admission
Purchase Tickets
“I SAID WHAT I SAID” is a new performance by writer and artist Mackenzie Thomas, in which she will revisit and analyze everything she uploaded onto her Twitter account, @evilmackenzie in the year 2025. Thomas will read every tweet she posted throughout the year, accompanied by the media from her archive (personal videos and retweeted content included). Throughout the performance, she will share twelve original short essays—one for each month—offering an intensely personal perspective on the content, her personal life + heart, and the internet.
OPEN DOOR | The Stage Protects Us (VIRTUAL EVENT)
Courtesy Solidarity Organizing Initiative.
UPDATE: This event has been moved to Zoom due to inclement weather.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Calling all artists and culture workers to join us for a day of creative action for immigration justice! Learn how to stand up to unconstitutional policies and pledge to collectively ensure our performance spaces are havens for vulnerable communities - from the lobby to the stage. This half-day program for performing artists and culture workers will include excerpts from the play How to Melt ICE by Amalia Oliva Rojas to jumpstart a deep dive into production processes that center immigrant stories, action-generating workshops, Know Your Rights rehearsals and "on your feet" bystander trainings.
Organized by CPR - Center for Performance Research, Solidarity Organizing Initiative, White Bird Productions with Amalia Oliva Rojas, Elena Araoz and Claudia Acosta.
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 | Metamorphosis Dancers Collective: Swimming in the Sky and An Odyssey
Image Credits: Quratulain Mir and Hannan Mir
Friday, January 16, 2026
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Tickets
$30 General Admission
$20 Reduced Price (for artists, low-income, and families purchasing multiple tickets)
Purchase Tickets
Please join Metamorphosis Dancers Collective in our Inaugural Showcase @CPR.
Metamorphosis Dancers Collective (MDC) is an emerging company of committed movement artists who believe audiences are hungry for dance that engages the imagination and reflects our communities. Our Inaugural Showcase will feature two works: An Odyssey by MDC Artistic Director Allana Loraine and Swimming in the Sky by MDC members Olivia Kleven and Nadia Benes, in collaboration with Emma Eileen. The evening will culminate in an exciting opportunity for the audience to learn a meaningful gesture from our performance, one we hope you will carry with you as an empowering token of human resilience.
Dance belongs to the community, so we invite all in our community to come join us in celebration of Metamorphosis Dancers Collective Inaugural Showcase, where we hope to inspire you to get out there and move.
FEATURING METAMORPHOSIS DANCERS COLLECTIVE ARTSITS
Allana Loraine – Director
Nadia Benes
Tyler Brunson
Danielle Goodman
Olivia Kleven
Verena Lee
Kristi Ann Scopfer
Mirai Shinde
With Guest Artists
Janae Bonnen
Emma Eileen
Special Thanks to Anabella Lenzu, Hannan Mir, and Srikrithi Srinivasan for your generous support.
Please visit www.metamorphosisdance.co for more on Metamorphosis Dancers Collective.
@CPR | Metamorphosis Dancers Collective: Swimming in the Sky and An Odyssey
Image Credits: Quratulain Mir and Hannan Mir
Friday, January 16, 2026
Saturday, January 17, 2026
Tickets
$30 General Admission
$20 Reduced Price (for artists, low-income, and families purchasing multiple tickets)
Purchase Tickets
Please join Metamorphosis Dancers Collective in our Inaugural Showcase @CPR.
Metamorphosis Dancers Collective (MDC) is an emerging company of committed movement artists who believe audiences are hungry for dance that engages the imagination and reflects our communities. Our Inaugural Showcase will feature two works: An Odyssey by MDC Artistic Director Allana Loraine and Swimming in the Sky by MDC members Olivia Kleven and Nadia Benes, in collaboration with Emma Eileen. The evening will culminate in an exciting opportunity for the audience to learn a meaningful gesture from our performance, one we hope you will carry with you as an empowering token of human resilience.
Dance belongs to the community, so we invite all in our community to come join us in celebration of Metamorphosis Dancers Collective Inaugural Showcase, where we hope to inspire you to get out there and move.
FEATURING METAMORPHOSIS DANCERS COLLECTIVE ARTSITS
Allana Loraine – Director
Nadia Benes
Tyler Brunson
Danielle Goodman
Olivia Kleven
Verena Lee
Kristi Ann Scopfer
Mirai Shinde
With Guest Artists
Janae Bonnen
Emma Eileen
Special Thanks to Anabella Lenzu, Hannan Mir, and Srikrithi Srinivasan for your generous support.
Please visit www.metamorphosisdance.co for more on Metamorphosis Dancers Collective.
OPEN LAB | MAJOR: Teamwork with Ogemdi Ude
Photo by Fabian Hammerl.
Free, RSVP required (limited audience)
RSVP
Join Director/Choreographer and 2025 Technical Resident Ogemdi Ude, Dance Captain Selah Hampton, and Archivist Myssi Robinson for a workshop during which they will teach majorette technique and choreography, and introduce participants to The Chord Archive and its methodologies.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, and a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
Technical Residency: Ogemdi Ude (closed to the public)
Photo by Fabian Hammerl.
The Technical Residency is closed to the public.
CPR welcomes Ogemdi Ude for a Fall 2025 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 MAJOR, a dance theater project exploring the physicality, history, sociopolitics, and interiority of majorette dance, a form that originated in the American South within Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the 1960s. These Black femme teams accompanied by marching bands created a movement style that requires master showmanship with allegiance to count, undulation, groove, and sensual yet strong performativity. In MAJOR, six Black femmes embrace majorette form - a fundamental relic of Black girlhood - to pursue the intimate journey of returning to bodies they thought lost. Experiments in improvised and verbatim language intertwine with a music score that integrates Southern rap, horns, drumlines, and melodic R&B and soul by Lambkin. The Chord Archive is showcased alongside performances, a physical and digital documentation of the creative process and personal historical accounts from former majorette dancers. A fierce investigation of physical memory, sexuality, sensuality, and community, MAJOR is a nuanced love letter to the folks who taught the team how to be proudly Black and proudly femme.
The Technical Residency will culminate in an OPEN LAB workshop in which Ude, Dance Captain Selah Hampton, and Archivist Myssi Robinson will teach majorette technique and choreography, and introduce participants to The Chord Archive and its methodologies, on December 20, 2025. Tickets and more information here.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, BRIC, ISSUE Project Room, Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Center for Performance Research, and for BAM's DanceAfrica festival. She is a 2025 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Choreography, 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria in Choreography, 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2024 NEFA National Dance Project Production Grant recipient, and a Live Feed Residency Artist at New York Live Arts. She has been a 2024/2025 BAX Artist-in-Residence, 2024-2025 Leslie Lohman Artist Fellow, 2022-2024 Movement Research Artist-in-Residence, 2021 danceWEB Scholar, 2021 Laundromat Project Create Change Artist-in-Residence, and a 2019-2020 Center for Ballet and the Arts at NYU Resident Fellow. In January 2022 she appeared on the cover of Dance Magazine for their annual “25 to Watch” issue. Most recently, she has published a book Watch Me in a collection edited by Thomas DeFrantz and Annie-B Parson: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press.
@CPR | Dale Ratcliff & Nikki Theroux: The Art of Carrying
Photo credit: Joan Dwiartanto
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Sunday, December 14, 2025
General Admission: $25
Purchase Tickets
“The Art of Carrying” follows two characters in a world turned upside down, each navigating shared experiences through their own distinct lens. Through moments of embrace, resistance, and mutual support, they explore what it means to carry and be carried.
An exploration of the invisible threads that bind all beings to each other and to the Earth. It speaks to a kind of universal intimacy, one that transcends physical presence and emphasizes the spiritual and ecological ties that weave through every aspect of existence. In this way, the work invites audiences to reflect on the ways in which we are constantly impacting and healing one another, even in the subtlest of gestures.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dale Ratcliff is a dance artist and choreographer based between Toronto, Canada, and Detroit, Michigan. He trained in Ballet and Contemporary dance at Steps on Broadway in New York City. While living in New York, Dale performed in works by Julia Ehrstrand, Brice Mousset, Dante Brown, and Jennifer Archibald, as well as internationally in creations by Emma Evelein, presented in venues across Germany and Amsterdam. Since 2017, Dale has been developing and presenting his own choreographic work in venues including Westbeth, Triskelion Arts, The Tank, and Dixon Place. He is also the co-founder of Wildflower Dance Collective, alongside long-time collaborator Nikki Theroux, with whom he has been creating since 2018. Together, they are currently developing their new work, Return, supported by Moulin/Belle in France for further choreographic research and creation.
Nikki Theroux is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Marymount Manhattan College and has additionally studied in Israel and Montreal. Nikki has performed and presented work in venues including the Park Avenue Armory, the Joyce Theater, Westbeth, Triskelion, and Bryant Park. Additionally, Nikki has worked with Doron Perk’s More Fish Dance Company and Soluq Dance Theater. She is a co-founder of Wildflower Collective, alongside her longtime collaborator, Dale Ratcliff. The collective’s creative process has been supported by Leimay’s Incubator Program, Moulin/Belle, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Inspired by her work as a dance and movement artist, Nikki is currently in training to become a practitioner of the Ilan Lev Method.
SUPPORT
The Art of Carrying” is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
@CPR | Dale Ratcliff & Nikki Theroux: The Art of Carrying
Photo credit: Joan Dwiartanto
Saturday, December 13, 2025
Sunday, December 14, 2025
General Admission: $25
Purchase Tickets
“The Art of Carrying” follows two characters in a world turned upside down, each navigating shared experiences through their own distinct lens. Through moments of embrace, resistance, and mutual support, they explore what it means to carry and be carried.
