WHEN:
June 5-8, 2025
WHERE:
Abrons Arts Center’s Underground Theatre
446 Grand Street (at Pitt Street) Manhattan
New York, NY 10002
A spokesperson describes the event as follows:
“...For 39 years, New Dance Alliance’s Performance Mix Festival has offered diverse emerging and mid-career artists an opportunity to share work with audiences in Manhattan. Annually, it offers this jam-packed program of local, national, and international artists with the direct aim of supporting the development of experimental works with the public. Performance Mix Festival (1986) was groundbreaking in that it was the only festival at that time exclusively dedicated to performance art in Lower Manhattan. Its continued success is testimony to its vital necessity in New York’s cultural community..."
Schedule of Performances and Events
(All performances will be live unless otherwise noted)
Thursday, June 5
Program A | 7pm: Karen Bernard | Lisa Parra
Karen Bernard / Fleeting Glimpse
A black wooden chair. A black sequined curtain. A black faux fur blanket. A black laptop. A woman with white hair dressed in black sequined shorts and a matching black top. Choreographer Karen Bernard offers these disparate visual elements to the viewer in her latest work, Fleeting Glimpse, only to connect them by revealing their hidden inner vitality. Through surprisingly spare and inventive movement, Bernard demonstrates that movement itself is life, and despite its fleeting and transitory nature, we experience its pulse through gestures, sideways looks, and subtle shifts that reflect an internal light.
Lisa Parra / family reunion side two
family reunion side two is an interdisciplinary solo performance based on audiotape recordings of Lisa Parra’s mother’s family reunion in 1999. With this work, Parra contemplates how prosody and memory resonate in both movement and vocalization.
* * * * *
Program B | 8:30pm: Elle Sofe Sara | Egbesola Efunyemi | jay beardsley | Jo Warren | Muyassar Kurdi
Ciné-Corps film: Elle Sofe Sara / Giitu Giitu (Thank You Lord), 2019
Shot on location in Guovdageaidnu (Kautokeino), Finnmark, Norway, Thank You Lord takes us back to a time when lihkahusat, a state of Lestadian trance, occurred in Sápmi.
Egbesola Efunyemi
Egbesola Efunyemi’s project intersects the mortal body with the Òrìṣà (Yoruba deity) of the human experience and creativity—Ọbàtálá. By ascertaining one’s spirit and alignment with Ọbàtálá, one goes on a magical late-night/early-morning club journey. The wooden floors unite humanity and creativity with ancestral magic and electronic beats.
jay beardsley / impossible task
Inspired by the written works of Sarah Ahmed, two dancers will investigate the strangeness of intimacy. The piece is built through the layering of an experimental movement score titled impossible task that was developed through work with AI.
Jo Warren / Neighbors
Neighbors is a dance for six people that tells non-linear stories about suburbia, the life and death of Jesus Christ, extraterrestrial communication, telepathy, love, and living at the end of the world.
Muyassar Kurdi
Through the sonic topographies of memory, the body recalls the rhythms of migration and the resonance of place. An immersive, embodied sound performance unfolds as an aural tapestry, woven from the threads of displacement and longing, where the body becomes a vessel for the stories that travel through time and geography.
Friday, June 6
10am-12pm: Breakfast Mix
The Breakfast Mix is a gathering and informal discussion with the international artists of the festival. This season’s panel discussion will be facilitated by Karen Bernard, Artistic and Executive Director of NDA, and includes a presentation by Montreal-based artist Lara Kramer and Ciné-Corps Director Virginie Combet.
12pm-2pm: The breakfast will be followed by a creative workshop, Unfolding Time, led by Lara Kramer. Working with temporality, the workshop will give time to deceleration to allow new and old embodied knowledge and awareness to unfold, exploring a personal, rigorous approach to minimalism. Underlying the creative workshop is a desire for experiential play, storytelling, and sharing among participants that will strive to be open-ended, offering an invitation for reciprocity.
* * * * *
Program A | 7pm: Fu Le | andrea soto & compañía | Ariana Speight | Liony Garcia | PixelTongue
Ciné-Corps film: Fu Le, Haptonomie, 2024
In the vast placenta that is our atmosphere, three inhabited bellies communicate. This film is a chance encounter of an ode to multiple bodies. How to dance a body that eludes us?
andrea soto & compañía / Pa El Chuco, 2025
Pa El Chuco is the study of the historical and geographical emergence of the Pachuco movement in Mexican bodies. A dance of their dance un danzón made to carry the avidness to exist proudly, and the bold joy of the Mexican American Pachuco culture.
Ariana Speight / Vent & Drain
This embodied monologue explores cyclical patterns addressing what shapes us as human beings. Led by joy and guided by emergent strategy, these autobiographical fragments prioritize spontaneous compositions driven by the power of the voice.
Liony Garcia / Up in the Clouds
Blending the aesthetics of punk music with physical theater, Up in the Clouds examines the shadow self through dynamic movement and structured improvisation. The piece utilizes body language, costume, and raw physical expression to externalize the character’s internal conflict, mirroring the unrestrained intensity of punk performance.
