Organized by Jesi Cook + Ayano Elson
Co-Presented with CPR – Center for Performance Research

Tickets $16, $40, $72, $96 (sliding scale)
Purchase here

doors 2:45 PM
shows 3–6 PM 


Hosted by Tess Dworman

Featuring luciana achugar, Stephanie Acosta, Chia-Lun Chang, Leslie Cuyjet, Francesca D’Uva, Aruni Dharmakirthi, DJ Jen Goma, Sam Kim, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Mina Nishimura, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Anh Vo, Lu Yim, and more!

Author Alexander Chee is generously matching the first $444 in tickets with a donation to Red Canary Song.

From Ayano and Jesi: 
We're hosting a performance marathon titled 888 to benefit Red Canary Song, an organizing collective for Asian & migrant sex workers. Our goal is to raise and contribute $888 to RCS in memory of the victims of the spa shootings in the Atlanta area in March 2021. The number 8 symbolizes wholeness in Taoist tradition; 888 is an invitation to connect, share, and be together as part of a larger community. With this stellar artist lineup and in partnership with CPR, we’re creating an intentional space for celebration, prayer, and remembrance. We hope to see you there! <3

For those unable to attend but still wishing to support the cause, please send donations to https://venmo.com/u/Ayano-Elson.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

This workshop has been canceled.

Co-Presented with FAILSPACE


$0-$40 per day, sliding scale
Sign up for one or both!
Register here

Fri, June 3 | 1:00 P.M. – 3:30 P.M.
Sat, June 4 | 1:00 P.M. – 3:30 P.M.

As part of CPR’s ongoing partnership with FAILSPACE, visiting artists los little guys (Erik Elizondo & Dimitri Kalaitzidis) will facilitate a two-day workshop at CPR focused on deconstructing movement habits, working with efficiency while encountering complexity, and the building of mobility, endurance, and strength. We will work with improvisation, which has been developed focusing on impulses to simultaneously coordinate and disassociate the body. Continuity and the layering of focus are tools which we will use to identify habits and create new movement patterns. The form of exploration will develop in gradual layers and vary, offering the chance to explore the body through upright positions, through the floor, and through the air, always focusing on an active and inquisitive process.

All movement backgrounds and levels are more than welcome.


About the artists

Los Little Guys is a Mexico based project that began between Erik Elizondo and Dimitri Kalaitzidis in 2017. Since its foundation they have engaged in residencies, created and performed both original and collaborative work, and offered classes and workshops for professionals and companies in Berlin, London, Brussels, Budapest, Milan, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Montreal, Vancouver, Reykjavik, Delhi, Bangalore, and Kuala Lumpur among others. Primarily utilizing improvisation as a means of movement creation, the motivation behind their work is to continuously find ways to reeducate the body through the interaction between imagination and physical space. The name “los little guys” was conceived out of the desire not to conform to common constructs of contemporary dance which idolize big and strong bodies and to always allow playfulness to be a part of their practice.

Erik Elizondo is originally from Monterrey, Mexico. He graduated from SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, with a focus on contemporary dance performance. He started his dancing career in Monterrey with the independent company Teoría de Gravedad, and later worked with Inside the Body Performing Arts directed by Aladino R. Blanca. His professional experience includes projects with Ruby Gámez, Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood, Cinthya Dueñas, Elías Cohen, Francisco Córdova, Raúl Martinez, Beto Pérez, João Cidade, Marion Sparber, Alfonso López Aguilar, Barnaby Booth, Milla Koistinen, and Angelica Baños. In addition to his professional work, Erik took part in a residency with the company Kim Kosmos in Movement in Chile, as well as the physical performance intensive SMASH in Berlin. In 2017 he co-founded Los Little Guys, a project in collaboration with Dimitri Kalaitzidis.

Dimitri Kalaitzidis was born and raised in Massachusetts, USA. He graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he received a Bachelor of the Fine Arts with a focus on contemporary dance performance. Dimitri later became a member of the Bodhi Project at SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance with which he performed internationally. He has worked on projects with choreographers such as Emanuel Gat, Sita Ostheimer, Mala Kline, Rosalba Torres, Barnaby Booth, Rohan Bhargava, and Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich. Dimitri co-created Los Little Guys alongside Erik Elizondo in 2017 and has presented original work in North America, Europe, and Asia alongside their pedagogic research which has continually been in development since the beginning of their project.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

This workshop has been canceled.