An exploration of the invisible threads that bind all beings to each other and to the Earth. It speaks to a kind of universal intimacy, one that transcends physical presence and emphasizes the spiritual and ecological ties that weave through every aspect of existence. In this way, the work invites audiences to reflect on the ways in which we are constantly impacting and healing one another, even in the subtlest of gestures.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dale Ratcliff is a dance artist and choreographer based between Toronto, Canada, and Detroit, Michigan. He trained in Ballet and Contemporary dance at Steps on Broadway in New York City. While living in New York, Dale performed in works by Julia Ehrstrand, Brice Mousset, Dante Brown, and Jennifer Archibald, as well as internationally in creations by Emma Evelein, presented in venues across Germany and Amsterdam. Since 2017, Dale has been developing and presenting his own choreographic work in venues including Westbeth, Triskelion Arts, The Tank, and Dixon Place. He is also the co-founder of Wildflower Dance Collective, alongside long-time collaborator Nikki Theroux, with whom he has been creating since 2018. Together, they are currently developing their new work, Return, supported by Moulin/Belle in France for further choreographic research and creation.
Nikki Theroux is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography from Marymount Manhattan College and has additionally studied in Israel and Montreal. Nikki has performed and presented work in venues including the Park Avenue Armory, the Joyce Theater, Westbeth, Triskelion, and Bryant Park. Additionally, Nikki has worked with Doron Perk’s More Fish Dance Company and Soluq Dance Theater. She is a co-founder of Wildflower Collective, alongside her longtime collaborator, Dale Ratcliff. The collective’s creative process has been supported by Leimay’s Incubator Program, Moulin/Belle, and the Brooklyn Arts Council. Inspired by her work as a dance and movement artist, Nikki is currently in training to become a practitioner of the Ilan Lev Method.
SUPPORT
The Art of Carrying” is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council.
@CPR | Jian Yi: Cloud States
photo credit: Yining Chi
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Friday, December 12, 2025
General Admission: $15-40 (sliding scale)
Purchase Tickets
Cloud States is a new multi-disciplinary dance project / film screening / live art performance by Jian Yi.
Cloud States is a tender, visually-rich meditation on loss / love and self-identity, inviting audiences to reflect, feel, and rediscover what connects us across borders and experience.
Interwoven by choreography sculpted in immersive light atmospheres to create a sensory experience questioning the boundaries between dream / memory and reality – the work features a talented ensemble of trans-national performers in a powerful combination of video art, dance, autobiographical / personal storytelling and immersive lighting / FX. The work explores intersectional-migrant identities, the process of reconciling living in a new time and place with our ancestral connections and familial memories – and creates an awareness / new perception of personal-yearning for the fragile beauty and nostalgia of living in the present time. Set across neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, the work is a love letter to the city of immigrants and new beginnings.
At its heart is a multi-channel video installation in the performance space – an epic-visual poem chronicling intimate portraits of personal / migrant storytelling, quiet moments of beauty and joy paired with live performers moving sensuously through shifting atmospheres of light / sound and psychic-emotional space. By merging poetic-filmic storytelling, immersive lighting design and dance, the piece creates a liminal space whereby memory, identity, and the present / past / future of all the experiential-moments of our lives as ‘lonely travellers’ through this world collide.
CREDITS
Choreographer / Writer / Director: Jian Yi
Performers: Yuxi Ma, Jian Yi
Cinematographer / Project Assistant: Yining Chi
Production / Lighting Designer: Tuçe Yasak
Producing Associate: Stephanie Acosta
ABOUT JIAN X YI
Through Jian Yi's multidisciplinary work of performance art / contemporary dance, video art/photography, new genres, installation art, and social sculpture – they seek to explore the experiential trauma of marginalized persons within our society, such as neurodiverse and queer people of color, and how we reflect on the broader human condition. Their practice is rooted in an ongoing enquiry into the ambiguities of emotional experience, and touches upon borderline states – considering Otherness, neurodivergence and alternative states of consciousness / being – in line with their continuing research focus on queer mental health. Jian Yi's work has been performed/exhibited internationally in locations such as New Museum, The Kitchen NYC, ACMI Melbourne, Buddies in Bad Times Toronto, Contact Manchester, CPT London, DanceLive Aberdeen, Summerhall, Dance Base Edinburgh, Tramway and Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow. They have been selected for awards / funding and artist residencies including with Cove Park, Tramway, Unlimited, Dance4, Dance Base, Made in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe / Summerhall, Take Me Somewhere Festival / Work Room Glasgow, Creative Scotland, NTS, Live Art Development Agency London, Movement Research NYC, Brooklyn Arts Council, Theatertreffen Berlin, People's History Museum Manchester, and Seventh Gallery Melbourne among others. In 2023, they curated / produced the second edition of Journey to the East Festival – featuring performing artists including Matt Mullican, Sung Im Her, River Lin, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas. jianxyi.com
OUR FUNDERS + SUPPORT
Jian Yi / Cloud States was awarded BAC's 2025 – ‘Creative Equations Fund: Cultural Heritage & Diversity + Dance’. Creative Equations Fund is sponsored by the Howard Gilman Foundation, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. Jian Yi is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist in Residence in support of the development of their project Cloud States, funded in part by the Jerome Foundation.
@CPR | Jian Yi: Cloud States
photo credit: Yining Chi
Thursday, December 11, 2025
Friday, December 12, 2025
General Admission: $15-40 (sliding scale)
Purchase Tickets
Cloud States is a new multi-disciplinary dance project / film screening / live art performance by Jian Yi.
Cloud States is a tender, visually-rich meditation on loss / love and self-identity, inviting audiences to reflect, feel, and rediscover what connects us across borders and experience.
Interwoven by choreography sculpted in immersive light atmospheres to create a sensory experience questioning the boundaries between dream / memory and reality – the work features a talented ensemble of trans-national performers in a powerful combination of video art, dance, autobiographical / personal storytelling and immersive lighting / FX. The work explores intersectional-migrant identities, the process of reconciling living in a new time and place with our ancestral connections and familial memories – and creates an awareness / new perception of personal-yearning for the fragile beauty and nostalgia of living in the present time. Set across neighbourhoods in Brooklyn, the work is a love letter to the city of immigrants and new beginnings.
At its heart is a multi-channel video installation in the performance space – an epic-visual poem chronicling intimate portraits of personal / migrant storytelling, quiet moments of beauty and joy paired with live performers moving sensuously through shifting atmospheres of light / sound and psychic-emotional space. By merging poetic-filmic storytelling, immersive lighting design and dance, the piece creates a liminal space whereby memory, identity, and the present / past / future of all the experiential-moments of our lives as ‘lonely travellers’ through this world collide.
CREDITS
Choreographer / Writer / Director: Jian Yi
Performers: Yuxi Ma, Jian Yi
Cinematographer / Project Assistant: Yining Chi
Production / Lighting Designer: Tuçe Yasak
Producing Associate: Stephanie Acosta
ABOUT JIAN X YI
Through Jian Yi's multidisciplinary work of performance art / contemporary dance, video art / photography, new genres, installation art, and social sculpture – they seek to explore the experiential trauma of marginalized persons within our society, such as neurodiverse and queer people of color, and how we reflect on the broader human condition. Their practice is rooted in an ongoing enquiry into the ambiguities of emotional experience, and touches upon borderline states – considering Otherness, neurodivergence and alternative states of consciousness / being – in line with their continuing research focus on queer mental health. Jian Yi's work has been performed/exhibited internationally in locations such as New Museum, The Kitchen NYC, ACMI Melbourne, Buddies in Bad Times Toronto, Contact Manchester, CPT London, DanceLive Aberdeen, Summerhall, Dance Base Edinburgh, Tramway and Centre for Contemporary Arts Glasgow. They have been selected for awards / funding and artist residencies including with Cove Park, Tramway, Unlimited, Dance4, Dance Base, Made in Scotland at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe / Summerhall, Take Me Somewhere Festival / Work Room Glasgow, Creative Scotland, NTS, Live Art Development Agency London, Movement Research NYC, Brooklyn Arts Council, Theatertreffen Berlin, People's History Museum Manchester, and Seventh Gallery Melbourne among others. In 2023, they curated / produced the second edition of Journey to the East Festival – featuring performing artists including Matt Mullican, Sung Im Her, River Lin, and Keioui Keijaun Thomas.
OUR FUNDERS + SUPPORT
Jian Yi / Cloud States was awarded BAC's 2025 – ‘Creative Equations Fund: Cultural Heritage & Diversity + Dance’. Creative Equations Fund is sponsored by the Howard Gilman Foundation, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council. Jian Yi is a 2024-2026 Movement Research Artist in Residence in support of the development of their project Cloud States, funded in part by the Jerome Foundation.
OPEN STUDIOS | Maho Ogawa, Kate Williams, Rochelle Jamila, and AJ Wilmore, curated by mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks by Nir Arieli.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
mayfield brooks curates OPEN STUDIOS, inviting Kate Williams, Maho Ogawa, Rochelle Jamila, and AJ Wilmore to present work from their unique practices and experiments in dance & performance.
PROGRAM
Maho Ogawa: “Nothing to Watch”
“Nothing to Watch” is a performance inspired by Japanese Tea Ritual and Zen meditation.
Featuring Carolyn Hall, Annie MingHao Wang, Emily Young, and Maho Ogawa.
From Maho Ogawa: “In 2022, I began researching the Japanese Tea Ritual, visited Zen gardens and the historic Japanese Tea House, designed by the pioneer Tea Master, Sen-no Rikyu, in Kyoto. I then conducted a survey about people's daily rituals in New York to explore the connection between Japanese Tea / Zen culture and the local community in New York. Research and results from the survey, along with an overview of Japanese Tea Culture, and an interview with a Japanese Tea Master, were published as an online magazine, “a place where individuals become a whole,” by Culture Push.
At CPR, I'll invite dancers to experiment with incorporating the practice of Zen meditation into choreographic scores.”
Kate Williams: Tender and Technical
Featuring Reed Rushes and Iliana Penichet-Ramírez with Sound Design/Sound Mixing by Raphael Lelan-Cox.
"She opens her eyes and sees…everything
And she can’t believe it.
In her head her voice sounds loud, but it’s barely coming through, or maybe it is but it’s hard for her to tell.
She never got to say goodbye, and the feelings are starting to trickle through the cracks.
Maybe she waved and just can’t remember.
Through hyper femininity, the overdramatization of mundaneness, and humor I explore the grief within myself and within connection. With two dancers joining me, they are wearing white morph suits in order to blend in with the background; it’s an illusion-there’s someone there, but also no one there.
