Passenger’s Pet is a cross-pollination of kinetic theatre, oneiric inquiry, and sonic exploration, activated on the grounds of Apartamento Satélite in San Antonio, Texas. By unearthing their dormant interiors, this intervention ushers forth reservoirs of feral radiance. Passenger’s Pet imagines a subordinate companion carried within, slipping between states of agency and submission, longing to be memorialized as a passage through time.
For Gus
Director, Concept, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Performers: Celeste Camfield, Aída Hernández-Reyes, Jacob Medina
Music: Shea McGilvray, Justo Cisneros
Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Cleopatra Diwata
Wardrobe: Justo Cisneros
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
O Mother Goddess (OMG), or, Việt Namaste: Queer Vietnamese Indigenous Shamanism the Muzak-al is an immersive reimagining of hầu bóng, the centuries-old Vietnamese Mother Goddess ceremony exploring transformation, transcendence and queer ritual practices across Southeast Asia and its diasporas, performed inside the Artpace Hudson Showroom. Featuring International Artist-in-Residence Việt Lê in collaboration with Justo Cisneros, Anna Bauer, Jairus Carr and Shea McGilvray.
Artpace International Artist-in-Residence: Việt Lê
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Anna Bauer, Jairus Carr
Music: Shea McGilvray, Justo Cisneros
Wardrobe: Việt Lê
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
Poem Zero’s Elegy 4 is a site-specific performance presented inside Ballroom Marfa’s Bull Room that activates space through the exploration of sonic thresholds. Channeling Marfa’s landscape, multi-instrumentalists Justo Cisneros and Shea McGilvray create a transportive score merging choral textures, bass, synthesizers and electronic processing. Elegy 4 is a symbolic act of activation and genesis.
Poem Zero: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
Ultrasound explores psychic freedom as an act of reclaiming the imprisoned spirit. Performed in Co-Lab Projects' culvert, passages of intimacy, distortion and gestation collapse time into a single undivided state as bodies respond to internal and structural tensions of resistance. Within the realm of the unseen, movement and sound give form to the invisible by exploring what emerges when one body crosses the threshold as another remains held inside it. An olfactory trace of apples, oranges and incense permeates the space, activating scent as a sensory layer shaping an atmosphere of transformation. Ultrasound operates in a world of dream logic, where time hangs in suspension, carrying traces of what has yet to appear and what may never be.
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Anna Bauer, Jairus Carr
Music: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Sean Michael Gaulager
Stylist: Justo Cisneros
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
The Ripe Leash performed at Casita in San Antonio, Texas explores what unfolds when the mind and body poised for release are bound by bodily and psychological constraints, and limits become orchestrators of expression. Within this liminal space, addiction, hypnosis and dreams emerge as thresholds between rupture and reckoning, where waves of disorientation open into portals of hidden truths, revealing distortions of consciousness in which acts of personal liberation are performed as penance. As these altered states ripple outward, the mutable self is laid bare, transforming release into reclamation as The Ripe Leash exposes the body as the front line of reinvention.
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Aidan Rodgers, Erin Ellis, Laney Phillips
Music: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
Harmonic Gutter, featured in Mosh Now, Cry Later at Contemporary at Blue Star is a declaration of parallel universes, an unraveling of identity, time and space, where the boundaries between reality and the imagined self-dissolve into an act of introspection and defiance. Dancers Taryn Lavery and Ty Graynor, serve as mirrored embodiments of identity engaging in a ritualized dance of reflection and confrontation. Through a hypnotic interplay of movement, sonic immersion and material symbolism, Cisneros invites the audience to enter a space where self-examination and external forces collide, exploring the liminal terrain between personal and cultural history through themes of idol worship, music as sanctuary and the desire to break free from systems of order. At its core, Harmonic Gutter is an exploration of rebellion against time itself.
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Taryn Lavery, Ty Graynor
Music: Justo Cisneros
Stage Design: Justo Cisneros, Cleopatra Diwata
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
VHS: Alyssa Grace
Bodybuilder is a study on identity, escapism, and the repressed conformist experience translated through performance and experimental sound. Located on Co-Lab Projects' Sean Gaulager’s Ranch Apocalypse in Austin Texas, Bodybuilder seeks to channel an isolated landscape as a gateway to explore states of spiritual deterioration and transcendence.
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Jairus Carr, Anna Bauer
Music, Set Design: Justo Cisneros, Shea McGilvray
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata
Preliminary sketch of the land sculpture, Fantasy Bond for the residency and pop-up sculpture park Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in Adkins, Texas.
Land sculpture for the group residency and exhibition Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations in Adkins, Texas curated by Megan Solis. Fantasy Bond explores metaphysical states of ascension by illuminating the cyclical nature of time through recontextualized materials and objects.
Materials: discarded mattress, bricks, cement, chains, soil, artificial fruit, artificial flowers, pins, styrofoam, plywood, recycled tarp, steel poles, super glue, nails.
This privately owned land hosted an independent residency and exhibition space started by San Antonio artist Megan Solis. Its inaugural exhibition, Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations, questioned how art is made and experienced when free from a traditional exhibition space, in a land strange and energetically charged.
The artists all made work that challenged institutional norms in modes of making and display. They ranged from performance that blured gendered pathways, to a composition of uncanny sculpture and sound; effectively opening up portals of blanketed history. Traveling to and from this forgotten soil created a potential transfiguration for its artists and visitors.
Fantasy Bond is a performance created for Wild Ruins, Wild Orientations, exploring the cyclical nature of birth, decay and renewal, using a found mattress as an altar for crossing thresholds. Fantasy Bond exists in a liminal space between dreams and nightmares, presence and absence, where an object of function becomes a metaphysical site in which intimacy and disappearance intertwine, reflecting cycles of life and closure. Through sound, movement and sculpture, bodies channel languages of mourning where the visible and invisible merge. This imagined union symbolizes the human desire to connect worlds that can never fully converge.
Director, Choreography: Justo Cisneros
Sculpture: Justo Cisneros
Dancers: Jairus Carr, Oddalys Salcido, Anna Bauer
Music: Justo Cisneros
Stylist: Cleopatra Diwata
Photography: Cleopatra Diwata, Death to Content