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HOUSE PARTY: “YES AND…”

join me
leave your stresses at the curb
let go of the standards
hold on to the dreams
Dauan Jacari invites you to his house party

– Dauan Jacari, Master of Ceremonies
 
Dauan Jacari, the transformative NYC brand founded by the sexy- hustling, designer, DJ Chappel. Trained in dance and garments construction Chappel designs clothes that inspire movement. DJ’s story dates back to studying dance at Point Park University and developing his love for garments working in the costume shop. His latest collection “Royal Court” debuted in London in fall 2025. The presentation was a non-traditional runway that included stage play, live mixing, and audience participation. Similar to this work, DJ’s other projects have included but not limited to costume design for stravaiging, til infinity, paradise the runway, and contemporary music videos. The common thread in Chappel’s work is his ability to showcase characterplay in the form of stageplay. DJ’s practice always returns back to the self through his daily self portraits, he works out how the closet can teach you about yourself. It is not by mistake that the name DJ translates to disc jockey, as Mr. Chappel continues to mix, remix, and transform materials into new meaning. dauanjacari.com.
 
HOUSE PARTY at Performance Space New York uses the spirit of house parties to instigate more spontaneous, responsive, immediate, less formal programming that inspires togetherness through shared performance and art experiences. Artists are asked to invite their community to Performance Space New York to perform and create in our spaces for one evening with a live audience. Artists are given a series of prompts to guide the organization of the evening: there must be music, there must be food, there must be a surprise, there must be a performance that is not sonic, there must be some kind of takeaway.

Set times, elaborate descriptions, and detailed information are meant to be deemphasized. Instead, we ask audiences to trust artists, trust the artist curator, and to lead with a desire to be together.

QUEER|ART x PSNY OFFICE HOURS

Across the 2026/2027 season, Queer|Art and Performance Space New York will co-host OFFICE HOURS–drop-in open hours with curators, administrators, producers, and technicians from NYC arts institutions, offering opportunities for artists and arts workers to meet, review portfolios, and build connections.

Memorial for Charles Dennis

This memorial offers an opportunity for friends, family, and Performance Space New York/P.S. 122 community to come together and celebrate the life and work of P.S. 122 co-founder, Charles Dennis. Across the evening, Dennis’ collaborators will present a commemorative program with performances, rotating short films, and an open floor for those called to share a memory, perform a song, and remember the incredible contributions of Charles Dennis to the organization and performance at large.

A core member of Robert Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, Charles performed in many of Wilson’s early works, including the original cast of Einstein on the Beach. He later joined Charles Moulton, Tim Miller, Gabrielle Lansner, and Peter Rose in occupying the former public school building in the East Village and founding P.S. 122 – the org now known as Performance Space New York.

The way Charles and his fellow artists led P.S. 122 deeply shaped who we are, and remains central to our DNA and mission. The recent New York Times obituary that traces his life/work quotes co-founder Charles Moulton: “When a piece didn’t work, Charles encouraged booing. Failure was necessary.”

We extend deep gratitude to Charles for his fearless spirit as Performance Space New York and the world of downtown New York performance would not be what they are without his singular contributions. Additionally, our sincerest condolences to his widow and P.S. 122 alum, Mona. As part of our 2026/2027 season, we gather for this memorial and hope you will join us to celebrate his life, his spirit, and the worlds Dennis helped make possible.

Climate Week: Assembly

Across a week at Performance Space New York and across the city, , Swissnex hosts Assembly–the main Swiss stage at Climate Week NYC, the world’s largest climate festival with over 1,000 events running in parallel to the UN General Assembly. 

Swissnex assembles Swiss and global voices–from private sector innovators and researchers to artists and policymakers–in the East Village for three days of communal climate thinking and action. The theme Assembly speaks to Swiss deliberation and democracy–the idea that a diverse body of citizens and communities must gather together to define their future collectively. Assembly also evokes an ongoing process: the combining of pieces to create new structures, echoing the work of building our collective climate future.

