Shows | Page 5 of 53 | Performance Space New York

Aguas Frescas

On the heels of the 10th year anniversary of his cross-disciplinary fashion label, Sánchez-Kane, artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s Aguas Frescas creates a collective and sensorial experience, inviting the audience into a performance drawing on Mexican street culture and the communal ritual of drinking horchatas.

Across two evenings of performances, Sánchez-Kane’s collaborators share their work through varied mediums inside the installation which consists of traditional Mexican Malinche chairs called with glass containers of fresh horchata. A metallic spoon stirs the liquid, providing a steady rhythm as audience members are invited to indulge in the aguas frescas before and after the performance, highlighting its metaphor of shared experience and collective engagement.

Aguas Frescas is co-commissioned by Mudam and TONO Festival and presented by Performance Space New York.

Mister Cobra

Mister Cobra, a semi-autobiographical solo theater-music performance by Lucy Liyou, combines free-jazz, korean folk opera, musique-concrète, 2000s era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance techniques to confront and dematerialize the boundaries of their transition, and reconsider her transition and personhood as inevitably intertwined with public spectatorship.

Liyou looks at Mister Cobra as a humiliation ritual that confronts and dematerializes the embarrassment one has regarding the traumas that inform the boundaries of one’s transition. It raises questions about the role that desire plays in one’s transition, how abuse can distort motivations to transition, and where transitioning “begins” and “ends” (assuming that these points even exist).

In Residence

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.

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.

DARKMATTER

In ~~DARK~~MATTER, Cherish Menzo and her onstage partner Camilo Mejía Cortés look for ways to detach their bodies from the way they are perceived and the daily reality in which they move. Among other things, they look up to the sky, at dark matter and at black holes that meet and collide to give birth to a new, (afro)futuristic and enigmatic body. ~~DARK~~MATTER wants to get rid of the biased way of looking at one’s own body, at that of the other, and at the stories we attribute to them. Together, they throw their bodies into a complex conversation that they want to both enter into and transcend—a duality that feeds the performance.

Just as in her previous project, JEZEBEL, Menzo stretches her movement language further by applying the Chopped and Screwed method to her movement language. A remix technique from hip-hop music in which the tempo is sharply reduced. By stretching the notions of time, the register changes and the performing body manages to generate new readings. ~~DARK~~MATTER wants to create a thorough reshuffle of our atoms, looking for a new form for—and way of looking at—our body and the complex outside world to which it relates.

Cherish Menzo‘s ~~DARK~~MATTER is co-presented by Under the Radar.