Pioneers Go East Collective Presents the 2026 Out-FRONT! Festival
January 3-11, 2026, at Judson Memorial Church

Pioneers Go East Collective, an artist-driven incubator for thought-provoking art, announces the lineup for the fourth edition of the Out-FRONT! Festival. Centering queer and feminist voices, the 2026 festival features the work of nine interdisciplinary movement-based artists exploring bold new performance modes for a lively exchange of art and culture.

The 2026 festival features world premieres by Ian Andrew Askew, Alexa Grae, Dominica Greene, Johnnie Cruise Mercer, Suzzanne Ponomarenko, Owen Prum, Sugar Vendil, and Jo Warren, and a US premiere by Norway-based artist Corentin JPM Leven. The festival will also include dance and experimental short films as part of the Out-FRONT! Film Series.

Pioneers Go East Collective’s producing and curatorial team includes founder and artistic director Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, co-founder Philip Treviño, and cultural organizers Remi Harris and Joyce Isabelle.

“We created the Out-FRONT! Fest. as a high-visibility platform for radical choreographers and performing artists whose rigorous, playful, and fabulously outrageous creative practices speak to our community in new, unexpected, and beautiful ways,” said Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte. “We remain dedicated to making the invisible visible. We champion art for and by underrepresented LGBTQ+ and feminist artists. The spirit that initially brought us together continues to be our guiding force. Now, more than ever, we are committed to fostering cross-cultural connections that can endure these uncertain times and encourage us to emphasize empathy as a vital and spiritual necessity.”

The 2026 Out-FRONT! Festival runs Saturday, January 3 to Sunday, January 11, at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012 (entrance at 243 Thompson Street). All festival events are free with a suggested donation of $25. Reservations are required and can be made online at https://www.eventbrite.com/o/pioneers-go-east-collective-32986072425.

The 2026 festival is presented in partnership with Judson Memorial Church and is supported by JanArtsNYC.

2026 Out-FRONT! Festival Schedule

Saturday, January 3, and Monday, January 5, at 7pm
Split Bill
Suzzanne Ponomarenko
Selections From: Tapestries (world premiere)
Dominica Greene
openings (world premiere)
Running time: 75 minutes

Selections From: Tapestries is a dance-theater piece guided by the curious narrative of The Unicorn Tapestries or Hunt of the Unicorn (1495-1505), reimagined through the queering out of Ukrainian folklore and tales. This non-narrative performance consists of eight short vignettes developed through a rigorous and quirky movement vocabulary abstracted from Ukrainian folk dance, ballet, American modern dance, and contemporary dance. It serves as an embodied archive, an ever-evolving “Сморгасбург” (smorgasbord) of the subjective history of queer Ukrainian culture and pays homage to the endless fight of all the unicorns.

Choreographed and directed by Suzzanne Ponomarenko. Performed by eight movement artists:
Kate Antionette Reyes, Pilar Mellon-Reyes, Lauren Marie Jaeger, Larissa Asebedo, Paige Barnett Kulbeth, Piper Makenzie Dye, Dalton Young, and Jay Beardsley. Music composed by Katie James Rushin. Lighting by S.C. Lucier. Costumes by David Quinn. Illustrations by Emmy Castellani.

openings, by Dominica Greene, is a conceptual performance hinging on improvisation and audience participation, shaping a living dialogue around intervention and communal care. Guided by Greene’s voice through an invisible score—a pre-recorded audio track created anew each day —each performance unfolds uniquely in time. openings asks what compels or prevents us from acting in moments of crisis or need, inviting multiple entry points to reflect on what love looks like, how human connection can be sustained, and the responsibilities we hold to one another.

* * *

Tuesday, January 6, and Wednesday, January 7, at 7pm
Split Bill
Sugar Vendil
Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia (world premiere)
Alexa Grae
Tone Pillar (world premiere)
Running time: 95 minutes

Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia is a memoir of a Filipinx American childhood that interweaves chamber music, dance, and nonlinear theater in an interdisciplinary performance. Excavating seemingly insignificant but deeply ingrained memories, Antonym envisions the future as an escape from pain and ponders how we can possess painful memories without being beholden to them. Using field recordings of New York City to create a rich sonic landscape, the four seasons serve as a cyclical frame and context for memory.

Choreography and music composition by Sugar Vendil. Directed by Mei Ann Teo, Pink Fang. Performed by Cindy Lan, Annie Nikunen, Marie Lloyd Paspe, Sugar Vendil, and Annie Wang. Costume and set design by Harriet Jung. Lighting design by Hao Bai.

Tone Pillar, by Alexa Grae, is a techno-opera that layers live vocals and movement with club-influenced compositions, poetry, and rituals sparked out of self-preservation. With Stephanie Acosta as director, they draw from the traditions of operatic madness, cosmic spirituality, queer raves, solitude, the body intellect, and the building of self as practice. The work is assembled from research and snapshots of a quarantine and uprisings, rooted in Blackness, in trans-queer identity, in neurodiversity, and with magic. Grae engages in the thrills of virtuosity through systems of alignment that focus on stories and vehicles of transformation that happen in the steps of a protest and the thump of the dance floor.

Composition and libretto by Alexa Grae Choreography, direction, and visuals by Stephanie Acosta. Costume design by Isaac Pool.

