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KATAYA AND DUTA 
Yekaterina Pavlovna Chizhayeva (Katya)- her/she, originally from Kiev, USSR, local to NOLA since 2005.

"The practice of dance/ movement is extremely important to deep core well being, beyond status, technique, aesthetics. Seeking to grow in this path is a deeply healing privilege, a dream which is worth following because it feels meaningful, joyful, freeing. Learning how to connect with others through artistic process has been revolutionary in experiencing another way of being."

 

Late blooming arteus, Katya loves to cook winter squash, enjoys proving herself wrong, feels that dance is the best thing that touched on her planet, and is hoping Pluto will stop torturing her value system.

 

Ryuta Dutah Iwashita Suderman (Duta) - they/them, he/him, originally from Japan, transplant to NOLA since 2016. Duta has been

around the world thrice, is a complete nut about contact improvisation, avid biker, and a sweetheart.


SAMANTHA CC:
"Samantha CC is a performance artist, curator, filmmaker, videographer and vocalist living and working in New York City. For Performing Process, she will be performing a new work called "Saint Cassini's Offering." Her work often uses mythological tropes to connect lived experience in a black woman's body to the divine. In particular, her performance practice often manifests as an alchemical exercise, moving from pain to peace. Since 2016 since has been curating a performance and video series, along with a zine, called The Great BE, or Great Black Expanse. The goal of the project is to center work by artists from the African Diaspora whose work defies the confines that the art world likes to place around black artists. Samantha has performed at spaces such as Secret Project Robot, The Glove, Outpost Artist Resources, Pioneer Works, The Knockdown Center, Wild Project, and Otion Front Studios to name a few. She is currently a 2017-2018 ProjectArt artist in Residence."



SUMMER BAT

I am called Summer Bat. I currently dwell on the Mississippi gulf coast. I live with my husband who knows too much about VHS for any one human, a cat who looks at herself lovingly in the mirror, a preserved butterfly named Saint Agatha, and a preserved Mournful Sphinx named Saint Dymphna. My piece tries to cover the movement when processing thoughts, specifically difficult thoughts, proven by the exacerbated movements this piece portrays. My pronouns are she/her.


CHRISTIANA COTT NOGEOSCU

I like to see myself as a conceptographer. Conveying concepts through different mediums, depending on the nature of the concept I choose mediums like performance, video, installations poems etc.

I have been studying in the UK at the University of Lincoln and I am now based in Düsseldorf, Germany, experimenting with all mediums at the Kunstakademie.

When I was 12, I started drawing out of impulse and I have been just drawing and painting until I was 17. Then I was presented my first camera, and I fell in love with photography.  When doing my studies at the University of Lincoln, my first photography project during my bachelor in photography was an experimental movie. Ironically enough, but also fascinating for me, I was always evolving into a new medium, sometimes fearing that I will discover them all and then I can not do anything entertaining. But like love-making, one doesn’t only do it once, yet we are in a continuous process of the transformation’s movement.

Always evolving.

http://www.cristianacott.com

 

GEM ROSENBERG

Gem Rosenberg is an interdisciplinary artist working in Boston. Her mediums include collage, performance, and found objects.Explorations of healing, environment and human relationships with each other and other species of animals influence her creative practice.

 



KRISTEN GREMILLION
Kristen Gremillion is a theatre artist enthusiastic about creating visceral art experiences with physical work and in-depth text analysis. A New Orleans Area Native, a Space-Case, and sometimes Dinosaur, Kristen trained in directing and performance at Bennington College before returning to New Orleans in 2010. She has performed for, trained with, directed and supported productions and theatre companies across town, most notably as a Company Member of the Cripple Creek Theatre Co. from 2009 - 2015.



NORTH SINISTAR
north star is a queer working class artist, born in the south and grown up in the northern rust-belt-midwest. currently living and working in detroit, mi, not far from where she grew up. she spent much of the last decade living and working between pittsburgh, pa; new orleans, la; the north-west coast and traveling the us as a penniless street singer, musician, puppeteer & performer.

 

north's raw, minimalist & multi-dimensional work recalls a tune; a place outside of time. somewhere between the soul and the mind. vivid imagery. bridging ancient past and distant future. haunting. chanting. channeling. dreams, past lives, & futures. collective memories. shared through many mediums: music; singing & songwriting, sound & vocal loops, written & spoken word, projection & shadow, puppetry, objects & props, masks & movement, ritual spaces, painting, collages, design & visual art work; to convey hidden messages. puzzle pieces of the past. remembering. mysteries & hidden things. songs and stories long forgotten or never told. archive of collective dreaming.

 

north divides their time between the waking working class reality and a kaleidoscope of past lives, memories, dream realities and subconscious imaginings.

 

north star is a healer, a storyteller, a communicator, and a survivor of many unbelievable things.

 

north's current work is mostly centered around SAFE TEAM, a project dedicated to community health, safety awareness and spreading positive messaging through design and print media. they have been working on this project since 2015 and are currently in the production phase; designing t shirts, jackets, zines & other things. north's current interests are: music, healing arts, health & safety, astrology, street medic-ing, shadow puppetry and pochinko style clowning.

