Demetris Charalambous. Photo by Nicolas Karatzas.
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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 60 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.
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.