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Color Theories

Julio Torres debuts his Off-Broadway show, Color Theories, while in residence at Performance Space New York. 

Color Theories finds Torres blending stand-up, surreal design, and dream logic into a whimsical exploration of color, emotion, and identity that is equal parts comedy, theater, and art piece. This multisensorial, synesthetic experience follows Torres as he attempts to understand people and systems through the lens of color.

Julio Torres created, directed and wrote the Peabody-winning HBO series Fantasmas; is a co-creator of the acclaimed series Los Espookys alongside Fred Armisen and Ana Fabrega; directed his first feature film, Problemista, co-starring Tilda Swinton in 2024; and was nominated for four Emmys as a part of the SNL writing team.

SXXTXCH LIVE

Tickets!:
October 17th | Nielma Sidney Theatre
October 18th | Nielma Sidney Theatre
We the Youth: Keith Haring Lecture Series for Kids

Mindy Seu presents SXXTXCH LIVE, in collaboration with Deem Journal, a weekend of live podcast recordings, a guest performance, and a reception that delves into sexual technologies. Over two days, Seu and invited guests will discuss the impact of sexuality on technology, innovating online, queering biotech, transforming markets, and more.
 
Schedule:

6:00PM:
Bar opens in OPEN ROOM

6:30PM:
Podcast 1 – WIRING AND WETWARE: Mindy Seu and Ani Liu on the body as technology
Podcast 2 – QUEERING TECHNOLOGIES: Gabriella M Garcia and Navild Acosta on fantasies of the archive

9–9:20PM:
TERMS OF SERVICE – a performance by SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY with A.J. McClenon

TERMS OF SERVICE is catalyzed by technology, primarily hardware and software-based triggers engaged through the physical collision of Holloway and McClenon’s bodies, in turn producing stunning outputs of sound and light.

The performance is an experiment in the “photography of yearning”—invoking the flare of a photographic flash—in an attempt to triangulate the impossibility of the satisfaction of consummation. Within this performance, “consummation,” what Anne Carson suggests is a basic erotic driver between two bodies, is interrupted by the edges of the performers’ bodies and their illumination during the moment of impact. The sound triggered by the work’s choreography of relentless and repetitive cycles of embracing, disengagement, re-engagement, and retreat, suggests a parallel sequence happening in, around, and through American life as told by the American media.

Holloway provokes us to wonder how large institutional structures turn bodies into tools. Particularly, in the context of this weekend of conversations around sex and technology: How do structures of power and control produce and guarantee a lack of consummation, a lack of satisfaction? What are the erotics of machines, of endless yearning, and who are those performing the instrumentalization?

3PM:
Bar opens in OPEN ROOM

4PM:
Podcast 3 – POWER PLAY: Mindy Seu x Mistress Harley on data domination
Podcast 4 – SEX ON SCREEN: Ayanna Dozier x SHAWNÉ MICHAELAIN HOLLOWAY on expanded cinema
Podcast 5 – ONLINE EROTICS: Sam Cole x Noelle Perdue on pornography and legislation

7:30PM:
A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET: A performance by Mindy Seu

Day 2 of SXXTXCH Live will include ASL interpretation. Please let our Front of House team know if you’ll need to sit closer to the stage and they will asssist you.

The Cyborg Stork | October 18th, 12-2pm | Neilma Sidney Theatre | for ages 3-10

[siccer]

In the dance performance and video installation [siccer], Will Rawls experiments with stop-motion filmmaking techniques, wherein still photographs are strung together to produce a moving image, to consider how Black gestures are relentlessly documented, distorted, and circulated in lens-based media. Throughout [siccer]’s live performance, Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste are suspended in stop-motion film shoot. When the camera’s shutter closes momentarily between photographs, Rawls and collaborators play within the intervals, taking advantage of a gap in surveillance.

The project’s title is driven by the Latin adverb “sic” which indicates incorrect spelling within a quotation and which is often employed to contrast Black vernacular speech with standard English. Rawls turns this conflict on its head in order to illuminate the verbal and physical play of Black performance as something that eludes capture on screen and in language—and that speculates on the potential of strategies for narrating the world, uncorrected.

