Performance | Performance Space New York

Gasoline Girl

Gasoline Girl draws on the technology of the CDJ, an instrument that marks and ultimately unsettles how one arrives at time. For Yesenia Rojas, it can also intervene with the limits of reality by cutting, looping, and slicing through it. Animated by the chaos of the elemental world, specifically oil as a dialectical engine that traces and touches bodies and social systems, this work casts the compression of organic and mineral life onto the inherited tensions between sound and image. Deploying digital aesthetics, multi-deck experiments, and live video editing, this performance wrestles with the raw physicality of what it means to generate energy against the pulse and scratch of time.

Yesenia Rojas is an artist working across sound, video, installation, and performance. She explores notions of spontaneity, language, the body, and virtuality, combining sampling materials, both existing and otherwise, to challenge the possibilities and politics of image and text.

Cavernous Shoal Season Opening

We are excited to open our 2026/2027 season with the unveiling of our transformed lobby and community space, OPEN ROOM, redesigned by Jesús Hilario-Reyes as our season-long resident. Entitled Cavernous Shoal, the space includes a bespoke sound system and a sculpture composed of mangrove roots to assemble a temporary ecology: one that stabilizes without fixing, gathers without enclosing, and produces forms of belonging that emerge through movement rather than permanence. The installation draws inspiration from the rhizomatic nature of DJ culture and shorelines shaped between land and sea, understanding the dancefloor in Black diasporic club culture as sites of perpetual transformation where belonging is secured through relation rather than geography.

For the Season Opening, Hilario-Reyes invites sound artist and experimental vocalist Ibrahima Mbaye to perform LIVING ROOM, arranging herself as vocalist among surfaces rigged to produce sound and samples when struck. She applies electroacoustic methods with spiritual animist logic, charging the room with sonic “soul stuff”, and moving through the space rendering imaginary friends to aid the composition. Here, Ibrahima further transform the installation into a living audio environment and playable instrument for live performance.

Please join us early in the courtyard at 4pm for drinks and a Seafood Boil by Raúl de Nieves and Pati Hertling! We invite you to gather, eat, drink, listen, commune and immerse yourself in the Cavernous Shoal.

Digital program available here

Bio:

Ibrahima Mbaye is a sound artist and experimental vocalist based in New York City. Her live practice currently involves vocal synthesis, multi-instrumental play, and sound installation. She molds and refashions acoustic forms, projecting her internal, gendered logic of transition onto objects, spaces, instruments, and voice.

Ibrahima also DJs under the alias Doula. She is known for her unpredictable range and sound collage approach, crafting intense, psychedelic sets that disregard expectations of genre, functionality, tempo, cadence, and respectability.

EMOTES

EMOTES, a new work by Nazareth Hassan, is a dance in four movements exploring hyperreality, simulation, gnosticism, and avatars.
How does virtual life reduce and distill our experiences?
How do we manage our impulse to control through self-(re)creation?
What is the residue of digital conditioning on our bodies?
What happens to us when we perform our virtual avatars in real life?

In gaming, an emote is a physical command given to your avatar, like a dance or gesture.
On text-based platforms, these commands are written out, i.e.: *jumps for joy* or *model pose*. Often, colloquial dances become programmed into various gaming and social media platforms, with the gamified versions of the dances becoming viral memes that are performed again in the real world. Often, these dances change when moving through this algorithmic equation, and the original version of the dance is forgotten all together.

EMOTES is supported by a 3D developmental residency taking place in September 2026 at Mercury Store.

Creative Team:

Written and directed by Nazareth Hassan
Choregraped by Joëlle Santiago
Music and Sound by Ryan Gamblin
Designed by Dyer Rhoads

Nazareth Hassan:

Nazareth Hassan is an interdisciplinary writer, director & musician. Their play Bowl EP was a 2026 Pulitzer Finalist and won the 2025 Obie Award for Outstanding New Play. Other performance and theater works include Practice at Playwrights Horizons, Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatertreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, and Memory A at MUAC in Mexico City. Their first book of poetry and photography, Slow mania, was published in December 2025 by Futurepoem. In 2022-23, they were the dramaturg at Royal Court Theatre. They are a 2026-27 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Chain Reaction

New York based visual and dance artist, Malcolm-x Betts, leads, participates in, and organizes a two-week residency with a cohort of artists through a curatorial framework called Chain Reaction, inspired by Betts’ curiosities around labor, silent rage, and improvisational dance.

Drawing inspiration from both his visual and performance practices, Betts alongside invited artists, will explore their relentless interest in the possibilities that exist beyond form. Envisioning a world where multiple movement languages and expressions coexist, the group will create alternative social configurations and improvisations, where repetition and iteration generate self-devised living archives. The residency will culminate in a works-in-process showing.

EDGING

Christelle Oyiri (who DJs under the moniker CRYSTALLMESS) hosts and organizes the U.S. debut of EDGING at Performance Space New York, in conjunction with and in celebration of her first solo exhibition, Belief May Vary, at Amant. Oyiri’s EDGING is a performance and musical laboratory with DJ sets and live performances, a high energy collision of experimental electronics, regional club forms, rap, and techno, bringing dancers to a sonic edge.

LINEUP:

BOBBY BEETHOVEN
KLEIN
DJ ZIRK
DANIRO
B0YG1RL
MAK OF MEMPHIS