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This movement workshop by 2026 AiR Quaba Venza Ernest explores improvised theatrical staging through scored improvisation, composition, and play. Beginning with somatic and proprioceptive practices, participants will cultivate awareness of their own bodies before collectively mapping the space and discovering relationships with one another. Together, we will create events by exploring symbolic weight, spatial relationships, dynamic tension, and the quiet beauty of natural occurrences.

Through simple compositional prompts and improvisational scores, we will investigate how stories emerge through presence rather than predetermined narrative, allowing meaning to arise from the relationships between bodies, objects, space, and time.

Open to movers of all backgrounds, this workshop invites participants to experiment, observe, and compose in real time, embracing curiosity and intuition as tools for theatrical world-building.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Quaba Venza Ernest is a Brooklyn-born, St. Lucian-American interdisciplinary artist whose work merges contemporary dance, theater, writing, and sound to create immersive performance worlds. His relationship to movement is deeply rooted in lineage, the conversation between past, present, and future—and in choreography as a way of carrying dreams across generations. He trained at Dance Theatre of Harlem, Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance, and Springboard Danse Montréal. His choreography and films have been presented locally and internationally at venues and festivals including Triskelion Arts, Arts On Site, BAAD!, Jamaica Dance Festival, Making Moves Dance Festival Cinedanza, (Italy), Quinzena de Dança de Almada (Portugal), Dance Camera Istanbul, ADF’s Movies By Movers (2023), Hostos Center for the Arts & Culture, and the 92Y Future Dance Festival. He is the founder of Venza Dance and Ernest Records, platforms through which he develops interdisciplinary work and supports the artistic community. His distinctions include the Works & Process Residency Artist (2026-2027), Center for Performance Research Resident Artist (2026), Dancing While Black Fellowship (2026), Pepatián/BAAD Dancing Futures Residency (2025), Chelsea Factory Summer Residency (2024), the Ann & Weston Hicks Choreography Fellowship at Jacob’s Pillow (2021), and the Thayer Fellowship in the Arts (2019).

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.

CPR - Center for Performance Research invites applications for the 2027 Artist-in-Residence Program. Click here to apply.

Application deadline: Monday, August 24, 2026 at 5:00 P.M. EST.

Email applications@cprnyc.org with questions.

CPR – Center for Performance Research invites eligible applicants to apply for its 2027 Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program.  Please be sure to read through the residency description and criteria in its entirety before applying. We strongly recommend drafting narrative answers in a separate document.

ABOUT CPR'S ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE PROGRAM

CPR – Center for Performance Research’s year-long Artist-in-Residence (AiR) Program seeks to support NYC-based artists working within various perspectives of contemporary dance, performance, and time-based art. In selecting its AiRs, CPR values experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and encourages risk-taking, interdisciplinarity, and the unexpected.

The year-long residency creates an open environment for experimentation, exploration, embodiment, and exchange, and will provide a cohort of six (6) artists with research and presentation opportunities, subsidized rehearsal space, curatorial and project support, and peer dialogue. The program is intended to nurture the individualized creative process, and prioritizes artists for whom the opportunity will make a major impact on the growth and evolution of their work and career.

Applications are solicited through an OPEN CALL, and AiRs are selected by an independent panel of artists, curators, and arts leaders. With this approach, CPR aspires to create a more accessible and equitable selection process, and to increase visibility, opportunities, and resources for a more diverse range of artists in the field.

CPR is committed to supporting artists from every background and maintains an expansive approach to performance practice. We strongly encourage BIPOC artists, LGBTQ+ artists, immigrant artists, artists with disabilities, and artists across generations to apply.

RESIDENCY DETAILS

Six NYC-based artists will be selected for a year-long residency from January to December 2027. AiRs will have opportunities for presentation, community engagement, and creative exchange through CPR’s curated Public Programs, and will receive curatorial support and feedback from CPR staff and fellow artists throughout the year. 

In addition, each AiR receives:

*A $2,000 stipend.

*Advance access to CPR’s rehearsal booking calendar.

*20 free hours of rehearsal space for the residency cycle, and may book up to 150 subsidized rehearsal hours in either of CPR’s studios during the residency year, with priority booking January 2027 through February 2028. 