This presentation represents the long-awaited New York premiere of the work. Co-presented by Performance Space New York and L’Alliance New York, the live performances of [siccer] accompany the artist’s exhibition at The Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist.

Concept, Choreography, and Direction: Will Rawls
Performance: Holland Andrews, keyon gaskin, jess pretty, Katrina Reid, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Sound Design and Vocals: Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste
Technical Director: David Szlasa
Lighting and Scenic Designer: Maggie Heath
Costume Designer: Saša Kovačević, Dana Doughty
Dramaturg: Kemi Adeyemi
Studio Rawls Studio Director: Margaret Knowles
[siccer] Producer: Benedict Nguyễn

[siccer] was originally commissioned by The Kitchen in partnership with co-commissioners, The Momentary, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, On the Boards, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. [siccer] was made possible, in part, by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is a Creative Capital Project. [siccer] is also a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project which is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency). [siccer] also received substantial developmental support from THINKLARGE.US, a family run nonprofit created by Don Quinn Kelley and Sandra L. Burton to aid in the creation of new work. [siccer] is made possible, in part, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature through the Media Arts Assistance Fund a regrant partnership of NYSCA and Wave Farm.

[siccer] was developed and supported, in part, by residencies at The Momentary and Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts, with additional support by On the Boards and The Kitchen; a creative residency at Petronio Residency Center, a program of the Stephen Petronio Company; with financial, administrative and residency support from Dance in Process at Gibney with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Movement Research; the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at the University of California Los Angeles and The Hammer Museum Residency; the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography at Florida State University; with production support and residency provided by EMPAC / Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Williams College and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

The forthcoming [siccer] album was made possible with support from the Barbara Streisand Center for the Study of Women at UCLA.

L’Alliance New York is an independent, not-for-profit organization committed to providing its audience and students with engaging French language classes and audacious multi-disciplinary programming that celebrates the diversity of francophone cultures and creativity around the world. A welcoming and inclusive community for all ages and all backgrounds, L’Alliance New York is a place where people can meet, learn, and explore the richness of our heritages and share discoveries. L’Alliance New York strives to amplify voices and build bridges from the entire francophone world to New York and beyond.

Crossing The Line is a citywide festival that engages international artists and New York City audiences in artistic discovery and critical dialogue to re-imagine the world around us. Crossing The Line is produced by L’Alliance New York in partnership with leading cultural institutions.

Critique Cabaret

Tickets to Critique Cabaret (Performance + Holiday Party)
 
Critique Cabaret, organized and performed by Mandy Harris Williams, is a performance-lecture and live inquiry examining what it means to think, feel, and perform in a world where attention has become both currency and trap. Moving between critical theory, cabaret glamour, and digital intimacy, Williams stages a space where scholarship becomes spectacle and spectacle becomes survival. Through live writing, original music, improvisation, and audience participation, she invites us into the unstable terrain where intellectual responsibility meets the pressures of marketability, desire, and public expectation.
 
Critique Cabaret extends into Performance Space New York’s Annual Holiday Party presented by HOLE PICS, dissolving seamlessly into a night of DJs, experimental drag, and communal release, where the performance’s questions will continue to echo in the room.
 
Across a series of vignettes that unfold like lucid dreams, Williams shifts between the persona of a pop idol, the rigor of a theorist, and the vulnerability of someone trying to hold onto integrity in a time of intense political fatigue. Screens flicker with online fragments, music builds and dissolves, as the performer toggles between her physical audience and her parasocial one — revealing how digital presence distorts, amplifies, and sometimes eclipses the bodies producing it. Critique Cabaret becomes a live examination of influence, exhaustion, and erotic knowledge: a remembrance that thinking can be felt, and feeling can be an act of resistance.
 
The performance culminates with a final sequence that blurs the line between confession and confrontation, asking who is permitted to step back from the struggle for justice, who is expected to keep performing care, and what it costs to be perceived as politically coherent in public.
 
Critique Cabaret is creatively produced by Family Affairs Studio, led by Michael R. Speciàle.

