OPEN STAGE | Fall Movement 2025

CPR’s long-running Fall Movement program is an opportunity for artists to present new, fully-produced work in dance, performance, and time-based art in a shared program, curated by an independent panel of artists through an open call. Artists are encouraged to submit work with experimental approaches to content, form, and aesthetic, and which embrace risk-taking and the unexpected. Five artists working across and between live art disciplines were selected to present their work for Fall Movement 2025: Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye.
This year, for the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, Fall Movement 2025 and Spring Movement 2026, with each program presenting five short works. The artists selected for Spring Movement are Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Rosalie Yu, and Mae May, who will present their work on March 13-14, 2026.

The Fall Movement 2025/Spring Movement 2026 programs were curated by a selection panel composed of artists Shawn Escarciga, Dominica Greene, Amelia Heintzelman, and Muyassar Kurdi.
PROGRAM
Justin Allen: Rot
Rot builds on previous works Karaoke (2024) and Untitled (2021), which both combine writing, tap dancing, and video. In this new performance, I sing along to a karaoke-style video, the text projected onto the wall. The video, however, departs from a few karaoke conventions: it has no sound and includes not only original song lyrics but original poetry and onomatopoeic phrases in the style of jazz scatting. Following the video, I sing the lyrics a cappella, read the poetry, and "perform" the onomatopoeias by tap dancing, interpreting the words into live rhythm. Thematically, Rot addresses the Black bourgeoisie, class stratification, and social conformity. The performance subverts the metaphor of "rotting away" due to lack of motivation or progress by asking: What if upward mobility in a classist society is just another form of rotting?
Kaye Hurley: 9V PUSSY
9V PUSSY is a multimedia live performance celebrating the mechanical nature of the body. With electronics and sex, this performance asks us to destroy the body as temple. Through manipulated live video, kinetic sculpture, and original text, 9V PUSSY reclaims the cyborg body as a defense of bodily autonomy.
Nadia Khayrallah: Martyr Complex
Martyr Complex is a solo dance-theater trip through the spectacle, seduction, and inevitable betrayal of Empire. It draws inspiration from:

- Handala, Palestinian cartoonist and satirist Naji al-Ali’s figure of a 10-year old boy, representing the betrayal of the Palestinian people
- The biblical arrest and crucifixion of Jesus Christ
- America’s Sweethearts, the docuseries about the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, and the branding of American nationalism at the intersection of megachurch Christianity, military culture, and sex appeal.

The collaged soundtrack includes excerpts from the bible, America’s Sweethearts, and interviews with Naji al-Ali.The movement shifts between contemporary dance, pedestrian movement, cheerdance, dabke, and military drills, as the performer takes on various personas (sometimes blurring the lines between them), positioning themself as both oppressor and victim. 
Ibuki Kuramochi: m/Other m/Other is a Butoh based solo performance exploring grief, kinship, and transformation across species lines. Inspired by the death of my dog and Donna Haraway’s theory of companion species, the work invokes motherhood as a bond that is not biological but shared. An edible bone lingers in the space as memory, and I chew it as part of the ritual. I carry a bone of my lost companion within my costume as a relic. Through movement, my body shifts toward dog motherhood. I mourn, howl, and search for my absent kin. m/Other unfolds as a ritual of interspecies connection.
Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye: to be free
to be free explores immigrant hypervisibility and surveillance through sound-movement choreography. Responding to what it means to be seen and make art with our bodies during heightened scrutiny, this piece centers observation and deep listening to the invisible, Sacred, and absent.

Audiences will experience layered sonic landscapes created through loop pedals, body microphones, and live vocals, interwoven with choreography that embodies the invisibilities of immigrant labor and the absence of what was left behind. The performance moves between moments of hypervisibility and disappearance, using repetitive soundscapes and gestural movement to create an immersive meditation on presence.

