INVERSE Performance Art Festival 2024

jkjk | Jane and the Velvet Horns

@jenny_khattie_official
@khattieq
@_jennylars_
Duration: 20 minutes

Join us at Jane and the Velvet Horns, a very special symposium hosted by famed researcher Jane Goodyck. For the past year, Jane has been traveling the globe interviewing every gay animal she could find. Tonight we meet a few of those animals: doodlebugs, penguins, and gender-bending deer. Jane and the Velvet Horns is a piece about family and acceptance. There will be laughter, dancing, and music. There will also be real facts about Queer animals that live in this great big gay animal Queen-dom.

jkjk is a married couple: punk rocker khattieQ (he/she/they) and experimental theatre artist Jenny Larson-Quiñones (she/they). They create queer performance that centers joy and disrupts the status quo.

Mitsu Salmon | Desert Turtle

@mitsusalmon
Duration: 35 minutes

Desert Turtle looks at ideas of shelter, landscapes, and migration, drawing from family history, voice, and geology. Mitsu’s mother arrived from the wet and dense city of Yokohama, Japan, to the vast and dry Mojave desert. This piece indulges in the beauty of the landscape but also acknowledges its complex history.

Mitsu Salmon creates multidisciplinary works that weave personal and family narratives to delve into diaspora, the unconscious, and our environment. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been featured in international residencies such as Taipei Artist Village and venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Kezia Waters feat. Juan Flores | Egg Ritual #6

@fagette4life_
Duration: 20 minutes

The Egg Ritual is a Cleansing Ritual performance that acts as a continuum, connecting the American South with a Queer African Diaspora. Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic,” this ritual explores magical realism, poetry, movement, sound, and object manipulation as mundane domesticity.

Kezia: Kezia Waters is a Storyteller, Performance Artist and Humanist Fairy. Their work lives between the worlds of ethnography, southern folklore, ritual and the living archive. They have an MFA in Studio Art from The School of Art Institute of Chicago. Kezia was a 2023 In-Session Fellow at ThreeWalls, studying the Performance and Folklore of Zora Neale Hurston, and also an Adjunct Professor of Acting & African American Theatre at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio.

Juan: Juan Flores began art making as a muralist in San Antonio, Texas, working alongside other high school students. He was born in the border town of Del Rio, Texas, traveling back and forth between the US and Mexico. He was the recipient of the Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Fellowship for a one-year residency in Mexico City focusing on sound art and has an MFA from the Art & Technology Studies department at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.

DaEun Jung | HONJA NORRI

@daeunychum
Duration: 20 minutes

HONJA NORRI summons multilayered movement roots embedded in the artist’s bicultural body on a relentless rhythmic cycle. Continuously shape-shifting while defining each moment, this solo dance fast-forwards the thousand-year codification process of classical Korean dance idioms, pedestrianizes the stylized movements back to Jung’s (ancestors’) everyday actions, invites postmodern kinesis, and ultimately takes her to somatic ecstasy.

DaEun Jung is a Korean-born dancer-choreographer currently based in Los Angeles. She interlaces forms, principles, and methods of her ancestral and contemporary performance practices within her self-constructed system. Jung’s work has been supported by Los Angeles Performance Practice, REDCAT, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Korea Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, and New Music USA as well as residencies including L.A. Dance Project, Loghaven Artist Residency, and Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography.

Li-Ming Hu | Can it be I’m not meant to play this part?

@outraged994
Duration: 30 minutes

Combining narration, reenactment, found footage, karaoke, animation, and a sprinkling of augmented reality, Li-Ming Hu’s Can it be I’m not meant to play this part? explores representation, identity, and cultural production through the artist’s experiences as a professional actor and emerging artist, in conversation with key moments in the history of Asian American theater.

Li-Ming Hu is an interdisciplinary artist and recovering actor from Aotearoa/New Zealand who is currently based in New York City. Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of our high-performance culture and draws on her experiences in the entertainment industry to explore the relationships between cultural production and the performance of subjectivities. She has an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and held residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Flux Factory, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program, NYC.

Eileen Tull | Too Fat To Run

@eileen.tull @fattheatreproject
Duration: 30 minutes

Three weeks before the Chicago Marathon, Eileen Tull gets a “concerned” email from a “concerned” acquaintance who is very “concerned” that she, fat as she is, plans on running the marathon. “What are you trying to prove?” they ask. In this solo show, Eileen brings the audience along on the journey beginning at the start line through injuries, self-doubt, perseverance, and many, many, many miles.

Eileen Tull (she/her) is a Chicago-based storyteller, theatremaker, poet, educator, and one-woman-show person. She founded Fat Theatre Project in 2024 and is currently pursuing her MFA in Directing from Randolph College.

