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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

Jamel Gaines Creative Outlet: Remembering

Jamel Gaines Creative Outlet, a leading dance-theater company devoted to social justice, presents a multimedia production exploring the Middle Passage, slavery, and emancipation. Inspired by The MAAFA Suite and the teachings of Bishop Rev. Dr. Johnny Ray Youngblood, Remembering blends contemporary and African dance with spoken word, music, and African drumming, bringing American history to life through African voices and dynamic audiovisual elements.

Get Rhythm

Get Rhythm is a celebration of music, movement, and the communities that give them life. Featuring performances by emerging choreographers and musicians, the evening explores how sound and shared experience shape the way we move. Rooted in the music that raises us and the people who pass it on, the works presented pay homage to the rhythms, relationships, and histories that continue to resonate across generations.

Peter Stathas Dance: What We Hold

More than 40 years later, these artists reunite for What We Hold, a rare, cross-generational dance program that brings seminal works from the 1980s into the present, now embodied by a new generation of dancers navigating New York City’s dance landscape in 2026.

Trinity Irish Dance Company

“Sophisticated and commanding” (Los Angeles Times), Trinity Irish Dance Company (TIDC) has pioneered a movement genre that “ushered in a new era for Irish step dance” (Chicago Tribune). Led by Founding Artistic Director Mark Howard and Associate Artistic Director Chelsea Hoy, this Chicago-based company celebrates 35 years of genre-defying innovation with a program representative of Howard’s unique vision to fuse vibrant Irish traditions with ever-evolving American innovation.