As transcontinental artists whose families immigrated seeking better lives, we use our bodies as both instruments and archives, creating a living testimony to being seen, unseen, and surveilled while honoring immigrant resilience.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Justin Allen works in music and sound, performance, visual art, and writing. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Shed, and ISSUE Project Room and received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He received his BA in literary studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School and his MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2022 he released a four-song EP, Ekphrastic Punk, with his band Black Boots. In the fall of 2024, he released his first book, Language Arts, published by Wendy’s Subway.
Kaye Hurley is a playwright and multimedia artist. She is currently an Exponential Festival Fellow and her play :/secondplace will be presented as part of the 2026 festival in January. Recently, her video Pickup was screened as an official selection at Ridgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival. She works extensively with Kedian Keohan, with whom she developed BLUSH in the Soho Rep Writer Director Lab, as well as their first piece DAD DANCE! Kaye sound designs and plays “Pussy” in Amando Houser’s DeliaDelia!, has sound designed for artists like Sibyl Kempson and Erin Markey, and has also collaborated with Peter Mills Weiss + Julia Mounsey. Playwriting MFA candidate at Brooklyn College. khurley.info @a_femme_url
Nadia Khayrallah is a Lebanese-American dance artist, writer, administrator, and (dis)content creator, rooted in history and fantasy, form and groove, esoterica and common sense. They have worked as a company member with Parijata Performance Projects, Gotham Dance Theater, Jonah Bokaer Choreography, and Artists by Any Other Name. They have presented choreographic work through Pageant, Arab American National Museum, Time & Space Limited, Little Island NYC, Dixon Place, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, Queens College Arts Festival, Screendance Miami, YallaPunk, and New York Arab Festival, and New York Fashion Week. Nadia is Programs and Advocacy Coordinator at Dance/NYC, a teaching artist, and a part of movements around labor and Palestinian liberation in the performing arts.
Ibuki Kuramochi is a Japanese-born interdisciplinary artist working across performance, video, and installation. Her work has been shown in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, Sydney, Taipei, and Rome. Since 2016, she has studied Butoh under Yoshito Ohno at the Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Her practice explores metamorphosis, interspecies kinship, and posthuman feminism through the physicality of Butoh. She is a recipient of the 2025 AHL AAPI Women Artist Fellowship, 2024 DCA EMPOWERMENT and Dance in the City grants, and the 2022 SCIART Fellowship. In 2019, she was featured as Artist of the Year in LA WEEKLY’s PEOPLE issue, and in 2025 was named one of Los Angeles Magazine’s Ten Essential Local Artists.
Marie Lloyd Paspe is a Filipina-American choreographer, dance artist, vocalist, and performance maker re-rooting liberatory futures in the practice of kapwa ("shared one-ness"). Of Batangueña & Ilonggo lineage, she immigrated to four countries before age 6, now based in Brooklyn, NY. As a descendant of nurses and farmers, her work is shaped by a tenacity to be in service against oppressive regimes. Solo and collaborative works have been presented nationally at Harlem Stage, Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe's Pub, Green Space, among others; and internationally at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), UGNAYAN (Manila), and Taikang Space (Beijing). She is a 2025 NEFA National Dance Production Finalist, 2024 Harlem Stage WaterWorks Emerging Artist, 2024 Target Margin Theater Institute Fellow, 2023 GALLIM Moving Artist Resident, 2022 A4 Jadin Wong Fellow, and a recurring Resident Artist with TOPAZ Arts (2021, 2025, 2026). As a performer with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company (2018-24), the company received a Bessie for Outstanding Choreography for contributions to Deep Blue Sea. She has performed with Faye Driscoll, Sugar Vendil, Ching-I Chang, among others. Marie has guest taught at University of the Philippines, SVA Design for Social Innovation, Princeton University, and Duke University. marielloydpaspe.com / @mmmlloyd.

Sylvain Souklaye is a French Caribbean Brooklyn-based live artist, sonic maker, and author whose work transcends identity politics to explore interiority, broken bodies, and environmental urgencies. Rooted in Lyon's Canut revolt heritage and Martinique's Neg marron rebellion spirit, his practice evolved from DIY social justice "vandalism" to gut-wrenching live experiences and sonic installations.

His notable performances include "Depopulated" at Judson Church (New York) and the Momentary (Arkansas), and "UNDERMY-YOUR-OURSKIN" at Grace Exhibition Space (New York) and Ancien Musée de Bruxelles-Nord (Brussels). His work has been presented at Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz gallery, Helsinki Central Library Oodi, and Ars Electronica Forum Wallis, among others.

Recent projects include "solitary venise" as part of Observatory Station at the Barbican and installation "Be Happy or Die" (Prospect Art grant recipient). Currently a Harvestworks fellow and IRCAM lecturer, Souklaye is a commissioned artist for the International Contemporary Ensemble & Jerome Foundation's 2022-2024 program. His practice creates collective intimate experiences that activate audiences through what he calls "epigenetic dialogues," revealing shared interiorities through sound, movement, and radical presence. / https://www.sylvainsouklaye.com @sylvain.souklaye

Host or Publisher CPR- Center for Performance Research