Cavernous Shoal

Jesús Hilario-Reyes, an anti-disciplinary artist working at the intersections of sonic performance, land installation, and expanded cinema, redesigns our lobby and community space OPEN ROOM 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.

This 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. Shoals are shallow areas where ridges of land impede the movements of sailing vessels. The location of shoals erode and change over time, in a fluctuating boundary between land and sea, always emerging as places of contact and becoming.

OPEN ROOM is located on the 4th floor with elevator access, gender-neutral restrooms, free WiFi access, and open to the public. OPEN ROOM is a publicly accessible space used by members of our community for readings, meetings, book launches, hangouts, coworking, performances, and more. Each season, we invite an artist or collective in residence to re-envision the space and think about creating a gathering place for community and expanded programming. Within this year-long OPEN ROOM residency and installation, Hilario-Reyes will host open decks, performances, conversations, workshops, screenings and experimental sound activations. We invite you to hang out, gather, listen, and engage with the space.

Schedule of Programming:

Cavernous Shoal opens with a live performance from Ibrahima Mbaye, entitled LIVING ROOM.

LIVING ROOM transforms Jesús Hilario-Reyes’ installation into a living audio environment and playable instrument for live performance. Ibrahima arranges 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 satisfies her longing to commune with objects and space itself.

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.

Gasoline Girl: Yesenia Rojas

Pay what you can with RSVP!

Gasoline Girl draws upon the technology of the CDJ, an instrument that marks and also ultimately unsettles how one arrives at time. For Yesenia Rojas, it can also play 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. 

Manufacturing Cunt: A Conversation about the Influence of Nightlife in the Latinx and Fashion Community with Raúl Lopez (founder and lead designer of LUAR), Jesús Hilario-Reyes, and Carina del Valle Schorske

This program is presented as part of Remesas y Sobremesa, an ongoing signature series co-presented with The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center as part of their multiyear HISTORIAS initiative. Remesas y Sobremesa invites the community to gather around the table, where the warmth of food and shared meals meets thoughtful dialogue. This edition will launch the third episode of Dance, Memory, and the Sonic Commons, a three-part radio series commissioned from Montez Press Radio for HISTORIAS, featuring Jesús Hilario-Reyes and Carina del Valle Schorske.

Jesús Hilario-Reyes: “The sound system functions as a vessel for site—or more precisely, for site-making. Within club culture and dance music, it is the sound system that constitutes the site itself. The dance floor is only the membrane upon which the traces of that encounter accumulate. In this sense, activations are always occurring, wherever people gather. This is especially true within diasporic contexts, where belonging is not secured by geography but produced through relation. Regardless of location or territorial coordinates, one comes to recognize a sense of place through the collective presence of others.

The mangrove becomes its central figure because it constructs threshold worlds between tropical coastlines and the open ocean. Its exposed root systems weave into vast rhizomatic networks that become ecosystems in their own right. Within these porous boundaries, sediment is held in place, storm surges are softened, and countless species find shelter and the conditions necessary for growth. The mangrove suggests a formal understanding of site as both organism and technology of holding. It works through the entanglement of the imported and the native, the synthetic and the organic, the violent and the sustaining. I find a poetic refraction of this logic in the rhizomatic nature of DJ culture and in the strange, collective hold of the night.

In Pedagogies of Crossing by Jacqui M. Alexander offers an insightful proposition for thinking about our relationship to site. She complicates the notion of arrival, writing that “people in exile/diaspora have grown up metabolizing exile; feeding on its main by-products, alienation and separation.” She asks us to consider what it means to be “African American and exiled on the spot where one is born. To be Caribbean and exiled on foreign soil producing a longing so deep that the sight of neglect is reminiscent of beauty.” Here, Alexander underscores the ontological and phenomenological conditions of exile and dispossession as multigenerational inheritances rather than singular events. This distinction leads me to a question that runs throughout these offerings: if dislocation is fundamental to the way one arrives at a site, can there be a reparative gesture in its continual relocation?”

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