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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.

Recent articles

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Calendar

Jasmine Hearn: Memory Fleet: Time & Trinity

Memory Fleet is a continually expanding, episodic, migrating performance and archive project that builds an alternative archive for the preservation of shared memories and stories that center the work/rest & past/future of the Black people who mother and mentor.

Platform 2026: Secret Gardens

Platform 2026: Secret Gardens, co-curated by Judy Hussie-Taylor and Seta Morton, tends to the relationships between plants and dance; strategic seedings, subterranean root systems, medicinal blossoms, rituals and rabbit holes.

Rosario La Tremendita: Tránsito (Fleeing the Noise)

With Tránsito (Fleeing the Noise), groundbreaking singer Rosario La Tremendita strips flamenco to its core in a powerful collaboration with master guitarist Dani de Morón. This intimate work is a journey back to the traditional songs that form the soul of flamenco, reimagined with fearless artistry and emotional depth. With her unmistakable voice - raw, nuanced, and deeply human - and the guitar’s enveloping resonance, La Tremendita creates a space where memory and innovation meet.

Soa Ratsifandrihana: g r oo v e

g r oo v e is a solo performance by Soa Ratsifandrihana that draws on a wide range of dance styles, from baroque-influenced forms to the Afindrafindrao of her native Madagascar. She revisits the Madison, her first learned choreography, popularized in the 1960s by African American singer Al Brown, and references Ghost in the Shell, an anime she loved as a teenager.

Los Ricos - Sonia & Ismael: Vínculo

Vínculo (meaning “Bond”) is a flamenco show that captures the vibration of an encounter. A space where emotion, art, and memory intertwine to shape a world of their own. It is an open dialogue in which every moment, sound, and pause builds a connection, allowing flamenco’s tradition to meet the personal vision of its creators.