Leslie Cuyjet, during a season-long residency with Performance Space New York, will further research and develop her project For All Your Life, a performance and social experiment that examines the value of Black life and Black death. Weaving the historical context of life insurance with real current day financial structures, she aims to pay dividends to investors after her passing. At Performance Space New York, Cuyjet will further develop this project, examining ideas of cultural and institutional legibility and how to value a life’s worth, seeding new vehicles of performance.
In collaboration with the 2025 Performa Biennial, Cuyjet will have a consistent presence at the Performa Hub, designed by multi-disciplinary agency, Clocks.
Show Category: Residency
sim-B
sim-B is an laboratory for co-designing liberatory systems of preservation and encryption, stewarded by Black queer memory artists Jazmin Jones, Olivia M Ross, Yeelen Cohen, and Nana XOXO.
sim-B will have a physical presence in the Performance Space New York offices and on occasion, publicly in Open Room, hosting workshops and events, and keeping informal office hours to address our community’s pressing archival questions and needs. In addition, sim-B will advise on Performance Space New York’s burgeoning oral history project that bridges the impactful history of PS122 and the East Village with our current programming and institutional practices.
Training Facility
Organized by Arianna Gil
By the 1990s, the area around the Astor Place Cube was an epicenter of skateboarding culture. Arianna Gil of the feminist art collective BRUJAS, whose founding members were born and raised on the Lower East Side, remembers her first skateboarding adventures in the neighborhood’s many empty lots, most of which have now been developed. To compensate for Manhattan’s limited skateboarding opportunities in 2018, BRUJAS (Robin Giordani, Antonia Perez, Tabby Wakes, Sarah Snider, Ripley Soprano, Myles Sales, Taj Williams, Orlando Gil, Miles Giordani) invites industrial designer Jonathan Olivares to build a skate park in Performance Space New York’s new theater. People with a passion for skateboarding and radical politics are invited to join open skate sessions and sign up for collaborative peer-based workshops.
Schedule
8pm – 1am
BRUJAS hosts their third annual Anti-Prom, as part of Red Bull Music Festival New York. 18+, no social media, and the dance floor is phone free zone. Featuring: Young M.A, La Gooney Chonga, Killavesi, Tabby Wakes, Slim Poppins, Sly C, Gods Wisdom, No Intimate, gnarianna, Flex Lang, Cofaxx
Open Skate | 12pm – 4pm
Workshop | 4pm – 6pm
Direct Action gets the goods
Organized by LJ Amsterdam
Direct Action is the practice of organizing each other to live as though we were already free. Together we’ll build a brave space to practice tactics for civil disobedience, strategies for community defense, and ways to use our bodies to build power.
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Performance | 4pm – 6pm
Zhe Zhe Live
Zhe Zhe, the fictional band from the cult web series Zhe Zhe, plays live. Zhe Zhe is Ruby McCollister as Mona Deliza, Leah Hennessey as Jean D’Arc and Emily Allan as Chewie Swindleburne.
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Open Skate | 12pm – 4pm
Workshop | 4pm – 6pm
Advanced DJ Seminar W/ A-Trak
Organized by A-Trak
If you have some experience DJing, come hang for an advanced learning session with A-Trak, one of the world’s premier battle DJs and founder of Fool’s Gold Records.
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Open Skate | 12pm – 6pm
Open Skate | 12pm – 4pm
Workshop | 4pm – 6pm
Herban Cura: Dyeing with Flowers, Bugs and Bark
Organized by Ana Ratner
Advance registration required
Learn the basics of nature-based dyeing. We will play with different fabrics, mordants, and dyes including indigo, cochineal, osage orange, and more. We will provide strips of fabric, but participants should come with clothing or fabric they are interested in dyeing (only cotton, bamboo, linen, flax, hemp, wool, or silk blends)
Open Skate | 12pm – 4pm
Workshop | 4pm – 6pm
BRUJAS SS18 Collection: Seize Bellevue
Hosted by Emily Allan, Ripley Soprano, Isaac Madison, Arianna Gil
Brujas will host a conversation around their latest SS18 Collection, Seize Bellevue, which calls for a compassionate and radical re-conception of one of our more insidious carceral institutions – the pharmaceutical industry and mental health crisis system.
BRUJAS’ Training Facility was made possible with lead support from our corporate sponsor Red Bull as well as New York City & Company Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. This project was funded in part by a Humanities New York Action Grant.