Co-Presented with FAILSPACE


$0-$40 per day, sliding scale
Sign up for one or both!
Register here

Fri, June 3 | 1:00 P.M. – 3:30 P.M.
Sat, June 4 | 1:00 P.M. – 3:30 P.M.

As part of CPR’s ongoing partnership with FAILSPACE, visiting artists los little guys (Erik Elizondo & Dimitri Kalaitzidis) will facilitate a two-day workshop at CPR focused on deconstructing movement habits, working with efficiency while encountering complexity, and the building of mobility, endurance, and strength. We will work with improvisation, which has been developed focusing on impulses to simultaneously coordinate and disassociate the body. Continuity and the layering of focus are tools which we will use to identify habits and create new movement patterns. The form of exploration will develop in gradual layers and vary, offering the chance to explore the body through upright positions, through the floor, and through the air, always focusing on an active and inquisitive process.

All movement backgrounds and levels are more than welcome.


About the artists

Los Little Guys is a Mexico based project that began between Erik Elizondo and Dimitri Kalaitzidis in 2017. Since its foundation they have engaged in residencies, created and performed both original and collaborative work, and offered classes and workshops for professionals and companies in Berlin, London, Brussels, Budapest, Milan, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Mexico City, Oaxaca, Montreal, Vancouver, Reykjavik, Delhi, Bangalore, and Kuala Lumpur among others. Primarily utilizing improvisation as a means of movement creation, the motivation behind their work is to continuously find ways to reeducate the body through the interaction between imagination and physical space. The name “los little guys” was conceived out of the desire not to conform to common constructs of contemporary dance which idolize big and strong bodies and to always allow playfulness to be a part of their practice.

Erik Elizondo is originally from Monterrey, Mexico. He graduated from SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, with a focus on contemporary dance performance. He started his dancing career in Monterrey with the independent company Teoría de Gravedad, and later worked with Inside the Body Performing Arts directed by Aladino R. Blanca. His professional experience includes projects with Ruby Gámez, Gavin Webber & Grayson Millwood, Cinthya Dueñas, Elías Cohen, Francisco Córdova, Raúl Martinez, Beto Pérez, João Cidade, Marion Sparber, Alfonso López Aguilar, Barnaby Booth, Milla Koistinen, and Angelica Baños. In addition to his professional work, Erik took part in a residency with the company Kim Kosmos in Movement in Chile, as well as the physical performance intensive SMASH in Berlin. In 2017 he co-founded Los Little Guys, a project in collaboration with Dimitri Kalaitzidis.

Dimitri Kalaitzidis was born and raised in Massachusetts, USA. He graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where he received a Bachelor of the Fine Arts with a focus on contemporary dance performance. Dimitri later became a member of the Bodhi Project at SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance with which he performed internationally. He has worked on projects with choreographers such as Emanuel Gat, Sita Ostheimer, Mala Kline, Rosalba Torres, Barnaby Booth, Rohan Bhargava, and Iratxe Ansa and Igor Bacovich. Dimitri co-created Los Little Guys alongside Erik Elizondo in 2017 and has presented original work in North America, Europe, and Asia alongside their pedagogic research which has continually been in development since the beginning of their project.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

Free, RSVP required
Tickets

Co-Presented with ISSUE Project Room
Also streaming live on Wave Farm Radio

For her first commissioned work as a 2022 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence, sound artist and musician Sydney Spann presents "Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog" a performance-activated sound installation co-presented with CPR – Center for Performance Research. The piece will premiere at CPR’s space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

"Cow, Cow, Cow, Rabbit, Recalcitrance, Bunny, Dog, Dog, Dog" is a performance-activated sound installation using the entirety of CPR's gallery and theater space. Spann will use FM radio baby monitors to receive and diffuse a live performance taking place in one room to another room where the audience will be left to parse through the broadcast music. Additive synthesis is superimposed over feedback swells created with hearing aids, punctuated by rhythms made with electromagnetic microphones and augmented with sung and spoken vocalizations.

