Live Artery 2026
Showings & Artist Salon | January 11
Live Artery provides a platform for artists to share their work with the general public and presenters from around the world, fostering new commissions, touring opportunities, and lasting professional relationships. Artists showing works-in-progress or excerpts of completed works on January 11 include 2025-2026 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA) Joanna Kotze, as well as esteemed past RCA awardees Kyle Abraham, Raja Feather Kelly, and Faye Driscoll.
Sunday, January 11
Artist Salon: Dean Moss / Gametophyte, Juliana F. May, Kenyon Adams (K7N), Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, and Annie Dorsen
11:30am; Doors Open at 11am, Invitation Only
An informal gathering to share recently premiered works with short presentations, conversations and light refreshments.
Showings:
Joanna Kotze
At 1pm, Invitation Only
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
At 2pm, Invitation Only
Raja Feather Kelly | the feath3r theory
At 3pm
Faye Driscoll
At 6pm
Joanna Kotze | this is the beginning, this is the end
1pm, Studio
Choreographer: Joanna Kotze
Composer/Musician/Performer: Ryan Seaton
Musician/Performer: Maralie Armstrong-Rial
Light Designer: Kathy Kaufmann
Dancers:
Joanna Kotze
Lena Engelstein
Wendell Gray II
Molly Heller
Symara Sarai
Hsiao-Jou Tang
Joanna Kotze’s this is the beginning, this is the end interrogates the phenomenon of history repeating itself in a two-part, unison, non-unison, non-hierarchical, canon dance. Performed by an ensemble of six dancers and two musicians, the interdisciplinary work scrutinizes leadership, agency, and the thresholds we encounter individually and collectively. Kotze examines how individual bodies carry the residue of political and social systems, and how the act of tearing down and rebuilding becomes both an artistic and human imperative. Cascading waves of intricate, rigorous, layered movement and sound engage the current socio-political challenges and reflect on two divergent forces: the need for collectivism to accomplish change and, its most dangerous manifestation, unthinking conformity.
As the 2025-2026 Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist (RCA), Kotze receives two years of salary, healthcare benefits, full-time access to dedicated office space during the entire residency period, creative funds, a technical residency and fully-produced world premiere in our theater, and touring support.
FUNDING
this is the beginning, this is the end is being commissioned, produced, and premiered by New York Live Arts as part of the Randjelović/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist Program (RCA), with lead funding from Rockefeller Brothers Fund. this is the beginning, this is the end has been supported in part through residencies at Marble House Project, Milvus Artistic Research Center, LMCC’s RehearsalWeek, the Pillow Lab at Jacob’s Pillow and Loghaven Artist Residency. Joanna is the recipient of a 2024 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award, and a 2025 NDP Finalist Grant Award, both of which have contributed to the making of this is the beginning, this is the end.
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham
2pm, Theater
A.I.M by Kyle Abraham presents excerpts of two of its newest evening-length works: White Space and I Grieve Different. White Space brings together renowned visual artist Glenn Ligon alongside acclaimed composers Jason Moran and Nico Muhly for a haunting new collaborative score that pierces the heart of Abraham’s atmospheric work. I Grieve Different is a 2025 National Dance Project recipient and utilizes Kendrick Lamar’s music to explore health, healing, and belonging. The work creates a nuanced narrative that parallels Lamar’s evocative storytelling with Abraham’s theatrical and kinetic movement vocabulary which spans (but isn’t limited to) hip hop, ballet, contemporary and modern dance techniques.
Choreographer: Raja Feather Kelly
Company Manager: Stella Amuzu
Sound Designer: Christoph Mateka
Performers:
Dylan Contreras
Justin De Luna
Ami Gernux
Alexandria Giroux
Sara Gurevich
Nelson Mejia
A Body of Dangerous Ideas is a danced-theatre investigation of danger as both threat and threshold: how it lives in the body, how in search for connection intimacy itself can be perilous, and how media shapes our sympathies for violence and collapse. Inspired by Claire Bishop’s Disordered Attention and Daniel Sherrell’s Warmth, the work asks what it means to live at the hinge between digital saturation and planetary crisis, between the infinite scroll and the finite planet. In this space, the body becomes a site of translation, distortion, and possibility. This performance will not offer escape or easy answers; instead, it asks you to sit inside the uncertainty and risk of our moment, to witness danger not as spectacle but as a condition we share.
Faye Driscoll | CHIMERA (working title)
6pm, Studio
Choreographer/Performer: Faye Driscoll
Set Designers: Nick Vaughan & Jake Margolin
Dramaturg: Dages Juvelier Keates
Producer: J. Alex Mathews
An experiment in decentralizing the conception of the body by extending it through objects, lights, other bodies, the audience, and the theater itself, Driscoll attempts to animate the strangeness of projection and desire. When we project ourselves into the world does the world project itself back into us? And onward into infinity? She asks the audience to fill in the absence, the outline of what is not there. CHIMERA (working title) is an ongoing investigation into perception as choreography—how bodies shift meaning through the friction between what is seen and what is sensed, that asks: What is a body? What is desire? Where is my body, where is yours? Where do they meet and how far do they extend? CHIMERA (working title) animates the wild plurality of the body and revels in the deep queerness of the more than human.
