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** Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 6:30PM.


NEW INC, an incubator for people working at the intersection of art, design, and technology, organizes an evening of work-in-progress from its interdisciplinary cohort of artists, designers, technologists, futurists, and creative entrepreneurs, with presentations by elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ, Johanna Flato, Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan, and Trevor Van de Velde. This OPEN STUDIOS at CPR is an extension of NEW INC’s monthly Workshares program, where cohort members receive feedback, exchange knowledge, cross-pollinate ideas, and ask for help – and the first time the public is invited to engage in these gatherings.

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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PROGRAM

elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ: Networked Gong Gathering
This collaborative sound-making workshop is inspired by a community gathering of gong ensembles throughout the SEA. While keeping the core of having rhythms distributed among participants, it focuses on collectively reconstructing sounds from different SEA sound cultures through networks using code. 

Johanna Flato: Spatial Articulations with Tangle AR 
Tangle AR App is an artist-built mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. Currently in beta, it aims to inject critical friction into this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and seed our tech-mediated environments with a more civic, intentional, and playful dimension. 

Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan: Creative Coding Test Kitchen
Join Avneesh and Sumanth as they show off a new interactive audiovisual recipe! This talk/demo will show off an audiovisual work built with their new javascript libraries. They’ll explain what tooling gaps they’re trying to fill, and what new forms of art they hope enable for themselves and others.

Trevor Van de Velde: Hacking Grains
The universe is granular. Hacking Grains is a multidisciplinary performance project that reimagines the world being made of grains. This project explores the relationships between technology, ritual, and Asian futurity through amplified grains of rice. Individual grains become both sonic actuators and resonators. The sounds of rice dominate the space through custom-built synthesizers, speaker installations, and live performance.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

elekhlekha อีเหละเขละขละ is a collaborative research-based group consisting of immigrant Bangkok-born, Brooklyn-based artists, Kengchakaj–เก่งฉกาจ and Nitcha–ณิชชา. The collective delves into subversive storytelling by exploring non-hegemonic sounds and visual archives, historical research–decoding, and unlearning biases. elekhlekha’s work spans performing documents, multimedia, and technology centers to interrogate, experiment, explore, and define decolonized possibilities. elekhlekha is a Thai word that means dispersedly, chaos, all over, and non-direction to break free our practices from being labeled through a Western lens. In 2022, they were awarded the Lumen Prize Gold Award. The artists have received grants and development funds from Rhizome, the Processing Foundation, and more for their projects. elekhlekha is Eyebeam Democracy Machine Fellows, 2023–2024 AIR at CultureHub, and the NEW INC Y10 Art & Code track member. 

Johanna Flato is a visual artist and creative technologist based in Brooklyn, NY and was born in San Antonio, TX. She investigates ways in which our sense of site — and in turn, locational belonging — is mediated and manipulated through language, technology, and gesture. She is the founder and developer of an augmented reality app called Tangle — a mobile tool for spatial annotation and poetic encounters. Tangle makes site-based, real-time, mixed-reality ideation and collaboration possible. It aims to inject critical friction into this accelerationalist AI/XR moment and seed our tech-mediated environments with a more civic, intentional, and playful dimension. As an ongoing research thread, Johanna coined and iteratively re-works the notion of a "syn-site" (a term updating Robert Smithson's site/non-site construct for our contemporary extended realities).  

Avneesh Sarwate and Sumanth Srinivasan, spurred by their own adventures and challenges with making and sharing software-based multimedia art, want to build browser-based tools and software libraries that allow artists to more easily design, collaborate on, and share digital work. Avneesh Sarwate is a programmer, musician, visual artist, and improviser. His work focuses on using real time computer systems to enhance the gestural and impulsive elements of the creative process. A guitarist since childhood,  “jamming” with computers has been a goal of his from the minute he started making art with them.  Sumanth Srinivasan is an engineer, visual artist, writer, and musician. His work thus far has centered around digitizing human imperfections and playfulness in art, and the presentation of noise and degradation as an aesthetic.

Trevor Van de Velde is a composer, sound artist, instrument builder, and creative programmer based in NYC. Trevor's work focuses on exploring the relationship between technology, play, materiality, and hybridity through a combination of "hacked" electronics and live performance. 

NEW INC was conceived of as a not-for-profit platform for furthering the New Museum’s ongoing commitment to new art and new ideas. Now in Year 11, NEW INC’s membership model continues to support a diverse range of creative practitioners with a values-driven program and safe space for gathering and developing new creative projects and businesses.

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*Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 7:00 P.M.

Pleasure ceremonialist and dreamer cy x curates OPEN STUDIOS like they would Love Island, inviting freaky, intimate, and captivating work from friends they have work-crushes on. Emerging from their desire to support their friend’s traveling show where she fucks a flower in full eco-erotic fashion, cy invites friends and crushes Avatar Lilith, Coco Villa, and Candi X to share their work and practice in budding stages.

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.

View the Program


PROGRAM

Avatar Lilith: INTRAFACE 001
INTRAFACE 001 is a work in progress exploring the transitional space between membranes – where one ends and another begins. Existing as a bodily extension of Avatar Lilith, and as a flesh and sinewed tethering point, INTRAFACE 001 is a hybrid instrument that produces sonic fragments created algorithmically through Artificial Intelligence, trained off of her digital DNA, creating a type of intimacy between Avatar, meat body, and interface. By giving this algorithmic alien-other a fetish body and presence, Avatar Lilith reimagines and reframes our relationship to intangible and incoherent technocratic byproducts and systems that are inherently obscured and designed for flattening and optimizing. INTRAFACE 001 explores the power dynamic between these entities by creating a physical encasement (INTRA-/inside, rather than INTER-/between), encircling, entrapping, and perhaps un-flattening. 

Coco Villa: I Am Swimming With Zaza
I Am Swimming With Zaza is an ongoing intimacy between fact and the fantastical, real and imagined. As they circulate, slow-moving sculptural gestures and rhythmic shapes become more intertwined superseding juxtapositions of you and me, then and now, and here and there. What can I do to honor you, now that it is too late? The You, and you that I come from, and the You that occasionally stands in for me.

Performed by Benin Gardner and Coco Villa
Sound Mix by Taul Katz, featuring Las Nalgas de Venus by Quixosis, DIZZY PPL BECOME BLURRY by Saya Gray, and Macorina by Chavez’s Vargas

Candi X: R.I.P. ROSY
A bright and playful piece about aliveness, love, death, and celebration, R.I.P. ROSY follows the intimate romance between Clay and Rosy (man and flower) as their bond transforms with joy even as their physical forms change. Following clear instructions left by Rosy for her commemoration party, we are asked to get silly and deeply curious about what it means to be alive. Drawing from erotic ecology philosophies, our life/death/life cycles are invited into reflection. How may we use celebration as a way to confront grief and bring ourselves into action in these times when our aliveness is needed most?

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Avatar Lilith is a multi-hyphenate artist that masquerades as an avatar using computer graphics, sound design, installations, and audiovisual performance. They seek to reject linearity and binary logic systems by existing in two or more places at once. Avatar Lilith hopes to encourage others to embrace playfulness, curiosity, and creativity by worldbuilding and embracing alternative logic systems and technologies as a critical practice through performance, installations, and research. Their work has been featured internationally in galleries and venues such as Acud Galerie (Berlin), Nunu Gallery (NYC), Basement (CPH), Stonewall Inn (NYC), and Ars Electronica (AUT).

