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mrpj.org is the online edition of Movement Research Performance Journal. Discover our latest issue, explore our archive and follow a calendar of select events dedicated to contemporary performance.

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Cover of Issue #62

Issue #62

Winter 2026

We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers

What began as a project responding to the fiftieth anniversary of the ‘end’ of the Vietnam War became a project of inhabiting the Movement Research Performance Journal (MRPJ) from within the landscape of contemporary Vietnamese performance art. The result, Issue #62, is a window onto a community of insiders who reflect a set of concerns, questions, historical trajectories, and aesthetic legacies that differ from what has more often been foregrounded in our U.S./New York City-centric publication. Like other documents of this kind, which endeavor to portray a performance scene that will be foreign to many readers, the texts from this group of intergenerational, contemporary artists demonstrate a careful navigation of the dialectics of inside and outside, self and other, performer and audience, seeing and being seen, that informs every exchange across cultural difference. The texts are also not monolithic, suggesting a range of relations to the Vietnam of the past and present, from within Vietnam’s national borders and among the diaspora. Especially for contributors living and working in Vietnam, writing has also been a practice of choreographing words within a political landscape where to speak publicly, in itself, is a performance of negotiated risk. Embracing the complexities of these differing positions has been the focus of our editorial process—one that has asked the editorial team to embrace the limits of our own knowledge, to recognize we will not be able to recognize all valences others may discover in these texts, and not to edit these layers out of the works that follow.

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Calendar

Target Practice

Target Practice is a night of three works that sit at the intersection of grief, survival, and transformation. The evening reflects on what is lost when safety is never guaranteed, and what is reshaped in the process of enduring.

Estévez / Paños y Compañía

Award-winning duo Estévez / Paños y Compañía present flamenco with a contemporary twist. La Confluencia highlights the versatility of the male flamenco dancer as five performers and a live soundscape take you on a voyage to discover flamenco’s roots, weaving together dance styles from around the world.

Leïla Ka: Maldonne

Following the international success of her first three multi-award-winning pieces, the solos and duets Pode ser / You’re the one we love / Bouffées Leïla Ka creates Maldonne, her first group piece nominated for the International Dance Prize 2025 at Sadler’s Wells in London and performed more than 100 times. It will be the USA premiere.

Off-Season: Amanda Krische presents Double Blade

There are some things that happen to you where you think: “Surely, any moment now, someone is going to walk up behind me, tap me on the shoulder, apologize for the inconvenience, and guide me back home to my real life.” Double Blade is an interdisciplinary dance-theater work about the events that come before and after that moment and other such moments, about the things that are hidden, and about the stories we tell to make sense of what cannot be explained.