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Episode 1: Fri, June 14 at 7 P.M.
feat. Candice Hoyes, Kamikaze Jones with geo blake, and Autumn Knight

Episode 2: Sat, June 15 at 7 P.M.
feat. Alicia Grullón, Kat Sotelo, and Martha Wilson


For CPR's annual Spring Movement, Ayana Evans curates Giving You the Best That We Got: The Ayana & Tsedaye Variety Show (with Tsedaye on Video). This talk show-style performance extravaganza will be like Oprah meets Miami Vice… but more neon! In previous iterations collaborator and co-creator Tsedaye Makonnen was involved as a co-host and curator; this time Makonnen will be our video correspondent.

The Variety Show at CPR – filmed before a live studio audience! – will feature live performances by artists working at the intersection of performance and visual art across two unique episodes, featuring Candice Hoyes, and Kamikaze Jones with geo blake, and Autumn Knight on Friday night’s episode and Alicia Grullón, Kat Sotelo and Martha Wilson on Saturday night’s episode. Get ready for commercial and yawn breaks, shag carpeting, and emotional sit-and-talks with everyone’s favorite performance artists!

In addition to the live Variety Show, the Premier American Performance Art Museum (PAPAM), founded by Esther Neff in 2024, will be on view in CPR’s Storefront Gallery beginning at 6pm each night. Works on view will include relics and ephemera by Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Dominique Duroseau, and more artists to be announced.

View the Program: Episode 2


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ayana Evans is a NYC-based performance artist. Her guerilla-style performances have been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, Queens Museum and a variety of free public  locations. Her performances have been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She was a 2017-18 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance, 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2021-22 Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and 2022 Chamberlain Award winner at Headlands Art Center. Her past residencies include Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Evans' current projects include an upcoming performance and class visit at Wellesley College as part of the Taking Off the White Gloves showcasing the work of Lorraine O’Grady and the development of a arts focused career fair that  has welcomed over 200 formerly incarcerated individuals and transformed the job hunting space into a fun environment. Evans is currently a professor at Fordham College and NYU.


This program is made possible, in part, by a Late Stage Stipend from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

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


Episode 1: Fri, June 14 at 7 P.M.
feat. Candice Hoyes, Kamikaze Jones with geo blake, and Autumn Knight

Episode 2: Sat, June 15 at 7 P.M.
feat. Alicia Grullón, Kat Sotelo, and Martha Wilson


For CPR's annual Spring Movement, Ayana Evans curates Giving You the Best That We Got: The Ayana & Tsedaye Variety Show (with Tsedaye on Video). This talk show-style performance extravaganza will be like Oprah meets Miami Vice… but more neon! In previous iterations collaborator and co-creator Tsedaye Makonnen was involved as a co-host and curator; this time Makonnen will be our video correspondent.

The Variety Show at CPR – filmed before a live studio audience! – will feature live performances by artists working at the intersection of performance and visual art across two unique episodes, featuring Candice Hoyes, and Kamikaze Jones with geo blake, and Autumn Knight on Friday night’s episode and Alicia Grullón, Kat Sotelo and Martha Wilson on Saturday night’s episode. Get ready for commercial and yawn breaks, shag carpeting, and emotional sit-and-talks with everyone’s favorite performance artists!

In addition to the live Variety Show, the Premier American Performance Art Museum (PAPAM), founded by Esther Neff in 2024, will be on view in CPR’s Storefront Gallery beginning at 6pm each night. Works on view will include relics and ephemera by Marcelline Mandeng Nken, Dominique Duroseau, and more artists to be announced.

View the Program: Episode 1


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ayana Evans is a NYC-based performance artist. Her guerilla-style performances have been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Newark Museum, Queens Museum and a variety of free public  locations. Her performances have been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic, and New York Magazine's The Cut. She was a 2017-18 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance, 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2021-22 Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and 2022 Chamberlain Award winner at Headlands Art Center. Her past residencies include Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Evans' current projects include an upcoming performance and class visit at Wellesley College as part of the Taking Off the White Gloves showcasing the work of Lorraine O’Grady and the development of a arts focused career fair that  has welcomed over 200 formerly incarcerated individuals and transformed the job hunting space into a fun environment. Evans is currently a professor at Fordham College and NYU.


This program is made possible, in part, by a Late Stage Stipend from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

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


Friday, December 1 at 7:00 P.M.
Saturday, December 2 at 7:00 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 and collaborations working across and between live art disciplines were selected to present their work: Juli Brandano, ALEXA GRÆ and Stephanie Acosta, Dominica Greene, Nazareth Hassan / Paratheater, and Cherrie Yu.