The live performance marks a reflection on Spann’s experience working in childcare. For years, Spann has found herself enmeshed in the complex, exploitative, and inevitably partial structures of care and kinship that reproduce the nuclear family. Care work collapses, or rather, reveals as spurious the “structural, experiential, conceptual gap between the public and the private.” For Spann, the bourgeois middle class home is a contested site, in which nanny cams and radio monitors represent just one form of banal surveillance and control. Also integral to the performance is the artist’s interest in the relationship between sound and psychoanalysis, particularly D.W. Winicott’s theory of “transitional phenomena,” which identifies early speech, singing, and babbling to sleep as both methods of self-soothing and assertions of independence. Spann’s own distilled transitional speech and song broadcast through baby monitors is meant to gesture towards an expanse of care outside the nuclear family, perhaps prefigured intergenerational, queer, and other imaginitive forms of childrearing.

Sydney Spann (b.1994 Baltimore, MD) is a sound artist and musician based in New York. She works with synthesis, chance operations, recursive compositional processes and voice to intervene within a personal archive of field recordings, culminating in long form compositions and improvised performances. Her music engages the private experiences that shape public spaces, and the affective dynamics within childcare work. She has released albums with Ehse Records (Baltimore), She Rocks! (NYC), and Reading Group (NYC), with a full-length release forthcoming on Recital in 2022. She has performed at the High Zero Festival of Experimental Free Improvised Music, The Walters Art Museum, Bar Laika by e-flux, and in diy spaces and galleries throughout the US. Recent works for streaming include Sending up a Spiral of on Montez Press Radio and Attached/Detached (partial disappearance) for ISSUE Project Room’s With Womens Work Series. She is an MFA candidate in Music/Sound at Bard.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

Tickets: FREE, RSVP required
RSVP here

Co-Presented with The Bushwick Starr


Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ife Olujobi: MARKETPLACE


Additional Starr Reading Series programs:

Monday, March 28, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ro Reddick: Throwback Island

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Nkenna Akunna: cheeky little brown

Monday, April 4, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Amara Brady: the beautiful things are gonna kill you


Since 2010, The Bushwick Starr’s annual Starr Reading Series has cultivated a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers, who approach writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. Selected through an invited submission process by a rotating committee of curators, currently Jehan O. Young, Elizagrace Madrone, and William Burke, 4-8 playwrights are selected each year, and receive developmental support for a public staged reading of a new, usually unfinished, work. With The Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home currently under renovation, the 2022 Starr Reading Series will take place at, and is co-presented by, CPR – Center for Performance Research, uniting the process-oriented missions of both organizations, and celebrating the incubation of new, experimental work in performance. The Starr Reading Series has previously supported new plays by writers including Whitney White, Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Haruna Lee, and many more.

MARKETPLACE is a practical reverie, a theoretical bonfire of corporeal exchange, a pageant of movement vignettes that explores the relationship between bodies, capital, labor, intimacy, and reciprocity, reveling in the sometimes miraculous, sometimes banal ways that we love and hurt each other while trying to get what we need to survive.

Ife Olujobi (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based Nigerian-American playwright, screenwriter, and editor from Columbia, MD. She is a 2020-22 Resident Artist at Ars Nova, a member of the Obie-winning Youngblood at Ensemble Studio Theatre, a 2019-20 New Voices Fellow at The Lark, an alumnus of both the 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group at the Public Theater and the 2020 Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, an inaugural Project Number One artist-in-residence at Soho Rep, and the recipient of a 2020 Sloan Foundation commission from Manhattan Theatre Club. Their play Jordans won a special commendation from the 2021 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, and they are the recipient of a 2021 Steinberg Playwright Award. Their plays include Smoke, MARKETPLACE, Color Girls and others, and their work has been seen at The Public, Ensemble Studio Theatre, HERE Arts Center, Bishop Arts Theater Center, and more. She also conceived and edited a book of interviews with theater artists during the pandemic called No Play, is the founder and editor of Townies zine, managing editor of The Supplements at Soho Rep, and a former assistant editor at the Criterion Collection. They received their BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in 2016.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

Tickets: FREE, RSVP required
RSVP here

Co-Presented with The Bushwick Starr

Monday, April 4, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Amara Brady: the beautiful things are gonna kill you

*This performance is currently SOLD OUT online. A wait list will begin at the door at 7pm and we will do our best to accommodate everyone!


