35th Annual Performance Mix Festival Announced for June

New Dance Alliance has announced the lineup for the 35th anniversary of the Performance Mix Festival. This four-day festival brings together more than 20 artists with diverse approaches to performance, inviting audiences to engage with the unexpected and to experience some of the newest voices in experimental dance. The festival will feature live in-person performances, livestreams, installations, and video/film screenings at Movement Research at 122 Community Center in Movement Research studios and the Courtyard at 122CC. The festival is curated by New Dance Alliance Founder and Director Karen Bernard.

Performance Mix 35 features works by Leslie Cuyjet, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Rachel Thorne Germond, Camilo Godoy, Jil Guyon, Yvonne Meier, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice, MOLLY&NOLA, Sari Nordman, Christopher "Unpezverde" Núñez, Alethea Pace, Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro, Rosy Simas, Hadley Smith and Johanna S. Meyer, Andrew Tay, Anh Vo, Nami Yamamoto, and we are: Anna, Kimiko, s., Symara, Tara, Taylor, Ogemdi, and marion.

The festival will take place June 10−13, at Movement Research at 122 Community Center, 150 First Avenue, in Manhattan. Performance times vary. All COVID-19 safety protocols, including mandatory masks, social distancing, and capacity regulations, will be in place. For more information about the festival, visit: https://newdancealliance.org/performance-mix-festival/.

Tickets for the 35th annual Performance Mix Festival range from $15−$20 and can be purchased online at

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/performance-mix-35-festival-tickets-148495675563.

Schedule of Performances

Thursday, June 10

Sari Nordman | Tower (installation)

A multimedia tower installation by Sari Nordman will be on view throughout the festival. Incorporating sculpture, video projection, archiving, and community participation, the project reflects on climate change and the biblical story of the tower of Babel, a story of greed and the value of cultural differences.

7:00 PM: Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro | LAND Project (live and virtual performance)

Lisa Parra and Daniel Pinheiro began their collaboration in 2013, exploring possibilities for "moving" together at a distance using video-conferencing as a means to establish a shared space for intervention. Their research has developed in different formats of execution that mainly focus on a shared sense of presence. For LAND Project, they will connect remotely to construct a shared space using João Fiadeiro's real-time composition practice. Parra will perform live in New York; Pinheiro will join via livestream from Porto, Portugal. The actions transform the space where the invisible and visible presence of the other creates a togetherness stream of consciousness.

8:30 PM: Anh Vo | non-binary pussy (live performance)

Anh Vo creates dances and texts about pornography and queer relations, about being and form, about identity and abstraction, about history and its colonial reality. Their new work, non-binary pussy, is a revolutionary concert, fusing pope pop entertainment and political propaganda to produce an immersive experience and, ideally, a collective transformation. Vo is a 2020-21 NDA LiftOff Resident Artist.

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Friday, June 11

3:00 PM: Andrew Tay (livestream)

This livestreamed performance from Toronto-based artist Andrew Tay explores moving toward the future body. Resisting categorization, this is a performance of queer moments of reflection, transformation, dream, and perversion, offering the body as a landscape and making skin and flesh the site for magic, illusion, fantasy, horror, and desire.

7:00 PM: Dana Michel and Tracy Maurice | Lay them all down (video installation)

Lay them all down, a film by Canadian choreographer and performer Dana Michel and multidisciplinary artist Tracy Maurice, will be presented as an installation. The film, which premiered at the 11th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (September-November 2020), features "Michel moving through physical frustration with humor and candor, while Maurice drives the camera over the floor, amplifying all sounds, using her body as a tripod that advances and collapses." (Amelia Bande, Berlin Biennale 2020)

8:00 PM: Shared program: Videos and films by Camilo Godoy, Jil Guyon, Rosy Simas, and Andrew Tay

Camilo Godoy will present a lecture-demonstration from his ongoing project titled What did they actually see? This project focuses on the artist's research into colonial texts by European missionaries and explorers describing the dance practices of nonwhite people. Godoy is a 2020-21 NDA LiftOff Resident Artist.

Two films by Jil Guyon will be presented. Set against the backdrop of a volcanic red-rock quarry in southern Iceland, Widow's End depicts a lone woman caught in an extreme, inhospitable landscape. Enveloped in a swath of black fabric, her inner and outer realities collide-eliciting a visual tableau that is both beautiful and horrific in its invocation of loss. Shot as one take, Coda features a woman lying motionless on red, volcanic gravel as a handheld camera scans her body. The generating event of her predicament occurred before the film time-inviting spectators to free-associate about the mystery of her plight, and the inevitability of one's own temporality.

Rosy Simas (Seneca, Heron Clan) is a transdisciplinary and dance artist who has historically presented her work as a choreographer. She unites cultural concepts and images with scientific and philosophical theories to

create work that is literal, abstract, and metaphoric. Her work weaves themes of personal and collective identity with family, sovereignty, equality, and healing. A video screening of Simas's yödoishëndahgwa'geh (a place for rest) will be presented. This installation and performance work was created to heal seven generations of ancestors and seven generations yet to be born.

Andrew Tay's video is an extension of his livestream event.

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Saturday, June 12

12:00 PM: Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDprojectNYC produces BAPTISM (Part 1)

Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDprojectNYC will share BAPTISM (PART I & II), the first event of Process memoir 6: thenowlater (HEART). Part ritual, part process performance, BAPTISM follows the journey of "the red figure", "the black figure", and "the white figure" as they shed through time in a two-part self-guided metamorphosis.