Candi X is a performance and video artist, experience facilitator, producer, and director originally from the US currently based in Mexico City. Her work reflects deep research around the eco-erotic relationship between the human and natural world and expresses through brightly queer and colorful outputs. All of her works are equal parts accessible, embodied, intellectual, and silly – redefining the erotic by focusing on igniting the sensorial imagination. Through playful, body based experiences, performances, films, and practices she facilitates fun, connection, and curiosity that opens audiences up to new perspectives.

Coco Villa is a Jamaican-Colombian-American dancer, interdisciplinary artist and educator from Queens, currently living in Brooklyn. Tightly bound to identity, Villa leads an interdisciplinary art-research practice investigating relations between body, object, and landscape. Their work spans across disciplines of performance, fashion design, installation, photography, and film. They utilize material and movement languages to tell autobiographical stories, explore human intimacy, and build familial archives. Driven by historical and scientific discovery, Villa thrives in the ocean, in the woods, in the dance studio, darkroom, design lab, and library, playfully creating by hand.

cy x is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror, queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized ephemera in the form of writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.

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*Advance tickets for this program are sold out. An in-person wait list will open at 7:00 P.M.

Organized by independent curator Alessandra Gómez, this program showcases three innovative performances that blend humor and critical social commentary, with each artist approaching their work through clowning, drag performance, or a combination of both—each form having its own distinct and rich history. Amando Houser’s DeliaDelia! is comedic performance inspired by the "witch hunt" against trans rights in America. Reed Rushes’ Twilight Zone is a drag king performance exploring birthing, domesticity, and consumption from a queer masculine perspective and MTHR TRSA’s I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY takes us on a conversational journey between inner demons, the MTA, and RuPaul. Together, these three artists illustrate how humor can serve as a powerful tool for social commentary in contemporary performance.


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.

View the Program


PROGRAM

Amando Houser: DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch!
DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch! is a solo comedic clown hour inspired by the “witch hunt” on trans rights in America. DeliaDelia is a witch from the swamps who happens to be as nasty on the eyes as she is on the basketball court. On a quest to become a “real girl” and fit into the human world to play for a team. Will she finally get to display her talents and become the greatest of all time? Or be cursed forever and turned into a serpent?

Created and performed by Amando Houser
Directed by Kedian Keohan

Research and development support from Fisher Center LAB, the Fisher Center at Bard‘s residency and commissioning program.

Reed Rushes: Twilight Zone
As night falls the living room is cast in an unfamiliar hum blue. Darkness grows the TV light, which flickers brighter casting shadows that lick the living room floor, sofa, walls. Edges begin to take new forms, shifting. Half asleep, sound distorts. From the TV, from this room, (“things get strange at night”) from this half light, Stan’s world unfolds…

Twilight Zone takes inspiration from films that explore female hysteria and body horror. Channeling the voices of both hysterical women and rebel boy icons from classic Hollywood body horror thriller movies, Rushes presents a drag king performance that examines birthing, domesticity, and consumption from a queer masculine perspective. Using drag, abstract movement, and theatrical costumes made by Kate Williams Twilight Zone is a humorous, surprising and emotionally moving experience.

MTHR TRSA: I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY
I DON’T THINK THAT WAS MOLLY reflects the collective experience of those who feel like they can never slow down, no matter how desperately they need to. It’s a disorienting energy of modern life, where nothing feels tangible or secure, and every attempt to grasp onto something is met with uncertainty. The chaotic rhythm of NYC heightens this dissonance, making us question if we are in control, or simply SPIRALING. The struggle to hold onto anything — a routine, money, stability, trans healthcare — feels increasingly futile as everything slips through our fingers, evoking a sense of panic and helplessness.

As the line between pleasure and paranoia blurs, we ask ourselves, “Was that actually Molly we just took?” There is no relief, there is no finish line, and the J train is not coming. The overwhelming sense of burnout becomes palpable. The opinionated demons and insecurities begin to march into the room alongside the haunting voice of RuPaul and the allure of queer success. Just another impossible standard! A reminder of how even within queer spaces, the forces of capitalism and conformity press down upon us.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alessandra Gómez is an independent curator based in New York. She recently served as a curator for Luna Luna, the world’s first art amusement park, originally created in 1987. Gómez was part of the core curatorial team for Luna Luna: Forgotten Fantasy and worked on the early development of new artist-designed rides, attractions, and games. From 2018–2023, she was part of The Shed’s founding curatorial team, where she developed over seventy-five visual arts and performance commissions during her tenure including shows by Shayne Oliver & Anonymous Club and Maxwell Alexandre. She currently serves as the guest curator for public art at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and is working on a number of forthcoming curatorial projects, including one with NIKE.

Amando Houser is a trans-masculine clown and actor born and based in NYC. Following a sold-out run at The Brick, their solo show DeliaDelia! The Flat Chested Witch! debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and will have its US premiere at the Philadelphia Fringe Festival. Off Broadway: Midnight Coleslaw! Tales From Beyond The Closet! (The Tank); Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken (Soho Rep). They have performed in and devised work at venues and variety nights around town as well as at The Signature, The Elysian, New York Theatre Workshop, Vox Populi Gallery, The Wild Project, JACK, and The Richard B. Fisher Center at Bard College. Amando is a recent graduate of École Philippe Gaulier in France and has trained with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia, and Julia Masli (ha ha ha ha ha ha).

Reed Rushes is a British-American performance artist living and working in Queens, NY. Rushes has a multimedia performance practice that centers queer fantasy. Combining drag, movement, video, found and self made objects Rushes’ performances unpick the hierarchical distinctions between human bodies, emotional affect and objecthood. Rushes graduated with a Masters in Fine Arts from Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Bard College New York (2022) and holds a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature and Performance with honors from Queen Mary University London (2015). They began their performance art practice in London's queer club and drag scene. Their work has now shown at Park Avenue Armory, Performance Space New York, CPR – Center for Performance Research, The Yard Theatre London, Rich Mix London, BOFFO, and Art Omi and has been supported through public funding by Arts Council England. They cofounded and curated Low Stakes Festival London and collectively run the performance residency at Otion Front Studio New York.

MTHR TRSA IS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST, PHOTOGRAPHER, CHOREOGRAPHER, STYLIST, DIRECTOR, MODEL, DJ, LAWYER, DOCTOR, SECURITY GUARD, THERAPIST, FREE LANCER, ACCOUNTANT, CHIEF & PROFESSIONAL COMPLAINER.

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Palestinian-American artist Muyassar Kurdi invites artists Zekkereya El-magharbel, Muyassar Kurdi with gabby fluke-mogul, and Alex Zhang Hungtai to share new work, experiments, and collaborations through embodied sound and improvisation. The program’s title If I Must Die is inspired by Refaat Alareer’s poem of the same title, and is in honor of the martyrs in Falastin, uplifting their voices and stories. Through indigenous ways we heal our communities and remain steadfast. If I Must Die is an attempt to reclaim our bodies and narrative. Imagination as the ultimate freedom: a future without a colonizer. 

