OPEN STUDIOS | Curated by Nazareth Hassan

*In the event that advance tickets for this program are sold out, an in-person wait list will open at 7PM. We always do our best to get everyone inside comfortably!
Director and performance artist Garrett Allen, composer Matthew Jamal, and choreographer Liana Zhen-ai are all artists who have an active relationship with shame in their performances. They achieve striking balance between taming and succumbing to trauma, while demonstrating the fragility of ego and its subsequent death. This is where hope is born, as these artists offer us a space to process what often remains repressed. Multidisciplinary theater maker Nazareth Hassan has curated artists who explore shame as a social emotion, in which the performance of self becomes dissociative.

PROGRAM

Matthew Jamal: Skipping Service

A reflection on gender, family and religion performed through use of cello, voice and electronics.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nazareth Hassan is a writer, director & musician. Performance and theater works include Practice at Playwrights Horizons, Bowl EP at The Vineyard Theater, Untitled (1-5) at The Shed (text published by 3 Hole Press), VANTABLACK at Theatretreffen Stückemarkt in Berlin, Security Theater at Judson Memorial Church, and Memory A at Museo Universitario del Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City. Their 2nd book, Slow mania, was published in 2025 by Futurepoem. In 2022-2023, they were the dramaturg at the Royal Court Theatre in London. They are currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University. They were a 2023–25 Jerome Hill artist fellow and the 2024-25 Tow Playwright in Residence at The Vineyard Theatre. www.nazarethhassan.com

Matthew Jamal is a New York–based performance artist and composer whose interdisciplinary practice merges sound, movement, and visual mediums. From the ages of 14-18, he was primarily a street performer improvising through use of live looping and double bass in Washington DC and New York. Now, their career includes collaborations with Madonna, Benjamin Clementine, Obongjayar, J’Nai Bridges, Jason Moran, and Jacob Jonas The Company. As a composer and producer Jamal’s credits include works by Annahstasia, Cleo Reed, and Cktrl. His work has been featured at major events such as the Newport Jazz Festival, Free Arts, the Gucci Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, and covered by the likes of Vogue, Vanity Fair and Notion Magazine. Rejecting genre as a limiting label, Jamal describes his music as queer, fluid and non-conforming. He holds a BM in Classical and Jazz Double Bass Performance from the Manhattan School of Music.

OPEN STUDIOS is a series of work-in-progress showings held regularly throughout the year, organized by guest curators, and serves as an incubator for new work, inviting the public into the artistic process.

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher CPR- Center for Performance Research