Center for Performance Research Unveils Spring 2026 Season Of Public Programs And Technical Residency

Center for Performance Research, which supports the development and incubation of new work in dance, performance, and time-based art, has announced its Spring 2026 Season of public programs featuring performances, installations, workshops, and special events with CPR resident artists and an expansive network of artists, organizations, and guest curators, as well as a Spring 2026 Technical Residency with artist Yiseul LeMieux.

“This spring at CPR, artists are building networks of care that protect, regenerate, instruct, and fortify our community, offering means of resistance, refusal, sanctuary, and solace against predominant structures of power,” says Kerosene Jones, CPR Programs Manager. “Through spontaneous moving companies, irreverent demonstrations of grief, ecosomatic activation, dance scores for the visually impaired, ecstatic whirling, dissections of state propaganda, and more, artists this season explore fate, chance, nationalism, indigeneity, shame, nourishment, trance, cosmology, resilience, and the strength of collective resources.”

Public program series all begin with the word “OPEN” – capturing the ethos of CPR as a space that is expansive, accessible, and porous – including OPEN AiR, a flexible platform for resident artists to share their current practice; OPEN LAB, bridging the theoretical and the practical with opportunities for learning and creative exchange; OPEN STUDIOS, providing an informal setting for experimentation and critical feedback, organized by guest curators; and OPEN DOOR, encapsulating various collaborations and cross-pollinations with organizations, collectives, and artists in the CPR community.

With CPR Artists-in-Residence (AiRs) forming a central part of public programs, the Spring 2026 Season will feature OPEN AiR presentations across multimedia performance, featuring nocturnal odysseys, disability poetics, and absurdist funerals with 2025 AiRs DANIRO, Latif Askia Ba, and Spring 2026 Technical Resident Yiseul LeMieux. Additionally, CPR's 2026 AiRs will present a variety of OPEN LAB programs, featuring ecological bodywork with Joan Gutiérrez, sustained spinning with Valentina Baché, dancing stillness and silence with Yuki Kawahisa, and investigating the affective resonances of cardboard with Erica Enriquez. 

Additional Spring 2026 Season programs include OPEN STUDIOS organized by guest curators Nazareth Hassan and Ann Marie Dorr, and the OPEN DOOR programs Tesora Garcia and Zacarías González, curated by Visual AIDS and Cameron Barnett: Ending Explained.

CPR is also thrilled to announce the line-up for its Spring Movement 2026, which presents new work in a shared program, with artists selected through an OPEN CALL and by a peer panel of artists. For the first time, CPR solicited applications for two distinct programs spanning two seasons, with each program presenting five short works, making this presentation opportunity available to more artists. Spring Movement 2026 will present work by Demetris Charalambous, Morgan Gregory, Umber Majeed, Rosalie Yu, and Mae May on March 13-14, 2026. Fall Movement 2025 featured work by Justin Allen, Kaye Hurley, Nadia Khayrallah, Ibuki Kuramochi, and Marie Lloyd Paspe and Sylvain Souklaye on December 5 and 6, 2025. 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.

Alongside the Spring 2026 Season, CPR is thrilled to support a week-long Technical Residency (closed to the public) with Yiseul LeMieux, who will research her new work, Die Cute, an imagined funeral that invites the audience through elements such as procession, eulogy, and celebration. Incorporating a bunny choir and a quietly humorous pastor figure, LeMieux creates a space where grief, tenderness, and absurdity can coexist.