BAPTISM (Part I) is a ritualistic happening curated and directed by Adrienne Ansley, Community Coordinator of Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDprojectNYC. BAPTISM (Part 1) will take place at Prospect Park at 12pm. Exact Location TBA via Instagram invites. Follow for updates: @jcm_redprojectnyc and @newdancealliance

7:00 PM: Looking Back: A video featuring highlights from Performance Mix Festivals from 1986 to 2020, edited by Charles Dennis

7:30 PM: Shared program of live performance featuring Degenerate Art Ensemble and Johnnie Cruise Mercer/TheREDprojectNYC

Seattle-based Degenerate Art Ensemble brings a performance created specifically for NDA's anniversary celebration. Part of the company's current work in development, the piece explores animism and the connections and disconnects between human beings and the natural world. The work combines visceral movement, sculptural costume, site-transforming video projection, and live music. It will be performed by director/dancer Haruko Crow Nishimura, composer/musician Joshua Kohl, and video artist Leo Mayberry, with costumes by Wyly Astley.

For this program, TheREDprojectNYC will share BAPTISM (Part II), a process-performance choreographically directed and designed by Johnnie Cruise Mercer. BAPTISM is part of Process memoir 6: thenowlater (HEART), a five-part series of community events scheduled throughout June 2021. Curated as a communal ritual and a documented moment, the series, writes Mercer, is "inspired by deeper sensational listening; the fourth and final journey of PM6 sets course on the ocean of freedom, visibly charting TRPNYC's collective exodus from tradition." Mercer is an NDA Black Artists Space to Create Resident Artist.

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Sunday, June 13

12:00 PM: Christopher "Unpezverde" Núñez | A Garden in the Shape of Dreams

Christopher "Unpezverde" Núñez's latest performance is a playful, imaginary world inspired by a queer, disabled child who survived years of physical and sexual abuse.

2:00 PM: Shared program of live performance by Yvonne Meier, Hadley Smith and Johanna S. Meyer, Rachel Thorne Germond Performance Collage, and we are: Anna, Kimiko, s., Symara, Tara, Taylor, Ogemdi, and marion

Multiple Bessie Award-winning artist Yvonne Meier brings her latest work to the festival. Subtly, and in the persuasion of Meier's own rhythm, the work will be interrupted by bold explosions. Flow will get interrupted by the playful fulfillment of some COVID-created movement, Phantasiewelt. With music by Zeena Parkins and Ikue Mori.

Hadley Smith and Johanna S. Meyer have worked together for 12 years in different capacities and this performance marks their first co-creation. The work is an experiment made with improvised scores and set material, performed both live and online, using rudimentary Zoom features. The artists are framing this work through the "eye" of the computer camera for detail and perspective, while performing the dance in person and outside at the same time. Their work together foregrounds fragile technology and a fluid femininity between screen and body.

Enigma of an Afternoon is a movement installation. Rachel Thorne Germond and Tasha Taylor perform a metaphysical dreamscape that addresses various physical and psychic states that have emerged and escalated during the COVID-19 pandemic. The artists write, "In this work, we ask ourselves, as we are coming tentatively out of our year of isolation: How has the world changed? How have we changed? What has stayed the same? We attempt to comprehend an enigmatic new reality by exploring how we can move, and find stillness, within it." Video projections of photographs and visual art will be included in the performance.

to love the rise/pt 2 is an ongoing multimedia dance project including performers Ogemdi Ude, Symara Johnson, Kimiko Tanabe, Tara Sheena, s. lumbert, slowdanger, and marion. Taking lessons from liminality, abolition, and Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," the collective offers visions of a world built from the detritus of our current one-collectively moving and grooving, sensing and sounding, finding and losing order to arrive together in a transformed state of sensing, imagination, and action. Marion Spencer is a 2020-21 NDA LiftOff Resident Artist.

4:00 PM: Shared program of live performance by Leslie Cuyjet, MOLLY&NOLA, Alethea Pace, and Nami Yamamoto

Bessie Award-winning performer Leslie Cuyjet will perform a new work. Cuyjet is an NDA Black Artists Space to Create Resident Artist.

Molly Ross and Nola Sporn Smith, also known as MOLLY&NOLA, have been making work together since 2017. Their new piece reckons with material they began developing pre-pandemic, and tumbles into unforeseen territory where livestock auctioneering, cloning, and a brief dalliance with the Pentecostal Church collide. MOLLY&NOLA are 2020-21 NDA LiftOff Resident Artists.

Alethea Pace's Here goes the neighborhood (excerpts) is an offering to the Bronx, a glimpse into memories of a place faced with forgetting, erasure, transformation, and possibility. It is an invitation to reclaim space and a reminder of the wealth of knowledge we have in our bodies, histories, and communities.

Nami Yamamoto's powerless creature keeps going...(Working Title) is an exploration of dancing at the East River Park during the pandemic and her studio work Trooper's Brother, which was completely on pause in 2020. She will bring two different elements of her practice together-she will apply, combine, adapt, and discover a new normal way to bring dance to performance. Yamamoto is a 2020-21 NDA LiftOff Resident Artist.

Schedule subject to change.