I reach my hand out to…
waiting………"
Rochelle Jamila: it’s easy to be soft, like cotton
In it's easy to be soft, like cotton Rochelle turns to her roots in the Mississippi delta to unravel and re-fabricate her relationship with cotton and cotton based textiles. The cotton plant has an over 5000 year history of cultivation and collaboration with humans, but for Black Americans with roots in the US South, cotton can evoke the traumas of enslavement, sharecropping, and Jim Crow. Rochelle channels the energy of this sacred plant, the Mother (Mississippi) River, and ancient textile practices to process this inherited dissonance and seek solace in cotton's soft and wise medicine.
AJ Wilmore: dolla party
dolla party is an attempt to recall dances AJ did outside of (in)formal dance training and a peek into the practices they were building as a young girl growing up in Philly. It guides the viewer through a night of clubbing at 12 years old—an activity where pre-teens and teenagers would attend late-night “dolla parties” in various makeshift venues around the city. This particular night unfolded in the basement of a home shared by several teenage brothers. The choreography also draws inspiration from the movements of the Fly Girls, the dance group featured on the 90s sketch comedy show In Living Color.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is currently a Creative Time Research & Development fellow. They love living by the sea.
Maho Ogawa is a Japanese-born multidisciplinary movement artist working in New York. Her work has delved into building a choreographic language based on nuances and isolated body movements, and she has built a database, "Minimum Movement Catalog". Ogawa uses body, video, text, computer programming, and audience-participatory methods to discover how relationships and the environment affect individual bodies consciously and subconsciously.
Her recent works partly decontextualize and research the minimum movement in Japanese tea culture. She crafts public events inspired by Japanese tea rituals to build new thinking methods about "silence," providing a quiet but active mindset to heal and unite the community.
Maho's works have been shown in Korea, Japan, and in the U.S., including Princeton University, Invisible Dog Art Center, JACK, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and Center for Performance Research, to name a few.
Ogawa is the recipient of the Artist-In-Residence program at Movement Research (2024-2026) and MOtiVe (2025-2026).
Kate Williams is a multi-media artist. Her work centers around movement improvisation and choreography as well as designing clothing. She started her process of “dance” in college, where she began her focus into narrative dialogues based on personal experiences. Through movement she has been making it a part of her practice to learn how to further express and delve into these experiences. She is a self-taught sewist, making her own clothing since high school.
Kate’s work is to merge her two practices at the center of expression—using clothing and wardrobe she creates as a sculptural element of her movement work. In addition to making her own costumes-she does commissioned seamstressing work: tailoring, personal commissions, and costuming entire shows.
She has performed in various places around New York City, and toured internationally. Currently, she is one half of the performance duo ‘Star & Stan,’ alongside her partner Reed Rushes. She is also a part of the management team, as well as a member, of Otion Front Studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She attended Bard College (May 2020) where she was a joint major of Dance and Human Rights with a concentration in Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Rochelle Jamila is a Brooklyn based multidisciplinary performer, dancemaker, and healing artist hailing from Memphis, Tennessee. Rochelle’s work imagines liberation and pleasure through human and ecological fertility, by sounding, dancing, and ritualizing the psychic worlds of women. She is particularly inspired by her heritage and upbringing in the Mississippi River Delta. Her work has been presented in Tennessee, New York, the Netherlands, and at venues such as Judson Church, Snug Harbor Botanical Garden, Triskelion Arts, The Buckman Theater, University of Amsterdam, and Harriet’s Gun Dance Film Festival. Rochelle was a 2024 Resident at A Studio in the Woods, a recipient of Brooklyn Arts Council’s 2024 Creative Equations Cultural Heritage & Dance Fund, and a 2025 Movement Research Van Lier Fellow. She has performed in works by Ebony Noelle Golden, Adia Whitaker, Jasmine Hearn, Beth Gill, Ambika Raina, and Maria Bauman among others. She is currently a member of Trisha Brown Dance Company and Reggie Wilson Fist & Heel Performance Group. Rochelle graduated from Columbia University with a B.A. in Dance and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. In her free time Rochelle enjoys frolicking out of doors, communing with water, studying herbalism, and weaving.
Born and raised in Philadelphia, on the land known as Lenapehoking, the ancestral home of the Lenni-Lenape people, AJ Wilmore is a Brooklyn-based artist and performer whose practice is shaped by questions of storytelling, identity, and the complexities of Black familial relationships. A 2020 graduate of The University of the Arts, AJ has performed in works by Okwui Okpokwasili and Peter Born, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Ralph Lemon, Joan Jonas, Isabel Lewis, and MBDance. Their performances have been presented at venues including Brooklyn Academy of Music, Abrons Arts Center, MoMA and MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Philadelphia Art Alliance, Judson Memorial Church, and Snug Harbor Cultural Center. A 2025 Dancing While Black Fellow, AJ recently premiered their first experimental film, Untitled (434). Their practice—driven by making love to their fears—investigates the stakes, texture, and vulnerability of their social and sexual life.
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 STAGE | Fall Movement: Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye
m/Other by Ibuki Kuramochi. Courtesy the artist.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 5 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 6 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 2025: Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye.
This year, for the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2025 and Spring Movement 2026, with each program presenting five short works. The artists selected for Spring Movement are Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Rosalie Yu, and Mae May, who will present their work March 13-14, 2026.
The Fall Movement 2025/Spring Movement 2026 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Shawn Escarciga, Dominica Greene, Amelia Heintzelman, and Muyassar Kurdi.
View the program
PROGRAM
Justin Allen: Rot
Rot builds on previous works Karaoke (2024) and Untitled (2021), which both combine writing, tap dancing, and video. In this new performance, I sing along to a karaoke-style video, the text projected onto the wall. The video, however, departs from a few karaoke conventions: it has no sound and includes not only original song lyrics but original poetry and onomatopoeic phrases in the style of jazz scatting. Following the video, I sing the lyrics a cappella, read the poetry, and "perform" the onomatopoeias by tap dancing, interpreting the words into live rhythm. Thematically, Rot addresses the Black bourgeoisie, class stratification, and social conformity. The performance subverts the metaphor of "rotting away" due to lack of motivation or progress by asking: What if upward mobility in a classist society is just another form of rotting?
Kaye Hurley: 9V PUSSY
9V PUSSY is a multimedia live performance celebrating the mechanical nature of the body. With electronics and sex, this performance asks us to destroy the body as temple. Through manipulated live video, kinetic sculpture, and original text, 9V PUSSY reclaims the cyborg body as a defense of bodily autonomy.
Nadia Khayrallah: Martyr Complex
Martyr Complex is a solo dance-theater trip through the spectacle, seduction, and inevitable betrayal of Empire. It draws inspiration from:
- Handala, Palestinian cartoonist and satirist Naji al-Ali’s figure of a 10-year old boy, representing the betrayal of the Palestinian people
- The biblical arrest and crucifixion of Jesus Christ
- America’s Sweethearts, the docuseries about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and the branding of American nationalism at the intersection of megachurch Christianity, military culture, and sex appeal.
The collaged soundtrack includes excerpts from the bible, America’s Sweethearts, and interviews with Naji al-Ali.The movement shifts between contemporary dance, pedestrian movement, cheerdance, dabke, and military drills, as the performer takes on various personas (sometimes blurring the lines between them), positioning themself as both oppressor and victim.
For Fall Movement, Martyr Complex will be performed by Dahlia Qumhiyeh.
Ibuki Kuramochi: m/Other
m/Other is a Butoh based solo performance exploring grief, kinship, and transformation across species lines. Inspired by the death of my dog and Donna Haraway’s theory of companion species, the work invokes motherhood as a bond that is not biological but shared. An edible bone lingers in the space as memory, and I chew it as part of the ritual. I carry a bone of my lost companion within my costume as a relic. Through movement, my body shifts toward dog motherhood. I mourn, howl, and search for my absent kin. m/Other unfolds as a ritual of interspecies connection.
Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye: to be free
to be free explores immigrant hypervisibility and surveillance through sound-movement choreography. Responding to what it means to be seen and make art with our bodies during heightened scrutiny, this piece centers observation and deep listening to the invisible, sacred, and absent.
Audiences will experience layered sonic landscapes created through loop pedals, body microphones, and live vocals, interwoven with choreography that embodies the invisibilities of immigrant labor and the absence of what was left behind. The performance moves between moments of hypervisibility and disappearance, using repetitive soundscapes and gestural movement to create an immersive meditation on presence.
As transcontinental artists whose families immigrated seeking better lives, we use our bodies as both instruments and archives, creating a living testimony to being seen, unseen, and surveilled while honoring immigrant resilience.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Justin Allen works in music and sound, performance, visual art, and writing. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Shed, and ISSUE Project Room and received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He received his BA in literary studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School and his MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2022 he released a four-song EP, Ekphrastic Punk, with his band Black Boots. In the fall of 2024, he released his first book, Language Arts, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Kaye Hurley is a playwright and multimedia artist. She is currently an Exponential Festival Fellow and her play :/secondplace will be presented as part of the 2026 festival in January. Recently, her video Pickup was screened as an official selection at Ridgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival. She works extensively with Kedian Keohan, with whom she developed BLUSH in the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab, as well as their first piece DAD DANCE! Kaye sound designs and plays “Pussy” in Amando Houser’s DeliaDelia!, has sound designed for artists like Sibyl Kempson and Erin Markey, and has also collaborated with Peter Mills Weiss + Julia Mounsey. Playwriting MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. khurley.info @a_femme_url
Nadia Khayrallah is a Lebanese-American dance artist, writer, administrator, and (dis)content creator, rooted in history and fantasy, form and groove, esoterica and common sense. They have worked as a company member with Parijata Performance Projects, Gotham Dance Theater, Jonah Bokaer Choreography, and Artists by Any Other Name. They have presented choreographic work through Pageant, Arab American National Museum, Time & Space Limited, Little Island NYC, Dixon Place, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Queens College Arts Festival, Screendance Miami, YallaPunk, and New York Arab Festival, and New York Fashion Week. Nadia is Programs and Advocacy Coordinator at Dance/NYC, a teaching artist, and a part of movements around labor and Palestinian liberation in the performing arts.