*Additional artist fees and resources for CPR Public Programs, including access to technical equipment and production support.

AiRs will have the chance to present their work publicly through the following programs:

OPEN LAB, in which AiRs facilitate embodied workshops or feedback-generating performances organized around a central research question.

OPEN AiR, in which AiRs share their current practice and research. These programs may take a variety of forms – solo presentations of new work in development, multi-artist programs that offer space for dialogue between artists’ practices, and other formats that are responsive to each artist’s practice and ongoing research.

ELIGIBILITY

• Eligible applicants have previously had their work publicly presented, and have not been selected as a CPR Artist-in-Residence in the last 5 years.

• Individual artists, companies, collaboratives, or collectives may apply, but each applicant/application will be considered as a single residency.

• The residency is exclusively for New York City-based artists. CPR cannot provide US visas, travel, accommodations, or other living expenses in connection with the residency. If you are an artist based in NYC but traveling or out of town for a majority of the residency cycle, please consider if the resources provided by this residency will best suit your practice.

• Current undergraduate students are not eligible to apply.

CONSIDERATIONS FOR A COMPETITIVE APPLICATION:

• Demonstrating a strong understanding and commitment to CPR's core values, including artistic practices which prioritize play, risk, experimentation, curiosity, new forms, modes of embodiment and presence, and urgency.

• Understanding the scope of CPR's resources, and successfully demonstrating how they will be utilized throughout the residency cycle.

• Identifying a central research question in your proposal that will be explored throughout the duration of your residency.

• Illustrating how one's practice might be activated by CPR's OPEN LAB and OPEN AiR public programming formats. 

• Understanding that classical or traditional artforms will not be considered unless they are subverted or disrupted through modes of experimentation. 

THE SPACE

CPR occupies a 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has two flexible studio spaces. The Large Studio is an 1,875 sq. ft., flexible rehearsal and performance space, outfitted with an LED theatrical lighting system, full-range sound, projection capabilities, and a sprung wood dance floor with white marley, and can seat up to 68 people. The Small Studio functions as a rehearsal studio, gallery, and meeting space, and features floor-to-ceiling storefront windows looking out onto the street, track lighting, and a sprung wood dance floor. CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two all gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible. A floor plan, images, and technical specifications can be found here.

SUPPORT

CPR's 2027 AiR Program is directly supported by Americans for the Arts National Arts Relief Fund, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Howard Gilman Foundation, IndieSpace, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.

APPLICATION TIMELINE

Applications will be accepted until Monday, August 24, 2026 at 5:00pm EST. Late submissions will not be accepted. Notifications will be made in November 2026.

The panelists look forward to reviewing your application!Email us at applications@cprnyc.org with any questions.

Speed Racing! Road Tripping! Thrill Seeking! & more!

Please join us at CPR – Center for Performance Research on Tuesday, June 16 for our 2026 Spring Benefit, which gathers artists and friends for an evening JOYRIDE with delightful detours, scenic highways, and high-octane action to celebrate CPR.

PROGRAM

7PM | Fuel, Hydration, Start Your Engines
8PM | Performances, Pitstops, Cruise Control
9PM | Drive-Thru Desserts, Deacceleration, Disembarking

Hosted by Designated Driver
Tiresias

Art Direction by
Kat Sotelo

Roadside Attractions by
Catherine Brookman
Das Besties
JoyBoy
Yiseul LeMieux
Diovanna Obafunmilayo
Kevin Peter He
Sleth
Kate Williams
& more hidden gems off the beaten path…!

View the Artists Bios

View the Program

Light Bites and Libations! Food by Cozy Royale ‍ ‍Drinks by Vine Wine, Zev Rovine Selections, Zakuska Vodka‍, Grimm Ales ‍
Sweets by Settepani Bakery, 3rd Floor Brooklyn

Raffle Prizes
*Art by Jeanette Levy. *Tickets to BAM, New York City Ballet, and The New York Aquarium. *Merch from Unemployed Philosophers Guild.