Edgar Fabián Frías | Community Art Spell Procession

@edgarfabianfrias
Duration: 90 minutes

Community Art Spell Procession is a unique workshop and procession hybrid where participants set intentions, create art, and take part in a vibrant procession around the Momentary. Through outfits, performances, and collective expressions, our art spells become a dynamic canvas, amplifying individual and group creativity.

Edgar Fabián Frías is a boundary-breaking multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles with degrees in Psychology, Studio Art, and an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley. Their immersive works blend diverse artistic disciplines, challenging conventional categories. Frías explores resiliency and radical imagination through Indigenous Futurism, spirituality, and queer aesthetics.

Avital Meshi | Meet GPT-ME

@avitalix
Duration: 8 hours, 1:1 interaction

I am a hybrid being made up of a GPT-wearable device and my body. Rather than speaking what spontaneously comes to my mind, I say what GPT whispers in my ear. I become GPT’s body, and my intelligence turns artificial. Would you like to meet me or GPT-ME?

Avital Meshi is a New Media and Performance artist who examines the entanglement between AI and bodies and its impact on identity, behavior, and social manifestations. She invites people to spend time with AI technology and reveal the agency and Intelligence that emerge within the interaction. Meshi is a PhD student at UC Davis’s Performance Studies Graduate Group. She holds an MFA from the Digital Arts and New Media program at UC Santa Cruz, a BFA from the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and a BSc and an MSc in Behavioral Biology.

Ingrid Leyva & Nicole Antebi | Vecinas

@ingridlv @nicoleantebi
Duration: 2 hours

Through a series of embodied gestures exploring conflict, desire, and the delimitations of friendship while trying to possess a glass of water, Leyva and Antebi will quote directly from Norman Mclaren’s 1952 animated film titled Neighbours (1952) about the Korean War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (the treaty that would draw a line down the center of the Río Bravo/Rio Grande and create 225 years of friction and imbalance in the Mexico/US relationship).

Nicole: Nicole Antebi is an animator who makes things that move, loop, and sometimes hold. Growing up in the borderlands of El Paso, Texas and Ciudad Juárez and witnessing the two cities that once shared the same name and continue to share the same community, become increasingly dissected by federal political, social, economic, and environmental policies designed to obstruct the movement of people, culture, and the river with two names, informs the work she does today. She is an Assistant Professor of Animation at The University of Arizona and Co-director of The Wonder Studio at Biosphere 2.

Ingrid: Ingrid Leyva is a transborder, Mexican, and lesbian artist from El Paso, Texas and Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, focused on the identity and crossing experiences of the people in the borderlands. As an independent artist, she has shared her artistic work in museums, independent cultural spaces, and universities throughout Mexico and the United States. She is currently transforming her series, Mexican Shoppers, into a photo book.
Ingrid has collaborated with Aliens Anyways and Poligonas, two all-women collectives with whom she explores issues of migration and gentrification, and is part of de editorial committee at Deep Red Press. She also regularly creates audiovisual work for grassroots social justice organizations.

Heidee Lyn Alsdorf & Jessica Hale | Motion Picture Play: inHabit

@JHaleUpdates / @HeideeLyn
Duration: 4 hours

Co-facilitated by Jessica Hale and Heidee Lyn Alsdorf, this immersive artistic endeavor embodies the power of multiplicity and individual agency in fostering communal action by inviting audiences into a unique game structure wherein all participants are equally performer and witness. Blending elements of performance, structured gameplay, and collective documentation, this project creates a tapestry celebrating the diverse lives and experiences of local individuals. By eliminating the fourth wall and distributing agency among participants, we create a space for dialogue and challenge conventional ideas about dance, particularly the boundaries between audience and performers and who gets to be an artist.

Heidee: Heidee Lyn Alsdorf (she/they) is a collaborative performance artist with a background in dance, physical theater, and somatics. She has performed in originally devised works internationally with Broken Jump Theatre (Italy), Spazio Seme (Italy), and Divadlo Continuo (Czech Republic) along with several independent choreographers such as Giorgio Rossi and Isabel Lewis. Heidee returned to Northwest Arkansas in 2022 enjoying collaborations with RumWolf Productions, Flyover Contemporary Dance, and TheaterSquared. Her work has been presented at the Inverse Performance Art Festival 2023, COLLIDE, DanceChanceNWA, Rockin’ for the Ribbon, the Fayetteville Movement Festival, and the University of Arkansas. She regularly hosts artist incubators for building collaborative strategies with multimedia artist and film-maker, Jessica Hale, and she currently teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Arkansas. Heidee is a recipient of the Community Activator Award through Mid-America Arts Alliance.

