SLC Performance Lab

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

César Alvarez is interviewed by and produced Sheridan Merrick (SLC'26). Edited by Amelia Munson (SLC'26)

César Alavarez is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals, in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship, and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, bandleader, and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art, and social practice. César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016, The Kleban Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022. César teaches at Dartmouth College.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Dacvd Neumann is interviewed by Sarah Pollock (SLC'26) and Rebecca Padrick (SLC'26). Produced by Sheridan Merrick (SLC'26). Edited by Amelia Munson (SLC'26)

David Neumann’s work as a freelance choreographer, director and performer includes a wide range of projects and disciplines. Since 1999, Neumann has worked behind the scenes to craft plays, operas, films and multi-disciplinary performances. From avant-garde theater to blockbuster films, classic opera to new musicals, David’s diverse experience has given him a unique ability to articulate ideas through performers’ bodies. Neumann has many years of teaching experience working at Juilliard, NYU, Princeton and Yale and is currently a tenured professor in the Theatre Department at Sarah Lawrence College. He has received three Lucille Lortel Award nominations and one Fichandler for his work on Cabaret at Arena Stage. He is the Artistic Director of ‘Advanced Beginner Group’, a multi-disciplinary performance company, which has been awarded three Bessie Awards. He is a 2019 Lucille Lortel, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony Award nominee, as well as the recipient of the 2019 Chita Rivera Award for Choreography for his work on the Broadway musical, ‘Hadestown’. Recent and upcoming projects include the musical ‘Swept Away’ at Berkeley Rep, and choreography and coaching for ‘A Marriage Story’, starring Scarlett Johanssen and Adam Driver.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Dael Orlandersmith is interviewed by Khari Walser (SLC'27) and produced by Sheridan Merrick (SLC'26). Edited by Amelia Munson (SLC'26)

Dael Orlandersmith is an acclaimed playwright known for works such as Stoop Stories, Yellowman and Until the Flood. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Drama Desk Award nominee, and won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for The Gimmick. Her honors include a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, the Helen Merrill Award for Emerging Playwrights, Doris Duke grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Orlandersmith’s play Forever premiered at the Mark Taper Forum and was subsequently performed at venues including Long Wharf, New York Theatre Workshop and Portland Center Stage. Until the Flood debuted at St. Louis Repertory and has since been staged at numerous theaters, including the Arcola Theatre in London. She’s worked on commissions for Rattlestick Theatre and Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, including Watching the Watcher and Antonio’s Song/I Was Dreaming of a Son, and collaborated with David Cale and Robert Falls on You Don’t Know the Lonely One. In 2023, Orlandersmith performed Spiritus/Virgil’s Dance at CATF Theatre in West Virginia, followed by performances at Rattlestick Theatre and Merrimack Theatre in Lowell, Massachusetts in 2024. She also appeared in Pre-Existing Condition by Marin Ireland, directed by Maria Dizzia, at Connelly Theater in New York City. Additionally, she is currently working on a book of autofiction.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Nicki Miller is interviewed by Frank Barret (SLC'25) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

NICKI MILLER (she/her) is an interdisciplinary theatre maker, aerial artist, performer, writer, and movement educator interested in art and performance that ignites the imagination, troubles the intellect, and nourishes the body.

Nicki creates “art medicine” through theatrical encounters that connect bodies, minds, and environments to one another at the intersection of science and mysticism. Collaboration and relationship are central to her practice and process. Rather than approaching work from a discipline-specific focus, interdisciplinary art and performance emerges through poetic relationships between her skills and interests in the arts, ceremony, ecology, and embodiment.