TICKETS

$1000| MAXIMUM MILEAGE
$750| PASSENGER PRINCESS
$500| SPEED DEMON
$250| PIT CREW
$150| EASY RIDER
(for artists & arts workers)[limited]

Tickets are 100% tax-deductible, and include all food, drink, and merriment. All proceeds benefit CPR’s artists and programs – and the joyful act of experimentation and embodied practice.

If you can’t attend this year, you can make a tax-deductible donation to CPR via Zeffy.

BENEFIT COMMITTEE(in formation)

Samuel Akinloye Babajide*
Annie-B Parson & Paul Lazar
Sidra Bell* Amy Cassello Yanira Castro Noah Chesnin* Alison Cuzzolino
Jonathan Gardenhire Nick Hockens*
John Jasperse*
Margaret Knowles
Tommy Kriegsmann & Shanta Thake Molly Kurzius
Natasha Logan Tamara McCaw*
Kathleen O’Connell* Alexandra Rosenberg
Amber Sasse*
Martha Sherman*
Megan Sprenger*
Janet Wong

*CPR Board of Directors

RAFFLE: $25 each or 5 for $100

Enter to win an artwork or prize donated by CPR artists and friends:

Jeanette Levy‍ ‍Blooming
Aug 2021 - oil on canvas - 22” x 17”
value: $700

BAM
2x tickets to the Fall 2026 Next Wave Festival or the 2027 Winter/Spring season from BAM.
value: $150

The New York Aquarium
4x tickets and Guided Shark Tour from The New York Aquarium at Coney Island. value: $350

Unemployed Philosophers Guild
Outer Space Merch, including Planet Plates, Moon hairpins, and more. value: $150

New York City Ballet
2x Tickets for the New York City Ballet’s upcoming 2026-27 season performances.
value: $400                                              

Raffle tickets are $25 a piece or 5 for $100. Anyone can enter (even if you are not attending!), and you can enter as many times as you wish! The drawing will take place live at CPR’s Spring Benefit on June 16, and tickets will be drawn at random. Purchase 4 or more raffle tickets, and receive a limited-edition CPR tote bag!

Raffle tickets may be purchased online before 12PM on Tues, June 16, or during the Spring Benefit, via Zeffy.

Terms and restrictions:Raffle winners must arrange to pick up their prize at CPR’s offices in Brooklyn within 1 month of the drawing. Unfortunately, CPR cannot arrange shipping. Tote bags can be picked up at CPR on select dates, where you can also select your preferred color and size! Please note raffle tickets are NOT tax-deductible.

ADOPT A CHAIR

As a special addition to your evening of JOYRIDE, you can Adopt a Chair at CPR with an additional tax-deductible donation of $100. To commemorate your support, we’ll affix a plaque on your chair naming you as its benefactor, or dedicated to a loved one, friend, pet, place, or JOYRIDE of your choosing.

You can Adopt a Chair at checkout via Zeffy. You can complete this order form to confirm your dedication or email Jaclyn Biskup at jaclyn@cprnyc.org with the details.

Orders placed by June 1 will have their plaques affixed by the Spring Benefit, so that you may recline in your honorable passenger seat as we cruise the night away. While not required, we hope that you will continue to sustain your chair with a meaningful donation in subsequent years.

LOCATION AND ACCESSIBLITY

CPR – Center for Performance Research
361 Manhattan Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211

CPR is easily accessed by public transportation or car. For detailed directions, please visit www.cprnyc.org/contact-directions.

CPR is located on the ground floor in a fully accessible and ADA-compliant venue, with two single use all-gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible.

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets

Sat, May 30 at 7:30 P.M.
Sun, May 31 at 2 P.M.

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.

View the program.

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.

Ending Explained utilizes materials from Materials for the Arts (MFTA).

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets

Sat, May 30 at 7:30 P.M.
Sun, May 31 at 2 P.M.

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.

View the program.

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.

Ending Explained utilizes materials from Materials for the Arts (MFTA).

Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
RSVP

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 the band Ube Boys, performing a set of improvisational 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.

CPR - Center for Performance Research invites proposals for live performance works to be presented as part of Fall Movement 2026 on December 4 and 5, 2026 or Spring Movement 2027 on March 5 and 6, 2027.

Click here to apply.