The 2023 program was curated by a selection panel comprised of artists Lauren Bakst, Doménica García, and Jordan Demetrius Lloyd.

View the Program

PROGRAM

Juli Brandano: Wet Material (for CPR)
Wet Material (for CPR) is a dance made for CPR's Large Studio and emerged in the wake of choreographic research done on site at Rockaway Beach. Its dancers move across multiple timescales and rhythms, devised from studying tide charts, work/break schedules, Éliane Radigue's score (Épure), the sculptural tradition of wet drapery, and several other musical and embodied rhythmic influences. Developed in collaboration with dancers Julia Antinozzi, Leah Fournier, and Amelia Heintzelman with sound by Éliane Radigue.

ALEXA GRÆ and Stephanie Acosta: COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR – transfiguration
COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR - transfiguration is an electronic opera in the form of dazzling soliloquy, performed by ALEXA GRÆ and directed by Stephanie Acosta. The work features new soundscapes, movement, poetry, and rituals sparked out of necessity for self preservation, with source material assembled through snapshots from a quarantine and uprising that brought intelligences rooted in blackness, trans-queer identity, neurodiversity, and magic to the fore. Drawing from the traditions of operatic madness, cosmic spirituality, queer raves, solitude, the body intellect, and the building of self, as artistic practice, vocalized joy poems bend genre and arias of longing serve as musical anchors. Paired with house music they conjure meditative states and access portals to the dream realm, arranging these moments into many revolutions.

Dominica Greene: no training required
no training required is an improvisational performance constructed around the theory that every living body is a body that is already dancing. The work is entirely dependent upon the audience – every attendee will receive a printed list of tasks which Dominica Greene has predetermined and consented to, ranging from directives like “spin” and “bend backwards” to “do a duet” and “pee into a bucket.” After a timer and recording device are set, Greene will begin to improvise while the audience can call out any of the provided directives. In a second round, Greene will re-perform the work from the recording, and the choreographers (audience) may make alterations to the first draft in real time. After a final review of the work, Greene will perform the finished choreography to a piece of music voted on by the audience.

Nazareth Hassan / Paratheater: Slow Mania 009
Slow Mania 009 explores the architecture of love, its disillusionment, idle bodies, and coonery. Created in collaboration with filmmaker Alexander Mejía.

Cherrie Yu: Verb List
Verb List started as a found-footage project that collects movements from Chinese and Chinese-diasporic moving image history. The title references the American sculptor Richard Serra's 1967 drawing, and the work borrows from Serra’s structure of words and actions. Treating the history of moving image as raw material, Cherrie Yu creates a movement archive from Chinese and diasporic communities, and explores cinematic history as collective memory. The performance-lecture will weave the essay-film, personal writing, and live dance, informed by Yu’s training as a dancer working with postmodern archives and choreographers, as well as from their migrant experience as a Chinese artist living in the US. The project asks: what are the ontological implications to be surrounded by movements and actions of people who look like oneself?


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Juli Brandano is a dancer and choreographer based in Brooklyn. She has collaborated as a dancer with Phoebe Berglund, Jessica Cook, Ayano Elson, Amelia Heintzelman, Leah Fournier, Julia Antinozzi, and Cally Spooner, among others. She was a 2020 Lighthouse Works Fellow and a 2022 Dance Research Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Jerome Robbins Dance Division during the theme of Dance and Ecology. Her choreographic work has been shown previously at Performance Mix Festival, fouroneone, Movement Research at Judson Church, the Westbeth Courtyard, Pageant, and BAX.

ALEXA GRÆ is an interdisciplinary artist focusing on how art informs identities, socialization habits, self-expression, and the ability to create – creating genre-defying performances that incorporate theatrical personas and experimental storytelling. In January 2023 they performed at Out-FRONT! Fest with Pioneers Go East Collective, and shared a work-in-progress of COLLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR - transfiguration. As a sound and performance artist they have worked with Stephanie Acosta, Isaac Pool, Jessie Young, and Same As Sister. ALEXA released their first studio song cycle, SEEN, accompanied by Sur La Nuit, an operatic/electronic music video by Matthew Ozawa & Jon Wes that premiered at The Art Institute of Chicago with Open Television; and they composed the score for the short film Searching for Isabelle  by Stephanie Jeter. They have performed with Haymarket Opera Company, Madison Opera, and Elements Contemporary Ballet, and have been a featured soloist/artist with Chicago Arts Orchestra, The Savannah Philharmonic, Northwestern University Orchestra, The Orchestra of New Spain, Texas Tech University Symphony Orchestra, The Violet Hour, The Fly Honey Show, and Big Spring Symphony.

