Nazareth Hassan. Photo by Alexander Mejía/Bergamot.
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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.
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, and Marcus Sargent, 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.