PixelTongue / Moniker
Moniker is a ritualistic piece that utilizes facial and hand recognition software to manipulate sounds and visuals (and emotions?) in real-time. It imagines a mystical sect that uses carefully choreographed sensory stimulation to reshape followers’ emotional landscapes.
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Program B | 8:30pm: Dolly Sfeir | Barr Bodies – Dahlia Qumhiyeh and Bev Vega | Das Besties – Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez | Joshua Fried | Nicole Bindler
Ciné-Corps film: Dolly Sfeir, It Cries Too Loudly, 2021
Devastated and powerless as she watched the 2020 Beirut explosion and its aftermath from afar, Lebanese American choreographer and director Dolly Sfeir set about creating a work to express her delicate state of mind. It Cries Too Loudly is a dance film exploring the overlap between joy and tragedy in her tumultuous home country and the experience of being an émigré.
Barr Bodies – Dahlia Qumhiyeh and Bev Vega / Gender Deviance
The work explores gender deviance in the digital age, sponsored by self-surveillance, brazzers, and sugarbear hair.
Das Besties – Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez / Das Rauschgift
Das Besties will present an excerpt from Das Rauschgift, a new evening-length work about humanity’s relationship to drug use, addiction, presence, and the ineffable passage of time. The piece showcases the delicate hesitancy toward trying new things coupled with the learned fear of falling into a self-destructive pattern—all happening against a backdrop of FoMO.
Joshua Fried / Hattie’s Dance
In his latest work, NYC’s celebrated musical trickster Joshua Fried evokes the spirit of East Village cultural hub the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, where he performed and worked on staff from 1981
to 1984. Hattie’s Dance channels Pyramid punk-drag absurdism through polyrhythmic House grooves and mid-tech wireless controllers.
Nicole Bindler / Sand in My Soda Pop
Sand in My Soda Pop, created by Nicole Bindler and directed by Emme Kennedy, juxtaposes two of the most prevalent exports of this country: U.S. pop culture and bombs. The work is a classic anti-war dance, a reverse striptease, a middle finger to America.
Saturday, June 7
Saturday Night Special | 7:30pm-9:30pm, followed by a reception: Karen Bernard | Lara Kramer Dance | Lisa Parra
Karen Bernard / Fleeting Glimpse
A black wooden chair. A black sequined curtain. A black faux fur blanket. A black laptop. A woman with white hair dressed in black sequined shorts and a matching black top. Choreographer Karen Bernard offers these disparate visual elements to the viewer in her latest work, Fleeting Glimpse, only to connect them by revealing their hidden inner vitality. Through surprisingly spare and inventive movement, Bernard demonstrates that movement itself is life, and despite its fleeting and transitory nature, we experience its pulse through gestures, sideways looks, and subtle shifts that reflects an internal light.
Lara Kramer Dance / Gorgeous Tongue
Anchored in this world and orbiting a universe beyond, a lone performer unfolds memories on stage through rhythmic scores. For Gorgeous Tongue, Lara Kramer embodies stories, dreams, and songs that stem from her Anishinaabe lineage. Entering Kramer’s artistic constellation is to embrace the past and usher in a new world. Gorgeous Tongue is a celebration of Indigenous transmission, transformation, and futurity.
Lisa Parra / family reunion side two
family reunion side two is an interdisciplinary solo performance based on audio tape recordings of Lisa Parra’s mother’s family reunion in 1999. With this work, Parra contemplates how prosody and memory resonate in both movement and vocalization.
Sunday, June 8
Program A | 12pm: Mitchell Rose | Isabella Thorpe-Woods & Zhangxinan Wu 吴张⼼安 | Jo Warren | Lindsey Barlag Thornton
Ciné-Corps film: Mitchell Rose, Attention Span, 2020
An experiment in seeing—in exploded perspective. A dancer is shot from 16 camera angles and edited at a disturbing rate. It is a response to our culture’s hunger for haste. But suddenly there is stillness—only an unchanging portrait of raw humanity, photography’s most sublime imagery.
Isabella Thorpe Woods & Zhangxinan Wu 吴张⼼安 / make.shift
make.shift delves into dynamics of remote intimacy. Isabella Thorpe-Woods and Zhangxinan Wu have been devising work across the 12-hour time difference between New York and Beijing. The work focuses on subconscious undercurrents of connection and the fleeting spaces between duets. Absurdity emerges in the mundane, as the piece navigates the tension between visibility and obscurity, memory and anticipation, lagging presence and complete absence, filling in each other’s gaps.
Jo Warren / Neighbors
Neighbors is a dance for six people that tells non-linear stories about suburbia, the life and death of Jesus Christ, extraterrestrial communication, telepathy, love, and living at the end of the world.
Lindsey Barlag Thornton / flights for future generations
flights for future generations is a solo performance that draws from the histories of women aviators and spiritualists. Interweaving movement, text, sound, and imagery with analog devices, the performance explores our longing for the cosmos, how we navigate loneliness, and how we might begin to find each other.
* * * * *
Program B | 1:30pm: Hadi Moussally | Joy Norton | Julie Mayo | Justin Cabrillos
Ciné-Corps film: Hadi Moussally, Bellydance Vogue, 2020
Hadi Moussally’s birthday landed on the 3rd of April 2020, during lockdown, and for the first time he celebrated it all by himself—and as if it was his last. The film was made during quarantine.