Additional Starr Reading Series programs:

Monday, March 28, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ro Reddick: Throwback Island

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Nkenna Akunna: cheeky little brown

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ife Olujobi: MARKETPLACE


Since 2010, The Bushwick Starr’s annual Starr Reading Series has cultivated a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers, who approach writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. Selected through an invited submission process by a rotating committee of curators, currently Jehan O. Young, Elizagrace Madrone, and William Burke, 4-8 playwrights are selected each year, and receive developmental support for a public staged reading of a new, usually unfinished, work. With The Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home currently under renovation, the 2022 Starr Reading Series will take place at, and is co-presented by, CPR – Center for Performance Research, uniting the process-oriented missions of both organizations, and celebrating the incubation of new, experimental work in performance. The Starr Reading Series has previously supported new plays by writers including Whitney White, Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Haruna Lee, and many more.

In the beautiful things are gonna kill you, O is a Black Queer person deeply in love with Ele, a white Lesbian; Ele is in love with O. Can Ele get past the manipulative nature of white womanhood? Together can they get over society's ingrained narratives? Probably not, but it might be fun to try.

Amara Brady (She/Her) is a generative artist & cultural dramaturg from Chicago. At the crux of her artistry is showcasing the humanity and divinity of Black women and connecting underserved communities with experiences that mirror their own. Acting: “my dick is david duke” or The Sad Fat Negress Can’t Get a Date (Ars Nova), Hachetation (O’Neill), Wine in the Wilderness (Roundabout), Abduction (Atlantic Theater Co.), This Is Where We Go (MCC), Bernarda’s Daughters (The Lark), Annie Golden: Broadway Bounty Hunter (Barrington Stage Co.), NYTW, 54 Below, Joe’s Pub & others. She’s a member of Iconis & family. Writing: “my dick is david duke” or The Sad Fat Negress Can’t Get a Date (Ars Nova), This is Where We Go (MCC), Last Ones First (Crux VR in association with Blair Russell Productions); When We Were gods (Blackboard collective + Kervigo Ensemble); Manic Pixie Dream Girls Aren’t Black (The Parsnip Ship), The Wickedness of Men or Love Songs for the End of the World (MTF + Broadviews on Broadway) Producing: “my dick is david duke” or The Sad Fat Negress Can’t Get a Date (Ars Nova), the 2019 Theatre Communications Groups National Conference. Assistant Producer of NYT’s Critic Pick, Jillian Walker’s SKiNFoLK (Bushwick Starr). YouTube series, ‘Skinny & White’ Aren’t Character Traits. In This Paper I’ll Explain. Resist, check your privilege, & then give some space to Women of Color & Trans Folx. Ashé to the ancestors. All Power to all people. https://linktr.ee/ajbrady

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

Tickets: FREE, RSVP required
RSVP here

Co-Presented with The Bushwick Starr

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Nkenna Akunna: cheeky little brown

*This performance is currently SOLD OUT online. A wait list will begin at the door at 7pm and we will do our best to accommodate everyone!


Additional Starr Reading Series programs:

Monday, March 28, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ro Reddick: Throwback Island

Monday, April 4, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Amara Brady: the beautiful things are gonna kill you

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ife Olujobi: MARKETPLACE


Since 2010, The Bushwick Starr’s annual Starr Reading Series has cultivated a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers, who approach writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. Selected through an invited submission process by a rotating committee of curators, currently Jehan O. Young, Elizagrace Madrone, and William Burke, 4-8 playwrights are selected each year, and receive developmental support for a public staged reading of a new, usually unfinished, work. With The Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home currently under renovation, the 2022 Starr Reading Series will take place at, and is co-presented by, CPR – Center for Performance Research, uniting the process-oriented missions of both organizations, and celebrating the incubation of new, experimental work in performance. The Starr Reading Series has previously supported new plays by writers including Whitney White, Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Haruna Lee, and many more.

cheeky little brown uses the whirlwind of a failed night out to explore heartbreak, one’s relationship to their own body, and the shifting realities of the city they call home. The story opens on Lady, who’s in the middle of crashing (and lowkey ruining) her best friend Gemma’s birthday party. The two haven’t spoken for six months, Lady’s presence is a surprise, and over the course of the play we untangle the reasons why.