In lieu of a traditional Q&A, after their individual presentations, the artists will engage in a series of improvised collaborations.

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.

View the Program


If I Must Die
by Refaat Alareer

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

إذا كان ال بّد أن
أموت إذا

إذا كان ال بّد أن أموت
إذا كان ال بّد أن أموت
فعلي َك أن تحيا
لِتق ّص ق ّصتي
لِتبي َع أشيائي
لِتشتري قطعة قماش
و بضعَة خيوط
)بيضاء بذي ٍل طويل(
ن ما في غزة

حتى طف ٍل، في مكا
يحّد ُق بالسماء
ينت ُظر أباه، الذي غا َدر على عجل-
بال أن ي ّودع أحد
حتى جسده
حتى نفسه -
يرى الطائرة الورقية، طائرتي التي صنعَتها،
تحل عالًيا ّ ُق

و ي ُّظن لوهلة أن مال ًكا عالًيا
يعيد الح ّب

إذا كان ال بد أن أموت
لتجعلها تجل ُب األمل
لتجعلها قصة

Translated to Arabic by @TameeOliveFern


PROGRAM

Zekkereya El-magharbel: Notes on Matisse
The influence/appropriation of North African textiles and architecture by turn of the century Modernists is widely documented, yet barely discussed; on one hand, the decontextualization and subsequent disparagement of the African Orient by Western Imperialists, evidence of our incivility, on the other, beautiful planes of color sweeping across the canvas dancing celestial. This work explores the links between musical practices of Modern Europe and North Africa using reappropriating works from Henri Matisse as graphic scores for performance. 

Muyassar Kurdi with gabby fluke-mogul: A Lullaby for the Children of the Sun
This is a sound dedicated to the children of Gaza. Glory to the martyrs. A Lullaby for the Children of the Sun is embodied/performed from a graphic score (ink on paper) for violin and voice, and was originally commissioned for a string quartet.

Alex Zhang Hungtai: Divining Youth
Divining Youth derives from the Hokkien word khí-tâng, a Chinese folk tradition akin to a spirit medium or a Shaman. A khí-tâng is believed to be a person to have been chosen by a particular Shen (Chinese Deity) or spirit as the earthly vehicle of divine expression. The universal ritualistic components of drums, reeds, repetition, and trance-inducing rhythms relay back to ancient folk technology, facilitating the exploration of the human unconscious and the gravitational pull towards the dark matter of the cosmos.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Zekkereya El-magharbel is a visual artist, trombonist, and composer from Los Angeles, CA. They have been a member of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra for over a decade and have worked with such luminaries as Angel Bat Dawid, Jaimie Branch, Moor Mother, Kierra Sheard, Cory Smythe, Tyshawn Sorey, Wendell Harrison, Wendy Eisenberg, among others. As a visual artist they have shown animated works internationally and have exhibited paintings accross the country. Their current research centers on interrogating Pan-Arabism within in parallel to African identity.

gabby fluke-mogul is a New York-based violinist, improviser, composer, educator, organizer, and doula. Weaving within the threads of avant and free jazz, with deep roots in improvised and experimental music, their music has been described as “embodied, visceral and virtuosic” and “the most striking sound in improvised music in years.” gabby is humbled to have collaborated with Nava Dunkelman, Joanna Mattrey, Ava Mendoza, Charles Burnham, Fred Frith, Luke Stewart, Zeena Parkins, Tcheser Holmes, Lester St. Louis, William Parker, and Pauline Oliveros among many other musicians, poets, dancers and visual artists. gabby facilitates improvisation and composition workshops, curates programming for Creative Music Studio, and is a current Roulette Jerome Artist in Residence.

Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American NYC-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, 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. Kurdi received the American Composer Forum Create 2024, Brooklyn Arts Fund 2024, and was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023. She was awarded a Roulette Intermedium 2020 commission and 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation, and 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 La MaMa Gallery in NYC. Performance highlights include Poetry Project, Roulette Intermedium, CPR – Center for Performance Research, Lincoln Center, The Rubin Museum of Art, ISSUE Project Room, Cafe OTO, Chicago Cultural Center, Center for Contemporary Art Laznia, Fridman Gallery, Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, and Judson Memorial Church as well as exhibitions and film screenings (solo and group works) at VIERTE WELT, Trieze Gallery, Knockdown Center, Queens Museum, Spectacle Theatre, and Anthology Film Archives. She taught workshops in movement and voice most notably in Portugal at Zaratan - Arte Contemporânea, Bilgi University and Cultur in Istanbul Turkey as well as at MoMA PS1 in NYC. 

Alex Zhang Hungtai is a multi-disciplinary artist focused on improvisation and its correlation with the unconscious. After retiring his project Dirty Beaches, Zhang has been focusing on explorations of improvised music, free jazz, and his role as a composer. His newer compositions predominantly work with saxophone and drums, delving into electronic music. Besides his solo work, some past collaborators include: Tashi Dorji, Che Chen, Chris Williams, Sam Shalabi, David Maranha, and Gabriel Ferrandini. Zhang currently works as a composer for film soundtracks, along with acting in independent films. He has appeared in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return alongside Dean Hurley and Riley Lynch under the fictitious band Trouble. His latest film score “Godland” by Hlynur Pálmason, was in competition at Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard. He currently lives in NYC.

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Hi Sarah,
Following up to check in about curatorial language—Do you think you could put together 1-3 sentences by the end of the week? This short event description might include your curatorial framing of the evening, and/or why you chose these particular artists, etc. If you'd prefer to send over bullet points, we'd be happy to edit together for you.
Let us know, we look forward to hearing from you.
Thanks,
x
Anna
Dearest Anna
well to be honest i don’t feel myself as a curator - or maybe thats redundant to say since y’all did ask  me and then i did ask some artists if this might be a good moment  for them to share their practices in this context -I thought to be honest and with deepest respect that the cash amount for them is modest- so for whom might this opportunity be useful right now- maybe for varying reasons - 
These artists are all people that work very specifically and on their own terms - They are all people I have connected with deeply and have some understanding of the very specific spaces that their work can hold- spaces I have deep curiosity about -all these artists are -as I understand the term- dancers -
Thank you for this opportunity 

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.


PROGRAM

Oren Barnoy: (Radio Edit)
A meditation on inspiration from those who are no longer with us.

Dominica Greene: lover
to be inflicted with pain and marked forever
what does the body remember of those it has loved
while being inflicted with pain 
and marked forever
while remembering
those it has loved
while remembering
love 
to be inflicted with pain
and marked forever
love
to be 
forever

Performed with SoupTatu

Seta Morton: madzoon
A hero on my grandmother’s table, madzoon (or yogurt) was the only word I learned in Armenian before English. Madzoon is a fermentation of milk made by mothers and grandmothers, an ancient cure-all, a vessel for live active culture(s). A transmutation of individual, collective, and ancestral grief and love—madzoon is a dance and movement research project about intergenerational alchemy. With this work in process, I consider what fermentation—as a method for both preservation and change—can teach about archiving ephemerality, cultural memory, ancestral knowledge, and intergenerational healing.

