JACK Reveals 2025 Spring Season Featuring Theater, Dance and More

This spring, JACK will present a season of bold, thought-provoking performances that challenge, inspire, and ignite conversation. From visceral explorations of power and identity to immersive, participatory works that blur the lines between artist and audience, the Spring 2025 season showcases groundbreaking artists pushing the boundaries of contemporary performance. This season, JACK will present Ankita Sharma’s dhoka/Betrayal/, a gripping dance-theater duet unraveling the intersections of mythology and authoritarianism; Asia Stewart’s any experience with men and alcohol, an audacious, interactive performance dissecting power and service; and Cara Hagan’s Mama Piranha, a poetic journey through the dreamscape of motherhood and self-discovery. As always, JACK remains a space for artistic risk-taking, collective dialogue, and transformative experiences—inviting audiences to witness, question, and engage. Learn more about each project below!

THE SEASON:

MAY

Ankita Sharma: dhoka/Betrayal/
Created and Performed by Ankita Sharma
May 15th - 17th, 2025

dhoka/Betrayal/ - Heady and erotic, dhoka entangles Hindu goddess Kali’s ultimate power with present-day authoritarianism and religious violence in a South-Asian diasporic dance-theater duet. Using myth to unpack how Western influence has shaped Hinduism into propaganda for ethnonationalism, dhoka accompanies Kali's transformation into a colonized, fetishized, destructive image that upholds violence with her bloodied tongue. The work lives at the fringes of reality and genre, letting the epic and human dance together: a physical exploration of how worship distorts what something stands for and a challenging look at embodied colonization in a political world trending right. 

Ankita Sharma is an experimental movement-based performance artist invested in storytelling where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. They create to think critically, unpacking systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in the body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is a grungy, confrontational, cheeky dance-horror with physical practices rooted in Contemporary dance, Dance-Theater, and forms from both the South Asian and the African diaspora. For Ankita, performance audiences are agentive, sitting with and challenging discomfort in environments where sophistication and blasphemy collide. 

Ankita holds degrees in Dance and Anthropology and currently lives in New York. They have had live work performed throughout the US, including at: Denver Art Museum, Abrons Art Center, Dixon Place, The Tank, BASE, JACK, Ormao, Brockus Dance Project, and University Settlement. Their films have been presented internationally. They have received funding and support from Performance Project, GALLIM, NYSCA, Base Experimental Arts + Space, The Barn, ECS, LEIMAY, Crown-Goodman, and more. In their spare time, they have managed several award-winning dance-theater companies, including Punchdrunk's Sleep No More. 

Asia Stewart: any experience with men and alcohol

Created and Performed by Asia Stewart
May 29th - 31th, 2025
Tickets are available here.

any experience with men and alcohol is a participatory performance about service and power. Adapting Allen Jones' highly controversial "Table" sculpture, Stewart spends the majority of the performance on all fours with a panel of glass balanced on her back. While on the floor, Stewart leads random members of the audience through a series of questions, instructions, and challenges. Considering tables to be sites of exchange, the performance unfolds as an absurd study of the conversations and interactions that happen at and around them.

Asia Stewart is a performance artist whose conceptual work centers her body as a living archive. Based in the United States, she devises rituals that reflect the way she weathers life in a deeply extractive society. Many of her performances unfold as social experiments that negotiate terms of agency and power with audiences. Stewart’s performances have been supported by organizations that include The Bronx Museum, The Shed, Franklin Furnace, A.I.R. Gallery, Marc Straus Gallery, Marble House Project, GALLIM, The Watermill Center, and the Brooklyn Arts Council.

Stewart routinely questions how live art can be documented and represented across multiple mediums. Her photographs and videos have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

JUNE

Cara Hagan: Mama Piranha

Created and Performed by Cara Hagan
June 12th - 14th, 2025
Tickets are available here.

Mama Piranha invites audiences on a journey through the liminal space between dreams and reality. Caught in the vivid haze of hypnagogia, a woman grapples with loss, identity, reclamation, and the search for meaning. Are the fleeting visions of her dreamscape the product of an overactive mind, or do they reveal profound truths about her existence as a woman and a mother? As the inevitability of waking looms, will the sharp edges of reality bring relief—or an even deeper confrontation with her inner world?

Cara Hagan (She/They) is a mover, maker, writer, curator, champion of just communities, and a dreamer. She believes in the power of art to upend the laws of time and physics, a necessary occurrence in pursuit of liberation. In their work, no object or outcome is sacred; but the ritual to get there is. Hagan’s adventures take place as live performance, on screen, as installation, on the page, and in collaboration with others in a multitude of contexts.

Hagan’s newest short film, “Cut Me Summa Dat Noise,” premiered at the Grrl Haus Film Festival in Cambridge, MA in December of 2024 and has been accepted to several festivals for 2025. She is currently in process for “In/Separate,” a multimedia performance work that explores how human bodies and non-human bodies experience climate trauma in ways that are similar, connected, or both. The work has been supported by a grant through the Puffin Foundation and a technical residency at the Barnard Movement lab in 2024. The anticipated premiere of In/Separate is set for the fall of 2026. 

Other recent work has included, "were we birds?,” an immersive, site-specific work commissioned as part of the 90th anniversary season of the American Dance Festival. Additionally, Hagan's body percussion work titled, "SKIDD-ID-A-BOP" was commissioned as part of the 2023 season for Rhythmically Speaking, a jazz-focused dance company based in Minneapolis. Hagan was awarded a 2023 GALLIM Parent Artist Residency, where she has had the pleasure of crafting a new solo-dance and visual artwork titled, "Mama Piranha." Thus far, iterations of Mama Piranha have been presented by Morven Moves at the Morven Museum, a GALLIM artist residency showing at the Chelsea Factory, and by Pioneers Go East as part of the Crossroads Festival. Hagan will premiere the work in its entirety in the spring of 2025 at JACK.