Dahlia Qumhiyeh (She/Her) was born in Malaysia and raised in Kuwait as a Palestinian-Malaysian expat with her family. Having moved to the U.S. at the age of 17, she received her B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina, and soon after moved to New York City, working as an artist with United Talent Agency. She has had the opportunity to work with choreographers such as Mandy Moore, Tanisha Scott, Brian Friedman, Charm LaDonna, Luam Keflezy, as well as movement directed for projects on Stephen Colbert, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and Bergdorf Goodman. Dahlia has been featured on GQ Middle East, Paper Magazine, NatGeo, and Schön Magazine as an upcoming artist. Using movement as a foundation, she implements technology and spoken word to form immersive narratives around self surveillance, gendered structures, and individuation. Through her multidisciplinary collective project Barr Bodies, co-founded with fellow movement artist Bev Vega, she has shown work at Danspace Project and Bridge for Dance, and has been awarded the GALLIM Moving Artist Residency in 2022, the 2025 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency, and is currently a Fresh Tracks 25-26 Cohort at New York Live Arts!
Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation. Her work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome. Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Her practice explores metamorphosis, interspecies kinship, and posthuman feminism through the physicality of Butoh. She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL AAPI Women Artist Fellowship, 2024 DCA EMPOWERMENT and Dance in the City grants, and the 2022 SCIART Fellowship. In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year in LA WEEKLY’s PEOPLE issue, and in 2025 was named one of Los Angeles Magazine’s Ten Essential Local Artists.
Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina-American choreographer, dance artist, vocalist, and performance maker re-rooting liberatory futures in the practice of kapwa ("shared one-ness"). Of Batangueña & Ilonggo lineage, she immigrated to four countries before age 6, now based in Brooklyn, NY. As a descendant of nurses and farmers, her work is shaped by a tenacity to be in service against oppressive regimes. Solo and collaborative works have been presented nationally at Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe's Pub, Green Space, among others; and internationally at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), UGNAYAN (Manila), and Taikang Space (Beijing). She is a 2025 NEFA National Dance Production Finalist, 2024 Harlem Stage WaterWorks Emerging Artist, 2024 Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow, 2023 GALLIM Moving Artist Resident, 2022 A4 Jadin Wong Fellow, and a recurring Resident Artist with TOPAZ Arts (2021, 2025, 2026). As a performer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-24), the company received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to Deep Blue Sea. She has performed with Faye Driscoll, Sugar Vendil, Ching-I Chang, among others. Marie has guest taught at University of the Philippines, SVA Design for Social Innovation, Princeton University, and Duke University. marielloydpaspe.com / @mmmlloyd.
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker, and author whose work transcends identity politics to explore interiority, broken bodies, and environmental urgencies. Rooted in Lyon's Canut revolt heritage and Martinique's Neg marron rebellion spirit, his practice evolved from DIY social justice "vandalism" to gut-wrenching live experiences and sonic installations.
His notable performances include "Depopulated" at Judson Church (New York) and the Momentary (Arkansas), and "UNDERMY-YOUR-OURSKIN" at Grace Exhibition Space (New York) and Ancien Musée de Bruxelles-Nord (Brussels). His work has been presented at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz gallery, Helsinki Central Library Oodi, and Ars Electronica Forum Wallis, among others.
Recent projects include "solitary venise" as part of Observatory Station at the Barbican and installation "Be Happy or Die" (Prospect Art grant recipient). Currently a Harvestworks fellow and IRCAM lecturer, Souklaye is a commissioned artist for the International Contemporary Ensemble & Jerome Foundation's 2022-2024 program. His practice creates collective intimate experiences that activate audiences through what he calls "epigenetic dialogues," revealing shared interiorities through sound, movement, and radical presence. / https://www.sylvainsouklaye.com @sylvain.souklaye
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2025/SPRING MOVEMENT 2026 PANELISTS
Shawn Escarciga is a multidisciplinary artist, administrator, and connector existing somewhere between performance, comedy, the internet, and community-engaged work. Shawn explores themes of labor, class, and power, questioning value systems and hierarchies, and ways to balance being silly with tangible moves towards collective liberation.
Their work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces across New York City, the U.S., and internationally. Shawn is a recipient of a Franklin Furnace FUND grant and has done other cool stuff too.
They ran and organized the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund in 2020 which gave out nearly $250k in direct support to artists across the 5 boroughs. Their memes have been seen in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, in projects with What Would an HIV Doula Do?, at protests, galleries, and on the phones of f-slurs worldwide.
Shawn is currently the Development Director at Visual AIDS, an arts non-profit that supports artists living with HIV and the legacies of those lost to AIDS.
Dominica Greene is a movement-based conceptual artist, dancer, and facilitator residing on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people. She creates body and time-based multidisciplinary environments which interrogate cycles of life, death, and love. Harnessing the elements, spirit, and womanness into an existence rooted in love, community, and regeneration, her work seeks to reflect nature –human and otherwise– as a way of highlighting humanity, the stark similarities in our differences, and our inheritances as legacies.
Amelia Heintzelman is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has been supported by residencies, commissions, and grants through Center for Performance Research, Draftwork at Danspace Project, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Issue Project Room, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pageant, Snug Harbor, and UCross Foundation. She has worked as a performer for Juli Brandano Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Ayano Elson, Deborah Hay, evan ray suzuki and Alexa West. She is on teaching faculty at Movement Research and Pageant, and rarely/sometimes teaches Comedy Pilates. www.ameliakh.com
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.
OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement: Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye
m/Other by Ibuki Kuramochi. Courtesy the artist.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Fri, December 5 at 7 P.M.
Sat, December 6 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 2025: Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye.
This year, for the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2025 and Spring Movement 2026, with each program presenting five short works. The artists selected for Spring Movement are Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Rosalie Yu, and Mae May, who will present their work on March 13-14, 2026.
The Fall Movement 2025/Spring Movement 2026 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Shawn Escarciga, Dominica Greene, Amelia Heintzelman, and Muyassar Kurdi.
View the program.
PROGRAM
Justin Allen: Rot
Rot builds on previous works Karaoke (2024) and Untitled (2021), which both combine writing, tap dancing, and video. In this new performance, I sing along to a karaoke-style video, the text projected onto the wall. The video, however, departs from a few karaoke conventions: it has no sound and includes not only original song lyrics but original poetry and onomatopoeic phrases in the style of jazz scatting. Following the video, I sing the lyrics a cappella, read the poetry, and "perform" the onomatopoeias by tap dancing, interpreting the words into live rhythm. Thematically, Rot addresses the Black bourgeoisie, class stratification, and social conformity. The performance subverts the metaphor of "rotting away" due to lack of motivation or progress by asking: What if upward mobility in a classist society is just another form of rotting?
Kaye Hurley: 9V PUSSY
9V PUSSY is a multimedia live performance celebrating the mechanical nature of the body. With electronics and sex, this performance asks us to destroy the body as temple. Through manipulated live video, kinetic sculpture, and original text, 9V PUSSY reclaims the cyborg body as a defense of bodily autonomy.
Nadia Khayrallah: Martyr Complex
Martyr Complex is a solo dance-theater trip through the spectacle, seduction, and inevitable betrayal of Empire. It draws inspiration from:
- Handala, Palestinian cartoonist and satirist Naji al-Ali’s figure of a 10-year old boy, representing the betrayal of the Palestinian people
- The biblical arrest and crucifixion of Jesus Christ
- America’s Sweethearts, the docuseries about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and the branding of American nationalism at the intersection of megachurch Christianity, military culture, and sex appeal.
The collaged soundtrack includes excerpts from the bible, America’s Sweethearts, and interviews with Naji al-Ali.The movement shifts between contemporary dance, pedestrian movement, cheerdance, dabke, and military drills, as the performer takes on various personas (sometimes blurring the lines between them), positioning themself as both oppressor and victim.
For Fall Movement, Martyr Complex will be performed by Dahlia Qumhiyeh.
Ibuki Kuramochi: m/Other
m/Other is a Butoh based solo performance exploring grief, kinship, and transformation across species lines. Inspired by the death of my dog and Donna Haraway’s theory of companion species, the work invokes motherhood as a bond that is not biological but shared. An edible bone lingers in the space as memory, and I chew it as part of the ritual. I carry a bone of my lost companion within my costume as a relic. Through movement, my body shifts toward dog motherhood. I mourn, howl, and search for my absent kin. m/Other unfolds as a ritual of interspecies connection.
Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye: to be free
to be free explores immigrant hypervisibility and surveillance through sound-movement choreography. Responding to what it means to be seen and make art with our bodies during heightened scrutiny, this piece centers observation and deep listening to the invisible, sacred, and absent.
Audiences will experience layered sonic landscapes created through loop pedals, body microphones, and live vocals, interwoven with choreography that embodies the invisibilities of immigrant labor and the absence of what was left behind. The performance moves between moments of hypervisibility and disappearance, using repetitive soundscapes and gestural movement to create an immersive meditation on presence.
As transcontinental artists whose families immigrated seeking better lives, we use our bodies as both instruments and archives, creating a living testimony to being seen, unseen, and surveilled while honoring immigrant resilience.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Justin Allen works in music and sound, performance, visual art, and writing. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Shed, and ISSUE Project Room and received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He received his BA in literary studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School and his MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2022 he released a four-song EP, Ekphrastic Punk, with his band Black Boots. In the fall of 2024, he released his first book, Language Arts, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Kaye Hurley is a playwright and multimedia artist. She is currently an Exponential Festival Fellow and her play :/secondplace will be presented as part of the 2026 festival in January. Recently, her video Pickup was screened as an official selection at Ridgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival. She works extensively with Kedian Keohan, with whom she developed BLUSH in the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab, as well as their first piece DAD DANCE! Kaye sound designs and plays “Pussy” in Amando Houser’s DeliaDelia!, has sound designed for artists like Sibyl Kempson and Erin Markey, and has also collaborated with Peter Mills Weiss + Julia Mounsey. Playwriting MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. khurley.info @a_femme_url
Nadia Khayrallah is a Lebanese-American dance artist, writer, administrator, and (dis)content creator, rooted in history and fantasy, form and groove, esoterica and common sense. They have worked as a company member with Parijata Performance Projects, Gotham Dance Theater, Jonah Bokaer Choreography, and Artists by Any Other Name. They have presented choreographic work through Pageant, Arab American National Museum, Time & Space Limited, Little Island NYC, Dixon Place, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Queens College Arts Festival, Screendance Miami, YallaPunk, and New York Arab Festival, and New York Fashion Week. Nadia is Programs and Advocacy Coordinator at Dance/NYC, a teaching artist, and a part of movements around labor and Palestinian liberation in the performing arts.