Stevfni.XYZ: A Portrait for Sailor
Since the loss of my cat, Sailor, I disallowed myself the space to mourn and grieve her passing, due to heartbreak. I choose to offer myself my own condolences to her and I through this portraiture of my belated familiar. Acknowledging the time allotted does not encapsulate the entirety of the sorrow I feel, it is a moment for me to observe stillness as a dynamic process of movement and mourning. I offer this piece to Center as a moment of solace and as a reckoning of difficult emotions.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Oren Barnoy is a dancer and choreographer from Brooklyn where he lives and works.

Dominica Greene is a bi-racial Caribbean-American artist harnessing the elements, spirit, and womanness into an existence rooted in love, community, and regeneration. Residing on the unceded lands of the Munsee Lenape people, Greene creates conceptual, body-based art guided by her philosophy that dance is a ubiquitous energetic entity encompassing anything that moves. Her work seeks to reflect nature, human and otherwise, as a way of highlighting humanity and the stark sameness and differences—and sameness in the differences—between all of us.

Seta Morton is an interdisciplinary performance curator, producer, writer, and dance artist based in Lenapehoking (NYC). She is the Program Director/Associate Curator at Danspace Project and the editor of Danspace’s print and digital publications. With Danspace and Executive Director and Chief Curator, Judy Hussie-Taylor, Seta has published over a dozen print and digital publications and curated numerous artist commissions, public programs, residencies, and artistic research fellowships, and has co-organized four Danspace Project Platforms, including, Platform 2020 with Okwui Okpokwasili and Platform 2024 with Kyle Abraham. Independently, she has guest-curated and produced an evening of performance and ritual, V E S S E L L / / FERMENT: archive alchemy (make it a prayer), this year at PAGEANT, and is guest curating the first solo exhibition for Yves B. Golden at the Feminist Center for Creative Work this summer in LA. Seta’s writing has been published with Danspace and in the Gibney Journal, and she has had the pleasure of performing with choreographers including iele paloumpis and Miguel Gutierrez. Seta’s curatorial practice is grounded in somatics, collaborative practice, and Black feminist thought, and her written and embodied works live in the tremble between iteration, fermentation, and intergenerational memory.

SoupTatu (aka Charlie Diman) is a self-taught tattoo artist based in Brooklyn who specializes in black and grey pseudo realism.

Stevfni.XYZ (aka Stev) is an emerging new media artist and academic hailing from the NYC metropolitan area. Born in ’93 to immigrant Trinidadian parents and raised across both sides of the Hudson River during the 2000s, Stev’s work plants roots within themes experienced by the urbanized cultures of the Afro-Caribbean and Latinx folks within her immediate area and community, primarily filtered through her own lens of trans-femininity. As a child influenced by the turn of the new millennium, Stev’s artistic style is encapsulated within the early Internet aesthetic of that era. She often communes with topics of self-identity and shared traumatic experiences, as well as interpersonal connectivity and the complex social intricacies that lead us to nuanced intrapersonal discoveries. As a black trans futurist storyteller, Stev combines spoken and written word and distorted abstract symbols and markings, including the presence of her live or pre-recorded physicality, interacting with a variety of digital technologies to share stories that reflect and explore trans activism, Afrofuturisim, and the African diaspora, and their relationships to ecomodernism and urban development.

Sarah Michelson (curator) is a dancer- dance maker based in Brooklyn. 


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CPR Programs Manager Anna Muselmann curates OPEN STUDIOS with artists whose work engages ecosensuality and erotics, micro- and macro-ecologies, and mutualistic relationships. The practices of artists Nicolas Baird, A.L. Steiner, cy x (as hell hooks), and agustine zegers each require deep and intimate material research, and examine the strange desires, adaptations, and interdependencies of our ‘more-than-human’ nature. Through learning behaviors, structures, and survival tactics beyond our human imagination, Money Ruined the World begins to conceive of an interspecial collaborative future that is not only more sustainable, but more sensual, pleasurable, and playful.

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.


PROGRAM

Nicolas Baird: In the beginning…
We move through deep time in a prose poem. This story is a meditation on endings-as-beginnings, a reflection on climate change and heartache, and an excavation of ecosystems, memory, and loss.

A.L. Steiner: Schwierige Gendanken/Difficult Thoughts.v3
No storage space reasonable. No cloud supple enough. No scrapbook sweet enough. No media responsible enough. No book complete enough to mold these contents.

cy x as hell hooks: GARDEN OF HELL
It's your lucky day. hell hooks will give you a super exclusive tour of their private garden of supersensual delights! Listen carefully, pay attention, and prepare to open all your holes.

agustine zegers: corriente etérica
corriente etérica is a guided, somatic practice incorporating olfactory elements. We will follow the currents pulsating through our bodies as channels of inter- and intra-habitat connections leading us from our own holobiont to that of the submarine cables that host our telecommunications along the ocean floor, encountering aqueous and plastified kinship through them. 


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nicolas Baird is an artist, evolutionary biologist, writer, and dancer interested in the relationships between bodies and their landscapes. He makes art and science that frame more-than-human life as a diverse network of strange kin. In art, he uses poetry, performance, and photography to explore mutability and adaptation in a multispecies world. In science, he studies the evolution of mammals in the context of long-term climate change. Since 2017 he has woven these practices together as co-director of the Institute of Queer Ecology, an ever-evolving, collaborative organism producing interdisciplinary art as a tool for critical optimism and queer futurity in the face of vanishing “nature”. He is studying for a doctorate in earth and environmental science.

A.L. Steiner is an artist and educator based in New York. She utilizes constructions of photography, video, installation, collage, collaboration, performance, writing, and curatorial work as seductive tropes channeled through the sensibility of a skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. Steiner is co-curator of Ridykeulous, co-founder of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) and collaborates with numerous writers, performers, designers, activists and artists. She is Faculty and Director at Yale University's School of Art. Upcoming projects include Ridykes' Cavern of Fine Inverted WInes and Deviant Videos with MIT Press and Detroit's 2024 Queer Biennial: I'll be Your Mirror.

cy x (hell hooks) is a demon and a dreamer moved by tremendous desire and obsession with glory holes, sex cinemas, erotic horror,  queer archives, and money. They study the way that erotics and space co-construct each other and the objects produced from such encounters and utilize their findings to create ritualized encounters through writing, sound, video, and performance. Their work has been shown in the Center for Art Research and Alliances, Culture Hub, Pioneer Works, Rewire Festival, and other spaces, both digital and physical.

agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and writer. Their work studies molecular biopolitics and anthropocene atmospherics, attending to the complex nodes of interdependence we share as inhabitants of Earth. By way of queer and microbial methodologies, zegers deploys care practices that reach microscopic dimensions by incorporating bacterial communities, aromatic molecules, and food absorption in their artistic projects, creating tools to reflect on ecocide, interspecies and intrahuman belonging, and care itself. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, Olfactory Art Keller, and DIS Magazine.

