THE FORMAT:

Practice Space is a series inviting artists to share their improvisational performance practices.

The accumulation of these scores will build into an improvised performance open to the public on July 6.

You can choose to attend single sessions based on your schedule and interest, but you are encouraged to participate in as many workshops as possible, so we can build a vocabulary together.

Single sessions are sliding scale $15-25. Get a bundle and save: all of May for $50-75, all of June for $60-85, or all sessions (including performance) for $100-200. Please pay what you can, and let us know (at [email protected]) if cost is a barrier — no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

THE ETHOS:

Practice Space is an attempt at making a space for sharing improvisational performance practices that isn’t quite class, isn’t quite an intensive, and definitely isn’t an audition. We’re building a zone for lateral exchange in the hopes of reducing competitive friction and instead focusing on sharing and practicing scores for improvisatory performance that can be performed, played with, and distorted.

THE SCHEDULE:

Tuesday, May 5 - Tamás Marquardt
Tuesday, May 12 - Kayvon Pourazar
Tuesday, May 19 - Liony Garcia
Tuesday, May 26 - evan ray suzuki
Monday, June 1 - James Barrett
Monday, June 8 - Marguerite Hemmings
Monday, June 15 - PRACTICE SPACE TEAM
Monday, June 22 - Jo Warren
Monday, June 29 - Kris Lee
Monday, July 6 - BIG COLLABORATIVE PERFORMANCE

WHO & WHAT:

Tuesday May 5, Tamás Marquardt shares THE RIVER: Basics.

'Rivers' or River Work refers to a series of structured physical improvisations credited to theatre director Jerzy Grotowski. As artists concerned with performance and creation, Rivers help to gain inner contact with the self, and with the sources and impulses that drive us to express through presence and form. Fun and exploratory, Rivers are also a ritualized way to ground us as we search for the deeper and often unknown sources waiting to be tapped within our creativity, whether as actors, dancers, writers, directors or choreographers. THE RIVER: Basics guides participants through a series of Standard Exploratory Rivers, both in solo and partner work. Through improvised exercises the artist will have space and time to inspect the images, gestures and texts that inhabit their bodies and are evoked when alone or in a studio with others. They will begin to test how these sources can be accessed, repeated and utilized as well as clarify the judgments and hindrances that stand in the way of presence and choice, be it in performance, composition, or both.

In this workshop we will be working with:

Recognition: being able to recognize images, hold them with the eyes and body, as well as repeat images, gestures and text relating to the River Work;

Presence: self-awareness and awareness of the studio and others while inside the River and;

Range: using a variety of Rivers to help the artist stretch their abilities in all directions, both through depth of image as well as theme and variation.

Please wear clothes that you can move in (sweatpants or yoga pants), and bring water as well as a notebook and pen.

Tamás (Tanya) Marquardt is a performer and writer in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn. Their book Stray: Memoir of a Runaway (Little A, 2018) was named a Best Queer & History Bio by The Advocate; a punk-musical version commissioned by Theatre Conspiracy toured nationally; Nocturne (an incomplete and inaccurate account of the love affair between George Sand and Frederic Chopin) was produced at Manhattan’s Dixon Place; Transmission, based on Sophocles’ Orestia, was published in the Canadian Theatre Review, and Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, Tamás’ play about being a sleep talker, was the subject of an NPR Invisibila. Their essays have appeared in Prism, Feminist Press, Medium, huffpost, Grain, Plentitude, and OffAssignment; their performances have been presented at The Tank, Brooklyn Museum, BAX, BrickAUX, U500 (Budapest), Mabou Mines, The Collapsable Hole, PuSh, VIDF, Dancing on the Edge, rEvolver, and Summerworks. They have worked with JoAnne Akalaitis, Jerome Bel, Ballez, Jess Barbagallo, Mallory Catlett, Fay Nass, Emily Johnson, Theatre Replacement, radix, and the Leaky Heaven Circus.

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Tuesday May 12, Kayvon Pourazar shares Guided Bodily Reverie.

This offering is a reflection of Kayvon’s current explorations in decentralizing and distributing awareness to be responsive to, and responsible for, the multiplicity inherent in the carnal body. By privileging qualitative sensorial curiosity and actively resisting the urge to translate these experiences into the quantitative world of data and information, we explore what it could be to walk into a poem and let the body dream there.