Dahlia Qumhiyeh (She/Her) was born in Malaysia and raised in Kuwait as a Palestinian-Malaysian expat with her family. Having moved to the U.S. at the age of 17, she received her B.S. in Biology from the University of North Carolina, and soon after moved to New York City, working as an artist with United Talent Agency. She has had the opportunity to work with choreographers such as Mandy Moore, Tanisha Scott, Brian Friedman, Charm LaDonna, Luam Keflezy, as well as movement directed for projects on Stephen Colbert, The Kelly Clarkson Show, and Bergdorf Goodman. Dahlia has been featured on GQ Middle East, Paper Magazine, NatGeo, and Schön Magazine as an upcoming artist. Using movement as a foundation, she implements technology and spoken word to form immersive narratives around self surveillance, gendered structures, and individuation. Through her multidisciplinary collective project Barr Bodies, co-founded with fellow movement artist Bev Vega, she has shown work at Danspace Project and Bridge for Dance, and has been awarded the GALLIM Moving Artist Residency in 2022, the 2025 CUNY Dance Initiative Residency, and is currently a Fresh Tracks 25-26 Cohort at New York Live Arts!
Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation. Her work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome. Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Her practice explores metamorphosis, interspecies kinship, and posthuman feminism through the physicality of Butoh. She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL AAPI Women Artist Fellowship, 2024 DCA EMPOWERMENT and Dance in the City grants, and the 2022 SCIART Fellowship. In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year in LA WEEKLY’s PEOPLE issue, and in 2025 was named one of Los Angeles Magazine’s Ten Essential Local Artists.
Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina-American choreographer, dance artist, vocalist, and performance maker re-rooting liberatory futures in the practice of kapwa ("shared one-ness"). Of Batangueña & Ilonggo lineage, she immigrated to four countries before age 6, now based in Brooklyn, NY. As a descendant of nurses and farmers, her work is shaped by a tenacity to be in service against oppressive regimes. Solo and collaborative works have been presented nationally at Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe's Pub, Green Space, among others; and internationally at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), UGNAYAN (Manila), and Taikang Space (Beijing). She is a 2025 NEFA National Dance Production Finalist, 2024 Harlem Stage WaterWorks Emerging Artist, 2024 Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow, 2023 GALLIM Moving Artist Resident, 2022 A4 Jadin Wong Fellow, and a recurring Resident Artist with TOPAZ Arts (2021, 2025, 2026). As a performer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-24), the company received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to Deep Blue Sea. She has performed with Faye Driscoll, Sugar Vendil, Ching-I Chang, among others. Marie has guest taught at University of the Philippines, SVA Design for Social Innovation, Princeton University, and Duke University. marielloydpaspe.com / @mmmlloyd.
Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker, and author whose work transcends identity politics to explore interiority, broken bodies, and environmental urgencies. Rooted in Lyon's Canut revolt heritage and Martinique's Neg marron rebellion spirit, his practice evolved from DIY social justice "vandalism" to gut-wrenching live experiences and sonic installations.
His notable performances include "Depopulated" at Judson Church (New York) and the Momentary (Arkansas), and "UNDERMY-YOUR-OURSKIN" at Grace Exhibition Space (New York) and Ancien Musée de Bruxelles-Nord (Brussels). His work has been presented at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz gallery, Helsinki Central Library Oodi, and Ars Electronica Forum Wallis, among others.
Recent projects include "solitary venise" as part of Observatory Station at the Barbican and installation "Be Happy or Die" (Prospect Art grant recipient). Currently a Harvestworks fellow and IRCAM lecturer, Souklaye is a commissioned artist for the International Contemporary Ensemble & Jerome Foundation's 2022-2024 program. His practice creates collective intimate experiences that activate audiences through what he calls "epigenetic dialogues," revealing shared interiorities through sound, movement, and radical presence. / https://www.sylvainsouklaye.com @sylvain.souklaye
ABOUT THE FALL MOVEMENT 2025/SPRING MOVEMENT 2026 PANELISTS
Shawn Escarciga is a multidisciplinary artist, administrator, and connector existing somewhere between performance, comedy, the internet, and community-engaged work. Shawn explores themes of labor, class, and power, questioning value systems and hierarchies, and ways to balance being silly with tangible moves towards collective liberation.
Their work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces across New York City, the U.S., and internationally. Shawn is a recipient of a Franklin Furnace FUND grant and has done other cool stuff too.
They ran and organized the NYC Low-Income Artist and Freelancer Relief Fund in 2020 which gave out nearly $250k in direct support to artists across the 5 boroughs. Their memes have been seen in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail, in projects with What Would an HIV Doula Do?, at protests, galleries, and on the phones of f-slurs worldwide.
Shawn is currently the Development Director at Visual AIDS, an arts non-profit that supports artists living with HIV and the legacies of those lost to AIDS.
Dominica Greene is a movement-based conceptual artist, dancer, and facilitator residing on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people. She creates body and time-based multidisciplinary environments which interrogate cycles of life, death, and love. Harnessing the elements, spirit, and womanness into an existence rooted in love, community, and regeneration, her work seeks to reflect nature –human and otherwise– as a way of highlighting humanity, the stark similarities in our differences, and our inheritances as legacies.
Amelia Heintzelman is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her work has been supported by residencies, commissions, and grants through Center for Performance Research, Draftwork at Danspace Project, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Issue Project Room, Movement Research at the Judson Church, New York Foundation for the Arts, Pageant, Snug Harbor, and UCross Foundation. She has worked as a performer for Juli Brandano Kim Brandt, Jesi Cook, Ayano Elson, Deborah Hay, evan ray suzuki and Alexa West. She is on teaching faculty at Movement Research and Pageant, and rarely/sometimes teaches Comedy Pilates. www.ameliakh.com
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.
OPEN LAB | Group Therapy Jam Band—Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1.5 / The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co
Kyle b. co.: Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1/The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co.: Orientation, presented by CPR – Center for Performance Research as part of OPEN LAB | Critical Race Therapy T1 with Kyle b. co.: Orientation on March 16, 2025. Image courtesy CPR. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Free; advance registration required at least 24 hours in advance.
RSVP
(2 hour group sessions, 3-5 participants)
This fall, 2025 Artist-in-Residence Kyle b. co. is workshopping sessions of their Critical Race Therapy project, which thinks through how one might address race as an embodied sense or an anxiety disorder, outside of the 1-on-1 structure of Treatment 1 (CRT T1). Group Therapy Jam Band sessions will take place with a guest musician or sound maker and host 3-5 participants who will build a sample pack together. Sign up together or join up with a stranger. Kyle b. co. is interested in how the inquiries and personal reflections that emerge from the sessions feed connection. The accompanying musicians will incorporate biofeedback into the process using contact microphones, radio signals and other approaches.
Group Therapy Jam Band will consist of two 2-hour sessions with 3-5 participants at 12PM and 3PM on the following Sundays:
Sun, October 12
Sun, October 19
Sun, November 9
Sun, November 30
Work generated from Group Therapy Jam Band will be utilized in Kyle b. co.’s upcoming OPEN AiR presentation Critical Club Therapy on Thursday, November 13.
With limited group sessions available, we kindly ask that you honor your reserved time. If you are not able to make it to a session, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or let us know ASAP at info@cprnyc.org so that we can reopen the slot to another participant.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle b. co. is a trans-disciplinary artist, performer, educator, and baker based in Brooklyn, NY. They are a 2024-25 Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2023 Smack Mellon Hot Pick, and were short-listed for the 2025 Creative Capital award in visual arts. They have received a RISCA Merit Fellowship in 3-D Arts and a Providence Arts, Culture, and Tourism Public Art Fellowship. Their work has found kinship at Hera Gallery, RISD Museum, Buoy Gallery, Zimmerli Museum of Art, Westbeth Gallery, Lucas, Lucas, and Grace Exhibition Space, among other spaces. Their practice engages with the task of mapping the present as a method of document and engagement with form. They work with materials of culture and personal history to make monuments of possibility. The matrices that hold an image may not be visible ‘til named. Their practice is one of futurity as they seek what can be sensed, not what is known. In various ways, they try to grasp at the transmission/translation of a feeling. Feeling(s) as a concept is unclear in its relationship to time. When did the feeling begin? Has the feeling ever stopped? Will you have this feeling again in the future? Their work spans both objects/installation and performance, the distinction between mediums not being that important. Their work is about feeling (&) connection(s).
OPEN AiR | Crackhead Barney: AN EVENING WITH NIGGA CLAUS (WHITE SANTA IS DEAD)
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Courtesy of Crackhead Barney.
Come get the perfect seasonal photo taken and bring a toy for the Toy Drive during 2025 AiR Crackhead Barney’s 6-hour Holiday Extravaganza! Featuring performance activations, gifts, and a festive screening room.
With cookies by Kyle co. Cookies. More special Guests TBA. Feel free to come and go as you please at any time between 3PM and 9PM.
Crackhead Barney: COME SIT ON NIGGA CLAUS LAP! GIVE ME A GIFT AND GET OUTTA MY FACE! NIGGA CLAUS pulls up in a SLEIGH BUT ITS REALLY A Busted up one wheel shopping cart that squeals. YES another delightful DECEMBER we can spend with NIGGA CLAUS. Bring EGG NOG, VODKA, WIGS, and GIFTS and TOYS and come to CPR, come sit on NIGGA CLAUS LAP for FUN in a WINTERY DECEMBER!
WITH LIVE PERFORMANCES from NIGGA CLAUS ELVES (who aren’t UNIONIZED, BUT WORKing to OVERTHROW NIGGA CLAUS so they can UNIONIZE!) Hes handing out CANDY CANES and UNPAID therapy SESSIONS!
REINDEER AND ALL ! WHITE SANTA IS DEAD LETS REJOICE ON NIGGA CLAUS LAP!!!
