Unfortunately, this event has been cancelled.


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Join CPR 2023 Artist-in-Residence x on Zoom for an evening of riveting discussion and digitized riots. Participants will engage in intersectional conversation across gender, race, performance, and the Prison Industrial Complex. While it’s no secret that queer and trans Black folk have led revolutions for generations, many of us have dedicated our lives to creating…art. Does a calendar chock full of performances mean we have thrown in the towel? Or can the contemporary push for abolition start in the white box/black box? Utilizing readings and provocative questions posed by x, we’ll dive in deep. No preparation is needed to attend. This program is open to attendees of all genders and embodiments. Come if you’ve got things to say; stay if you’ve got things to learn. 

Readings and media will be sent prior to the event with your RSVP, and include selections from:

• Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith

• Disindentifications: Queers of Color and the Politics of Performance by José Esteban Muñoz (“The White to Be Angry” Vaginal Creme Davis’s Terrorist Drag)

• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

• The Beginning of a Dream: A Film by Tourmaline for Trans Justice funding Project 

x (they/ze/fae)is a choreographer, curator, Intimacy Coordinator, TRANSdisciplinary artist, and a CPR 2023 Artist-in-Residence. In their creative practice, x offers a conceptual and anti-technique approach to movement-driven performance. Their work leans towards the experimental, avant-garde, and anti-modern. The source material for their work stems from personal experiences and often critiques carceral systems such as the Medical Industrial Complex and Child “Welfare” System. The visceral catharsis brought out through their work is what x calls “performative processing”; as they work through confusion, chronic illness, childhood trauma, and bigotry.


This program will take place virtually, on Zoom. ASL and audio description services are available upon request by emailing Anna Muselmann, Programs Manager at anna@cprnyc.org at least two weeks prior to the event. Auto-generated captioning will be available through Zoom.

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For this in-person Performance Philosophy Reading Group facilitated by CPR 2023 Artist-in-Residence Raymond Pinto, participants will engage in movement together in a way that is about reading each other, in conversation with Judith Butler's Bodies in Alliance and the Politics of the Street and Denise Ferreira da Silva's On Difference Without Separability. This workshop is a continuation of Pinto’s research for their 2020 multimedia performance titled Carry My Not Knowing, which highlights the pinnacle of human decision making in an expressive form. This work is everything and nothing at once, basking in a state of potentiality. The program will explore reading with the full body, and is intended to be inclusive of all bodies, no experience required.

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Subtext is a queer theory reading group that brings together artists, writers, and scholars from across disciplines to read and study together. The group was founded in Berlin in 2015 and is now based in New York City and online. Their running syllabus reflects a multigenerational queer theory by trans poets, authors with various relationships to dis/ability, writers of color, and scholars on the margins of mainstream queer studies. Subtext is organized by artist and scholar Sonya Merutka.

With CPR, Subtext will host a Performance Philosophy Reading Group focused on Six years (and counting) of circlusion by Bini Adamczak and Sophie Lewis (2022).

This text returns to the influential work of German feminist, queer, and communist writer, Bini Adamczak, and her formulation of the term circlusion. Described as the "obverse of penetration" by Sophie Lewis, the original essay's English translator and author of Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation (2022), circlusion offers us a different way of thinking about queer sex, power, and movement. As Lewis writes, "the circlusive subject-position can serve to describe the labor of topping, or it can inspire theorizing from the bottom (bottom theory), or it can confound the top/bottom distinction altogether." In the context of CPR's Performance Philosophy Reading Group, we’ll consider the choreographies of Adamczak's “gulfing,” “circling,” or “gulping” within our own work and situated knowledges of gender, race, and dis/ability. 

The reading materials and Zoom link will be sent to those who RSVP ahead of the event.

This program will take place virtually, on Zoom. ASL and audio description services are available upon request by emailing Anna Muselmann, Programs Manager at anna@cprnyc.org at least two weeks prior to the event. Auto-generated captioning will be available through Zoom.

Tickets: Free, RSVP required
RSVP here

This program will take place virtually, on Zoom.


2022 Artist-in-Residence Ayano Elson looks at the writing experiments of the late Bernadette Mayer to discuss ways of translating text into improvisational performance scores. 

As a child growing up interpreting English for her mother—and as a dancer transmuting concepts into movement—Ayano has worked as a translator her whole life. In translation, trust and treachery coexist; sharing may become subterfuge. In her current choreographic and performance practice, Ayano is asking the following questions: what constitutes a translated artifact? What are a translator’s responsibilities? How do we make the unlike like? How do we weigh aesthetic, ethical, and political priorities? What do we gain and lose? What do we leave behind?

Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.


This program will have auto-generated captioning on Zoom.

Tickets: Free, RSVP required
RSVP here

This program will take place virtually, on
Zoom.


Artist, writer, and frequent Performance Philosophy Reading Group participant David Lee Sierra hosts a reading group where, together, participants will read and discuss "Aye, and Gomorrah," a short science fiction story by Samuel R. Delany. Originally published in Harlan Ellison's 1967 short story collection, Dangerous Visions, “Aye, and Gomorrah” was lauded as one of Delany's most significant short stories. The work is one of Sierra’s favorites for its examination of sex(es), desire(s), and intimacies, all of which the spacey sci-fi narrative discloses as negotiations of normativity, alteration, and choice. She is interested in reading the story together in the most literal of senses.

All registrants will be emailed a PDF version of the story before the event and the document will be re-shared during the event. There is no expectation to read or prepare anything before the event. Everyone present will be welcome to read, but no one will be required. A short discussion of the work and its motifs will follow the reading.

Reading Materials


Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.


ASL interpretation and Zoom-generated auto captioning will be provided.

