Heather Sincavage, To My Small Hearth, His Fire Came - Performed at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on April 23, 2024
Performance Art Week XIII
April 14-17, 2025
Featured artists
Michelle Ellsworth
On April 29, 2010 Ellsworth premiered, The End of Man: Preparations for the Obsolescence of the Y Chromosome at MCA in Denver. 15 years later, she is premiering, Memento Mori in the Dreamatorium. This new work provides tools for death preparation and posthumous logistics. Based in reality, carefully developed, and rigorously tested on human subjects, each method is designed to be safe, effective, and practical. End-of-life care, choreography, documentation, replacement objects, and estate planning are addressed. At the heart of this work is Ellsworth's newest death preparation tool, The Dreamatorium. This portable, micro-human-scale device enables users to rehearse and adapt to the emotional and logistical realities of a parent's death. Driving Ellsworth’s labor is the belief that, until we change our relationship to death we can not change our relationship to life. Memento Mori in the Dreamatorium, provides tools to navigate life's “sure thing.” In a society often ill-equipped to handle death’s complexities, Ellsworth offers equipment. Collaborators include: Ondine Geary, Bruce Miller, and Satchel Spencer.
Michelle Ellsworth will perform Memento Mori in the Dreamatorium at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Holiday Theater on Tuesday, April 15 at 7:00 pm.
aryel rené jackson
Re:Future is a review and remix of a 2019 collaborative performance called The future is a constant wake that relates ancestral knowledge with the movement of topsoil. Using live visuals, sound, and uncovering text, it explores themes of displacement, labor, and resilience, turning the scientific interest in soil into a symbol of memory and reflection.
In Colorado, Re:Future links histories, highlighting landscapes traversed under force and coercion. Aryel René Jackson, an anti-disciplinary artist from Louisiana, performs a live top-down view of shifting, sifting, and clearing soil with their hands and feet. At moments, carved text—written in the language spoken in the original film The future is a constant wake—gradually emerges. This re-staging engages with soil as a vessel of memory, a kind of performer––a kind of witness.
Revisiting the poetic staging underscores connections to identity and labor, while logistical challenges—like integrating projectors, lighting, and sound—mirror the performance’s tension when engaging with symbols and their meanings. Achieving the intimacy of the original while maintaining the scale of a live-streamed performance adds another layer of difficulty that is navigated with improvisation and choreography. As a way of mirroring, Jackson engages with these constraints within the performance itself––envisioning the words “at the end of a kind of living,” as a constant transitioning with a sense of reflection.
Aryel René Jackson will perform Re: Future at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on Monday, April 14 at 1:00 pm
MG bernard
Visiting hours under the covers (2025) is a new performance where artist MG Bernard (she/they/ugh) invites audience members to climb into bed with her and do...whatever they want. Instead of a doctor or nurse, the artist asks participants to play a temporary "care partner" role while visiting them under the covers in a hospital bed. Via this experimental and participatory performance, she asks "How have my early experiences of being 'touched' by medical professionals impacted the way I experience bodily intimacy today? Can my bodymind learn/relearn/unlearn how to distinguish between 'clinical contact' and physical intimacy that can be pleasurable?" Bernard hopes to discover new and unfamiliar relationships, narratives, and movements with each one-on-one interaction.
MG Bernard will perform Visiting hours under the covers at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on Monday, April 14 from 10:0 0am-1:00 pm; Tuesday, April 15 from 11:00 am-2:00 pm; and Wednesday, April 16 from 11:00 am-2:00 pm
hyperlink
Beach Day started as a Hyperlink Art Collective project for Tryst, a Torrance Art Museum project in Los Angeles. Hyperlink Members Julie Puma, Tobias Fike, Theresa Anderson, Alicia Ordell and Lynn Bowman Cravens collaborated on a video installation with a pool/beach party theme to touch on subjects such as pool and beach culture, beauty standards, who has access to water and fun. What are our cultural and societal rules and norms and who gets to break them.
Hyperlink will perform Beach Day on Wednesday, April 16 at the CU Denver Experience Gallery at 6:00 pm. The Beach Day installation will be on view at the gallery from April 15-20.
Adán de la garza
Sweet spot will feature radios scattered throughout the space, broadcasting sound via portable radio transmitters connected to shotgun microphones. As each microphone crosses the path of a radio, a feedback loop will be created, influenced by my position within the space. Blindfolded, Adán de la Garza will navigate the room, using sound and acoustics to discover the “sweet spots” of resonance he wants to explore further. The performance will culminate when he exits the room, leaving the space filled with the ambient sounds from outside.
Adán de la Garza will perform sweet spot at the Emmanuel Art Gallery on April 17 (time TBD).
elle hong
lightness has a call that’s hard to hear. considers how external interactions shape our internal (self-)perceptions and vice versa. A performer comes out of a closet repeatedly, considering how introductions can be revealing, and simultaneously reveal even more about what is being withheld. How can we utilize the performance space as an ephemeral site for externalizing desires for transformation? Through dance, audience participation, and choral orchestration, the artist sets forth intentions for embodying lightness while demonstrating the certain impossibilities of disentangling lightness from darkness and/or heaviness.
Elle Hong will perform lightness has a call that’s hard to hear. at the Emmanuel Art Gallery (date and time TBD)
Teague McDaniel & silen wellington
In December 2024, Teague Oak McDaniel (they/he) broke their thumb while competing in a queer wrestling match with Silen Wellington (they/he). As Teague recovered, the two artists reflected on the manifold interpretations of their time wrestling and the resulting mark it left on Teague’s body. In the months following, they worked to develop Grapple–a cyclical game of chance that renders each performance unique.
In Grapple, Teague and Silen literally grapple to win rounds of a leg-wrestling game. The winner of each round is awarded the opportunity to recite lines of poetry. In the prose, each artist tenderly grapples with their own masculinity, spirituality, and self-expression.
Grapple was designed to create balance by carving out space in the in-betweenness of the seemingly opposite phenomenon: internal and external, physical and ethereal, masculine and feminine.
Teague McDaniel and Silen Wellington will perform Grapple at the Emmanuel Art Gallery (date and time TBD)
