INVERSE Performance Art Festival 2025

Collective VL4E

Mariana Parisca, bryan ortiz, Luis Vasquez La Roche | Wassy Fête

@wassybats, @la_maripari, @vasquezlaroche, @bryan.o 

Wassy Fête is a party and participatory sound performance where participants show off their costumes, dance, play instruments and celebrate as a group of revelers while listening to Caribbean and Latin American music. Wassy Fête is inspired by Trinidadian Carnival as a tool for social commentary and symbolic public discourse. 

In the Wassy Bats Costume-making workshop, participants are invited to create their own costumes using several techniques using paper, cardboard, fabric, and other materials. 

Noelle Choy & William Lanzillo | Cellphone Rollercoaster

@soyeahill, @lanzilloart 

Cellphone Rollercoaster invites participants to place their phones on a miniature ride that is part sculpture, model, and amusement park. With the phones’ cameras recording, it documents its own journey. This experience creates fractured viewership—between the phone’s perspective, the live installation, and the video playback. This layering highlights how cellphones mediate daily experience, using absurdity to reimagine their autonomy beyond us. 

Eunjin Choi | Hereing 

@choi_eunjinn 

Audiences are invited to listen to soundtracks while having contact with daily objects in the room. Things that are present and absent are converging in the present moment through the materiality of objects and individuals’ memories. This journey came from a sense of displacement, and a desire to transform that feeling into a shared and playful field.   

Shir Ende | Movement-Generated Architecture

@shirende 

Movement-Generated Architecture is a performance language that builds architecture. A run makes an exterior wall, a jump is a column, and a plank is a ramp. Choreographers are repositioned as architects, enabling them to shape environments by directing movements that define space. 

Director: Shir Ende 

Performers: Tina Wang, Stephanie Patsula, Clara Nizard, Graciela Gonzalez 

Calista Lyon | The Uncertain Behavior of Clouds 

calistalyon.com 

The Uncertain Behavior of Clouds is a lecture performance that investigates the mysterious role of clouds and their influence in shaping our climate’s future. Using research, performance, image projection, and sound, the work invites audiences to reflect on the political, environmental, and ethical dimensions of climate uncertainty—prompting us to consider what drifts above us and our collective responsibility. 

Performers: Calista Lyon, Tui Lyon, Drew Nikonowicz, Nikola Radan 

Robbie Trocchia & Nicki Duval | Bout

@robbie.trocchia

bout is a live audiovisual performance that deconstructs competitive boxing through the work of American realist painter George Bellows, breaking down boundaries between art and athletics, and challenging gender stereotypes through a tender collaborative structure. Originally commissioned by Locust Projects, Miami, this iteration features local boxers – Kalvin “Hot Sauce” Henderson and Justin “The Onyx Fox” Jones – and an expanded video component with site-specific livestreamed projections.   

Vanessa Damilola Macaulay | where the compass breaks open

@vanessadamilolamacaulay 

where the compass breaks open moves between South London, South Africa, and the U.S. South, tracing a circulation of warmth, scent, and residue between places often imagined apart. This work explores how the textures of the everyday carry the weight of shared histories and how something passed from hand to hand can hold geography, intimacy, and loss. ‘South’ emerges here not as a fixed direction but as a method of relation, a way of knowing shaped by repetition and exchange. In its quiet gestures, where the compass breaks open invites a re-mapping of kinship across distance.

Performers:

Vanessa Damilola Macaulay, Maya Odim, Nathége Casseus, Morgan Robinson Gay, Austin Miles 

Nora Sharp | Cosmic Docks 

@theamtraklor

Cosmic Docks is a trans tall-tale about orbiting the sources of yourself and yearning for clarity in a broken world. Comedian and choreographer Nora Sharp builds a world where personal history and sci-fi futurism intersect in the dumpster out back of a local top surgery office, eventually charting a pathway beyond story or self. 

Maree ReMalia | Moving Bodies/Dancing Lives workshop

@ma_ma_lia 

Moving Bodies/Dancing Lives invites movers, artists, and the creatively curious to explore connection and meaning at the intersection of practice and performance through playfully guided improvisation rooted in dance, theater, voice work, and somatics. Honoring the richness of our diverse physicalities and lived experiences, the workshop fosters creativity, reflection, and community through adaptable practices that support each person’s unique way of moving, as well as collectively composing in the moment. Ages 16+, no previous experience necessary—wear comfortable clothes and bring water, a journal, pieces of flair, and artifacts/objects/materials that can become part of our explorations. 

Mister & Mischief | Again! Again!

@misterandmischief 

A producer. A director. A performer. An audience. A dad. A mom. A babysitter. A kid. All catching each other in an endless joyful loop of caretaking and creating. 

Performers: Jeff Crocker, Andy Crocker, Tiffany Ogburn 

Jinlu Luo | Strawberries Are A Winter Fruit (《草莓是一种冬天的水果》） 

@jinluluo 

If you knew me before I was thirty years old, you don’t know me in the true sense of the word; you just know me from the first season, which was extraordinarily cheap to produce and had a screenwriting team who went through some things that are often difficult to deal with. 

如果你在我三十岁之前认识我，你不是真正意义上的了解我，你只是了解第一季的我，第一季的制作成本特别低，并且编剧团队经历了一些常人难以承受的事情。

Tristan Koepke | Emotional Tofu 

@big.boy.dance 

Emotional Tofu is a performance that queers the sad boy trope by embodying Post Malone’s viral improvised dance breaks. His minced steps and thrusts are transformed into tragicomic rituals of tenderness and absurdity, inviting audiences to reimagine a spectrum of masculinities. 

Performers: Tristan Koepke, James Barrett, Emilia Bruno 

Erin Ellen Kelly & Adam Hogan | Maelstrom 

@erin_ellen_kelly 

a haunted dream of crystalline wood treasure in the center of the storm 

a clarifying conductor  

orchestrating the furry  

dissolving the sap  

standing naked  

heart offering its blood to the moon  

Spending time floating, hitting water with a stick, and Soaring Crane with the honey locust tree has been crucial to the crafting process for this performance.  

Performance Design, Concept, Direction, and Choreography: Erin Ellen Kelly 

Soundscape Design and Cinematography: Adam Hogan, Fayetteville, AR 

Danielle Hatch | Our Story Starts With A Tear

@daniellehatchstudio

Through the format of a participatory nine course meal, the performance will encompass aspects of ritual, play and emotional exchange. Thematically the work will explore both the geography of motherhood, and mothering as survival, examining the mother/infant relationship through the lens of the work of psychoanalyst and pediatrician DW Winnicott. 

Armature Design and Fabrication: Somewhere Studio 

Performers: Danielle Hatch, Heidee Lyn Alsdorf, Jessica Colangelo, Monica Thomas 

Sound: Monica Diodati & Dana Idlet 

Zine: Molly Bess Rector & Katherine Rutter 

Chefs: Ali Cameron and Brandy Barnes