Anna Muselmann (curator) is a visual and performing artist, curator, producer, and stylist from Tulsa, OK. In addition to assisting visual and performance artists in Providence, Berlin, San Francisco, and NYC, Muselmann has worked for SIGNAL Gallery, Regina Rex, the WYE (Berlin), Otion Front Studio, Performance Space New York, and Danspace Project, and is currently the Programs Manager at CPR – Center for Performance Research. Her own performance work investigates social and relational dynamics through research in personal daily gestures and habits, more-than-human behaviors, durational group shaking, and group play; and she has performed and shown work at galleries, museums, and venues in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, Tulsa, and NYC. In 2021, she organized and co-curated Clouds Gathering, a 5-day performance residency-retreat for 85 multidisciplinary artists in New Lebanon, NY; and in 2023 she initiated Play Practice, a weekly group meeting of queer and trans artists that explores the relationships between play and games, rules and freedom, leading and following, desire and consent, and power and authority. Muselmann has a BA in Visual Arts and Modern Culture + Media from Brown University.

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Azikiwe Mohammed asked his friend Leroy Robinson if he knew anyone making the stuffs. Leroy invited three research-based artists – peter bd, Lex Brown, and Yoshie Sakai – who work in video, sound, or other time-based media. Join us and see what they have cooking. 

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.


PROGRAM

peter bd: changeover
A dance performance featuring peter bd, janine hartmann, divine lotus, owen prum, and special guest elise wunderlich.

figuring out who you are
ultimately becoming free 
shift 
transference 
redirection 
changeover 
the powers that be engendered the path 
but one must say
“fuck it” and unlock
intrinsic creativity

Lex Brown: Letters for Gaza
In this collective writing/artmaking session, we will write oversized letters for Ceasefire in occupied Palestine. These letters will be mailed in oversized envelopes to key political and cultural figures. This is a space to express sorrow, anger, and solidarity. Letters may be anonymized if desired.

Yoshie Sakai: Bathroom Stall Tears: Take Two
Where do you go in a public place to have privacy? The Bathroom Stall. Bathroom Stall Tears began as a series of videos meant to be viewed in the context of public restroom stalls. These videos opened the door to a more intimate space for expression and reflection by capturing Yoshie Sakai’s personal childhood memories of their grandmother’s (“obaa-chan” in Japanese) and mother’s selfless acts and small sacrifices to critique the power of gender stereotypes in shaping intergenerational expectations. For CPR, Sakai will experiment with combining the video form with live performance of these characters, “obaa-chan” and mother.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

peter bd is a writer, curator, performer and the author of the book milk & henny.

Lex Brown is a multimedia artist who uses poetry and science-fiction to create existential narratives about the Information Age. Working fluidly between installation, film, live performance, painting, and sculpture her work contemplates spiritual experience through humor and satire. Brown has performed and exhibited work at the MIT List Center, New Museum, the High Line, the International Center of Photography, and The Kitchen. Her films have been presented at e-flux Screening Room, New York; Transmediale, Berlin; and the East End Film Festival, London. Brown received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University and an MFA from Yale. She was a 2021 United States Artist Fellow. She is the author of My Wet Hot Drone Summer (Badlands Unlimited, 2015), Consciousness (Genderfail, 2019), and the creator of the audio project 1-800-POWERS. She will premiere her first operatic work at the Kennedy Center in January 2025 as a librettist in the Washington National Opera’s American Opera Initiative.

Yoshie Sakai is a multimedia artist who works with video, sculpture, installation, and performance, and is based in Gardena, CA. Her work is centered on accessibility and nurturing human connection while critiquing capitalist productions of space and ways of being. She draws on popular forms of entertainment and media to engage diverse audiences, especially those who have been historically devalued, ignored, and seen as burdens. She is the recipient of the 2021/22 City of Los Angeles (COLA) Individual Master Artist Fellowship in Design and Visual Arts, 2012 California Community Foundation for Visual Artists Emerging Artist Fellowship, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. She completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Kohler Arts/Industry Residency in Foundry at the Kohler Company. Her work has been exhibited at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Verge Center for the Arts, Antenna, the Chinese American Museum Los Angeles, and most recently, her first museum solo exhibition “Grandma Entertainment Franchise” at the Vincent Price Art Museum in Monterey Park, CA.

Working across performance, sculpture, painting, sound and video, Azikiwe Mohammed is a crafter who builds physical spaces that include Blackness and the stories of the people of this land. Sometimes that land is physical, and other times it lives in our bodies. These attempts at land shapings have taken place at Canada Gallery, NY; Transformer, Washington, D.C.; The High Line, NY; California African American Museum, LA; Fairmount Water Works, Philadelphia, PA; John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; and MoMA PS1, Queens, NY; among others. Mohammed is the recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), a Rauschenberg Artists Fund grant (2021), a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016), and an Art Matters Foundation Award (2015). In 2022, he was featured on Art21’s New York Close Up digital-film series on artists living and working in New York City. Azikiwe Mohammed lives in New York, NY and has his studio in Newark as part of Project for Empty Space.


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For OPEN STUDIOS, 2024 Artist-in-Residence Leo Chang curates Noise x Movement, bringing together artists who embrace the performative within their noise/sound-making practice, including Qiujiang Levi Lu, Lucie Vitková in a duet with Chang, and Kwami Winfield. Movements can observably influence sound; simultaneously, within this relationship, there is an emotional resonance between the body and vibration. In Noise x Movement, artists experiment with different forms of dependence and relationships with objects and instruments, and perform expressions of bodily and sonic liberation and resistance.

Qiujiang Levi Lu: Metanoia, for One Augmented Body
Metanoia, for One Augmented Body is a solo performance that explores the artist’s journey with body dysmorphia. In this work, Qiujiang Levi Lu is amplifying their internal body; muscle stretches, joint cracks, bone-conducted vibrations, and body movement become audible and palpable in the performance space. A microphone is inserted into Lu’s body thru their anus, and sounds are amplified by subwoofers in the room with processing. They also place a custom-built speaker in their mouth to create feedback with the headset microphone, so that they are able to use their voice to control the feedback.

Lucie Vítková with Leo Chang: Earth Eater x VOCALNORI
Leo Chang performs with his VOCALNORI instrument, where gongs are amplified through electronic instruments and voice. Lucie Vítková brings Earth Eater, a performative being who communicates through sound and light in space. The duo comes together to interact from within these two established bodies.

Kwami Winfield: Dissances
A new work for brass and electronics applying feedback in various scales of space within distinct cavities: trumpets, studios, amplifiers, sinuses.

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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.


ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Leo Chang (curator) is a Korean improviser, composer, and performer of experimental music. Born in Seoul, Leo lived as an expat in Singapore, Taipei, and Shanghai, until moving to the United States in 2011. His art is an act of homemaking inspired by various musical and ideological movements that have sought to question power dynamics and imagine egalitarian possibilities. His primary methods are free improvisation, written text, graphical notation, and electronic processing. Leo's projects have been presented and supported by the Vision Festival, Roulette Intermedium, Korea Foundation, Ostrava Days New Music Festival, New York City Electro-Acoustic Music Festival, Brooklyn Arts Council, and EMPAC at Rensselaer, among others. His various performances and collaborations have been with William Parker, Alex Zhang Hungtai, Che Chen, gamin, DoYeon Kim, eddy kwon, Miriam Parker, Lucie Vítková, Chris Williams, Lester St. Louis, Jason Nazary, S.E.M. ensemble, the Rhythm Method, and the JACK quartet. Leo holds a PhD in Electronic Arts from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. www.listentoleo.com

Qiujiang Levi Lu/卢秋江 (they/them) is a Beijing-born, New Jersey-based experimental improviser, composer, and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania. As an improvising performer, Lu utilizes custom-built feedback-driven electronic instruments, voice, and amplified muscle movements to deliver visceral, raw, and intimate performance. In addition to performing, Lu also writes for acoustic and electronic musicians and improvisers. Lu’s works have been performed at major festivals, conferences, and venues such as DiMenna Center, HighZero Festival, Spencer Museum of Art, Jazz Showcase, IRCAM Forum, SEAMUS conference, NIME conference, Elastic Arts, Oberlin MMG, Rhizome DC, and NowNet Arts conference.

Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, drums, synthesizer, harmonica, voice, and dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York. Their compositions focus on sonification (compositions based on abstract models derived from physical objects), while in their improvisation practice, Lucie works with the characteristics of discrete spaces through the interaction between sound and movement. In Lucie’s recent work, they are interested in the social-political aspects of music in relation to everyday life and in reusing trash to build sonic costumes and instruments. www.vitkovalucie.com

Kwami Winfield is a multi-disciplinary sound artist, composer, and improviser born in Jersey City and based in Brooklyn. Winfield works with trumpet, electronics, percussion, trash, rocks, and other objects and collaborators, and is led by a fascination with the sticky, noisy, and often grotesque circuitry of everyday accumulation, consumption, and waste. Involved with a growing number bands including Turnip King, Next Bus Pls, Mimé, Many Many Girls, Camp Rock, Mom + Anon, Piss, Under the Hands of Eachother, and several unnamed collaborative projects with artists and people such as Nana XOXO, Lucy York, C. Spencer Yeh, Leo Chang, and Rémy Bélanger de Beaufort. Big love. Winfield has developed her interdisciplinary collaborations as a Pioneer Works Music Resident (2023), an Artist in Residence at Chaos Computer (2023), and in ongoing compositional contributions to the works of choreographers Arien Wilkerson and Kyle Marshall. Alongside Cal Fish, Winfield co-runs and has released music on Call Waitn, a DIY label and toll free hotline featuring underground sounds at 917-426-4260.

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Artist and guest curator Kenneth Tam invites work by Tallulah Haddon, Elin Kuo, and Anh Vo – artists whose curiosity and boldness have made an indelible impression on him in recent encounters. Tam is excited to bring these three artists in dialogue, and hopes their experiments will produce provocative frictions and unexpected entanglements.

In Tallulah Haddon’s Score 1: Tongue, a creature navigates their way around the space using only their tongue. What new and dangerous experiences will they encounter?

In Making a perfect rectangle, Elin Kuo invites the audience to contemplate the interplay of shapes and dimensions in both geographical and personal landscapes. As we unfold the map of the United States, Colorado stands out as one of the states neatly mapped in the form of a rectangle. In fact, the state itself is not perfectly in straight lines due to historical and geographic consideration. This design also suggests a pursuit of equilibrium and serenity in our spatial arrangements. Drawing parallels with Feng Shui, where the rectangular shape is embraced for its auspicious qualities, we reflect on the intentional shaping of our surroundings. Making a perfect rectangle unfolds as an exploration of scale, blending a work-in-progress short film, with a live origami demonstration.

Anh Vo’s introjective exhibition is a practice of making contact with others' haunted selves, giving them linguistic and bodily forms to be put on public display. Thinking through the Kleinian psychoanalytic concept of "projective identification" and Vietnamese shamanistic rituals of conjuring, both of which presuppose the instability of the individual psychic container, introjective exhibition wallows in the risk of losing oneself in communing with otherness. If our ghosts demand to be seen and heard despite our conscious wishes to exorcise them, how can dance and performance create an intimate transitive space that can seduce this necessary loosening of the individual will? 

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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.

About the Artists

Tallulah Haddon is a multidisciplinary artist from London, working in performance, installation and film. Currently Centre for Live Art Yorkshire’s Associate artist, this year they wrote, directed and starred in their first film I’m Asking You To Eat it. They are best known for their work in Channel 4’s Kiss Me First and Netflix’s Black Mirror. They were nominated for a British Independent Film Award for their performance in Justine. Their debut show Rituals in Romance about the complexities of a trans and queer relationship was commissioned for the internationally renowned SPILL festival. Tallulah has had work at Soho Theatre, Kampnagel and SXSW. Their video and sculptural work with Kasra Jalili as Mystical Femmes, has been shown in multiple exhibitions including Rebel Dykes. Recently their work Pulpa with sound artist Alina Maldonado was shown at El Sur Gallery in Mexico City. Alongside, their training as a fishmonger informs their practice.

As an illustrator, the concept of instant reaction holds a pivotal place in Elin Kuo’s methodology. Her drawings are often raw, an immediate response to her surroundings that demand attention. Yet, these reactions are not static; her performance pieces evolve these reactions layer by layer, inviting viewers to engage with them within each scale and materiality of internal and external landscapes, often including paper, projection, drawings, sound and body language.

Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer based in Brooklyn. Described by the New York Times as "risky, erotic, enigmatic and boldly humorous," their works flesh out the tremulous sexual body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their most recent performances attempt to communicate the monotonous oppressiveness that is the weather of postwar contemporary Vietnam. Vo received their degrees in Performance Studies from Brown University (BA) and New York University (MA). They are currently a 2023-2025 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and will be a CPR 2024 Artist-in-Residence.

Kenneth Tam (curator) is an artist based in Houston, TX and Queens, NY. Tam received his MFA in 2010, and has a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union. He works with video, sculpture, installation, movement, performance, and photography. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, he examines themes including the performance of masculinity, the transformative potential of ritual, and expressions of intimacy within groups. Tam often implicates the male body in his projects, using humor and pathos to reveal the performative and unstable nature of identity, and often creates situations that foreground tenderness and vulnerability within unlikely settings. Tam has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), Berkeley; Ballroom Marfa; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Queens Museum; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art; The Kitchen, New York; Visual Arts Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Minneapolis Institute of Art; and MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge.

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2023 Artist-in-Residence Benae Beamon curates Open Studios, and invites artists Jordan Deal, Michael J. Love, Kaleena Miller, and Adriana Ogle to share works-in-progress. The program considers time as an abstract and perplexing concept that is ephemeral but available for capture, and features artists whose work interrogates and interrupts time as a limiting and colonized concept. Each artist engages temporality in a different way, from explorations of memories and legacy as markers of time to Afrofuturist and unmetered reimaginings of what is possible, collectively offering a nuanced examination of where and how time intersects with our lived experiences.

Jordan Deal’s Wetlands of our Mother's Tongues in Concrete is an experimental film that explores the notions of transness, motherhood, trauma, and healing. The subject(s) (Jordan Deal and Ivonne Perez) find themselves dispersed between the channels of the ocean, fragments of memory, and time travel as they dig into their family's history through photographs and sharing stories.

With How to Rhythm Dream, Michael J. Love continues the work that he and his collaborators embarked on with his most recent full-length piece, (RHY)PISTEMOLOGY!... Here, the focus is on contemporary Black women recording artists who write/ produce/ create across identity lines to experiment with genre. What instructions can such "on wax" compositions give us for imagining and embodying possibilities for ourselves?