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Crackhead Barney was born in Jamaica, Queens to strict religious parents who immigrated to America from Northern Nigeria. She was raised in a one bedroom apartment with her siblings in an era before wokeness and identity politics ruled the cultural landscape and was always taunted for her immigrant African roots and dark complexion. She studied Fine Arts and Media at Hunter College and was told her artwork wasn't shit. Rejected from museums and galleries, she decided to take matters into her own hands and use the streets of NYC as her canvas, painting pictures with her body across the landscape without the need to satisfy the desires of the cultural institutions. Her street performances garnered attention and she began to go viral all over the Internet with people reacting in confusion, laughter, anger, pity, concern, and all the other emotions available to humans. Rejecting any hierarchies that didn't feature her at the very pinnacle, she naturally was attracted to social media where she could form a universe centered on her performance art. She began a “Crackhead Barney and Friends” account on Instagram and TikTok where she’s developed a cult of personality supportive of her creative practice.
OPEN AiR | Kat Sotelo: A DEVOTION TO FAILURE
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Kat Sotelo by Paul Sadama.
A DEVOTION TO FAILURE is a compilation of scenes, dances, vignettes, costumes, and set pieces that failed to make the cut for 2025 AiR Kat Sotelo’s premiere A DEVOTION TO SERVICE (at Abrons Art Center on September 26-27, 2025). A weaving of B-sides and rarities, this piece will further explore themes of eroticism and servitude from a Filipino American sex worker lens. It will also further interrogate failure and embarrassment as generative forces, vehicles for surrender, ego dismantling and reassembly — ultimately locating absurdity not as an accident but as a radical strategy within art-making.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kat Sotelo is a first-generation Filipino American performance artist, choreographer, and set designer whose practice blends movement, satire, and constructed environments. She explores the body as a site of commerce, using her experience in exotic dance to examine fantasy, cultural hybridity, and the labor of spectacle. With roots in film, Sotelo’s compositions also integrate elements of cinema to create layered realities. Her current body of work focuses on eroticism and servitude through a Filipino American lens – at the intersection of nostalgia and melancholy, rage and humor. By weaving video, personal archives, and Philippine folk traditions, she critiques the commodification of art and identity with kaleidoscopic visions. Sotelo is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, and GALLIM Dance Company, as well as a Hybrid Arts Lab Fellow at Theater Mitu. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
OPEN DOOR | crying out we make a noise we do not recognize: a symposium of/on palestinian performance curated by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
Photo by Senna Ahmad.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 4:30PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!
What is a Palestinian performance in this moment of genocide, catastrophe, the world clinging to its fundamental qualities as we are annihilated? What does it do? Who does it reach? Who, sorrowfully, closes their eyes and ears and heart to its hatred, its grief, its stubborn insistence on survival? How does it circulate, make anything possible, get eaten and metabolized by the vultures of a counterrevolutionary art world? Why do we do it?
These are questions with no answers, questions which instead we devote the entirety of our lives to asking. Towards those questions, this event gathers Palestinian performance artists across medium, genre, place, and practice for an afternoon and evening of performance, research, and performance-research. Curated by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, featuring work by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Mette Loulou von Kohl, Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, and Muyassar Yousef Kurdi.
PROGRAM
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Only Sounds That Tremble Through Us | فقط أصوات ترتعش في أجسادنا
Only sounds that tremble through us is part of the ongoing project from Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth. This evolving work has taken on multiple forms that intersect and overlap; an online project (mayamnesia.com), installations and a series of public performances.
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: TERROR COUNTER
A debut collection of poems which acts against the many languages–interpersonal, legal, literary, rhetorical–constricting the lives and meanings of Palestinians, TERROR COUNTER moves through sections of varying experimentalism, from an invented visual form (the Gazan Tunnel) to all-caps queer ecstatic, attempting to carve out a space for the negotiation of an alternative subjecthood. The voices in this collection are driven by despair, futility, utopia, vulnerability and the spirit of a collective liberation; they move in search of a lyrical voice which can inhabit both the paranoid preservationist mode that facilitates Palestinian survival, and the imaginative possibilities that might make possible Palestinian life.
Featuring performance support by Ethan Philbrick.
Mette Loulou von Kohl: There are no words, so may it be the end
A satirical commentary on the “counter-terror” industry of Zionist state. The performance interrogates how the success of the industry is dependent on the constructed identity of the Zionist State as existing in a perpetual state of defense and moral exception. There are no words, so may it be the end is a multivocal, multimedia solo performance proposing Palestinian refusal to be seen and unseen as weapons in challenging and destabilizing settler colonial projects and identities.
Muyassar Kurdi: “Body Poetics: Falling”
“Body Poetics: Falling” is an interdisciplinary performance that weaves together sound, image, and ritual. Through meditative movement and immersive sound, it explores loss, transformation, and the body’s relationship to time and space. The performance flows between the ancient and the futuristic, where sound and image meet in a visceral, embodied moment. It invites the audience to experience the body as both anchor and release, dissolving boundaries between movement and stillness, memory and future.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi is a Palestinian performance artist and the author of TERROR COUNTER (Deep Vellum, 2025) and ANTIGONE. VELOCITY. SALT. (Deep Vellum, 2027). Find more at fargotbakhi.com.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality. Across their works they probe a contemporary landscape marked by seemingly perpetual crisis and an endless ‘present’, one that is shaped by a politics of desire and disaster. They have been developing a body of work that questions this suspension of the present and searches for ways in which an altogether different imaginary and language can emerge that is not bound within colonial/capitalist narrative and discourse. In their projects, they find themselves excavating, activating and inventing incidental narratives, figures, gestures and sites as material for re-imagining the possibilities of the present. Often reflecting on ideas of non-linearity in the form of returns, amnesia and deja vu, and in the process unfolding the slippages between actuality and projection (virtuality, myth, wish), what is and what could be. Largely their approach has been one of sampling materials both existing and self-authored in the form of sound, image, text, objects and recasting them into altogether new ‘scripts’. The result is a practice that investigates the political, visceral, material possibilities of sound, image, text and site, taking on the form of multi-media installations and live sound/image performances.
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.
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, voice, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature.
In 2024 Kurdi received the NYFA Women's Fund for Music, American Composer Forum’s Create, and Brooklyn Arts Fund. She was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023, and was commissioned by Roulette Intermedium in 2020 as well as a 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation. She is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps grant, and Puffin Foundation grant. Recent residencies include Harvestworks and The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo interdisciplinary exhibition, opened in the Fall of 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery in NYC. In April 2025 she performed durational pieces of voice & movement inside the exhibition by Otobong Nkanga in the atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Her forthcoming LP will be released in the Fall of 2025 with Bilna’es.
@CPR | Sikora + Dance: An evening of Sikoreography
Photography by Olivia Ramsey
Friday, November 14, 2025
Saturday, November 15, 2025
General Admission: $40
Artists/Students: $25 (limited availability)
Patron Tickets: $75
All fees included
Purchase Tickets
Sikora + Dance presents its 2025 Fall season in An Evening of Sikoreography. This season marks the first program made up entirely of choreography by Artistic Director Caitlin Sikora, a celebratory milestone after nearly 20 years of making dance works. The company will be performing Sharp Woman, a powerful trio developed and premiered as part of Green Space's 2025 D.I.G. Artist Residency. Sikora will also be premiering a vibrant new dance inspired by a recent trip to Cuba with her husband.
CREDITS
Sikora + Dance
Choreography: Caitlin Sikora in collaboration with dancers
Performers: Chaslyn Donovan, Ralphie Rivera, Corinne Hart, Holly Harkins, Jared McAboy, Oscar Antonio Rodriguez, Caitlin Sikora
Musical Collaborator: Jon Tippens
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sikora + Dance was founded in 2022 by Artistic Director Caitlin Sikora after 12 years of self-producing choreography as an independent artist. Sikora is an NYC-based dancer, choreographer, media artist, and software engineer. She earned undergraduate degrees in Physics and Dance at UC Irvine, continuing on to an MFA in dance from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. With strong roots in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance forms, alongside unique influences like ballroom dance, New York Minimalism and conceptual art, Sikora celebrates the beauty of the body and the dualities that challenge the mind. Her creative work is both cerebral and visceral–dealing with emotional and existential complexity through physically demanding movement sequences that weave into gradually transforming patterns.
Sikora's movement and performance aesthetic have been shaped by her time performing with the Hannah Kahn Dance Company and in works by William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Ohad Naharin, Cora Bos-Kroese and Winifred R. Harris. Her choreography and digital creations have been featured in the Boulder International Fringe Festival, Warwick Summer Arts Festival, MIT’s Hacking Arts Festival, and SXSW. She currently works on AI and Human-Computer Interaction at Google while continuing to build her company of bright, talented artists.
SUPPORT
Sikora + Dance is a 501c3 registered non-profit organization funded primarily by contributions from individual donors like you. Additionally, the company has received support from the D.I.G. Artist Residency at Green Space, as well as subsidized rehearsal space from Gibney Dance and Mark Morris Dance Group.
@CPR | Sikora + Dance: An evening of Sikoreography
Photography by Olivia Ramsey
Friday, November 14, 2025
Saturday, November 15, 2025
General Admission: $40
Artists/Students: $25 (limited availability)
Patron Tickets: $75
All fees included
Purchase Tickets
Sikora + Dance presents its 2025 Fall season in An Evening of Sikoreography. This season marks the first program made up entirely of choreography by Artistic Director Caitlin Sikora, a celebratory milestone after nearly 20 years of making dance works. The company will be performing Sharp Woman, a powerful trio developed and premiered as part of Green Space's 2025 D.I.G. Artist Residency. Sikora will also be premiering a vibrant new dance inspired by a recent trip to Cuba with her husband.