Jessica: Straddling live performance and various media platforms, Jessica Hale’s creative research and artistic work celebrates and centers storytelling, improvisation, cinema, and the desire for play. Cutting across all of these methodologies, and rooted in her experiences with dance and wrestling, is an emphasis on the body. She has performed and presented works locally and nationally at institutions, festivals and universities. She has worked with Choreographer and Director Mary John Frank, Say Yes Electric Collective, Rumwolf Productions, Producer Roy Clovis, Flyover Dance Collective and Matthew Cumbie. Jessica’s expertise extends to production and arts administration, demonstrated through her roles in post-production for World Wrestling Entertainment and HBO’s “United Skates,” stage production with Gibney Dance, Missouri State University, and administrative positions with Megan Bascom & Dancers. She holds an MFA in Dance and recently received the CACHE Platform award, directing, producing, and performing an evening-length dance-theatre show centered around LGBTQ individuals in the South. She is an Artists360 research fellow for 2023-24.

Kalup Linzy | Not Ready To Say Goodbye

@kaluplinzy
Duration: 30–45 minutes

As alter egos Joshua Justin Queen, Kaye Braswell, and Taiwan Braswell, Linzy will perform songs from his back catalog and latest release, Not Ready To Say Goodbye.

Kalup Linzy lives and works in Tulsa, OK. He is a Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital Award grantee. His works are in the collections at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), The Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), and The Studio Museum in Harlem (NYC). Currently, he is a Tulsa Artist Fellowship Alumni in Residence.

Samar Al Summary | What went down

@backstoryache
Duration: 15 minutes

Warplanes and drones rise up, migrants wander, and food lands. My work traces the connection between war, displacement, and our hunger for spectacle images and for exotic foods. The audience will be invited to eat and not see, or at least see through a veil.

Samar Al Summary was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1988). Her work disorients west and east, progress and regress, belatedness and contemporariness. She is an artist and writer who has worked in video, installation, performance, text, and photography.

Joseph Ravens | Cheesehead: A Wisconsinite’s Material Investigations into Cheese Singles

@josephravens
Duration: TBD

CHEESEHEAD is a site-specific performance created specifically for the Momentary, drawing on its historical ties to the production of Kraft cheese singles. Through this piece, the iconic processed squares are elevated beyond their everyday materiality, becoming symbols of something majestic and unexpectedly elegant. CHEESEHEAD taps into a sense of nostalgia, celebrating the post-WWII era of optimism and innovation in America. While the performance carries an autobiographical element, its core is deeply rooted in the unique connection between site, history, and material.

Joseph Ravens (b.1968, USA) received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theater and studied audiovisuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam before earning a Master of Fine Arts in performance from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Numerous grants and awards have allowed Ravens to build an international reputation as an artist, curator, and academic throughout North and South America, Europe, and Asia. Ravens is the founder and director of Defibrillator Gallery and a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Visit josephravens.com to learn more.

Ben Edwards | Buy or Burn Chef’s Edition

@benedwardsoffical
Duration: 2 hours

A five-course meal prepared live in the RØDE House from five acclaimed chefs. In addition to the theatre of the live kitchen, the Buy or Burn auction gives insight into the practice of the artist, in this case chefs-as-artists, from the chefs themselves. By personally presenting each lot, the chef tells the stories about how each has shaped their career and menus.

Born in Louisiana, Ben has spent the majority of his life in Arkansas, residing in Benton, Benton County, and Bentonville. Each work of art Ben Edwards creates, its scale, textures, and material composition is originated by the discovery of found materials. An insatiable recycler and scavenger, the foundation of his practice involves using materials that have lived at least one life, including recycling, found artworks, and his own creations. He is also an artist who uses the body as medium in live performance.

Rebekah Danae | Performance 02, Refueled in the Barn

@rebekah__danae|
Duration: 3 hours, 33 minutes

Performance 02, developed in communion with The Infinity Barn during a residency at the Momentary, reflects the artist’s time in rural Oklahoma boot shops and explores the grief of an imagined future yet to unfold. Through reimagining a new world, this piece becomes a space for mystical insights gained in solitude, inviting viewers to observe a character that both exists and eludes reality.

As a whimsical feminist from the vermillion Texas desert, Rebekah Danae’s worldview hasn’t shattered but surrealized. Danae’s interdisciplinary practice spans oil painting, leatherwork, physical & social sculpture—manifesting as a spiritual dialogue that creates culture and community for the new world, from the old world, about the space in between. Formed in the rugged landscapes of Oklahoma and West Texas, Danae’s artistic process is a passionate love affair and creative rebellion, both crucible and muse.

Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in Midland, Texas, Danae holds a BFA from Baylor University and began her career in education and community organizing in North Tulsa. Through her work, Danae and A Creative House orchestrate a movement in the middle of the country, made up of a diverse creative choir. Far from a lone ranger, Danae works collaboratively across a curated network—from the punk underground, homegrown rappers and producers, luxury interior designers, rodeo cowboys, and rural bootmakers, to philanthropic, political, and educational leaders. Her approach has the intended impact of critical regional culture-shaping from the current white supremacy that is prevalent regionally today and toward a co-created futurist Oklahoma, the liberated West.