Nkenna Akunna is an Igbo playwright and performer from London whose work primarily explores dimensions of Black femme life. Plays include Some Of Us Exist in the Future (Papatango Prize; Neukom Institute Literary Award for Playwriting second place; Women’s Prize in Playwriting shortlist; UK audio tour: Bush Theatre, Everyman Theatre Liverpool, Theatr Clwyd, Leeds Playhouse, Laurels Whitley Bay, Chichester Festival Theatre, Stephen Joseph Theatre, an Tobar & Mull Theatre, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Bristol Old Vic, Southwark Playhouse, Oldham Coliseum, Trinity Theatre Tunbridge Wells, Lyric Theatre Belfast), cheeky little brown, good god (VoxFest, Brown University), Good Fit (Rosa Parks Playwriting Award, Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award second place, Theatre Renegade, The Dare Tactic), and a meal (Polaroid Theatre). She has a BA in Economics and African Diaspora Studies from Dartmouth College and is completing an MFA Candidate in Playwriting from Brown University. nkennaakunna.com

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

Tickets: FREE, RSVP required
RSVP here

Co-Presented with The Bushwick Starr

Monday, March 28, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ro Reddick: Throwback Island

This event is now sold out. A waitlist at the door will start at 7:00 P.M.


Additional Starr Reading Series programs:

Tuesday, March 29, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Nkenna Akunna: cheeky little brown

Monday, April 4, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Amara Brady: the beautiful things are gonna kill you

Tuesday, April 5, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
Ife Olujobi: MARKETPLACE


Since 2010, The Bushwick Starr’s annual Starr Reading Series has cultivated a diverse group of writers at all stages of their careers, who approach writing for the theater in thrilling and unexpected ways. Selected through an invited submission process by a rotating committee of curators, currently Jehan O. Young, Elizagrace Madrone, and William Burke, 4-8 playwrights are selected each year, and receive developmental support for a public staged reading of a new, usually unfinished, work. With The Bushwick Starr’s new permanent home currently under renovation, the 2022 Starr Reading Series will take place at, and is co-presented by, CPR – Center for Performance Research, uniting the process-oriented missions of both organizations, and celebrating the incubation of new, experimental work in performance. The Starr Reading Series has previously supported new plays by writers including Whitney White, Clare Barron, Phillip Howze, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Haruna Lee, and many more.

Throwback Island is a dark and twisted satire that explores good old fashioned American fascism through a bonkers reality dating show. Six “sexy singles” go to a secluded island for nostalgia soaked good vibes, #truelove, and a chance to win a $100K. But when a strongman bachelor enters the villa there’s a lot more at stake than a pot of money…

Ro Reddick (she/her) is a playwright, performer, songwriter and first year MFA Playwriting student at Brown University. Her plays include Throwback Island, ROBAMA, Miss Black Syracuse, and The History of Black People Making White People Better People (co-writer Daryl Lathon). Her script The Fam was a semi-finalist in the MACRO x Blacklist Episodic Lab, and her short film A Test In Stamina premiered at the Big Apple Film Festival. Ro is a recipient of the Miranda Theatre Company 2021 Playwright Grant. As an actor, Ro has performed at theaters including the McCarter, Long Wharf, KC Rep, and Hartford Stage, off-Broadway in “Silence! The Musical”, and on screen in The Americans, Louie, and SATC 2. She formerly sang with a country, rock, and blues band and has written over a dozen original songs with musician Ron Gross. She is currently in the Brown Arts Institute Songwriters Workshop.

Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.

This workshop is by invitation only.

As part of its ongoing partnership with FAILSPACE, CPR will host the third and final gathering of Creating/Conjuring/Covenant: A Convergence of Raucous Embodiments by/for BIQTPOC Qwitches, which is facilitated by mayfield brooks and Estrellx through the FAILSPACE 2021 Mentorship Program.

mayfield and Estrellx have initiated a BIQTPOC Coven, inviting BIPOC and BIQTPOC folks into a series of effervescent encounters. we will take time to tune in, gather our energies, and set intentions for the year ahead. we will use our different & intersecting creative practices, to replenish ourselves, reflect, renew. and restore throughout the December 2021 moon cycle. we will offer BIQTPOC-centered somatic explorations, share embodied research, have conversations on lineage, land, love, intimacy, collectivity, abundance/scarcity, labor & inheritance and other topics as they come up from within the group.