CREDITS
Sikora + Dance
Choreography: Caitlin Sikora in collaboration with dancers
Performers: Chaslyn Donovan, Ralphie Rivera, Corinne Hart, Holly Harkins, Jared McAboy, Oscar Antonio Rodriguez, Caitlin Sikora
Musical Collaborator: Jon Tippens
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Sikora + Dance was founded in 2022 by Artistic Director Caitlin Sikora after 12 years of self-producing choreography as an independent artist. Sikora is an NYC-based dancer, choreographer, media artist, and software engineer. She earned undergraduate degrees in Physics and Dance at UC Irvine, continuing on to an MFA in dance from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an MS in Integrated Digital Media from NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. With strong roots in ballet, modern, and contemporary dance forms, alongside unique influences like ballroom dance, New York Minimalism and conceptual art, Sikora celebrates the beauty of the body and the dualities that challenge the mind. Her creative work is both cerebral and visceral–dealing with emotional and existential complexity through physically demanding movement sequences that weave into gradually transforming patterns.
Sikora's movement and performance aesthetic have been shaped by her time performing with the Hannah Kahn Dance Company and in works by William Forsythe, Merce Cunningham, Ohad Naharin, Cora Bos-Kroese and Winifred R. Harris. Her choreography and digital creations have been featured in the Boulder International Fringe Festival, Warwick Summer Arts Festival, MIT’s Hacking Arts Festival, and SXSW. She currently works on AI and Human-Computer Interaction at Google while continuing to build her company of bright, talented artists.
SUPPORT
Sikora + Dance is a 501c3 registered non-profit organization funded primarily by contributions from individual donors like you. Additionally, the company has received support from the D.I.G. Artist Residency at Green Space, as well as subsidized rehearsal space from Gibney Dance and Mark Morris Dance Group.
OPEN AiR | Kyle b. co.: Critical Club Therapy
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Kyle co. cookies presents Conditional Cookies a Fun(d)-raiser. Warehouse Market - Time Thrift. Photo by Sinclair Li.
It's a dance party at CPR.
It was once said “In da Clerb, We all fam.”
We all exist under the same rhythm, the same beat. Are standing in the same line.
There was also that one song “We Are the World” by the supergroup USA for Africa.
That is the vibe here. The patterns of race made music as part of Critical Race Therapy are spread through machines and brought to life in some imaginative DJ sets. Critical Club Therapy uses the club as architecture for connecting one another’s experience. There will be a bar, there will be a dance floor. There will be a line to get in.
Featuring: Buffy Sierra, Isaac Silber, Crackhead Barney, Sol Cabrini, and Kat Sotelo.
View the program
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle b. co. is a trans-disciplinary artist, performer, educator, and baker based in Brooklyn, NY. They are a 2024-25 Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2023 Smack Mellon Hot Pick, and were short-listed for the 2025 Creative Capital award in visual arts. They have received a RISCA Merit Fellowship in 3-D Arts and a Providence Arts, Culture, and Tourism Public Art Fellowship. Their work has found kinship at Hera Gallery, RISD Museum, Buoy Gallery, Zimmerli Museum of Art, Westbeth Gallery, Lucas, Lucas, and Grace Exhibition Space, among other spaces. Their practice engages with the task of mapping the present as a method of document and engagement with form. They work with materials of culture and personal history to make monuments of possibility. The matrices that hold an image may not be visible ‘til named. Their practice is one of futurity as they seek what can be sensed, not what is known. In various ways, they try to grasp at the transmission/translation of a feeling. Feeling(s) as a concept is unclear in its relationship to time. When did the feeling begin? Has the feeling ever stopped? Will you have this feeling again in the future? Their work spans both objects/installation and performance, the distinction between mediums not being that important. Their work is about feeling (&) connection(s).
OPEN LAB | Group Therapy Jam Band—Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1.5 / The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co
Kyle b. co.: Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1/The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co.: Orientation, presented by CPR – Center for Performance Research as part of OPEN LAB | Critical Race Therapy T1 with Kyle b. co.: Orientation on March 16, 2025. Image courtesy CPR. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Free; advance registration required at least 24 hours in advance.
RSVP
(2 hour group sessions, 3-5 participants)
This fall, 2025 Artist-in-Residence Kyle b. co. is workshopping sessions of their Critical Race Therapy project, which thinks through how one might address race as an embodied sense or an anxiety disorder, outside of the 1-on-1 structure of Treatment 1 (CRT T1). Group Therapy Jam Band sessions will take place with a guest musician or sound maker and host 3-5 participants who will build a sample pack together. Sign up together or join up with a stranger. Kyle b. co. is interested in how the inquiries and personal reflections that emerge from the sessions feed connection. The accompanying musicians will incorporate biofeedback into the process using contact microphones, radio signals and other approaches.
Group Therapy Jam Band will consist of two 2-hour sessions with 3-5 participants at 12PM and 3PM on the following Sundays:
Sun, October 12
Sun, October 19
Sun, November 9
Group Therapy Jam Band will have a single 2-session at 3PM on:
Sun, November 30
Work generated from Group Therapy Jam Band will be utilized in Kyle b. co.’s upcoming OPEN AiR presentation Critical Club Therapy on Thursday, November 13.
With limited group sessions available, we kindly ask that you honor your reserved time. If you are not able to make it to a session, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or let us know ASAP at info@cprnyc.org so that we can reopen the slot to another participant.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle b. co. is a trans-disciplinary artist, performer, educator, and baker based in Brooklyn, NY. They are a 2024-25 Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2023 Smack Mellon Hot Pick, and were short-listed for the 2025 Creative Capital award in visual arts. They have received a RISCA Merit Fellowship in 3-D Arts and a Providence Arts, Culture, and Tourism Public Art Fellowship. Their work has found kinship at Hera Gallery, RISD Museum, Buoy Gallery, Zimmerli Museum of Art, Westbeth Gallery, Lucas, Lucas, and Grace Exhibition Space, among other spaces. Their practice engages with the task of mapping the present as a method of document and engagement with form. They work with materials of culture and personal history to make monuments of possibility. The matrices that hold an image may not be visible ‘til named. Their practice is one of futurity as they seek what can be sensed, not what is known. In various ways, they try to grasp at the transmission/translation of a feeling. Feeling(s) as a concept is unclear in its relationship to time. When did the feeling begin? Has the feeling ever stopped? Will you have this feeling again in the future? Their work spans both objects/installation and performance, the distinction between mediums not being that important. Their work is about feeling (&) connection(s).
OPEN AiR | Yiwei Lu: Ride or Die Train Ride
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Photo by Yiwei Lu.
Hop on a toy train with 2025 AiR Yiwei Lu for a whimsical journey around the world!
“The good news is: you don’t need to leave the room or get a visa — you can enjoy
the whole world just by sitting or standing there.
We’ll explore language, food, and cultural differences together, featuring lecture
time, FaceTime, stand-up comedy, language learning, video watching, food
tasting, photo taking, and of course, train riding.
The concept was totally inspired by the Tokyo Asakusa strip show “Earth Beat”
(just kidding).
This Open AiR program is open to all ages — very family-friendly (I guess).
Thank you, and I’m looking forward to seeing you soon.”
View the program
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Yiwei Lu is an artist and refrigerator based in New York and Nanjing.
As an artist, Yiwei’s work has been exhibited internationally, including Nanjing Powerlong Art Center, The Wallach Art Gallery, SVA Library, Nanjing University of Arts, Trieste Photo Days, and Open Air Art Project.
As a refrigerator, Yiwei aims to unfreeze time, to make it hers. She focuses on the man-altered and social landscape. Created by humans, left with traces of use, they become part of human society and the figurative representation of collective memory. Through the methodical composition, the deepest levels of emotion transfers into extreme restraint.
Yiwei holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University, and an BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts.
OPEN STUDIOS | XSCN, Jessica Perez, and Melanie Hoff, curated by Empress Wu
Empress Wu. Photo by Studio Peri.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!
Multidisciplinary provocateur Empress Wu guest curates OPEN STUDIOS, inviting multimedia artists XSCN, Jessica Perez, and Melanie Hoff to share works in development. Guided by her own desires/dilemmas in both personal and professional leathersex, Wu is interested in uncovering how each artist explores confrontation, power, and personae in the ultimate sadomasochistic dynamic--the one we perform with ourselves.
PROGRAM
XSCN: (sketch for) trannymeatnoiseholeritualmachine
Staging a duet collision between her performer-body and a mixer-loudspeaker unit, XSCN’s trannymeatnoiseholeritualmachine is a movement performance-in-progress that activates thrashing and unruly loops between skin, resonating folds of flesh, and live electronic sound. It is a reverie working through the ambivalent spectacle of the tranny body, the sexual labor-power of wet orifices, and extreme amplification as a strategy of impoverished rage and counter-attack. What results, even in this sketch, is a time-and-site-specific score in the break between guttural sound and gestural movement, meant to resonate and revulse through spectators' bodies in a circuit of endurance, density, and submission.
XSCN requests that all audience members wear masks for her performance.
Sensory Warning: This performance is intended to be loud. It includes harsh electronic noise, unpredictable screeches, and may include strobing lights; any of which can overwhelm the body/mind. Ear protection is highly encouraged and will be provided.
Jessica Perez: Unblinking Interior
Born out of the isolation of the pandemic, this work weaves together journal/ing, audio diaries, documentary traces, and performance video. Through these intersecting mediums, personal narrative becomes both archive and performance, an ongoing dialogue between reflection and embodiment. The video anchors this exploration in an unfixed temporality, where emotion and time move in partnership. The intention of the above is a meditation on intimacy, memory, and the shifting borders between the private and the performed self. This piece is an exploration of the cannibalistic nature of the self that wants and needs and the self that protects and serves, between vulnerability and self-preservation.
Melanie Hoff: Sex is the World Our Desires Produce
Sex is the World Our Desires Produce is a meditative and embodied performance by Melanie Hoff that explores the materiality of conception through language, technology, sound, and breath. At its core, the piece transfigures the sex act into a generative, expansive gesture—one that operates not solely at the scale of the body but radiates fractally into systems of caregiving, social reproduction, and imaginative transformation.
Using a rope wand shaped in an inverted triangle, Hoff dips it into a bowl of consumer-grade soap and, through a dance of breath and gesture, coaxes iridescent bubbles into being. Crawling beneath and blowing into these delicate forms, they suspend the immaterial in spatial tension, transforming the ephemeral into image-scapes that float, collapse, and renew. The act is cyclical: collect, contract, expand, dissolve.