Joy Norton / Reveries of Metanoia: Who All Gon’ Be There
Reveries of Metanoia: Who All Gon’ Be There unfolds as a heartfelt ode to Black sensuality and the radiant tapestries of love, weaving a vision of Black Queer futures and technology blooming in the boundless expanse of space. The audience will enter the realm where community nurtures liberation, and the subtle whispers of privilege challenge us to awaken to the unseen dimensions of spatial awareness.
Julie Mayo / Fête
In Fête, the live companion piece to Julie Mayo's video work what will i be wearing? she suits up and tackles the question from a different angle.
Justin Cabrillos / Unnamed
Unnamed is a piece built out of pendulating emotional states, faces, and Nicholas Cage’s unhinged film moments.
* * * * *
Program C | 3pm: Raphael Chatelain & Nicolas Huchard | Ja’Moon and The Dancing Spirit | Nubian Néné/A Lady in the House Dance Company
Ciné-Corps film: Raphael Chatelain & Nicolas Huchard, Tajabone, 2021
“This is what freedom feels like, baby.” The uncompromising words of musician and writer Mykki Blanco echo over a transcendental parade of a group of empowered queer dancers. A film about the French Black queer community taking pride in who they are, what they have achieved, and embracing the bodies they are in. Tajabone takes its name from a unique tradition in Senegal, where in addition to singing and dancing through the streets, everyone practices cross-dressing through the night.
Ja’Moon and The Dancing Spirit / The Ghetto Shaman: That Which Lurks in the Shadows
The Ghetto Shaman: That Which Lurks in the Shadows is a visceral dance-theater work that delves into the mental and emotional landscape of the radical and wayward spirit. It explores themes of fragmentation, conjure, trance, and exhaustion as they manifest in the reckoning with social and political shadows.
Nubian Néné/A Lady in the House Dance Company
About their work, Nubian Néné writes: “There is a curiosity to bring different Black bodies to express what Waacking is to us, and what it looks like 40 years after its inception. What is the Queer, Black, American evolution of this movement? How does this dance form help us combat today’s challenges as Black Queer Bodies? How can we reclaim its power, and have it celebrated on American soil? With this work, there is a desire to highlight who the Black bodies, the Queer Black bodies are, and how we are using this dance form to express, activate, and empower. There is an opportunity to elevate teens and adults alike through this movement that can inspire to break prejudice, queerphobia, racism, and much more.”
* * * * *
Program D | 4:30pm: Zara Naber | Cristina Moya-Palacios | Emily Kyoko Shari | Makayla Peterson/Monét Movement Productions: The Collective | Prostalgia HD
Ciné-Corps film: Zara Naber, Athaar, 2021
Athaar, which means “ruins” in Arabic, is a story about the identities people create, adopt, and reject as they question the traditional constructs of freedom. “The Western world has claimed the notion of freedom as its own,” says director Zara Naber. “Freedom is not seen as belonging to Arabs. It’s American, European, Western. Eli El Sultan is the incredibly sculpted dancer at the heart of this performance film. As a Parisian of Middle Eastern heritage, he regales the viewer with an elevated rendition of his popular belly dance cabaret performance. Sultan’s slow and undulating movements are a physical expression of his sexual liberation and queer identity, ameliorated by clothing and a dance style traditionally performed by women.
Cristina Moya-Palacios / All Immerican Dream Girl!
All Immerican Dream Girl! aims to shine a light on the complexity of the immigrant experience in the United States by commenting on the American dream from the perspective of a Latina “Dreamer” or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient. Through overwhelming bouts of extreme physicality, gestural sequences, and social dance sections that never seem to settle, viewers enter a simulation of the taxing cycles, frustrating resets and restarts, unraveling, and inability to move forward that the immigration process entails. She takes us on a journey to nowhere with completely pathless attempts at assimilation that ultimately lead to a reckoning of the crumbling facade this empire has tried to sell us.
Emily Kyoko Shari / circle:bloom
circle:bloom consists of a bespoke circle fabricated from felt and rope which the artist interacts with using short movement phrases stemming from Laban/Bartenieff floorwork. Her body becomes a tool that activates the sculpture, transforming its presence and generating a symbiotic relationship between her body and the sculpture, giving form to a series of abstract emotional states.
Makayla Peterson/Monét Movement Productions: The Collective / demerara
A collection of poems selected from Brown Sugar Lit’s published zines exploring the themes of identity, femininity, and Black strength through spoken word and dance. At the heart of the movement is the continued embodiment of Black woman liberation, connection to their ancestors, and the reclamation of the Caribbean dancing body through joy and resistance.
Festival Finale
Prostalgia HD / LORE: Hansel/Gretel
LORE: Hansel/Gretel is a communal re-imagining of the classic Brothers Grimm folktale as an immersive dancefloor experience. Spectators are invited to dance while the story is told through original spoken word narration layered into a DJ set, exploring themes of hunger, abandonment, and triumph through self-empowerment.
Schedule subject to change.