 

 

MAEDEA LADYROSE
MaeDea LadyLaRose identifies with the words; Femme Queen Healer Poet Witch Mother Mystic Creature. LadyLaRose's relationship with snake and plant medicine has threaded radical transformation through her life. She is a practitioner of survivor magic and is a dedicated templeholder of music, healing, art, and nature.

https://feverdreamsgold.bandcamp.com/

https://paintedhoney.bandcamp.com/

 

 

GH

G.H. is the name I want to use as a performer, and the title of my piece is "You Are Her(e)". My preferred gender pronouns are she/her, and I am from Brooklyn, New York.

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OWL AND DOG:
Owl & Bird, formed of performance partners Al Schneider and Wendy McColm, is a performance duo based out of New Orleans. In the style of a French Steve Martin, we perform for you out of a suitcase full of laughing flowers, draped across a makeshift vaudeville stage, and murmured to the tune of our most beautifully quotidian dreams. Turning life’s lost connection around and making it what we need it to be, we ask the audience the question we feel we don’t often ask ourselves: What do you want?

 

Owl & Bird are a perfect match, paring comedy with obscure performance art, we create a show full of relatable, yet strange, moments in non sequitur speech, equipped with props that bring in a childlike dream aspect. We devise scripts collaboratively through actively observing our interactions with each other and those around us; taking language directly from our everyday life, we shape our words into a series of moments where we spill our secrets and find ourselves dancing through an ethereal subconscious wonder. Audience interaction, imagination, and dreaming required.

 

 

SHAWN ESCARCIGA

Shawn Escarciga (Brooklyn, NY, USA)  is an “experimental” “performance” “artist” whose work is based in Butoh and the creation of new movement paradigms, particularly around the queer body and his deep capacity to feel things. His work has been shown throughout New York City (Panoply Performance Lab, Glasshouse ArtLifeLab [Performeando], Queens Museum [LiveArt.us], MIX NYC, Triskelion, Chinatown Soup [Performance Anxiety], The Clemente, Le Petit Versailles), domestically (Boston, Chicago, Lexington), and abroad (Berlin). He has collaborated and performed with collectives throughout New York City, including Butoh company, The Vangeline Theater, and the multidisciplinary social justice group, Gender/Power, as well as teaching movement workshops independently for Otion Front Studio and the University of Kentucky. He thinks a lot about classism, queer visibility, how to light patriarchal structures on fire effectively, and what it would be like to live in a country that supports non-commercial artists, which might look something like eating a 2000 calorie diet regularly and owning a Shiba.

 

NADAHADA

Bio

nadahada is the collaboration between Juliana Fadil-Luchkiw (she/her or they/them) and María Paz Valenzuela (she/her or they/them). It serendipitously emerged from an undergraduate class in 2014 at The New School in NYC. Their work pieces together a trans-feminist, queer migrant eco-collage through an interdisciplinary process that performs non-surgical forms of cultural castration with digital technologies, trash, and yarn. To encounter worlds within worlds, they work in a multitude of mediums, including text, performance, video, sound, collage, interactive creatures and installation, with the intention of queering power structures and rupturing established systems through material and virtual fragmentation and (re)assemblage.  They have shared work in many different venues, including Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami, FL, The Church of Fun in Los Angeles, CA, Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia, and The Gallatin Gallery at NYU, Parsons School of Design, and The Glove in NYC. They were also 2016 participants at Residencia Corazón in La Plata, Argentina.

 

Statement

nadahada emerges in multiplicity and cannot be cohered to a flattented unity. As a collaboration, nadahada is a praxis that occupies a space of shifting borderlines–a migrant an-architecture of mobile frontiers that exceeds topographical placements. It has no coordinates that can be pinned down in metric space. This is to say, our intention for this collaboration is to symbiotically flourish at the threshold of a (dis)located spatiality that is neither here nor there. Such transformative (dis)location is not a passive background activated by the huMan, but it is rather a vibrant agent that is animated through relationality. It is a host that is collectively (re)assembled through a litter-atured worlding practice, in which we piece together ecosophically harvested, discarded materials. This is not a space solely of the future, or the present, or the past–it is rather a multidimensional opening to the transtemporality of a past that is yet to come. For us, the disjointedness of such a liminal spatio-temporality enables the past and future to be simultaneously present, forming the future anterior that struggles to liberate itself from the constraints of a homogenous, straight Time.