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers departs from the mainstream commemoration and reflection by Vietnam and the United States of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. While the injuries of the past remain present decades later and have been well-examined by Vietnamese-American artists, the history of experimental performance in Vietnam has emerged amidst a negotiation of ambivalence and resistance to government interference. To instigate a global conversation around art-making and censorship, the program provides self-determined Vietnamese-centered environments and contexts within which audiences may engage with contemporary Vietnamese practitioners. Supported by long-term residencies, conversations, and provocations in Performance Space New York’s theaters over the course of a month, the program will culminate in debut performances by four intergenerational artists, and conversations with the program’s instigators and co-organizers Anh Vo, maura nguyễn donohue, and Lumi Tan. 

The title of the project comes from unreleased lyrics by Ngoc Dai, a former soldier turned avant-garde composer, inferring that a radical existence can be both a refusal of the ambivalence of those in power, and enabled by that same ambivalence. 

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers is a part of a broader series of events featuring talks, screenings, publications, and more, collaboratively organized between organizations during the fall and winter seasons. Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #62 will be entirely dedicated to experimental Vietnamese performance, featuring reflections from 21 Vietnamese artists and curators including Tuong Linh Do, Vu Duc Toan, Viet Le, Phuong Linh Nguyen, Nhung Dinh, and Tra Nguyen. Public programs include a virtual engagement with artists ahead of their residency as presented in partnership with the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University; a conversation between Lumi Tan, maura nguyễn donohue, Anh Vo, and Do Tuong Linh around the origins of the project at Asia Art Archive in America; a screening and discussion exploring early video of experimental performance in Vietnam including work by Truong Tan and Vu Dan Tan at CARA (Center for Art, Research, and Alliances); and a conversation between Lai Dieu Ha and Nhi Le at New York University’s Institute of Fine Art.

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers is co-produced by Performance Space New York and the Center for the Arts, Wesleyan University.

Public Programming:

Tickets!

We Exist in the Ambivalence of those Motherfuckers with Thanh Toàn Doan, Vu Đức Toàn, Nhi Lê Phương, & Lai Dieu Ha Thi

RSVP!
In conjunction with We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers, co-organizers maura nguyễn donohue, Lumi Tan, and Anh Vo guest edited Issue #62 of Movement Research Performance Journal, inviting 21 Vietnamese artists, curators, and organizers engaged in experimental performance to contribute reflections on their own work, on historical spaces, performances, and events, or on present concerns. 

To celebrate the launch of the journal, donohue, Tan, Vo, contributor Vu Duc Toan, and MRPJ editor-in-chief Joshua Lubin-Levy will read excerpts from the journal, followed by a screening of the documentary Hanoi Eclipse – The Music of Dai Lam Linh (2010) directed by Barley Norton.

Contributors:

Anh Vo, Lyon Dat Nguyen, Đỗ Tường Linh, Nguyễn Minh Phước, Ly Hoàng Ly, Châu Kim-Sanh, Luu An, Nguyễn Quốc Thành, Đinh Nhung, Phương Linh Nguyễn, Phuong Phan, Nguyễn Xuân Sơn (SơnX), Tam Thi Pham, Vũ Đức Toàn, Trà Nguyễn, Bùi Duy Thanh Mai, Trần Lương, Vân Đỗ, Thảo Hồ , Việt Lê, Hải Nam Nguyễn

Tickets!
Nhi Le will introduce her artistic methods through performance practices focusing on experimenting with materials, creating “original” movements, and evoking feelings. Participants will begin with their old memories, make new memories together, and then listen to a song. Any human or alien can join in.

What is surreal in front and funny in the back?
What is disgusting when it goes sideways and shameful when it goes down?
What is exhausted when it stays down and gentle when it jumps up?
What is great when it opens its eyes and free when it holds?
It is Nothing
It is Nothing
Only know that the East is blood
The West is Man
The South is soil
The North is mother
Just walk the path.

Cái gì siêu thực ở đằng trước mà buồn cười ở phía sau?
Cái gì sang ngang thì kinh tởm mà xuống dưới thì hổ thẹn?
Cái gì ở lại thì kiệt quệ mà nhảy lên thì dịu dàng?
Cái gì mở mắt thì vĩ đại mà nắm lại thì tự do?
Chẳng có gì cả
Chẳng có gì cả
Chỉ biết phía Đông là máu
Phía Tây là Người
Phía Nam là đất
Phía Bắc là mẹ
Cứ thế mà đi.

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