Related Features
IMPRESSIONS: Under the Radar Festival Presents Kevin Matthew Wong's "Benevolence" at Lincoln Center
IMPRESSIONS: Winter in Brief (Part 1): Out-FRONT!, Exponential, Under the Radar, and New York Live Arts Live Artery Festivals
IMPRESSIONS: Winter in Brief (Part 2): More from Live Artery, Under the Radar, and The Exponential Festival
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
View Profile |
More From This Author
Published on January 26, 2026
Maria Camia at The Exponential Festival. Photo:Jose Miranda
Featuring: Ruth Childs, Cherish Menzo, Camilo Mejía Cortés, Autumn Knight, Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn, Miranda Brown, Noa Rui-Piin Weiss, and Maria Camia
Festival season continues with more offerings from Live Artery, The Exponential Festival, and Under the Radar. Catch up on Winter in Brief (Part 1) for highlights from the first week of the January performance orgy.
January 12: Ruth Childs' fantasia | Live Artery, New York Live Arts studio
The 1940 Disney film Fantasia has functioned as a cultural touchstone for generations of children to connect classical music with realms of imagination. The British-American, Geneva-based performer and choreographer Ruth Childs extends these fantasy worlds into the realm of the body — its metabolic depths and expressive potentials — and its capacity for transformation.
Childs’s fantasia, an extended solo performance that draws on snippets and rumblings of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, feels like a treatise on the visceral sensations and ephemeral dialogues of musicality in the body. Music lives in her body, emanating from gestures, vocalizations, and breath to make the looping refrains somehow strange, yet utterly familiar.
As she works her way through a selection of color-coordinated oversized t-shirts and dramatic bob wigs in luminous pink, white, green, red, and black, Childs is a stealthy, ethereal creature whose textural patience and specificity run the gamut: dry or quirky, constructed or deflated, delicately wrought or meticulously explosive. She quivers and skips, slouches and folds, slithers and spins with supreme agility and command of scale, moved from within as she navigates among the glowing pleasure of musical lyricism, the hissing static of recorded applause, and dark, enveloping clouds of rumbling bass. Her fantasia is a world of her own, delivered from deep within to vibrate through and beyond the original film’s imaginative range.
January 14: Cherish Menzo's DARKMATTER | Under the Radar, Performance Space New York
Dancer and choreographer Cherish Menzo, who is based in Brussels and Amsterdam, wields darkness as a conduit to radically reimagine Black presences and futurities. Her DARKMATTER, an extended duet for Menzo and Camilo Mejía Cortés, unspools with thick tension amid an atmosphere destabilized by distorted light, sound, and perception. Slick black paint anoints bodies and stage alike; black latex platform boots and flashes of gold teeth gleam amid ever-shifting landscapes of writhing flesh.
Curled fists plunge and swipe through the cold dark, spines undulate and hips grind in slow motion, limbs tremble, stutter, and entwine through potent geometries, weight slung low as their bodies’ codes slip continuously in and out of legibility. Throughout, Menzo and Mejía Cortés punctuate the deep groans and rising wails of the soundscape with rhythmic incantations in tightly isolated whispers and full-voiced choruses, passing lyrics between them as one being. Their world of elemental darkness holds multiply-textured volatilities that give rise to Black potentialities and modes of becoming through collective grief and mourning, cooperative rage and resistance, and shared pleasure and mirth.
Autumn Knight's NOTHING: more starring Dominica Greene and Jasmine Hearn. Photo: Brian Rogers
January 16: Autumn Knight's NOTHING: more | Under the Radar, The Chocolate Factory Theater
Interdisciplinary artist Autumn Knight activates an anti-still life in collaboration with a trio of formidable performers — Kayla Farrish, Dominica Greene, and Jasmine Hearn — and designers Tuçe Yasak (lights) and Matt Shalzi (objects). Their shared hour of near-constant motion spills over with purposeful curiosity as they craft improvisatory sculptures from an assortment of objects amid an unstable sensory environment. Everything is fair game, and everything is material: their choices blur boundaries of materiality as the tangible materialities of objects and bodies converse with emergent materialities of light and sound.
A fluorescent tube light dangles freely from the rafters, strung with a tiny tinkling windchime; handheld microphones roll compassed orbits around the floor to amplify thudding strides and crinkling plastic; vivid washes of color douse the space from all sides; a flashlight’s beam plays over a disco ball spun on a wheeled dolly. The performers’ abiding sense of siblingly mischief allows them free reign to trouble the materials that surround them, including one another’s bodies: how they fit or don’t fit, how they resist or surrender, and how together they create opportunities for beauty, risk, comfort, vulnerability, trust, and wonder, their task of becoming never complete.
Miranda Brown and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss present ¿¡¡simon negs≈≈>:(:{{**. Photo: Jose Miranda
January 17: Miranda Brown & Noa Rui-Piin Weiss present ¿¡¡simon negs≈≈>:(:{{** and Maria Camia presents Maria Reads a Book: Higher Eyes on Aricama | The Exponential Festival, JACK
Of the many dynamic duos on display throughout dance history and our dancing present, Miranda Brown and Noa Rui-Piin Weiss can count themselves among the most engaging, with a physical and theatrical chemistry that highlights their complementary individualities. Their ongoing collaboration in mischief making with ¿¡¡simon negs≈≈>:(:{{** extends the premise of their 2024 work !!simon says~~!:));)$$, in which the pair is directed by the omniscient authority of a higher power to perform and re-perform feats and tasks with escalating effort and risk.
The tone of the prompts, projected silently on the screen behind them, slides from playful to taunting to ominous to threatening as they respond to orders for rigor and discipline in intricate unison dances, militant calisthenics, and absurd contortions that somehow spiral into an artistic crisis, a participatory murder-mystery, and the eventual overthrow of their virtual overlord. Brown and Weiss put ridiculousness to canny use as an allegory for the demands that society and culture — and at times we ourselves — subject us to in life and art.
Likewise, visual theatre artist and introspective hypnosis practitioner Maria Camia crafts an intricate allegorical world from a stunningly intricate pop-up painting installation for a pair of finger puppet protagonists in Maria Reads a Book: Higher Eyes on Aricama. Live video, songs, and piano accompaniment color Camia’s garrulous dialogue and narration as she weaves themes of presence, power, and collective liberation from the infinite possibilities of cardboard, paint, magnets, and string — a feat of imagination.
Can you believe there’s more?! Stay tuned for Winter in Brief, Part 3 as we wrap up festival season and embark, fortified and defiant, on the rest of what looks to be another full and exciting year of performance.