The future anterior animates our mutating assemblage of both machinic and non-machinic technoembodiments to form strange vortexes that are out of Time. We aim for a poetic crossing of genres by collapsing science fiction and fantasy into performance, text, video, collage, garments, and installations. With these, we engage in destabilizing the human with hybridity. This destabilization calls to abjection–all that does not fit into the category of human, but instead proliferates a multiplicity of subjectivities, forms, and ideas. These hybrids–monsters and ghosts–also invoke an unintelligibility and unknowability that attempt to expose the inability for humans to possibly imagine or picture the massive numbers and intricately intertwined relations–such as climate change, globalized capitalism, mass extinction–that prevail in the current moment, but are also deeply implicated in the past and future. As such, we recognize the potency of multispecies drag performance and immersive experiences as embodiments of hybridity that have the capacity to demonstrate this uncertainty. We seek to evoke non-actualizable teratological creatures and together form abominable assemblages that do not arrive at something definitive, but that are entangled in a process of becoming that is no-longer and not-yet. We intend to reclaim the majoritarian insult of monstrosity, as a mixture of species, races, sexes, genders, and morphologies, that collapse the dichotomies of male/female, normal/abnormal, subject/object, human/nonhuman, organic/inorganic. In other words, as shapeshifting embodiments, we embrace monstrosity and failure as transgressions of racial, anatomical, psychic, and gender norms, assigned by a white supremacist, ableist, cis-heteropatriarchal ideology. This involves queer “oppositional consciousness”-raising to emphasize the importance of learning about patriarchy and imperialism as exploitative systems of domination: how they are institutionalized and how they are perpetuated and maintained through the oppression of others. nadahada manifests as a specter of that which has been silenced, erased, outlawed, and/or delegitimized. Intent on shattering the preservation of a linear temporal narrative, we use affect and irony to try to open up a portal towards a future about anachronistic repetitions and reappearance of the repressed.


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Artist Bios

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ELAINE THAP

Elaine Thap is an interdisciplinary artist working predominantly in performance now based in Los Angeles. She is also an organizer and writer of contemporary art exhibitions. She obtained her BFA in Studio for Interrelated Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Elaine Thap has shown work in Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Toronto, and Montreal.

 

As a Cambodian American woman, she uses her diasporic identity to convey layers of being and relationships. Live action or performance art is the ability to fabricate situations of childhood trauma and adult responsibility while seeking alternative perspectives and possibilities. She explores expressive psychosexuality in butoh movement while creating guttural, live sounds.




COURTNEY LEE NOVAK
Courtney Leigh Novak, Lesbos; I Miss An Island To Which I've Never Been Gender pronouns- She/her, From New Orleans

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KAIA AND MOH

Kaia Gilje is an artist from the pnw. She lives in new york city ans works with the medium of movement.

Mohammed Grout is a poet from the pnw. He lives in New York City. He is Eritrean and believes anything is possible.


 

OLIVIA CREAM
Olivia Cream is performing an original piece called "Chrysalize" tonight, inspired by the famous children's book "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. originally from Richmond, Virginia, she travelled here from Brooklyn, New York. she uses she/her pronouns. she is currently deciding what she likes by creating amalgams of song, movement, sculpture, ceremony, and lecture. she performs celebrations and deprecations of the self and constructive criticism of the community. but she is drawn to themes of serendipity, nurturing, empathy, and softness in a culture that praises emotional detachment and demands control of the personal and global environment. she attempts to subvert the omnipresent male gaze and often fails. she is confident she can snag your attention, but the question is, can she hold it?

 

please deliver harsh or kind words to her face.


AMOS LEAGER
King Of Herrings, He/Him from Kansas City MO, performing "Universal Threat."
Amos Leager, as King Of Herrings, has performed at numerous venues in Kansas City, as well as other cities in the American Midwest and South. His performances combine sound collage, live instrumentation, recitation/song, and theatricality into a congeries of dream logic, weird narrative, and sensory overload. King Of Herrings is a living gateway through which lividly artificial entities, from the blurred realm of the unconscious, may enter and alter consensus reality. 

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SARAH HILL
My video and performance work attempts to deconstruct monumental narratives of iconic comic book and childhood fictional characters. I seek to create a temporal historical rupture and point backwards to forms of historical queerness that might not have been read as queer, such as: Dara Birnbaum’s Wonder Woman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, and Disney films such as Pinocchio (1940) and Peter Pan(1953). 

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CHEALSEA COON
Chelsea Coon is an artist and writer. She examines beginnings and endings, life and death, the internal and external, phases, and the way in which the body on an elemental level is rooted to space. She received her MFA from Tufts University (2014) and BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2012). Coon has exhibited extensively across North America, Europe and Asia notably in London, Tokyo and Sydney among others. She is the Art Director of FUCK ALL, a bicoastal performance art festival in Los Angeles/New York (2018); author of No One Thing is the Root of All Anything: Phases and Performance of the Imminent(NOT A CULT, 2017), and a contributing writer for various publications. She is the recipient of the Rose Hill Performance Art Award, Yousuf Karsh Prize in Photography and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Coon lives and works in Los Angeles.

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NICHOLE GOODWIN
Nicole Goodwin is a writer/poet and performer hailing from Harlem, NYC. Her 3 year ongoing project "Ain't I a Woman (?/!)" is a statement of body-positivity, self-love and the enduring presence of Black bodies throughout American oppression.  Gender pronouns: she/her.

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