Application deadline:
Monday, May 18 at 5:00 PM EST.

Please email applications@cprnyc.org with any questions.

Fall Movement and Spring Movement provide an opportunity for artists to present new work in dance, performance, and time-based art in a shared program, curated by an independent panel of artists through an OPEN CALL.

CPR is soliciting applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, with each program presenting five short works. Fall Movement will be presented on Fri, December 4 and Sat, December 5, 2026, and Spring Movement will be presented on Fri, March 5 and Sat, March 6, 2027. 

Individual artists, collectives, and companies may propose a live performance work that is 15-20 minutes in length. CPR encourages applicants to submit work with experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and work that values risk-taking and the unexpected. 

Applicants must be available to share their proposed work in either the Fall Movement 2026 or Spring Movement 2027 program. CPR is committed to supporting artists from every background, at various stages of their artistic careers, and across generations, and maintains an expansive approach to performance.

We strongly encourage BIPOC artists, LGBTQ+ artists, immigrant artists, and artists with disabilities to apply. Please be sure to read through the program details and application criteria in its entirety before submitting your application. We strongly recommend drafting narrative responses in a separate document.  Please email applications@cprnyc.org with any questions. 

PROGRAM DETAILS

Fall Movement will take place at CPR on Fri, December 4 and Sat, December 5, 2026 at 7 PM. Spring Movement will take place at CPR on Fri, March 5 and Sat, March 6, 2027 at 7 PM. Five works will be presented in each “Movement” season, with each work presented on both evenings in an identical program. Each selected work will receive a 2-hour technical rehearsal with CPR production staff, 2 hours of complimentary rehearsal time in one of CPR's studios (based on availability), an honorarium of $350, and reimbursed production expenses (materials, transport, etc) up to $100.  

ELIGIBILITY

• Individual artists, collectives, or companies may apply, but each applicant/application will be considered as a unique project, and will receive a single honorarium of $350.

• While Fall and Spring Movement are not limited to NYC-based artists, CPR cannot provide US visas, travel, accommodations, or other living expenses in connection with the presentation.

• Current undergraduate students are not eligible to apply.

• Artists who have been presented in Fall Movement or Spring Movement at CPR within the last 5 five years may not apply.

• Applicants must be available for both Fall and Spring Movement dates.

• Works featuring classical or traditional artforms that are not subverted or disrupted through modes of experimentation will not be considered.

A COMPETITIVE FALL/SPRING MOVEMENT APPLICATION WILL INCLUDE:

• A strong understanding and demonstration of CPR's core values, including work that prioritizes play, risk, experimentation, curiosity, new forms, modes of embodiment and presence, and urgency.

• A strong understanding of CPR's resources and time constraints. 

• A work description that conveys the importance and timeliness of presenting this work at CPR, answering the questions: Why is CPR the right fit for this particular project? How would the opportunity impact this stage of your career and practice? 

THE SPACE

CPR occupies a 4,000 sq. ft. ground floor facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and has two flexible studio spaces. The Large Studio is an 1,875 sq. ft., flexible rehearsal and performance space, outfitted with an LED theatrical lighting system, full-range sound, projection capabilities, and a sprung wood dance floor with white marley, and tiered audience risers seating up to 68 people. The Small Studio functions as a rehearsal studio, gallery, and meeting space, and features floor-to-ceiling storefront windows looking out onto the street, track lighting, and a sprung wood dance floor. CPR is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible venue with two all gender restrooms, one being wheelchair-accessible. A floor plan, images, and technical specifications can be found here.

APPLICATION TIMELINE

Applications will be accepted until Monday, May 18, 2026, at 5:00pm EST.

We expect to send notifications in July 2026 and to announce both the Fall Movement 2026 and Spring Movement 2026 line-ups in August 2026 along with the announcement of CPR's 2026 Fall Season.

Please reach out to applications@cprnyc.org with any questions. The panel looks forward to reviewing your application!

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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Ty Defoe brings together Dawn Avery, 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.

View the program.

PROGRAM

Dawn Avery: Where is she?