Tickets: Free, RSVP required
RSVP here


CPR 2022 Artist-in-Residence Ogemdi Ude hosts a movement and discussion based workshop exploring the roles that fabricating, lying, and fantasizing play in identity and community building. Joined by Ude’s collaborators, participants will sample choreography and scores from Ude's recent dance-theater work, I know exactly what you mean, a piece that investigates the roles of storytelling and lying in recovering cultural memory, establishing kinship amongst Black folks, and processing personal grief. Using the movement practice as jumping off point, participants will dive into theoretical (and physical) questions about how, when, and why we lie, and work towards a performance practice that acknowledges the importance of living on the edge of truth.

This program is open to movers of all levels.

This program will take place in-person at CPR – Center for Performance Research.

Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.


“I know exactly what you mean” is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC).

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

This program will take place virtually, on
Zoom.

Hosted by CPR 2022 Artist-in-Residence Star Mitchell, through readings, as well as excerpts from the artists’ own work, we will navigate back to the source of our internal fire, with the intention of strengthening our inner resources through conversation and sensory exploration. In this work, emotions are the vehicles the body relies on to find balance after a trauma, and feelings represent the accumulation of incomplete events and the body’s attempt to complete them. Texts will include Audre Lorde’s poems “Walking Our Boundaries,” and “a litany for survival'' from The Black Unicorn, as well as an excerpt from Mitchell’s performance Reclaiming the home, which was presented in-progress at CPR in February 2022. Mitchell encourages all to join this reading group, it will be tender and kind to your spirit.


Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.


This program will have auto-generated captioning on Zoom, and ASL interpretation can be provided, on request, with at least two weeks' notice, by emailing info@cprnyc.org.

Tickets: Free, RSVP required
RSVP here

This event will take place virtually on Zoom.


Hosted by CPR 2022 Artist-in-Residence Jessie Young, and continuing CPR’s exploration of text and somatic research through its ongoing Performance Philosophy Reading Group series, Young will work with bell hooks’ all about love, and will invite us to move together through different durations as part of the discussion. Jessie Young is a dancer and choreographer who explores the development of movement practices through self-directed durations of reading, writing, and talking.

Closed captioning or ASL interpretation may be provided, upon request, with at least two weeks’ advance notice, by emailing regine@cprnyc.org.


Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.

Tickets: Free, RSVP required
RSVP here

This event will take place virtually on Zoom.


The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty coined the term the flesh of the world – this charged space, a viscous tension between organisms in relation, space we commonly think of as empty. This workshop co-hosted by 2022 CPR Artist-in-Residence ryen heart with poet and performer Amanda Monti researches pop music, tunnels, and the digestive tract as instances of the flesh of the world. We will be moving flesh, swallowing the consonant, and letting it move us toward an Oooooh. We will incorporate movement, imagination, and writing to channel that which makes us w/hole. Using pop music as source material we will play with the “viscous tension” between organisms, and allow consonants to transform hard matter into soft, honoring the temporary form of that which does not start or end in a body. From the vowels of pop to the bowels in our bodies, absorption is inevitable. Open to everyone, especially those interested in pop, w/holes, tunnels, digestion, and speculative movement practices.

The hosts have curated readings, and collaborative playlists of pop songs and music videos, as a menu for collective digestion, with a full download shared upon registration for the program. During the workshop, attendees are also invited to bring a pleasurable piece of nourishment, and eat however as much or as little as they would like. Familiarity with the provided materials might be nice, but is certainly not required.

ryen heart is a movement-based artist working in performance, video, and sound. their work centers devotion, apocalypse, embodied memory, and collective unconscious.

Amanda Monti is a cross-disciplinary poet and performer. They use playful research methodologies to create sites of porosity, love and ecological research.

Closed captioning or ASL interpretation may be provided, upon request, with at least two weeks’ advance notice, by emailing regine@cprnyc.org.


Performance Philosophy Reading Group is a regular reading group that invites artists and thinkers to facilitate discussion on a text or topic, in whatever way feels most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: Leonie Persyn (2019). ‘I Breathe, You Breathe, We Breathe: How a Daily Habitual Movement Appears as an Action and Grows into a Gesture through Listening’ Performance Philosophy Vol. 5 (1) 76-89.

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Artist-in-Residence Deborah Conton.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: José Esteban Muñoz (1999). ‘Performing Disidentity: Disidentification as a Practice of Freedom’ Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. (University of Minnesota: Minneapolis and London), pp. 161-180

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Artist-in-Residence Deborah Conton.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: Jeanne Tiehen (2018). ‘Climate Change and the Inescapable Present‘. Performance Philosophy Vol 4 (1) 123-138.

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Artist-in-Residence Ivy Baldwin.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: Jodie McNeilly's (2016). Bodily Schemata and Sartre's 'i and me': Reflection and Awareness in Movement. Performance Philosophy Vol 2 (1) 83-98.

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Artist-in-Residence Jordan Demetrius Lloyd.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: Generative Constraints (2019). ‘Break Up Variations: An Annotated Score’ Performance Philosophy Vol 4. (2) 591-600. https://www.performancephilosophy.org/journal/article/view/227/336

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Technical Resident Annie-B Parson/Big Dance Theater.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.

Free, registration required.

Reading: Blades, Hetty (2016). ‘Work(s) and (Non)Production in Contemporary Movement Practices’, Performance Philosophy Journal, Vol 2.1, 35-54.

This monthly reading group series, in conjunction with the international research network, Performance Philosophy, will be hosted by CPR 2019 Artist-in-Residence jess pretty.

In Performance Philosophy Reading Group we read exhilarating and thought-provoking texts as a springboard into generative discussion and thought-experimentation, engaging with texts in whatever way seems most productive.