Between these choreographies, poetic meditations surface—on the void, the body, and the infrastructural systems that scaffold intimacy and survival. The performance becomes a kind of inversion, where the internal is turned outward, where breath gives architecture to desire, and where the self dissolves into the swell of atmosphere, technology, and collective dreaming. Hoff’s work reveals how sex, as both act and idea, bursts the body and remakes the world.”-aristilde kirby
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Empress Wu (all pronouns) is a professional dominatrix and cultural activist practicing in NYC and beyond. Their work explores the performance of intimacy, through digital landscapes, queer SM, sexual labor, ancestral ritual, conflict and more. Her work in all its forms have been seen at MoMA PS1, the Performa Biennial, Brown University and probably a dungeon near you. She lives digitally at empresswu.net and mjtom.work
XSCN [pron. “scission”] is a performance and audio-video artist, writer, archivist, and DIY organizer from New York, by way of Ecuador and Romania. Her work deploys modes of confrontational endurance, sensual excess, and violent disharmony, often through the use of her own flesh, in scenes/studies for rites of self-abjection, antagonistic terror, social fracture and anarchic schism.
She currently works on the ongoing cultural project "Untitled [TRANNY]," which spans BDSM endurance performance, exploitation filmmaking, electronic noise music, and experimental cultural analysis to ecstatically embody a ghostly figure called “the Tranny” — a myth, ritual icon, weapon, and narrative form for the distinct material experience of being/surviving/dying as a racialized transsexual hooker.
Jessica Perez is a Brooklyn-based filmmaker, performance artist, and writer whose work examines what it means to be working-class and haunted. Approaching film as visual poetry, she crafts montage-driven works that expose the uncanny within the familiar. Through found objects, performance, and experimental editing, Perez tells the story of place and class with forceful intimacy. Her films draw audiences into recognizable spaces and symbols, then subtly distort them to reveal latent horror and social implication. Rooted in poetry and performance, her practice combines political insight with a visceral sense of haunting and revelation.
Melanie Hoff is an artist, educator, technologist, and organizer working within spaces of hacking and performance. Their work cultivates spaces of learning and collective reflection grounded in poetry and reconciliation for how we choose to live and what choices have been made for us. At the core of their practice is an interrogation of intersecting systems of classification and power alongside a dedication to acts of repair and reimagining. Melanie teaches about art, sex, technology, design, and social cybernetics at Harvard, NYU, and Yale. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, and elsewhere. They co-direct Hex House, an artist's space they co-founded in Brooklyn, and formerly co-directed the School for Poetic Computation where they can often be found teaching from the edges of their research and experimentation.
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 AiR | Diovanna Obafunmilayo: GODBODY, a ritual opera [Ceremony 2]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fac507656ff4f3028bdb444/1757621226647-A9XEBQ587ZK2CUGR0LGI/IMG_6334.jpg)
OPEN AiR | Diovanna Obafunmilayo: GODBODY, a ritual opera [Ceremony 2]
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
In the event that advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30PM.
Photo by Diovanna Obafunmilayo.
2025 AiR Diovanna Obafunmilayo presents GODBODY: a ritual opera [Ceremony 2]. “An invitation of spirit. A birthday party. The making of a body, born free and without shame.”
View the program
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Diovanna Obafunmilayo Frazier is a multimedia performance artist, Grammy-nominated songwriter, award-winning filmmaker, and poet. GODBODY: a ritual opera [Ceremony 2] is the second of two installments of her debut, evening-length performance presentation. She prayerfully wishes upon you, a body without shame.
*POSTPONED* OPEN AiR | DANIRO: "WHAT'S, DONE IN THE DARK..."
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets
Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30PM.
DANIRO. Courtesy the artist.
*This program has been postponed until further notice.
"WHAT’S, DONE IN THE DARK..." is a 3 part performance by 2025 AiR DANIRO that explores the desires, emotions, and imaginations of a woman of the night.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
DANIRO is a multidisciplinary artist who consistently places a future-centered focus on the voices of underrepresented communities that are the pulse of contemporary electronic music, art & culture. By reflecting the narratives of those living their lives in the societal margins, her work aims to capture a perspective not just close to home and heart, but one far too often overlooked by popular media. DANIRO's artistic practice at its root is based in her continued exploration of the human form, starting with her own body and narrative. She received her BFA focused in Film, Sculpture, & Performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. DANIRO has shown work at The Museum of Modern Art, Mana Contemporary, The Lower Manhattan Cultural council, The Gene Siskle Theater, Golden Thread Gallery and more.
OPEN LAB | Group Therapy Jam Band—Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1.5 / The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co
Kyle b. co.: Critical Race Therapy: Treatment 1/The Rhythm Treatment with Kyle b. co.: Orientation, presented by CPR – Center for Performance Research as part of OPEN LAB | Critical Race Therapy T1 with Kyle b. co.: Orientation on March 16, 2025. Image courtesy CPR. Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Free; advance registration required at least 24 hours in advance.
RSVP
(2 hour group sessions, 3-5 participants)
This fall, 2025 Artist-in-Residence Kyle b. co. is workshopping sessions of their Critical Race Therapy project, which thinks through how one might address race as an embodied sense or an anxiety disorder, outside of the 1-on-1 structure of Treatment 1 (CRT T1). Group Therapy Jam Band sessions will take place with a guest musician or sound maker and host 3-5 participants who will build a sample pack together. Sign up together or join up with a stranger. Kyle b. co. is interested in how the inquiries and personal reflections that emerge from the sessions feed connection. The accompanying musicians will incorporate biofeedback into the process using contact microphones, radio signals and other approaches.
Group Therapy Jam Band will consist of two 2-hour sessions with 3-5 participants at 12PM and 3PM on the following Sundays:
Sun, October 12
Sun, October 19
Sun, November 9
Sun, November 30
Work generated from Group Therapy Jam Band will be utilized in Kyle b. co.’s upcoming OPEN AiR presentation Critical Club Therapy on Thursday, November 13.
With limited group sessions available, we kindly ask that you honor your reserved time. If you are not able to make it to a session, please cancel your reservation through Eventbrite or let us know ASAP at info@cprnyc.org so that we can reopen the slot to another participant.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kyle b. co. is a trans-disciplinary artist, performer, educator, and baker based in Brooklyn, NY. They are a 2024-25 Franklin Furnace Fund recipient, a 2023 Smack Mellon Hot Pick, and were short-listed for the 2025 Creative Capital award in visual arts. They have received a RISCA Merit Fellowship in 3-D Arts and a Providence Arts, Culture, and Tourism Public Art Fellowship. Their work has found kinship at Hera Gallery, RISD Museum, Buoy Gallery, Zimmerli Museum of Art, Westbeth Gallery, Lucas, Lucas, and Grace Exhibition Space, among other spaces. Their practice engages with the task of mapping the present as a method of document and engagement with form. They work with materials of culture and personal history to make monuments of possibility. The matrices that hold an image may not be visible ‘til named. Their practice is one of futurity as they seek what can be sensed, not what is known. In various ways, they try to grasp at the transmission/translation of a feeling. Feeling(s) as a concept is unclear in its relationship to time. When did the feeling begin? Has the feeling ever stopped? Will you have this feeling again in the future? Their work spans both objects/installation and performance, the distinction between mediums not being that important. Their work is about feeling (&) connection(s).
@CPR | Amanda + James: Party Dish
Photo by Sierra Hendrix
Tickets $30
Purchase Tickets
PARTY DISH is a cooking performance and eating disorder exorcism. A woman prepares linguini with clam sauce for the audience while live-mixing a layered sound and video landscape that mourns, ridicules and celebrates the joys, necessity and pain of consumption. It's a rambling lecture given by an unstable dinner host. It's a party.
Choreographed, written and performed by Amanda Hameline
Projection Design by Jace Weyant
Sound Design by Lavinia Bruce
Dramaturgy by Ethan Hardy
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amanda Hameline is a choreographer, dancer, and designer. She creates performances that are rooted in the human body but also utilize text, props, and technology–everything from video projection, to hotplates, to stacks of cardboard boxes, to a summary of the history of fish cannery. Her works relish in the mundane and bring about a sense of productive dis-ease. Is it absurd or simply tragic? She's often not sure and is trying to figure it out. Amanda has presented evening-length work and split-bills in venues across New York City, such as Kestrels, Coffey Street Studio, Arts on Site, CPR-Center for Performance Research, National Sawdust, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, and Martha Graham Studio Theater; and in Berlin at Lake Studios and Cordillera. She has also developed site-specific pieces for a variety of non-traditional performance spaces, such as Christie’s New York, Pace Gallery, the Chelsea Hotel, and in Miami at RAW Pop Up and The Moore Building. Amanda Hameline is also a co-founder of the non-profit production company, Amanda + James. www.amandahameline.com | www.amandaplusjames.com
@CPR | Amanda + James: Party Dish
Photo by Sierra Hendrix
Tickets $30
Purchase Tickets
PARTY DISH is a cooking performance and eating disorder exorcism. A woman prepares linguini with clam sauce for the audience while live-mixing a layered sound and video landscape that mourns, ridicules and celebrates the joys, necessity and pain of consumption. It's a rambling lecture given by an unstable dinner host. It's a party.
Choreographed, written and performed by Amanda Hameline
Projection Design by Jace Weyant
Sound Design by Lavinia Bruce
Dramaturgy by Ethan Hardy
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Amanda Hameline is a choreographer, dancer, and designer. She creates performances that are rooted in the human body but also utilize text, props, and technology–everything from video projection, to hotplates, to stacks of cardboard boxes, to a summary of the history of fish cannery. Her works relish in the mundane and bring about a sense of productive dis-ease. Is it absurd or simply tragic? She's often not sure and is trying to figure it out. Amanda has presented evening-length work and split-bills in venues across New York City, such as Kestrels, Coffey Street Studio, Arts on Site, CPR-Center for Performance Research, National Sawdust, Dixon Place, Triskelion Arts, and Martha Graham Studio Theater; and in Berlin at Lake Studios and Cordillera. She has also developed site-specific pieces for a variety of non-traditional performance spaces, such as Christie’s New York, Pace Gallery, the Chelsea Hotel, and in Miami at RAW Pop Up and The Moore Building. Amanda Hameline is also a co-founder of the non-profit production company, Amanda + James. www.amandahameline.com | www.amandaplusjames.com