In honor of MMIWG and their families

Composed by Dawn Ieri’hó:kwats Avery with participants. Directed by Ty Defoe

In this work, I am experimenting with intentionality in and of the land, space, change, connection, relationship, language, gratitude, blessings, remembrance, and condolence gifted in the form of performance art with video design by a woman of great intention, Kate Freer. 

With a focus on Native Indigenous people and their language, it is inclusive to any participant who has a grandmother, mother, sister, woman, or auntie.

Women in the matrilineal, Haudenosaunee society and in many Indigenous nations, are honored as caregivers, caretakers, historians, clan mothers and leaders in governance, sacred keepers of moon and healing ceremonies, and medicine keepers. The respect is great. 

Where Is She?  honors the lives and families of the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) and is dedicated to those working to end this epidemic that has continued on Turtle Island for decades. A special thank you to CPR and curator, Ty Defoe for their continued work in bringing this to people’s attention.

Jolie Cloutier: Tomato Season

Tomato Season, written and performed by Jolie Cloutier, a member of Onondaga Nation's Wolf Clan, is the story of a young Native American woman navigating the complexities and possibilities of pregnancy in the contemporary United States, and the powerful possibility of bringing a life into today's  world. The piece explores themes of generational trauma, religious trauma, motherhood, abortion, and the realization of not being ready for something you've always wanted. Cloutier tackles a heavy societal topic and presents it to the audience from an Indigenous lens, and tells a daunting story with hope, honesty, and self grace. Tomato Season is Cloutier's first writing project to be presented in front of an audience. Jolie is extremely grateful to share this story, and she would like to thank Ty Defoe, the folks at CPR, her partner Andrew, her friends who listened to her from the start, and her instructors at HB studio for encouraging her to tell her story.

Jessica Ranville: Martha in Space

This is a work-in-progress excerpt of a one-act play with music, featuring puppetry, projections and choreography. It follows the story of Martha, a journalist unmoored by grief, on assignment in outer space. There she encounters Mo, a war photographer-cum-astrophotographer on a personal mission of his own. Encouraging, cajoling, undermining and inspiring Martha is a Greek Chorus—at times her ancestors, her inner voice, the natural world—that follows her everywhere she goes... even to space.

Featuring Sonia Villani and Bradley Lewis. 

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

GRAMMY and NAMA nominated performer, composer, professor, Dawn Ieri’hó:kwats Avery has worked with musical luminaries Pavarotti, Sting, Nakai, and Shenandoah; composers Cage, Wuorinen, Glass, Chacon, Becenti and, Indigenous elders Jan Kahehti:io Longboat, Tom Sakokwen’ion:kwas Porter, Ray Ta’wente’se John, among others. Holding a place of peace, spirit, and passion, Dawn Avery draws from her devotion to sacred world traditions, including those from her own Kaniènkéha (Mohawk) heritage. Her music can be understood as a sonic journey of awareness.

Avery’s work has been performed at the National Museum of the American Indian, Lincoln and Kennedy Centers, throughout Europe, and at many Universities and Indigenous communities. She has been composing a series of orchestral works that serve as a musical acknowledgment to honor the Indigenous ancestors, legacy, and land upon which the ensembles perform and live. Grounded in the ancient history of the land through the vibration of sound, the performers are asked to recite the names of the nations who have and continue to live in that area today. Entitled Indian Territory with specific nation names, works have been performed by the Albany, Alexandria, Ancaster, and Williamsburg Symphony Orchestras, along with several chamber groups throughout Turtle Island.

Azica Records releasedseveral of her cello works played by Wilhelmina Smith Sweetgrass (2025) and has an upcoming recording of her chamber works performed by Salt Bay ChamberFest musicians; both produced by Judith Sherman and directed by Wilhelmina Smith.  She has composed and recorded in a variety of styles on Okenti records that have won several Global Music Awards. Along with Mitchell and Tarrant, Avery composed music an Indigenous-based theatre project Ajijaak on Turtle Island; written and directed by Ty Defoe; Heather Henson’s (of the Jim Henson legacy) production.

Avery composed for the award-winning film Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native Mascots and won best composer in the Paris Women’s Film Festival (Iotsistokwaron:ion, performed by Duo Concertante). Two of her short operas, including Trials and Tears with libretto by Ty Defoe, will be performed at The Cooper Union in NYC on November 5, 2026.

