Photo by Elyse Mertz.
Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Anh Vo invites Sol Cabrini, Bao Nguyen, and Karwaan Kotwal to CPR for an evening of performance exploring the desire for the incommensurable.
PROGRAM
Sol Cabrini: What the Service Covers
What the Service Covers is a developing project where I examine background labor as a kind of work in keeping people alive that can disappear into another person’s apparent independence. The enslaved caregiver’s position within the slaveholding household opens my question of the “split object,” and of the labor psychoanalytic accounts of familial intimacy can leave in the background. W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness and the essays and sketches of The Souls of Black Folk inform my practice of ante-memoir, where the background refuses to disappear from the account of a life. I read Lacan’s remarks on death and faith through the trust demanded by services that promise relief. I rewrite the Cura fable from Heidegger’s Being and Time through The Care Service, a fictional institution that sells people access to their own memories and places psychoanalysis “out of network.” Scenes of unemployment and intimate care follow these questions through black trans life. I ask how service organizes the terms under which care can be priced or denied, and whether keeping someone alive must turn that life into evidence that the system has cared.
Bao Nguyen: My Hole is Buddhist Emptiness
A hug, a toilet paper roll, an asshole. These are the ideas that Bao will move through, chew on, and talk about. They might talk about their parents' buttholes also.
Karwaan Kotwal: Open Mic
An open mic is a live show at a venue such as a coffeehouse, nightclub, comedy club, strip club, or pub, often taking place at night (an open mic night), in which audience members may perform on stage whether they are amateurs or professionals, often for the first time or to promote an upcoming performance. As the name suggests, performers are usually provided with a microphone plugged into a PA system so that they can be better heard by the audience.
Performers may sign up in advance for a time slot with the host, who is typically an experienced performer or the venue's manager or owner. The host may screen potential candidates for suitability for the venue and give them a time to perform during the show. Open mics are focused on performance arts such as comedy, music, poetry, and spoken word. It is less common for groups such as rock bands or comedy troupes to perform, mostly because of the space and logistical requirements of preparing equipment and sound checking such groups.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Based in Brooklyn and Hanoi, Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working in the expanded field of performance. Together with Lumi Tan and maura nguyễn-donohue, they co-organize We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers (Performance Space New York, 2026), a large-scale program of residencies, performances, publication, and public events exploring contemporary performance in Vietnam.
Sol Cabrini is an artist, scholar, and author of Tgirl.jpg (Roof Books) and Poetics of Unbeing, forthcoming from Duke University Press. Her practice addresses the various ways creolization performs and operates in the world.
Bao Nguyen is a performance and visual artist based in Baltimore and raised in Vietnam. They improvise through movement, action, voice and words to unravel a range of emotions. Recently, they recited Cardi B’s “WAP”, rolled in a blanket while being naked, ate soil, scolded the audience and asked for their keys. Bao messes up the context of DIY and institutional spaces they perform in to uncover collective intimacy, openness and vulnerability.
Karwaan Kotwal: born in 1968 in Havana, Cuba. Bruguera, a politically motivated performance artist, explores the relationship between art, activism, and social change in works that examine the social effects of political and economic power. By creating proposals and aesthetic models for others to use and adapt, she defines herself as an initiator rather than an author, and often collaborates with multiple institutions as well as many individuals so that the full realization of her artwork occurs when others adopt and perpetuate it.
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.