Stephanie Acosta is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, curator and organizer who places the materiality of the ephemeral at the center of her practice, questioning meaning-making and manufactured limitations. Blending performance with practice-based and studio research and engaging ensembles in facilitated processes, they create fleeting performance works that examine perception in shared experiences. Acosta has presented her works with and for Museum of Art and Design, MCA Chicago, The Chocolate Factory, Knockdown Center, Current Sessions, Miami Performance International Festival, IN>Time Symposium, Abrons Arts Center, the Chicago Park District, the Performance Philosophy conference, and AUNTS. Acosta has collaborated with artist Miguel Gutierrez on multiple projects, and their collaborative curatorial experiment with Alexis Wilkinson, Sunday Service, ran for six seasons at Knockdown Center. Recently, Acosta opened Good Day God Damn, a solo exhibition curated by Alexis Wilkinson at The Chocolate Factory Theater, and a talk show, Apocalypse Talks, in which they spoke with artists on themes of multi-crisis making and radical hope found in art practices.

Dominica Greene is a bi-racial Black woman who cherishes and channels her Caribbean heritage and Queerness into an art-based existence. A dance artist, she has collaborated and performed nationally and internationally with many notable choreographers and companies. Based on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people, Greene creates conceptual, body-based art rooted in her belief that dance is not something to be learned, but an innate entity that we all have access to and are perpetually engaging with. Weaving her core research practices of duration, somatics, raving, and ancestral channeling, her work aims to reflect nature, human and otherwise, as a way of highlighting humanity and the stark sameness and differences – and sameness in the differences – within all of us.

Nazareth Hassan / Paratheater is an interdisciplinary artist working in performance, writing, music, video, and photography. Recent performance works include Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stuckemarkt in Berlin, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City. They have released 4 singles, available on all platforms; and their first collection of poetry and photography, Slow Mania, will be published in 2025 by Futurepoem. They are a 2023-25 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow.

Alexander Mejía (Nazareth Hassan / Paratheater collaborator) is a writer, director and interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Their work has premiered at BAMCinematek, New World Symphony as part of Miami Art Basel, NewFest, Inside Out Toronto and Schauspiel Dortmund. Mejía currently works as the video producer at Pioneer Works. 

Cherrie Yu is an artist born in Xi'an, China, currently living in the US. She works in choreography, moving image, writing, and installation. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE, McColl Center, Yaddo, Monson Art, Kala Art Institute, and Sharpe Walentas Studio Program. Her works have been exhibited at Contemporary Calgary Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Mint Museum, Links Hall, Wassaic Project, Roman Susan Gallery, PAGEANT, and Judson Memorial Church. 


ABOUT THE PANELISTS

Lauren Bakst is an artist, writer, and scholar working through experimental performance. Lauren organizes and curates The School for Temporary Liveness, a para-site for collective study and experiments in performance, practice, and pedagogy. She is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pennsylvania.

Doménica García is an Ecuadorian multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work delves into a process of introspection, exploring the personal and discovering the universal. With the use of a hyperbolic language and the juxtaposition of the radical with the ordinary, she gives greater relevance to the day-to-day experience. García’s multimedia approach, particularly merging performance and digital art, allows her to manipulate the perception of reality, facilitating a fantastic and surreal experience within the rational world. García’s work has been shown in the Atlanta Film Festival; San Diego Latino Film Festival; Queens Museum, New York; Museum of the Moving Image, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, Ecuador; Microscope Gallery, New York; CPR – Center for Performance Research, New York; and Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Providence, RI. García earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University.

Jordan Demetrius Lloyd is a Bessie-nominated choreographer and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from The College at Brockport and grew up in Albany, NY. He has collaborated with and performed for Beth Gill, Netta Yerushalmy, Tere O’Connor, Monica Bill Barnes, David Dorfman Dance, and more. His work has been produced by Danspace Project, New York Live Arts, ISSUE Project Room, BRIC, CPR – Center for Performance Research, and more. His teaching practice has brought him to the American Dance Festival, University of the Arts, Rutgers University, and Sarah Lawrence College. He was recently listed on Dance Magazine's 2023 '25 to Watch' list. He loves chocolate, sunsets, and his favorite color is green.