Attend

This project is supported by a Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Residency with previous support from an Access. Movement. Play. (A.M.P.) Residency (2024) — supported The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Attend is a radical access-as-performance crip dance work created for ONE Disabled audience member. A culminating public event – an interactive video performance – weaves together the edges of care and access from the performance while troubling product-oriented performance and prioritizing interdependence.

Created in collaboration with Miguel ‘Miggy’ Esteban, India Harville, Elisabeth Motley, Cory Nakasue, Beatriz Castro, JJ Omelagah, and Brent Felker.

BAX Artist in Residence Showing MAY 10, 2025 Details TBA.

Attend draws from crip methodologies and care aesthetics, and introduces new methods for crip dance making, such as leaky methods, which refer to how separate embodiments, histories, and memories might interconnect or web together in an exchange process. In order to make crip performances for one audience member, the artists create disability dance scores that are in conversation with the access needs of each audience member. The performers also explore how their own experiences of disability, access intimacy, and care intertwine with the audience member’s experiences.

Photography by Whitney Browne

Devised through the primacy of access, the final interactive video performance braids together the edges of the original performance scores for one. As a counter-performance to the idea of ‘performance,’ it invites the public to experience, witness, and embody the traces of the dances for one person without ever witnessing or attending the original performances.

The project considers the ways in which Disabled artists are often kept apart from one another and intentionally attends to one audience member’s accessible travel to the performance, ASL, audio description, COVID protocols, neurodiverse performance design, accessible seating, and meals AS performance actions. The work presses at the boundaries of notions of universal access and instead creates specific and care-full performance for an individual rather than a mainstream mass. The culminating public event results in an interactive multi-channel video performance that troubles conventional product-oriented performance and instead prioritizes the small, slow interdependence that disability culture-building requires.