###

CPR supports the work of mayfield brooks and Estrellx in relationship with FAILSPACE. We encourage you to read the following from mayfield brooks, and to consider contributing Reparations to support mayfield and Estrellx’s restorative and healing work with these BIPOCIA & QTPOCIA artists:

”I don't know about you, but lately I've been exhausted. For me, the task becomes how to rest, repair and regenerate in a moment where we are being asked to balance urgency with slowness. I am continually seeking and learning how to thrive in a world that is gorgeous and giving and at the same time violent and aggressive within the human-made apparatus of militarized capitalism. It is indeed a balancing act to be an artist in these times. It is even more of a balancing act to be an artist of color who may be femme, queer, non binary, disabled, Black, Indigenous, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latinx (and other queers & folks of color who may not fit into those categories). So in my role as a mentor for FAILSPACE, I decided to collaborate with my mentee, Estrellx, and put out a call to other BIPOCIA & QTPOCIA folks to CONJURE our own healing in these precarious times.

In order to make this happen we wanted to remove all financial constraints and offer a free series of workshops. In order to do this, we are asking for REPARATIVE FUNDING to cover 10 BIPOCIA & QTPOCIA artists to be able to participate in this work for free. We are asking for Reparations, not Donations. We are hoping that this work can grow from 10 to 100 artists in the future and that the magic we create from what we are calling our "Inaugural Qwitch BIPOCIA/QTPOCIA Convening" can have space to breathe and grow. We need to raise $2,500 to support the presence of the 10 BIPOCIA & QTPOCIA artists at these workshops, but welcome more funds to support the work of Estrellx and I, directly, as we share our practices of improvising while black, decomposing dance, attunement, quebrantamiento to renew/restore our bodies, and creating rage rooms against the machine where we get vulnerable, messy, honest, and raw.”

Contribute Reparations through FAILSPACE via PayPal.

FREE with registration, limited capacity
Register here
Registration will close on December 10 at 12PM

This workshop is open to dancers.

In accordance with the Key to NYC, CPR will require all workshop participants to show proof of full vaccination against Covid-19 (14+ days after final dose).

CPR is collaborating with dance artist Parijat Desai to co-present a workshop which explores material from her current project How Do I Become WE, and as an extension of her work as a 2021 CPR Artist-in-Residence. The workshop is an opportunity for dancers to engage with aspects of Parijat’s development process, including both improvisation and phrase material, and to forge a creative relationship for possible longer-term collaboration.

How Do I Become WE is a multimedia performance and participatory ritual. Built around a Kannada women's folk tale and Navratri garba (an autumnal circle-dance ritual in worship of primordial Mother), the work explores the relationship between our individual woundedness and the wounds of our world. Employing culturally rooted and experimental dance, with a dose of trickster energy, the piece is an inquiry into the process of releasing hurt, of activating our collective energies, and reconnecting with the natural world.

India-born, U.S.-raised dance artist Parijat Desai creates hybrids of contemporary, Indian classical and Gujarati folk dance; theater; martial arts and other forms to articulate a South Asian American experience through the body, and to challenge ideas of cultural purity and fear that underlie nationalism and xenophobia. Parijat also leads Dance In The Round, sharing circle dances from Gujarat, India. By reframing these ancestral dance practices as inclusive, participatory movement spaces for people across age, ability, caste, and gender, she seeks to support community well-being and activation. Parijat began Parijata Dance Company in 2000 in Los Angeles, and has been based in Lenapehoking / NYC since 2004. She is a 2020-2021 CPR Artist-in-Residence and was a 2018 CPR Technical Resident. In 2021 she received a residency at BRIC Arts | Media, and is a 2022  Gibney DiP Resident. Parijat is a member of the SAEDA Working Group, a collective of South Asian experimental dance artists that has received support from NCC Akron and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She is also grateful to have received support from Soham Dance Space/Chicago, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, and The Bay and Paul Foundations.

In partnership with Independent Dance (London) and The Bluecoat (Liverpool)

How to be Afraid? led by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson comes to Independent Dance for a week of practice, discussion, collaboration and performance.

PUBLIC RESEARCH SPACE
May 24-26, 2021 | 10AM-1PM EST / 3PM-6PM GMT
Online | £40
In-Person @ Siobhan Davies Studios (UK) | £50
Click here to book

TALK
May 27, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration

PERFORMANCE
May 28, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration

About the PERFORMANCE:
As bodies in exile, both outside and online, six dancers will simultaneously inhabit their only options for being together. Collaborators mayfield brooks, Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Mary Pearson, Anne-Gaëlle Thirot and Amy Voris and will perform a techno-site-specific ritual between London and New York. This performance will create layered video compositions in real time – using both pre-recorded material, and live streamed improvisations. Dancers will explore the tension of being in public in space in relation to the loss of intimacy and togetherness during Covid. We ask ourselves, do we want to perform or do we just want to be? Do we lean into the present fear of intimacy and its potential contagion? What exists now when we share space together? Also, how do we contend with the other pandemic of racial violence repeating itself and haunting our bodies in the present? Through this shared encounter dancers will investigate how these questions touch each other and the lives around them.