Kayvon Pourazar is of Persian origin and spent his formative years in Iran, Turkey and England. Kayvon immigrated to the US in 1995, graduated from SUNY Purchase in May 2000 and has resided in New York City ever since. He has performed in the works of Ivy Baldwin, Michelle Boulé, Beth Gill, Lily Gold, Levi Gonzalez, K.J. Holmes, John Jasperse, Heather Kravas, Juliette Mapp, Gabriel Masson, Juliana May, Jodi Melnick, Jennifer Monson, RoseAnne Spradlin, Wil Swanson, Donna Uchizono, Doug Varone, Gwen Welliver, Yasuko Yokoshi and in The Metropolitan Opera productions of Les Troyens and Le Sacre du Printemps. Kayvon's ventures into making dances have been shown in New York City at Danspace Project (Food for Thought), The Kitchen (Dance & Process), P.S. 122 (Hothouse), The Cunningham Studios, Roulette (DanceRoulette), Center for Performance Research, Catch, AUNTS, Dixon Place as well as the Universities of Nebraska, Vermont and Sacramento State. In 2010 he received a New York Dance & Performance "Bessie" Award for Performance. He has served as Adjunct Faculty at Bennington College and The New School and has taught as guest artist for Movement Research ,The Omega Institute, Tsekh Russia (Moscow) and Workshop Foundation (Budapest).

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Tuesday May 19, Liony Garcia shares his practice.

This session explores the interplay between visual and time-based art, focusing on how symbolic imagery merges with the physical to shift meaning and association. We’ll explore a range of images and sensations as starting points for movement that leans towards personal, idiosyncratic expression.

Liony Garcia is a dancer and choreographer from Miami, FL. He holds a BFA from New World School of the Arts. As a dancer, he has worked with Tere O’Connor, BodyTraffic, brigid baker’s wholeproject, Bistoury Physical Theater and is a founding member of Rosie Herrera Dance Theater. Garcia’s choreography has been commissioned by Miami Light Project, The Ringling Museum, National Performance Network, The Aspen Institute, Pioneer Winter Collective, The Wolfsonian Museum and New York Live Arts.

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Tuesday May 26, evan ray suzuki shares Butoh Goblin Mode.

This session will include a series of warm-ups, impulsive movements, and image-based scores rooted in evan’s longtime study of butoh and the movement practice developed around that.

evan ray suzuki is a dance artist and filmmaker of yonsei Japanese descent who creates butoh-ish performance works that investigate liminal hauntings and postinternet unbodiedness. Presentations include internationally at the Umbria Factory Festival in Spoleto, Italy, and at venues such as Pageant, Offerings, Ars Nova, JACK, CPR, Trans-Pecos, Icebox Project Space, and many parks, galleries, and basements. evan has received grants and residencies from the New York State Council on the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Ars Nova, New Dance Alliance, and Centro Umbro di Residenze Artistiche. As a performer, evan’s credits include works with Kim Brandt, maura nguyễn donohue, Ayano Elson, Gordon Hall, David Neumann, Mina Nishimura, and Glenn Potter-Takata, and he has been a member of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company since 2023. Evan is currently a 2025-26 Resident Artist at La MaMa and a 2026 Movement Research Van Lier Emerging Artist of Color Fellow.

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Monday June 1, James Barrett shares The Acoustic Body: Talking, Singing & Dancing.

We connect to the instinctual urge to breathe and vocalize to express and communicate, allowing this arena to be a portal to somatic imagination. Through improvisatory practices we address the sense of self and, by doing so, have the freedom to become other.

