Dolly Sfeir | Barr Bodies – Dahlia Qumhiyeh and Bev Vega | Das Besties – Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez | Joshua Fried | Nicole Bindler

New Dance Alliance presents the 39th Annual Performance Mix Festival

June 5-8, 2025, at Abrons Arts Center’s Underground Theater

The 39th annual Performance Mix Festival brings together 40 innovative experimental performance, sound, and film artists over four days in June. The 2025 festival is curated by New Dance Alliance Artistic and Executive Director Karen Bernard, Managing Director Alexandra Doyle, and artist panelists Arantxa Araujo, Chloë Engel, Johanna Meyer, Jordan Deal, and Estrellx Supernova. In addition, films were selected in collaboration with Ciné-Corps.

Friday, June 6 

Program B | 8:30pm: Dolly Sfeir | Barr Bodies – Dahlia Qumhiyeh and Bev Vega | Das Besties – Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez | Joshua Fried | Nicole Bindler 

Ciné-Corps film: Dolly Sfeir, It Cries Too Loudly, 2021

Devastated and powerless as she watched the 2020 Beirut explosion and its aftermath from afar, Lebanese American choreographer and director Dolly Sfeir set about creating a work to express her delicate state of mind. It Cries Too Loudly is a dance film exploring the overlap between joy and tragedy in her tumultuous home country and the experience of being an émigré.

Barr Bodies – Dahlia Qumhiyeh and Bev Vega / Gender Deviance

The work explores gender deviance in the digital age, sponsored by self-surveillance, brazzers, and sugarbear hair. 

Das Besties – Travis Amiel, Cosimo Pori, Arzu Salman, and Nina Lucia Rodriguez / Das Rauschgift

Das Besties will present an excerpt from Das Rauschgift, a new evening-length work about humanity’s relationship to drug use, addiction, presence, and the ineffable passage of time. The piece showcases the delicate hesitancy toward trying new things coupled with the learned fear of falling into a self-destructive pattern—all happening against a backdrop of FoMO.

Joshua Fried / Hattie’s Dance

In his latest work, NYC’s celebrated musical trickster Joshua Fried evokes the spirit of East Village cultural hub the Pyramid Cocktail Lounge, where he performed and worked on staff from 1981 to 1984. Hattie’s Dance channels Pyramid punk-drag absurdism through polyrhythmic House grooves and mid-tech wireless controllers.  

Nicole Bindler / Sand in My Soda Pop

Sand in My Soda Pop, created by Nicole Bindler and directed by Emme Kennedy, juxtaposes two of the most prevalent exports of this country: U.S. pop culture and bombs. The work is a classic anti-war dance, a reverse striptease, a middle finger to America.