About How to be Afraid?
How to be Afraid? explores fear and trauma stemming from brooks and Pearson’s different but connected ancestral links to the transatlantic slave trade. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in research, workshops and performances in a range of international contexts, most recently through the transatlantic online performance Improvisations with interference: haunted by histories, guided by ghosts live streamed in February 2021.

Currently, How to be Afraid? explores pressurized somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of this past year and how it has shifted perspectives. Living in a pandemic has also exposed harsh realities of already pressurized conditions: racial, gender- based and political violence, police brutality, and the increasing momentum of authoritarian governments in many parts of the world.

When a pressure valve is opened, releasing pressure exposes how much was already there. How do we navigate this time when pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from fear of intimacy, if we are afraid? What kind of life and society is this ‘new normal’ and was it ever normal in the first place? How can we duck and dodge the coercive aspects of normalcy?

This iteration of How to be Afraid? is co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with The Bluecoat (Liverpool) and CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust. Earlier iterations of How to be Afraid? were supported by Chisenhale Dance Space, Metal (Liverpool) and Improspections Festival at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Zagreb and the GPS/Global Practice Sharing program of Movement Research (NYC) with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

How to be Afraid? is supported, in part, by CPR’s Artist-in-Residence program, which is made possible, in part, by Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.


More information and updates about How to Be Afraid? can be found at: https://www.independentdance.co.uk/programmepage/activities/how-to-be-afraid-mary-pearson-and-mayfield-brooks/

In partnership with Independent Dance (London) and The Bluecoat (Liverpool)

How to be Afraid? led by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson comes to Independent Dance for a week of practice, discussion, collaboration and performance.

PUBLIC RESEARCH SPACE
May 24-26, 2021 | 10AM-1PM EST / 3PM-6PM GMT
Online | £40
In-Person @ Siobhan Davies Studios (UK) | £50
Click here to book

TALK
May 27, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration

PERFORMANCE
May 28, 2021 | 1:30 PM EST / 6:30 PM GMT
Online | Free with registration

About the TALK:
This public discussion will focus on artists who are exploring dismantling, decomposition, crumbling systems and how to work towards change. What does it mean to be a genuine ally or accomplice? How can we sit with discomfort? How do we navigate this time when pressure needs to be released? mayfield brooks, Mary Pearson and collaborators Akeim Toussaint Buck, Seke Chimutengwende, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Amy Voris will be in conversation.

About How to be Afraid?
How to be Afraid? explores fear and trauma stemming from brooks and Pearson’s different but connected ancestral links to the transatlantic slave trade. Over the past four years, iterations of this project have manifested in research, workshops and performances in a range of international contexts, most recently through the transatlantic online performance Improvisations with interference: haunted by histories, guided by ghosts live streamed in February 2021.

Currently, How to be Afraid? explores pressurized somatic responses to the turbulent politics and pandemic conditions of this past year and how it has shifted perspectives. Living in a pandemic has also exposed harsh realities of already pressurized conditions: racial, gender- based and political violence, police brutality, and the increasing momentum of authoritarian governments in many parts of the world.

When a pressure valve is opened, releasing pressure exposes how much was already there. How do we navigate this time when pressure needs to be released? How do we recover from fear of intimacy, if we are afraid? What kind of life and society is this ‘new normal’ and was it ever normal in the first place? How can we duck and dodge the coercive aspects of normalcy?

This iteration of How to be Afraid? is co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with The Bluecoat (Liverpool) and CPR – Center for Performance Research (New York), supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust. Earlier iterations of How to be Afraid? were supported by Chisenhale Dance Space, Metal (Liverpool) and Improspections Festival at the Museum for Contemporary Art, Zagreb and the GPS/Global Practice Sharing program of Movement Research (NYC) with funding from the Trust for Mutual Understanding.

How to be Afraid? is supported, in part, by CPR’s Artist-in-Residence program, which is made possible, in part, by Dance/NYC’s Rehearsal Space Subsidy Program made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts.