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.

Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
RSVP

Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30 PM.

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.

Advance tickets are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 6:30 PM. We will do our best to get everyone in comfortably!

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.

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Inspired by Words to Melt ICE, an online anthology of creative works of dissent against ICE,  join us for an afternoon of select pieces from the anthology and a community open mic. Bring your words, your pens, your rage to what will be an event of healing and collective resistance.  Co-hosted by playwrights Amalia Oliva Rojas and Christin Eve Cato. Proceeds will support deportation relief efforts. 

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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.

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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 in which we will absorb "energy food" from an insect guide 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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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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 Kate McGee, Jacqueline Scaletta, and Daphne Silbiger to share works inspired by this notion, to see what kinds of conversations can emerge.

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PROGRAM

Kate McGee: Girl Mode

A meditation on absence as an essential texture of transness, 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.

Directed by Coral Cohen.

Daphne Silbiger: Brain in a Box

What can a human do that a machine cannot? What can a machine do that a human cannot? Does a machine ever long for messy reality, and what does it mean that humans show more and more desire to fuse with machines? Is it hot? A question about the grotesque with music, improvised text, and projection. Co-created with Beatrice Hirsch.

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

Daphne Silbiger is a playwright, musician, and visual artist. Her plays include Language Party (in development), Very Blue Light (Tank Core Production), Attempts (Salon @ Life World), O The Humanity (Brick/Aux), Dirtbag Stacks (Crashbox), Pound (Relentless Award Semi-Finalist), and Six Years Old, which has been performed at theaters and colleges around the country. Daphne plays bass in the multidisciplinary band Go Home, with whom she performs regularly around the city, produced Uncle John and the Demon of the Wood (ANT Fest 2025) and is working on a second full-length record. She recently performed John Cage’s Telephones and Birds with Trisha Brown Dance Company (BAM). Daphne is also a teacher, working recently with School of Making Thinking on a course focused on the intersection of playwriting and new economic theory, and has collage work listed in the Kolaj Magazine International Artist Directory. Her work has been supported by MacDowell, The Sitka Fellows Program, and The Center for International Theatre Development. She is the academic advisor to Playwrights Horizons Theater School at NYU Tisch, and earned her MFA in Playwriting from UT Austin. 

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
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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.

View the program.

PROGRAM

Demetris Charalambous: GLIESER
“A banished creature treads the verge of a timeless afterworld. A scavenger in nature, it encounters fossils of the species it once belonged to. Driven by instinct, first light inspires desire. It passes beyond the border of the world, the earth cracks and pleasure seeps through its seams. A heart becomes a portal, a machine towards an annihilating immortality. A sentinel enters stage left.”

This work is a personal archeology of memories — summers growing up in my home land Cyprus, the realisation of my Queerness, fleeing mandatory military service at 18, crossing a demilitarised border into illegally occupied territory in search of love through Grindr, heartbreak under an incessantly searing sun.

Choreography by Demetris Charalambous.

Original Music by Quique.

Performed by Demetris Charalambous, Caias Kim. 

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 sayinis 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 Wildis 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.

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.

View the program.

PROGRAM

Demetris Charalambous: GLIESER
“A banished creature treads the verge of a timeless afterworld. A scavenger in nature, it encounters fossils of the species it once belonged to. Driven by instinct, first light inspires desire. It passes beyond the border of the world, the earth cracks and pleasure seeps through its seams. A heart becomes a portal, a machine towards an annihilating immortality. A sentinel enters stage left.”

This work is a personal archeology of memories — summers growing up in my home land Cyprus, the realisation of my Queerness, fleeing mandatory military service at 18, crossing a demilitarised border into illegally occupied territory in search of love through Grindr, heartbreak under an incessantly searing sun.

Choreography by Demetris Charalambous.

Original Music by Quique.

Performed by Demetris Charalambous, Caias Kim.

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 sayinis 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 Wildis 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.

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"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.

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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. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

UPDATE: This event has been moved to Zoom due to inclement weather. 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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).

Tickets: $0-$25, pay what you can
Purchase Tickets

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.