Kaleena Miller’s proximities records the space we’re in, and amplifies it. This soundscape combines with a tap dancer constructing phrase work inspired by the rhythms and architecture of the space. The work places attention and sensation at the forefront, seeking to create an ecosystem of listening that gives space for the audience and performers to consider/re-consider our bodies and actions in relation to other humans, structures and sounds.

Adriana Ogle’s To Let The Spell Break is an initial observation of the cyclical shape of legacies, and how the perpetuation of a cycle is affected by behavior.

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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.

About the Artists

Jordan Deal (aka ROSEKILLJUPITER) is a Philadelphia-based multidisciplinary practitioner and alchemist. Their investigative practice uses performance, sound, image, and their BODY as a conduit between unseen forces and the materializations of socio-political structures and mythologies. They have been investigating technologies of relations and movement that harnesses and disperses CHAOS FORCE as a subversive material and methodology. Deal has shown work in NYC at Judson Memorial Church, CPR – Center for Performance Research, The Brick, and Protocinema & Protodispatch; at Cafe OTO in London; and in Philadelphia at Icebox Project Space, Fleisher-Ollman gallery, Vox Populi, and other venues. They have recently been selected as a 2023-2024 Artistic Fellow at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art and were a Fall 2022 Studio & Research Resident at Amant in Brooklyn, where they continued their investigations of chaos force. Deal’s films have been part of selections in Blackstar Film Festival, Icebox Project Space, and Vox Populi in Philly, at CPR – Center of Performance Research, and at the Paris Film Festival. Their last album, GOGO UNDERWORLD, was released in 2022 with Cor Ardens featuring Deal combing through waste streams of aural debris, calling in warnings of the wild global West, and ghostly mirages from past and future.

Michael J. Love is an interdisciplinary tap dance artist and scholar whose embodied research intermixes Black queer feminist theories and aesthetics with a rigorous practice that critically engages the Black cultural past as it imagines Black futurity. He is currently Assistant Professor of Dance at Ursinus College. You can learn more at dancermlove.com and find Michael on socials as @dancermlove. 

Kaleena Miller makes and participates in sound-focused dance works. Her work has been presented at the Walker Art Center, American Swedish Institute, Icehouse, First Avenue, Jazz Central, and Bryant Lake Bowl in Minneapolis, and at Arts on Site and Symphony Space in New York. She has a BFA in Dance from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and a Deep Listening certification from the Center for Deep Listening at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Kaleena is currently splitting time between Minneapolis and New York, and is working towards an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. www.kaleenamiller.com

Adriana Ogle grew up dancing in the North Carolina Youth Tap Ensemble, directed by Gene Medler. In 2015, she joined Boston-based tap company Subject:Matter, performing at venues such as the Montréal Fringe Festival and The Yard. She is an alumna of the 2019 Tap Program at The School at Jacob’s Pillow, where she received the Lorna Strassler Award for Student Excellence; and, in 2021, she joined NYC-based tap company Music From The Sole. Recent performance highlights include: Marshall Davis Jr.’s Revelations in Rhythm, Okwui Okpokwasili’s Swallow the Moon at Jacob’s Pillow, the Little Island Music & Dance Festival, Bryant Park, the TODAY show, and the American Dance Guild Performance Festival. She recently premiered original choreography in the 2023 Emerging Choreographer Series via Mare Nostrum Elements, and co-choreographed material with Toru Sakuragi in the 2023 Battery Park Dance Festival.

Patrick Voller (Kaleena Miller collaborator) has been making sample-based electronic music for almost 20 years. He has recently become more interested in field recordings and incorporating these found sounds into his compositions. He enjoys improvisation, chance, and synchronicities. 

Benae Beamon (she/they) (curator) was raised in North Carolina, and her work is informed by black Southern culture. She holds a B.A. from Colgate University, an M.A. in Religion from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from Boston University. As a performance artist, Beamon uses movement, rhythm, space, and language as tools to sculpt sound and highlight the rich place where race, gender, sexuality, and class intersect with culture and ritual. Both her artistic work and scholarship examine the extraordinary and spectacular in the everyday, focusing on the way that the mundane can be sacred ritual. She has performed at Joe’s Pub in New York City, and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston with Subject:Matter, a Boston-based tap dance company. Independently, she was a 2019 finalist for the Hudgen's Prize and has premiered work at VCU Institute for Contemporary Art and at Arts on Site in New York City.

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For OPEN STUDIOS, Big Dance Theater invites artists from Big Dance: Big Tent – a long-standing, ever-evolving group of Big Dance associate artists, including actors, dancers, composers and designers – to share works-in-progress. Jess Barbagallo started performing with Big Dance 18 years ago! Jess and Anne Gridley are currently creating a new work with Paul Lazar. Anne Gridley joined BDT's tent in 2017 for Big Dance's rendition of Anne Carson's Antigone. Both Emily Davis and Kimiko Tanabe are artists whose work Paul Lazar and Sara Pereira da Silva have been following with admiration, enthusiasm, and interest.

For this program, Emily Davis, in collaboration with Jess Barbagallo, is telling stories from her time in Texas: how familial methods of communication and expression have evolved and converged in light of the extraordinary limitations imposed on her brother and father, the former a traumatic brain injury survivor, the latter diagnosed with aphasia. A hoot and a holler!; Anne Gridley shares Watch Me Walk, snippets of disability told first hand – bags included; and new Big Dance collaborator Kimiko Tanabe shares a new playful and whimsical dance work in process centering an investigation of plushie beets, sugar beets, anime aesthetics, and Asian sensuality all within the Japanese-American imagination.

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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.

About the Artists

Jess Barbagallo is an actor, playwright, director, and teacher. He has performed with Big Dance Theater, Half Straddle, Theater of a Two-Headed Calf (and its Dyke Division), and The Builders Association. Most recently, Jess appeared in Amanda Horowitz’s Bad Stars True West at STARS Gallery in Los Angeles. Currently running at Soho Rep: Snatch Adams and Tainty McCracken Present It's That Time of the Month, directed by Jess and devised in collaboration with Becca Blackwell, Amanda Duarte, and others. His writing has been featured in Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Culturebot, and 53rd State Press. Film (Youtube, really): Christmas on Earth/Joe Ranono’s Yuletide Log and Other Fruitcakes; The Puzzlers 1 + 2. TV: Law & Order: SVU.

Emily Davis is an actor based in Brooklyn who has been making work with Jess since college. She has worked with theater company Half Straddle as a performer since 2009, premiering work in the US and abroad. She originated the role of Reality Winner in Is This A Room (The Kitchen, The Vineyard Theater, Broadway's The Lyceum Theater), for which she received an Obie Award, The Lucille Lortel Award, and a Drama Desk nomination. TV: American Rust, The Patient, Tulsa King, High Maintenance, and Servant. Film: Loophole, The Plagiarists, The Harbinger.

Anne Gridley is a two-time Obie award-winning actor, dramaturg, and artist. As a founding member of Nature Theater of Oklahoma, she has co-created and performed in critically acclaimed works including Life & Times, Poetics: A Ballet Brut, No Dice, Romeo & Juliet, and Burt Turrido. In addition to her work with Nature Theater, Gridley has performed with Jerôme Bel, Caborca, 7 Daughters of Eve, and Big Dance, served as a Dramaturg for the Wooster Group’s production Who’s Your Dada?, and taught devised theater at Bard College. Her drawings have been shown at H.A.U. Berlin, and Mass Live Arts. B.A. Bard College; M.F.A. Columbia University.