Nicki has also worked as a specialist integrating aerial arts into the dramaturgy and staging of theatre, opera, and dance productions since 2010. She was co-founding artistic director of Only Child Aerial Theatre (with Kendall Rileigh 2012-2021). Residencies include Cirkus Cirkör (Sweden), the 2016/17 New Victory LabWorks Program, the Santa Barbara Floor to Air Festival, Toronto Circus Sessions, 5th Wall Studio, and The Hupstate Circus Residency, among others. She currently teaches Aerial Arts for Pace University’s Sands College of Performing Arts and throughout the Hudson Valley at NYC.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Alex Tartarsky is interviewed by Amelia Munson (SLC'26) and Sheridan Merrick (SLC'26) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Alex Tatarsky makes performances somewhere in between comedy, poetry, dance-theater, and rant—sometimes with songs. Tatarsky’s pieces play with the tension and overlap between written and improvised sequences, careening between known and unknown, set and scored. Drawing on the lineage of the clown, Tatarsky plays with the expectations and power dynamics of a given context, dissolving the fourth wall to respond to what is actually happening in the room, and probing the construction of genre, self, and narrative in real time.

Sad Boys in Harpy Land, which premiered in 2023 at Abrons Arts Center in New York, NY, is an adaptation of a German novel about a little boy who wants to change the world through art but isn’t very good at it. This narrative collides with other stories of tormented artists during horrific times, moving through the inaction born of anxiety, shame, and overwhelm towards strange and ecstatic modes of re-writing the world together. The performance takes the form of the bildungsroman or development novel—a classic narrative of an individual’s linear progress towards becoming a fully integrated member of society—and lets it decay, reveling in the insights of the fragment, the spiral, the wandering, and the broken bits. Sad Boys in Harpy Land was presented again in 2023 by Playwrights Horizons, New York, NY.

Tatarsky’s other works include MATERIAL, Whitney Biennial, New York, NY (2024); Gnome Core, Glen Foerd, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Dirt Trip, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY (2021); Untitled Freakout (Tell Me What To Do), The Kitchen, New York, NY (2021); and Americana Psychobabble, which premiered at La MaMa E.T.C., New York, NY (2016), with subsequent performances as part of the Exponential Festival, Brooklyn, NY (2019); and America(na) to Me, a program celebrating the 90th anniversary season at Jacob’s Pillow, Becket, MA (2022).

Photo: Maria Baranova

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Maria Camia is interviewed by Rebecca Padrick (SLC'26) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Maria Camia, creator of the MARICAMA brand and universe, is a Filipino American Director, Playwright, and Spiritual Visual Theatre Artist who creates Puppet Theater, Visual Art, and Fashion with the intention to globally inspire healing and play. Her transformative storytelling leaves audiences rewired and enlightened to the infinite potential of the MARICAMA mindset.

She has performed original work for established theaters, including The Henson Company, La Mama, and Chicago’s International Puppet Festival.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Sacha Yanow is interviewed by Julia Cowitt (SLC'24) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Sacha Yanow is an NYC/Lenapehoking–based actor, performance artist and organizer. Yanow’s performance practice draws on theater, dance, queer performance, and Jewish cultural traditions to reckon with ancestral trauma, gender and sexuality, antizionism and assimilation. Since 2015, Yanow has created a trio of solo performances based on familial archetypes— Dad Band (2015), Cherie Dre (2018) and Uncle! (2024) — these embodied portraits act as an entry point to discuss broader social issues, as well as connect to estranged personal and cultural histories. Sacha's work has been presented by venues including The Kitchen, MoMA PS1, Danspace Project, Joe's Pub, and the New Museum in NYC; PICA’s TBA Festival/Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, OR; and Festival Theaterformen in Hanover, Germany. They have received residency support from Baryshnikov Arts Center, Denniston Hill, LIFT Festival UK, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Mass MoCA, SOMA Mexico City, and Yaddo. Sacha has performed in theater, film and dance works by artists including Karen Finley, Sarah Michelson, Laura Parnes, Katy Pyle, Elisabeth Subrin, and Julie Tolentino. And they were a member of the Dyke Division of Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf, creators of Room for Cream, the live lesbian soap opera. Sacha is also working on two ongoing collaborative projects: a short film Grey Matter with organizer Bilal Ansari, disrupting settler colonial mythologies of their hometown of Williamstown, MA (Mohican Land); And an embodied dialogue Thank You for the Fire Between Us with Johannesburg-based performing artist Tshego Khutsoane involving divination practices. Sacha currently works as creative consultant for fellow artists and organizations. They served as Director of Art Matters Foundation for 12 years, and previously worked at The Kitchen as Director of Operations. They received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and are a graduate of the William Esper Studio Actor Training Program. Sacha is a member of the NY chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace.