More information and updates about How to Be Afraid? can be found at: https://www.independentdance.co.uk/programmepage/activities/how-to-be-afraid-mary-pearson-and-mayfield-brooks/

This event occurs online at 1:00 PM EST / 6:00 PM GMT.

Tickets: FREE, with advance reservation.

Improvisations with interference is part of How to Be Afraid?, an ongoing performance project led by mayfield brooks and Mary Pearson. How to Be Afraid? explores fear as an antidote to counteract the trauma of their different but connected links to the transatlantic slave trade. Last summer, Mary and mayfield connected with Seke Chimutengwende as part of Proximity: New Directions in Art and Social Repair with Migrant Artists Mutual Aid. As a result, and in relation with Seke's current project they have developed intersecting dialogues about how histories of slavery and colonialism haunt the present.

Taking place online from three locations – New York, Liverpool and London - this informal performance emerges from a short period of online collaboration this February and is an attempt at collective clairvoyance. Improvising with interference to open new spaces for connection, the artists ask, What haunts us? What lessons do today’s ghosts bring, along with their physical, psychic and interpersonal disruptions?

Improvisations with interference forms part of a wider body of research co-produced by Mary Pearson, mayfield brooks and Independent Dance in partnership with The Bluecoat (Liverpool), CPR - Center for Performance Research (New York), and supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England and with support from Creative Land Trust and in-kind support from Metal (Liverpool), and through CPR’s Artist-in-Residence Program.

The next phase of How to Be Afraid?, now rescheduled for May 2021, will include collaborative work between mayfield brooks, Mary Pearson, Seke Chimutengwende, Akeim Toussaint Buck, Anne-Gaëlle Thiriot and Amy Voris. Further news of a public research space and talks to be hosted by ID at Siobhan Davies Studios will be announced in early spring.

Tickets: Free
Registration is required in advance.

March 1, 2020 | 1 PM
March 8, 2020 | 1 PM

FAILSPACE, in partnership with CPR – Center for Performance Research, offers monthly workshops that are process-based weekly gatherings and ask the community to think expansively about what class looks like and how we take class. We work with our faculty to curate four experiences that immerse the cohort inside their creative process. In the weeks leading up to the workshop, FAILSPACE works with the faculty to refine the language of their teaching practice, provide marketing materials, and develop a marketing strategy to build a cohort of peers for the month.

FAILSPACE provides multiple platforms for emerging artists interested in live performance to grow their teaching practice among their peers. These platforms include our monthly workshop series in partnership with the Center for Performance Research, our Mentorship Workshop series, and our performance platform PARTY. FAILSPACE is organized by a Steering Committee that includes Andrew Pester, Rebecca Fitton, Angel Acuña, Pablo Muñoz, Lena Engelstein, and Nora Alami.

Tickets: Free
Registration is required in advance.

March 1, 2020 | 1 PM
March 8, 2020 | 1 PM

FAILSPACE, in partnership with CPR – Center for Performance Research, offers monthly workshops that are process-based weekly gatherings and ask the community to think expansively about what class looks like and how we take class. We work with our faculty to curate four experiences that immerse the cohort inside their creative process. In the weeks leading up to the workshop, FAILSPACE works with the faculty to refine the language of their teaching practice, provide marketing materials, and develop a marketing strategy to build a cohort of peers for the month.

FAILSPACE provides multiple platforms for emerging artists interested in live performance to grow their teaching practice among their peers. These platforms include our monthly workshop series in partnership with the Center for Performance Research, our Mentorship Workshop series, and our performance platform PARTY. FAILSPACE is organized by a Steering Committee that includes Andrew Pester, Rebecca Fitton, Angel Acuña, Pablo Muñoz, Lena Engelstein, and Nora Alami.

Free


CPR – Center for Performance Research is partnering with Dance/NYC to host their upcoming Town Hall event, The Words We Use to Talk About… Thriving!

Join entrepreneurial strategist and President of Yancey Consulting Lisa Yancey and Dance/NYC’s Executive Director Alejandra Duque Cifuentes for an armchair conversation on the mindset and practice of thriving. In a cultural and workplace landscape that favors productivity over human value, what needs to happen for dance makers and cultural workers to develop practices that center personal and professional well-being? How can institutional structures adapt to ensure the resiliency and sustainability of the workforce? This conversation aims to better understand the state of the field and present considerations for how we can move forward to create a thriving and more equitable dance ecosystem.