* * *

Thursday, January 8, and Friday, January 9, at 7pm
Split Bill
Jo Warren
MODEL HOME (world premiere)
Owen Prum
Extremely Chemical (world premiere)
Running time: 75 minutes

MODEL HOME is a group dance that attempts to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar by highlighting and then subverting cultural archetypes and cliches. Working with imagery of the family home and suburbia, the work seeks to disorient the viewer in relation to the mythology of American life. Model Home draws on gendered tropes from film and popular media—the cowboy, the housewife, the martyr, the businessman, the whore—and explores the dynamics of dominance and submission that circulate around them. By queering these recognizable figures and relational patterns, this work aims to disorient, asking us to feel, even briefly, the possibility of undoing what we think we know, to move us into more honest, unruly territory where things are no longer as separate or distinct as they appear.

Directed and choreographed by Jo Warren. Performed by Paris Cullen, Sofia Franklin, Meg Herzfeld, Maddie Hopfield, and Cullan Powers. Music by Ryan Gamblin. Costumes by Kate Williams.

In Extremely Chemical, choreographed and directed by Owen Prum, three dancers enter the space arriving at a still formation, dots on a grid. They appear as pedestrians, a group indiscernible as strangers or peers. They stand on the precipice between crowd and performer. A singular bass boom rings out, like a crash from a club down the street. Gradually they begin to shift, walk, patter in loose pathways, carving lines and right angles. Another bass boom sounds. Stillness follows. With an instigating step, the dancers enter into rhythmic, high-intensity movement drawn from a broad range of dance styles: punk, mosh, ballet, and modern. The movement is united by a common push, a drive that undergirds the piece: the thirst for honesty, sincerity, question marks, and exclamation marks. On the border between beauty and emergency.

* * *

Saturday, January 10, and Sunday, January 11, at 7pm
Split Bill
Ian Andrew Askew
SLAMDANCE punk lessons (world premiere)
Johnnie Cruise Mercer
Mercies of a Butterfly (world premiere)
Running time: 75 minutes

Ian Andrew Askew’s SLAMDANCE punk lessons is the third iteration in the SLAMDANCE series, an ongoing project on punk and Blackness. With punk lessons, Askew continues their research on moshing as a site of simulated violence and as a social dance which emerges, in part, from African diasporic traditions. Borrowing from instructional dance videos, boxing rulebooks, and international humanitarian law, Askew invites the audience to consider who is protected by the rules created to control violence and curtail its impact.

SLAMDANCE punk lessons was created by Askew alongside Cheyanne Williams, Anthony Sertel Dean, Itohan Edoloyi, and Justin Allen, building on their interdisciplinary collaboration for SLAMDANCE garage (celebrated by 3Views as “electrifying” and “theater at its best”). This new performance features a prototype of the pit simulator, an instrument which transforms physical impact into sound, allowing a dancer to conduct the score to which they are responding.

SLAMDANCE punk lessons derives its title from Adrien Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982-84), a series of participatory performances in which Piper offered an introduction to funk music before teaching audiences “how to listen to this music and how to dance to it.”

Mercies of a Butterfly is a one-act dance-theater work performed and created by Johnnie Cruise Mercer. A movement allegory about resilience, the work follows a recently born spirit as it contends with the weight of changing. With Mercer’s metaphysical history at its root, the work spills out as a testimony on both flying through and weathering the storm. Mercies of a Butterfly is the first work within The Good News, a series of personal choreographies honoring maker Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s upbringing in the Black Baptist church. Inspired by Bible scriptures orally passed down to Mercer in his childhood, the works are each intentionally crafted to guide communities through the grief of today while leading them toward the sensations/tools/state of letting go.

Performed by Johnnie Cruise Mercer with musicians Robert McSweeney (horn) and Jean Charlot (drum and percussion). Music producer: Young Denzel. Visual design and creative direction by Torian Ugworji. Wardrobe design by Pierre Wright.

* * *

Sunday, January 11, at 3pm
Corentin JPM Leven
Birds of Ill Omen (US premiere)
Running time: 60 minutes

From Norway, Corentin JPM Leven brings Birds of Ill Omen, a theater performance contextualizing and problematizing medicalization of the queer body. What are ways for the queer community to self-identify while also maintaining a productive relationship with the medical community? How can the queer body identify itself when, on the one hand, it has been defined by medicine and, on the other, by popular fabulation? Through his own HIV diagnosis, Leven explores the many roles he, as HIV-positive, must play both socially and in the LGBTQ+ environment. The work explores the tension between science and personal identity in heteronormative contexts, drawing on both the performer’s experiences and queer history. This visual performance sets itself in a space filled with memories and desires. A place between the construction of a monument and the striking silence of a memorial, a space between science and self-definition.

Created and performed by Corentin JPM Leven. Choreography by Ulf Nilseng. Music by Kim Reenskaug. Design by Ann Mirjam Vaikla.

2025 OUT-FRONT! Film Series

Saturday, January 10, at 4:30pm

The Out-FRONT! Film Series will include dance and experimental short films by Carrie Hawks, Eleonora Privitera, Cari Ann Shim Sham*, and Stephen Shynes.

The screening will include a talkback with the artists.