Tickets: $20 ($15 for low-income)

Brooklyn Studios for Dance (BkSD) is pleased to announce the three-part curated series, Alex Romania's Hot Consumer Trash. This live event series works against passive consumption by bringing together performing artists spanning dance, performance art and music to share something collective and momentary. Here at HCT we invite you to take your eyes off your devices and make it out for a night worth experiencing in person, to engage in moments that can only be in the flesh. It's a risk to tear your eyes away from the signals of instant brain flooding stupor of a device, we know... come here and don't become a computer, come here and remember humanity ...at least until we become computers. #broughtoyoufromthedivinebeyond #betterinreallife #hotconsumertrash #duh #thedoorsarealwaysopen #youwillconsumeus

Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary artist based in NYC working in video, visuals, and live performance. alexromania.com

November 1, 2018 Part I Artists

From São Paulo (Brazil), Raquel Mavecq is a New York based choreographer, dance artist and somatic healer. She choreographs using different mediums like sound, photography, video and live installation. Always reinventing her own choreographic process, she generates scores to evoke freedom, autonomy, vulnerability, and altered mindbody states from which to explore inner and outer landscapes. Raquel’s current work focuses on nature and the human body as being part of its cycles and manifestations. Looking at the body’s natural rhythms and rituals, she uses poetic movement and imagery to bring awareness of human history and daily practices as part of the gaian wholeness.

Currently Raquel is diving deep in practicing Herbalism, Reiki and Astrology as a way to recognize the human body as part of nature, investigate how movement can be a powerful path for self-healing, and self-healing a revolutionary process for greater transformation.

Arantxa Araujo is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist with a background in neuroscience based in NYC. Araujo is interested in how art changes the brain by allowing curated sensorimotor stimuli to create awareness using video, projection mapping, LEDs and movement-based performances. Her work has been shown in Mexico, Canada and USA, including Brooklyn Museum, University Settlement, Last Frontier, Glasshouse Gallery, Queens Museum, JACK, Panoply Lab, Art in Odd Places (AiOP), Rin NYC; El Monumento a la Revolución, and El Vicio, in Mexico City; RAW during Miami Art Week in Miami; The Semel Theater and Huret & Spector Gallery in Boston; and SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh; Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada. Araujo was part of EMERGENYC program in 2017, ITP Camp at NYU in 2018 and was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT. She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Malcolm-x Betts is a Bronx-based curator, visual, and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. The frame of his artistic work is around using embodiment for finding liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. Betts recently developed and presented excerpts of Black Bodies Gone Down: A Depiction of Black Masculinity at La MaMa Umbria International in Spoleto, Italy. La Mama NYC, Gibney Dance Center, Movement Research at Judson Church, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), The Bronx Museum and Dixon Place. Betts has a community engagement practice allowing artistic freedom and making art accessible to everyone. Betts is currently a 2018 Artist and Resident with Movement Research. Performed in works in collaboration with luciana achuga, Jonathan Gonzalez and Mersiha Mesihovic.

Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson are Co-Founding Artistic Directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance duo based in Pittsburgh, PA. Their work fuses sound and movement into an elusive, but illustrative combination of improvised contemporary and postmodern dance frameworks, found material, electronic instrumentation, vocalization, physiological centering and ontological examination. slowdanger uses performance as ritual practice to delve into patterns of the circular rhythm of life. Their work has been presented at Springboard Dance Montreal, The Carnegie Museum of Art, BAAD! and Links Hall Chicago. Dance Magazinenamed slowdanger one of the ’25 to Watch’ for 2018. www.slowdangerslowdanger.com / Photo: Umi Akiyoshi.

November 29, 2018 Part II Artists

Maira Duarte is a NYC-based Mexican dance artist. She directs Dance to the People, a collective that curates and organizes all donation-based choreographic projects, environmental dance research, performance parties, and class series. Her work has been most recently shown at Performática, Cholula, and Huerto Roma Verde, México City. She teaches dance in public schools around NYC, and was a professor at the University of The Americas Puebla. She presently performs with Alex Romania, Estado Flotante, and Butch Merigoni. She’s received support by the Mexican Fund for Arts and Culture (2010), CUNY Dance Initiative (2014-16), and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (2017). She is a contributor to Dancer Citizen and holds an M.A. in Dance Education from NYU.

