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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on May 20, 2026
Photos: Steven Pisano & Maria Baranova (more in body of article)
at Pioneers Go East Collective in CROSSROADS at La MaMa Moves, the Target Margin Theater, and the Queer Nightlife Community Center
Credits for Header Photo: (l to r) Sugar Vendil, Symara Sarai, Alexa Grae- Photos: Steven Pisano, marion spencer's "horizon", Tyler Ashley- Photos: Maria Baranova
As spring continues to unroll toward the promise of summer, I’m enlivened by the generous flood of creativity in the performance scene. And while our spring weather is proving fickle this May, experimental dance is steadfast and thriving. A recent crop of programs shows how artists foster iterative growth in their work through extended creative incubation processes and collaborative partnerships.
May 10: Sugar Vendil and Alexa Grae & Symara Sarai with Pioneers Go East Collective at La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival
The 21st edition of the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival celebrated community and collaboration through CROSSROADS, a series of two programs curated by Philip Treviño, Remi Harris, and Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte with Pioneers Go East Collective. The closing night of the festival, presented in La MaMa’s intimate Club space, offered works by two multidimensional artists featured in the Collective’s Out-FRONT! Festival at Judson Memorial Church in January.
Sugar Vendil's a “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia”; Photo: Steven Pisano
Sugar Vendil adapted her “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia” from a group work into a solo elegy for movement and voice that echoes with textures and sensations of memory. Vendil shapes worlds of recollection in tinny fugues on toy piano, electronically-looped rhythms, airy tones, and snippets of song; amid this shifting musical environment, she rises from her instruments to carve swooping gestural phrases that conjure emotional worlds from air. The pain, confusion, and wonder of childhood emerge from handfuls of stories interspersed with dreamlike interludes that meditate on the currents of doubt and longing that run underneath a child’s innocence, and how they are indelibly shaped by encounters and absences alike. Adeptly scaled from the grandeur of its previous presentation in the cavernous space of Judson, this rendition remains anything but miniature—instead, Vendil expands inward to offer new layers, colors, and dimensions to this moving portrait.
Alexa Grae likewise benefited from the change of scale in their multimedia odyssey, “A Sea In-MOTION,” which was created in collaboration with Lo Forte. The physical proximity and sensory immediacy of the work’s design, video, and performance elements—including choreography by and for Symara Sarai—conjured a holistic world tinged with the possibilities of queer futurities. Grae’s sublimely chameleonic operatic voice soars over accumulations of electronic beats; their lyrics convey messages of self-actualization and community empowerment as modes of resistance. Sarai dances with equal power and articulation, riding rhythms and tossing gestures into the sonic swirl as a complementary channel of expression. Kaleidoscopic video projections of Grae, directed by Lo Forte with bree breeden and Kathleen Kelley, deepen the work’s visual storytelling and vivid sci-fi sensibilities that stir the body, the natural world, and the imagination into generative fusions.
May 13: marion spencer’s “horizon” at Target Margin Theater
Nature was foremost in marion spencer’s mind in the long developmental arc of “horizon,” an evening-length meditation on how infinitely complex networks of underground fungi might serve as a model for a collective weathering of impending disaster. Through extensive interdisciplinary research voiced with a deft and subtle sense of theatricality, spencer crafts a world that spills over with fluent manipulations of movement, sound, objects, and sensations. Themes of mutuality and interdependence surface in the work’s content as much as its myriad forms; “horizon” evolves into an ecosystem contained in a cinderblock box.
marion spencer’s “horizon”; Photo: Maria Baranova
The work’s episodic arc begins as performers Mor Mendel and EmmaGrace Skove-Epes bring their bodies into dialogue with thin golden filaments that glimmer in and out of perception in the gloaming dark. Taut threads stretch between their ankles and wrists, tethering them together across distance; each slow shift of gravity, every limb’s unfolding gesture elicits a response in kind as they wind themselves together. Movement traverses spatial and textural dimensions: Shannon Yu tumbles low to the ground amid a tangled nest of filaments; Stacy Lynn Smith registers air, limbs tossed and suspended by breezes and gales in turn. The performers manipulate light as a material presence, shining handheld lamps and flashlights to illuminate and obscure: a creeping hand, skittering feet, a face sharply eclipsed against the swallowing black.
The atmospheric organism of Shamar Watt’s sound score crouches and prowls, aptly brought to visual life by rippling layers of haze and tonal drones that together merge into looming banks and haptic rumblings of sonic fog. Fragments of voiceover wander among branching thoughts and sensations as a broad net of golden filaments unfurls to engulf the stage and levitate, almost imperceptibly, to shelter the four bodies that coalesce into a many-limbed creature. They break away into sprints and snippets of dance traced by the scant, wavering beams of their flashlights. Side by side in slow retreat, they aim their beams squarely toward us, light prisming in the haze. In the pulsing silence, the wide corrugated bay door rises behind them to reveal the world again: this square of world in all its mundanity, yet somehow changed as they slip just beyond its frame.
May 14: Tyler Ashley "DON'T KIDNAP US" at Queer Nightlife Community Center
Creative people all over the city come together to carve out squares of their worlds as spaces of possibility. For two nights, Queer Nightlife Community Center’s expansive warehouse space became home to Tyler Ashley’s extended ensemble performance work, “DON’T KIDNAP US,” as an urgent conjuring of self-love and community. A neat island of domesticity stood contained in the open space—two chairs, a lamp, a small table set with a vase of flowers, a rack of clothes—where the cast of seven gathered for restful tableaus and costume changes. From an array of seating on risers, benches, broad cushions, and plush poufs, we saw it all. In this space, there is no hiding: from ourselves, or from each other.
Tyler Ashley's "DON'T KIDNAP US"; Photo: Maria Baranova
The work plays out as a series of studies in physical endurance and embodied imagining, set to selections from minimalist composer Julius Eastman’s evocative oeuvre. Thick sheaves of sound layer with shimmering bells and perennial snatches of melodic piano; a chorus of cellos shreds the air. While recordings fall short of the amassing walls of sound Eastman crafted in these works, the choice of musical score becomes immediately apparent in the textures and tasks of Ashley’s rigorous movement scores for herself and the cast. Aeon Andreas, Arantxa Araujo, Brandon Washington, Paris Alexander, Rakia Seaborn, and Shane O’Neill claim the space, each with their own frank and fearless grace. They are as persistent as the rhythms and melodies that buoy them, striding wide circles or cantering through weaving patterns to sail over obstacles with lilting leaps. At times, an omniscient voice commands them to inhabit visceral postures and actions that orbit or cut across the space; at others, they trace delicate cursives and wide, arcing gestures in a close ensemble cluster.
Bodies come into play with material and image through the use of slim wooden planks that become support structures for bodies in the flesh and canvases for renderings of Ashley’s flesh—her body sketched in marker by each cast member. These actions, and the ensuing scene in which the cast wield the planks against her raw flesh, materialize the reflections, distortions, and pain that span between states of seeing and being. And yet, in this punishing world, they find their way together, bearing Ashley aloft on three planks held between them to ascend toward the grace that has always been their due.
Experimental dance is spreading, its vital networks tendrilled through the indomitable bodies and creative minds of artists. From La MaMa’s historic flagship of experimental theatre and downtown dance to Target Margin’s cinderblock box in Sunset Park and the depths of QNCC’s multipurpose venue in East New York, artists have come to stay. Their unmistakable message rings clear: we are in this together.