Photo by Allison Michael Orenstein

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Juliana Francis Kelly is interviewed by K Stanger (SLC'24) and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Juliana Francis Kelly is an OBIE award-winning actor who has performed in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She has worked for both emerging and legendary theater artists, including the late Reza Abdoh, Richard Foreman, Young Jean Lee, Karin Coonrod, Anne Bogart, Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska, Normandy Sherwood, Charlotte Brathwaite, Bryan Doerries (for The Theater of War) and many others. She has appeared in films by Hal Hartley, Bertrand Mandico, Tatyana Yassukovich, and Marie Losier in collaboration with Guy Maddin. www.julianafranciskelly.net

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Eric Peters is interviewed and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Eric Peters is a Broadway performer who recently finished his run in Harmony: A New Musical, in which he originated the role of Erich. A proud Minneapolis native, Eric graduated from Northwestern University, where he studied Theatre and Mathematics. His credits include the national tour of Motown: The Musical, Off Broadway's Harmony (National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene), and Love Actually: The Unauthorized Musical Parody (Jerry Orbach Theater). When he's not performing, Eric loves to get outside, play board games, and support his beloved Minnesota Vikings.

ContemporaryPerformance.com and the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Theatre Program produce the SLC Performance Lab. During the year, visiting artists to the MFA Theatre Program's Performance Lab are interviewed after leading a workshop with the students. Performance Lab is one of the program's core components, where graduate students work with guest artists and develop performance experiments.

Sibyl Kempson is interviewed and produced by Julia Duffy (SLC'25)

Kempson’s plays have been presented in the United States, Germany, and Norway. As a performer she toured internationally from 2000-2011 with Nature Theater of Oklahoma, New York City Players, and Elevator Repair Service. Her own work has received support from the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and Dixon Place. She was given four Mondo Cane! commissions from 2002-2011 for The Wytche of Problymm Plantation, Crime or Emergency, Potatoes of August, and The Secret Death of Puppets). She received an MAP Fund grant for her collaboration with Elevator Repair Service (Fondly, Collette Richland) at New York Theatre Workshop (NYTW), a 2018 PEN/Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater Award for American Playwright at Mid-Career (specifically honoring “her fine craft, intertextual approach, and her body of work, including Crime or Emergency and Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag”), and a 2014 USA Artists Rockefeller fellowship with NYTW and director Sarah Benson. She received a 2013 Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation commission for Kyckling and Screaming (a translation/adaptation of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck), a 2013-14 McKnight National residency and commission for a new play (The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.), a New Dramatists/Full Stage USA commission for a devised piece (From the Pig Pile: The Requisite Gesture(s) of Narrow Approach), and a National Presenters Network Creation Fund Award for the same project. Her second collaboration with David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, I Understand Everything Better, received a Bessie Award for Outstanding Production in 2015; the first was Restless Eye at New York Live Arts in 2012. Current and upcoming projects include a new opera with David Lang for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston for 2018, Sasquatch Rituals at The Kitchen in April 2018, and The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S. Kempson is a MacDowell Colony fellow; a member of New Dramatists; a USA Artists Rockefeller fellow; an artist-in-residence at the Abrons Arts Center; a 2014 nominee for the Doris Duke Impact Award, the Laurents Hatcher Award, and the Herb Alpert Award; and a New York Theatre Workshop Usual Suspect. Her plays are published by 53rd State Press, PLAY: Journal of Plays, and Performance & Art Journal (PAJ). Kempson launched the 7 Daughters of Eve Theater & Performance Co. in April 2015 at the Martin E. Segal Center at the City University of New York. The company’s inaugural production, Let Us Now Praise Susan Sontag, premiered at Abrons Arts Center in New York City. A new piece, Public People’s Enemy, was presented in October 2018 at the Ibsen Awards and Conference in Ibsen’s hometown of Skien, Norway. 12 Shouts to the Ten Forgotten Heavens, a three-year cycle of rituals for the Whitney Museum of American Art in the Meatpacking District of New York City, began on the vernal equinox in March 2016 to recur on each solstice and equinox through December 2018