Andrew Braddock is from Fredericksburg, Ohio. He makes performance and video work, as well as helping to run Salad Editions/Best of Both Worlds, a print and fabrication business. He is proudly affiliated with Antibody Corporation and Human Trash Dump.

A native of Detroit, MI, Rakia Seaborn is a writer, choreographer and performer whose work has appeared at Dixon Place, La Mama E.T.C., The Tank, AUNTS, chashama, JACK and Brooklyn Studios for Dance. Seaborn has worked with Dianne McIntyre, Rashaun Mitchell, Jodi Melnick, Michael Cross Burke, Tyler Ashley, Kendra Ross, Meta-Phys Ed. and PMMDC. She is a Guest-Artist-In-Residence at Trinity/La MaMa and currently dances for Kathy Westwater. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2007, earning a Bachelors of Art in Dance with a concentration in Choreography, and in 2014, she gained an MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College.

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Kahiem Rivera manages to weave a cynical, world-weary perspective into hip-hop songs about love, sex, race and disappointment. The Earth is in rough shape, and so is he. After getting his start in alt-rap bands “The Universe Project” and “KoBu”, Kahiem began recording solo music following a near-death bicycle accident in the Fall of 2016. What he describes as “It could have been worse” still meant five months of largely immobile recovery, and a lot of free time. It also meant a resurgence of some old, cyclical depression. 

The blues are a nice fit though, even if they flow through the lens of a 27-year-old Brooklyn emcee. “I make ‘em dance and depressed at the same time” is an oddly poignant mission statement in 2018. There is a whole lot to be sad about, but there's also music. And as much as Kahiem Rivera would love to drink a beer and talk your ear off about how awful it all is, he'd rather rap.

It’s not all gloom though. If you were willing to return the favor, Kahiem would tell you that he loved you, and he would mean it. He even has a song about f***ing. It was spurred by a very symbolic dream involving paper cranes, but it’s about f***ing nonetheless. And who doesn’t like f***ing?

December 13, 2018 Part III Artists

Toni Carlson is a dancer, performer, and comedienne based in Brooklyn. A graduate of Eugene Lang College, she has appeared in the work of Miguel Gutierrez & Ishmael Houston-Jones, Yanira Castro, Sarah A.O Rosner, Lance Gries, Kirsten Schnittker, and Brendan Fernandes, as well as her own. She has presented work at the Judson Church, as well as the Rooftop/Groundfloor and Tight 5 performance series. 

Emily Smith received her BFA from Alfred University. She is the Artistic Director of NOT for reTALE, creating kinetic sculptures and performances. She and Elena Rose Light co-produce cnd curate Fete, a biannual performance series in Brooklyn, NY. She is a former member of the dance company Leimay, premiering their piece Borders at the BAM Fisher in 2016, and has performed in works by Steve Paxton at The MOMA and in Ryan Mcnamara’s MeC?m: in Performa. Emily also was a member of Layla Mrozowski’s “BAAD” Bicycle Awesome Adventure Dance Tour. She currently works as a metal fabricator at Arcana Metal, and performs with collaborator Zack Fuller.  

Justin Cabrillos is a choreographer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He is a 2017 Movement Research artist-in-residence. He was a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz, a Chez Bushwick artist-in-residence, and a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker's Forum. His work has been commissioned by the IN>TIME Series in Chicago, and his last project, Holdings, was commissioned by Danspace Project. Cabrillos has shown work at the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roulette, and Movement Research at Judson Church. Recently he has been collaborating with musician Sam Yulsman and poet Gabrielle DaCosta. As a performer, he has worked with Every house has a door, Julian Barnett, and Jen Rosenblit. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington, Seattle.

Ben Wohlfarth/Peripheral sounds and Alex Romania will also share live video.

Ben Wohlfarth is a musician and artist who makes collage style electronic and rock music. He creates music as Peripheral Sounds and released twoEPs in 2018. Check them out here: peripheralsounds.bandcamp.com