Announcing CRCI 2025 Programming
Photo by Ryan Landell
Early Phase Residency: Sage Ni’Ja Whitson
March 2025
Sage Ni'Ja Whitson will be working on their new project, Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial: Flight of Seven Planets. Trans Trappist the Extraterrestrial is an experimental trap opera, live performance art, and VR sculpture project made for and in microgravity.
Whitson embodies the work as, Trans Trappist, the conductor and librettist, a Transgender Extraterrestrial who speaks the galactic wisdom of the TRAPPIST planets. In a terrestrial juxtapostion Whitson collides TRAPPIST with a theoretical intervention of Transness and Trap Music - a Black cultural, technological, and musical phenomenon - signaling possibilities of flight and Black imagination, in the creation of a new critical and creative endeavor.
The CRCI Early Phase Residency with Sage Ni'ja Whitson is supported by the Brown Arts Institute and The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) at Brown University.
Immersive Residency: Movement in Microgravity
March 2025, June 2025
Photo by Aly Hansen
Photo by Rachel Keane
Photo by Cameron Kinchloe
About the Residency
CRCI's Immersive Residency will bring together dance artists Laila Franklin, Michael Figueroa, Sasha Peterson, and CRCI's very own Kate Gow to explore the challenges and opportunities of movement in microgravity. Participants will engage in research and development to refine choreographic practices for weightless environments, collaborate on optimizing technologies for microgravity, and participate in theoretical discussions on art production in space. While this year the artists will remain Earth-bound, findings will be showcased at the June 2025 CRCI conference and featured in Season 2 of the Dances with Robots podcast. Public classes related to the research may also be offered.
The CRCI Immersive Residency is supported by the Brown Arts Institute and The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) at Brown University.
CRCI 2025: Moondance
June 12th, 13th & 14th, 2025
Photo by Keira Chang
The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) celebrates its 10th year with an annual gathering at Brown University, June 12–14, 2025, in Providence, Rhode Island. This year’s themes explore the intersections of choreography, performance, and emerging technologies of the body in environments beyond Earth. How might live performance and arts research take shape in microgravity? Given the colonial imperatives of space exploration, how can rethinking terrestrial creative practices contribute to justice work?
CRCI 2025: Moondance marks a new phase in CRCI’s coalitional endeavors; a move to address global inequities by centering the arts to imagine futures beyond our planet.
Photo by Mark Escribano
Opening Performance at CRCI 2025:
COMMIT! by Kate Ladenheim
COMMIT! is an interactive performance in which a performer (Ladenheim) executes hundreds of dramatic falls in an hour, while the audience uses a web app to vote on whether they believe the performer has truly committed. After rounds of falling, an avatar replica of Ladenheim reads the audience's feedback aloud, while the live performer adjusts their actions in response. Throughout, motion capture and custom sensors collect data on each fall in an attempt to discover (and justify) the most "committed" fall there is.
Using gamified interactions to control a durational performance, COMMIT! explores the shifting boundaries between technological control and societal expectations. Through the performer’s repeated attempts to "commit," the piece highlights tensions between physical effort and digital representation, as well as the audience’s role in shaping and judging the performer’s actions. In this way, COMMIT! critiques societal pressures to demonstrate resilience, adaptability, and perfection. The work emphasizes the inexact and often reductive nature of data collection and digital mediation, inviting reflection on how technology distorts and constrains identity and agency.
COMMIT! is led by Kate Ladenheim, and made in collaboration with media artist Mollye Bendell and production technician Timothy Kelly.
COMMIT! is commissioned by the Brown Arts Institute and The Conference for Research on Choreographic Interfaces (CRCI) at Brown University.