Nopal En La Frente — Performance Still. Xoco Cemetery — Coyoacan, Mexico. 2023. Photo credit: Camille Lacadee.
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
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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.