James Barrett (They/Them) is a queer, Brooklyn-based performer, director, and educator. They have shared their work at New Dialect (TN), the Barn at Lee (MA), Green Space, Pageant and Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church. James’ creative practice incorporates theatrical and kinesthetic studies investigating the “empty nature” of things through songs, vignettes and dances. They lead local workshops, The Acoustic Body: Talking, Singing & Dancing, in Brooklyn highlighting aspects of their creative process. Through companies they have collaborated with renowned dancemakers such as Rosie Herrera, Lauren Edson, Yin Yue, Banning Bouldin, and Joy Davis. Most recent experiences of theirs include projects with Dolly Sfeir, Ben Green, and Faye Driscoll, with whom they created the critically-acclaimed and Bessy-nominated work, "Weathering," which is now touring nationally and internationally. They have worked independently and through companies as a rehearsal assistant and teaching artist, instructing at various programs including Jazzgoba Dance Academy (Costa Rica), Perry- Mansfield, Tulane University, and The Juilliard School. www.littlejab.com Instagram: @jamesandrewbarrett

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Monday June 8, Marguerite Hemmings shares their practices.

Marguerite is practicing the cypher and a series of collective formation-making practices as performance. How can we use the cypher to recall ourselves as full and multidimensional, pulling from a 360 degree perspective on our archive our people and our power? And how can that recollection move us into collective, responsive, and alternative movement?

Marguerite Hemmings is a mover, choreographer, and educator who specializes in emergent, improvisational and social movement styles and technologies. They research the subversive role of dance and music throughout the African Diaspora and channel this research through performance, body, text, social/public media, and moving image.

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Monday June 15, the practice space team (Nora, Chloë, Rose and Neva) share some practices.

Iterating upon our past few years of facilitating group durational improvisational scores (like hour-long shakes and Contemplative Dance Practice), we’ll set up time-based scores that generate strange states for moving and heighten attention to groupness and its splinterings. We’re asking, how do we prepare for, practice, and perform an open score?

Nora is a performer and writer obsessed with impossible tasks. Chloë makes work about being alive and dead and between. Rose is a dancer who is interested in duration and rigor and play. Neva is an artist and performance maker, and continuously, always studying.

We love to dance together.

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Monday June 22, Jo Warren shares their practice.

Jo’s current practice is oriented around making what is familiar to us strange again: playing with tropes, clichés, and stereotypes that circulate through culture (and settle into our bodies) and interrogating their ubiquity. How can we access unexplored terrain by taking familiar pathways? This workshop will focus on using the senses to generate imagined states, emotional landscapes and uncover emergent characters and relationships in the room together. We will practice pausing mid-dance as a way to mine our body-state for generative material.

Jo Warren is a New York based artist whose work intersects at the body as a site of potential and as a tool of resistance. In their time in New York, Jo has shared original work at Judson Memorial Church, The Brick Theater, The Performance Mix Festival, the Exponential Festival, and at Socrates Sculpture Park through Pioneers Go East Collective. Their work has been described by Culturebot as “operatic” and “subtly campy and hilariously queer” by the Brooklyn Rail. Jo has had the pleasure of performing with artists such as Lisa Fagan, Sarah Michelson, Beth Gill, Anna Sperber, the LAVA acrobatic dance company and Vanessa Anspaugh. They are part of the original and touring cast of Faye Driscoll’s Weathering. Website: https://jo-warren.com/ Instagram: @jo__warren

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Monday June 29, Kris Lee shares their practice.

Within this practice session we will invite spontaneous play, sharing of sources/archives/interest/fantasies/dreams….. creating situations for our bodies to excavate (individually and as a group) what is IN us and release the markers that aren't of us. This is a container for us to make a new, fail, and try again.

Kris Lee (she/they) is a dancer, performer and DJ who is grounded in the Black radical tradition of improvisation and aliveness. They work with dance and sound as audio-tactile-kinesthetic technologies for exercising non-performative liberation. Lee was named by Dance Magazine as one of “25 to Watch” in 2026. They participated in the creation and performance of OO-GA-LA Reimagined (The Fred Holland and Ishmael Houston-Jones 1983 Duet Danced into the 21st Century) at Danspace Project. Currently they are working with Shamel Pitts/TRIBE in Marks of Red (premiered March 2026 at The Walker Art Center), Sweat Variant, and Moriah Evans.

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Monday July 6, we perform!

All facilitators and anyone who has attended at least one Practice Space session is invited to perform (or witness, or do the lights, or make a sound score, or, or, or). No entry fee for performers.

Anyone at all is invited to be the audience. $10-100 sliding scale ticket.

You can learn more about Practice Space at @practice_in_space