Kimiko Tanabe (she/her) is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. She explores the mediums of performance art, dance, writing, and origami, and is in a committed partnership with her .38 Muji pen. She is forever fascinated with Japanese folklore and as a lover of literature she finds herself making important life decisions under the eyes and influence of fiction. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance with her literary tendencies to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting, and that gives platform and power to the Asian-American emotional experience. For Kimiko, art is intimate and inexact. Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance. She is a 2022 BAX Space Grant Recipient, 2022 Gallim Moving Artist Resident, 2022 Colorado College Artist in Residence, 2021 Artist in Resident at The Floor, and 2021 Fresh Ground Pepper PlayGround PlayGroup Residency Cohort Member. She currently performs with and glenn potter-takata and Shannon Yu and has performed with marion spencer, Catherine Galasso Projects, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, and Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell.

Founded in 1991, Big Dance Theater (curator) is known for its inspired use of dance, music, text, and visual design. The company often works with wildly incongruent source material, weaving and braiding disparate strands into multi-dimensional performance. Led by Artistic Director Annie-B Parson, Big Dance has delved into the literary work of such authors as Anne Carson, Twain, Tanizaki, Wellman, Euripides, and Flaubert, and dance is used as both frame and metaphor to theatricalize these writings. For more than 25 years, Big Dance Theater has worked to create over 20 dance/theater works, generating each piece over months of collaboration with its associate artists, a long-standing, ever-evolving group of actors, dancers, composers and designers. Big Dance Theater received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2002 and 2010; the company was awarded an OBIE in 2000, and BDT company members have received five other “Bessie” Awards and an OBIE award for their work with Big Dance. In 2007 the company received the first-ever Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. Big Dance Theater has been presented around the world, in venues including the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Dance Theater Workshop, The Kitchen, City Center, The Performing Garage, New York Live Arts, The Chocolate Factory, Classic Stage Company, Japan Society, Under the Radar, American Realness, Tanz Im August (Berlin), PS122’s COIL Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Walker Art Center, Yerba Buena, On the Boards, UCLA Live, ICA Boston, American Dance Institute (ADI), Fusebox Festival/Austin, CounterCurrent Festival/Houston, and Spoleto Festival USA. Recent commissions have been from Les Subsistances in Lyon, Chaillot Theatre National in Paris, BAM, Walker Art Center, Wexner Arts Center, Carolina Performing Arts, the Old Vic/London, Spoleto Festival USA, American Dance Festival, NCCAkron, and the new Perelman Arts Center in New York City. 

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For OPEN STUDIOS, poet and Executive Director of The Poetry Project, guest curator Kyle Dacuyan brings together Lucas de Lima, Kamikaze Jones, and Riven Ratanavanh with Demetris Charalambous – a group of artists who roll around textually and gesturally in disobedience, risk, excess, and disarray – to share works-in-progress. Interested in speech and movement behaving against functional expectation and decorum, Dacuyan asks: What do impulse, pleasure, and intuition open; what do order, legibility, and requirement foreclose? When we let go of those mantles, the stakes become higher, hotter, more vivid and true.

Lucas de Lima shares their work Cosmic Bottom, a ritual of rebirth and permeability in which liberation begins inside oneself and grows outwards.

Kamikaze Jones recontextualizes an earlier work, A Storm In Every Port, which troubles the multivalent archetypes of the sailor: as a pornographic stock character, as a vessel of colonial extraction, as an innately subordinate entity, and as a fraught sigil of queer carnality. Marooned on a deserted beach (or perhaps just stuck in a k-hole on Fire Island) the sailor outs himself as a ravenous ghost, an insatiable cumdump, and eventually, as a washed up siren who sings himself to proverbial shipwreck.

Created alongside collaborator Demetris Charalambous, Riven Ratanavan’s The Edge of Desire Has a Way of Curving is a vignette that questions the thresholds of effability, intimacy, and possibility. Drawing from personal experiences of cruising, fisting, and p̶a̶s̶s̶i̶n̶g̶, this new work-in-progress paints a portrait of power, agony, loss, and illumination through desire, and a queer yearning to reach into the unknown.

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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.

About the Artists

Demetris Charalambous (born 2000) is an experimental NYC-based maker born and raised in Cyprus. Demetris's mediums span performance, choreography, and visual art. Demetris' work and collaborations have been presented on platforms such as NOWNESS, Berlin Commercial, and spaces such as Judson Memorial Church and the Living Gallery. Demetris's artistic practice revolves around the human body as a channel for delving into themes surrounding mortality, form, and time.

Lucas de Lima is a Brazilian-born poet, artist, scholar, and educator based in NYC. Their recent work integrates lyric desire and ritual performance as a way of uprooting fear of ecology and the body. They are the author of Wet Land (Action Books 2014) and Tropical Sacrifice (Birds LLC 2022) and the recipient of grants and fellowships from the Charlotte W. Newcombe Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Canada Council for the Arts. de Lima's performances have taken place at Immigrant Artist Biennial, Untitled Art Fair, Artists Alliance Inc, Recess Art, and Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, with poems appearing in Brooklyn Rail, Hopkins Review, Apogee, Gulf Coast, and PEN America. They hold a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and teach at Mount Holyoke College.

Kamikaze Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores extended vocal technique, queer hauntologies, and ritualized erotic transcendence. Utilizing counterarchival impulse and experimental research procedures, Jones endeavors to provide both sonic and ceremonial sanctuary for the ghosts of public sex. His work across mediums has been featured by Anthology Film Archives, Black Mountain College Museum, Montez Press Radio, Wave Farm, The Poetry Project, and Onassis USA. He was a founding member of the poetry and performance collective The Anchoress Syndicate, and the host of the podcast “Pure Garbage: An Oral Examination of John Waters.” He is the current arts editor of WUSSY Magazine.

Riven Ratanavanh (born 1996 in Bangkok, Thailand) is a New York-based artist working at the intersection of performance, film, and installation. Weaving trans Asian-diasporic futures, their work has been shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Seattle Trans Film Festival, and the London Short Film Festival. They have taught movement workshops at Performance Space New York, and performed with Young Boy Dancing Group, Cassils, Kinlaw, and Raven Chacon, among others. Their work has also been featured by Dazed Magazine, CIRCA, and on the Piccadilly Lights in London.

Kyle Dacuyan (curator) is a poet, Executive Director of The Poetry Project, and author of Incitements (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). His poems have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series, Lambda Literary, The Offing, Social Text, and elsewhere. His performance works include Legal Tender, devised and presented with Andalyn Young and Antigravity Performance Project at Ars Nova, New York, NY (2019) and FringeArts, Philadelphia, PA (2020). As a 2023–2024 Open Call artist, he will present Dad Rock at The Shed, New York, NY (2024). Dacuyan has received the Cy Twombly Award in Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2023), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Creative Writing (2021), a Jerome Foundation Artist Fellowship Finalist Award (2021), and a Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship (2017).