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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on February 6, 2026
Tiran Willemse in "Nostalgia: Act 3". Photo: Rachel Keane
Highlights from Live Artery, Under the Radar, The Exponential Festival, and the Out-FRONT! Festival
Catch up on Winter in Brief, Part 1 and Part 2 for highlights from Live Artery, Under the Radar, The Exponential Festival, and the Out-FRONT! Festival.
As the winter festival season draws to a close, I reflect on the rich variety of works I’ve experienced, with programming that has run the gamut in terms of scale and thematic scope. I closed the month with a series of interdisciplinary solo works at small-scale venues around the city—a perfect chance to get up close and personal with each of these very different artists’ senses of craft and experimentation. - Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
January 21: Alex Rodabaugh, “RUIN” | The Exponential Festival, Open Arts Studio
Memory, presence, imagination, projection—each a mode of being and experiencing the world, of excavating the past to inhabit momentary suspensions that cascade toward speculative futures. In “RUIN,” experimental performance artist Alex Rodabaugh moves deftly through registers of time in a patchwork of intimately-textured scenes and character studies—so much so that it’s difficult to call the work a solo, though Rodabaugh’s is the only body we experience in the flesh. The disembodied voice of “Dad”—a cold, velvety baritone that carries authority and hints of softness—recurs as an interlocutor in scenes of questioning and conflict in childhood, youth, and adulthood. Nostalgia and dystopia rub shoulders as political allegiances waver and split amid social tensions that give rise to civil war. Scenes are intercut with a riotous collage of audio, video, and original video game passages that reckon with issues of class, personhood, martyrdom, grief, and the looming futility of truth, including a scathing ode to an ICE officer. In this multidimensional world of specters and monsters, the cathartic ecstasy of Rodabaugh’s closing dance—in spectacular orange-rainbow-camo liturgical vestments—channels untold volumes. The dance may wink at us on the surface (“You cannot defund THE SPIRIT OF THE DANCE!”), but as the artist’s body reels and rolls before us in elemental abjection and sacred release, we sense the deeper call: “The grief is frozen, but I am not. Action! Action! Action!”
January 24: Tiran Willemse, “Nostalgia: Act 3” | Danspace Project
In the open expanse of St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery’s sanctuary, a single figure, casually attired, moves under sparse and shifting light, buoyed equally by rhythm, silence, and breath. The South African-born, Swiss-based performer and choreographer Tiran Willemse offers “Nostalgia: Act 3,” a multivocal feat of endurance that spans, and at times defies, its historical and aesthetic frames. Willemese is an artist of virtuosic formal and expressive range—lithe, subtle, explosive, tender, grotesque—who traverses overlapping archives of theatrical and physical languages with a seemingly boundless hunger for movement. The work builds through iterative moments of transcendence that seem to fall out of time: invocations of grace arc from demure to sublime, a storm within howls cycles of resistance and renewal, a veritable exorcism strains the limits of body and voice. The phrase “tour de force” suits this work precisely, as Willemse dances right to the edge of bodily peril and dangles himself willingly into the void just beyond, though to what ends his prodigious force is deployed remains an open question—one certainly worth pondering. And New Yorkers will have the opportunity to do so: the artist’s three-channel video installation, “Dweller,” runs at Swiss Institute (two blocks from Danspace Project) through April 12.
Choreographer Etay Axelroad with visual artist Guillaume Linard-Osorio's installation in Heron at CARVALHO. Photo: Quinn Wharton
January 27: Guillaume Linard-Osorio & Etay Axelroad, “Heron” | CARVALHO
The contemporary art gallery CARVALHO’s fourth iteration of its performance series presents a mutually-responsive collaboration between Paris-based visual artist Guillaume Linard-Osorio and Israeli contemporary dancer and choreographer Etay Axelroad, whose solo “Heron” converses with Linard-Osorio’s large-scale sculpture amid his installation “Water for Wild Rushes.” There is a palpable sense of creative resonance between the two: structured geometries, layered textures, and expressive gestures court form, weight, and risk, glinting on tenuous surfaces and probing dreamlike depths. Linard-Osorio extends an interest in architecture into the structure and material of his work, blending industrial and organic registers with injections of color and suffusions of light on framed expanses of ridged polycarbonate. His monumental, multi-paneled sculpture-cum-stage slants vertiginously from chained suspension points to balance on one corner; Axelroad likewise masters gravity in recurring progressions of cantilevered balances on the points of his knees and elbows. The mobile architecture of the dance speaks of solidity and obliquity with a humming current beneath—the sculpture’s gridded incline and its luminous, shifting hues—as Axelroad carries multiple textures in his body with delicate command and an open intensity of focus. Together, these two artists show how cross-disciplinary collaboration can cultivate a web of experiential pathways for witnessing and feeling. “Heron” continues through March 14.
January 29: Akane Little, “MOMMA!” | The Exponential Festival, The Brick Aux
Ah, mothers. Maternal figures are undeniably complex: ubiquitous yet elusive, intimately felt yet somehow ever unknowable. Akane Little reflects on their relationship with their mother in their viscerally tender and incisive capsule memoir, “MOMMA!” Tethered to a teetering dress form by a braided, blood-red umbilical cord, Little explores stages of attachment, growth, and development from embryonic suspension and childhood innocence to teenaged angst and ever-present echoes of yearning. Little’s physical craft pulses with liveness as their infinitesimal negotiations with gravity and time unfurl on smooth surfaces that glow with sustained emanations of strength and control. Props and sounds lend touchpoints for the broader story of their Japanese-American upbringing as they handle matching chiffon ballet skirts with ritualistic care and recite Japanese hiragana exercises and American pop songs, at once playfully eager and solemn. Each encounter shatters into a cycle of crisis, recovery, and apology to add somatic and emotional layers to the relationship as mother and child experience the pangs of inevitable differentiation. Love and pain commingle across an array of settings and sensations, the umbilical cord stretching, draping, and tangling with Little’s unruly body. Release comes hand-in-hand with the rage and confusion of grief, assuaged only by the comforts and complexities of memory.
The solo form is often born of necessity—economic, logistical, creative—and these four artists show the variety of possibilities in work created for their own bodies, which are never truly alone in their multidisciplinary, collaborative environments. All told, this month has given me a roaring start to the year, full of artists as curious, generous, and determined as ever to make work that faces our times with every ounce of their strength and vulnerability. I am astounded by and endlessly grateful for every artist who continues to raise their voice—each in their singular and myriad ways—to wholeheartedly and wholebodily embrace and confront our moment. As I look ahead to another exciting year of performances amid a climate of tension and uncertainty, I am bolstered by the tone that has been set for me, and for all of us: never stop moving.
