Performance Art Week XIV
April 20-23, 2026
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All-day durational performance (upstairs) | Jackson Miller - Abdication of Literacy
10:00 am | Studio 3D MSU Denver - Soft Shoe, Hard Shoe, Basketball Shoe
11:00 am | Marin Perkins - One-Act Play In Which Six Strangers Sit In A Train, An Act Known As Traveling To The Airport
12:00-1:00 pm | Break
1:00 pm | Chanel Matsunami Govreau - Separate the Spine from the Body (Q&A to follow)
3:00 pm | Beginning & Intermediate Sculpture MSU Denver - Soft Shoe, Hard Shoe, Basketball Shoe
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All-day durational performance (upstairs) | Jackson Miller - Abdication of Literacy
8:30 am | Ryan Balcerzak
8:30 am | August Balderrama
8:35 am | TuTu Bamba
8:40 am | Maggie Fish
8:45 am | Sam Freese
8:50 am | Helena Gonzales
8:55 am | Megan Hatak
9:00 am | Erica Lapp
9:05 am | May Wu
9:10 am | Robin Groppi
9:15 am | Greg Pakieser
9:20 am | Liana Ruedel
9:25 am | Maya Olivier
10:00 am | 4D Foundations MSU Denver (multiple performances)
12:30 pm | MSU Dance - Written With the Body
1:00 pm | Ian Hatcher - Slop Retrospective
2:00 pm | Alex Crow - Deepen the Roots (durational)
2:00 pm | Luna Tornquist - Hole (durational)
2:00 pm | Brooklyn “Kodi/Savanah” Baltazar - The Fury That Built Me
2:10 pm | Ellie Winniger- It’s yours if you want it
2:20 pm | Cooper Gerrish - Storyteller
2:30 pm | Gabe Giles - STRONG MAN
2:40 pm | Katie Karakourtis - Egg
2:50 pm | Cameron Duffy - Panopticon
3:00 pm | Emmanuel Balderrama Moreno - Friction
4:00 pm | Sam Grabowska - Mother Country
6:30 pm | Amayas Gonzalez - What would it mean if I shot myself in the heart so no one did it before me?
8:00 pm | PAW Xtra Large (video projections on the D&F Tower at 16th and Arapahoe)
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All-day durational performance (upstairs) | Jackson Miller - Abdication of Literacy
10:00 am (durational) | Sam Freese - 3-Minute Hug
10:00 am (durational) | Chase Thorner - Post Your Fear
10:00 am (durational) | Adrienne Sommers - Live Kintsugi
10:00 am | Erica Lapp & Racheal Bennett - Emerge and Egress
10:10 am | Brisa Andrade - Trad-Wife
10:20 am | Liana Ruedel & Angel Blanco - Violin Dance
10:35 am | August Balderrama, Emilee Korach, Megan Hatak, Sam Edson, Karina Guapia & Marin Perkins - Cleaning Team
10:50 am | Brittany Loya - Hanging the Wash
11:00 am | May Wu - Foley Follies
1:00 pm | August Black - All Our Voices, All Together, All at Once
3:00 pm | Tanniqua-Kay Buchanan - Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch
4:00 pm | Emily Zeek - Social Seance
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All-day durational performance (upstairs) | Jackson Miller - Abdication of Literacy
8:30 am | 4D Foundations MSU Denver (multiple performances)
9:30 am | Mary Terese Perkins - to support
9:35 am | Brooke Wooden - to flow
9:40 am | Helen Lopez-Bosmenier - to discard
9:45 am | River Mastel - to crumple
9:50 am | Baxton Markwirth - to scatter
9:55 am | Kristan Vaughn - to heap
10:00 am | Marc Moeker - to bounce
10:05 am | Johnatan Villa - to tear
10:10 am | Alayna Grenier - to smear
10:15 am | Gavin Vesquez Sandoval - to expand
11:30 am | New Genres Collective - Drag Weight
1:00 pm | Joel Swanson - Via Negativa
3:30 pm | Anti-Fast Fashion Show
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Videos will be on a loop during the hour-long time slots listed below.
10:00-11:00 am | Sans Souci Festival’s Dance Cinema: Small Bites
11:00 am-12:00 pm | Emma Balder - The Shape of Becoming
12:00-1:00 pm | Travis Vermilye’s Motion Design class (assorted videos)
1:00-2:00 pm | Marin Perkins - Noggin’ Dog; August Balderrama - My Heart is a Motherboard; Brittany Loya - I Remember the Waves; Veronika Dixon - The Louvre by Lorde; Brisa Andrade - Me and Him ACT 1. Dinner Date ACT 2; Megan Hatak - Crossing the Line; Racheal Bennett - Black Car;
2:00-3:00 pm | Gemma Clemen’s Motion Design class (assorted videos)
DAY one footage - April 20, 2026
DAY three footage - April 22, 2026
DAY two footage - April 21, 2026
DAY FOUR footage - April 23, 2026
pAW XIV Artists
chanel matsunami govreau
Separate the Spine from the Body is a performance about the private negotiations that happen inside the body, especially bodies shaped by chronic illness and gender fluidity. The performance uses soft sculpture worn over the body to create a monstrous form. Drawing from sci-fi horror and daily rituals, it confronts invisible discomfort and the urges it creates. These include the desire to dissociate, destroy, or transform the body and thetenderness required to endure one’s self. Acts of self-care and self-harm collide, blurring into one another through ritualized gestures of containment, violence, and surrender. In this performance, dismantling is essential to bodily liberation, and that harm reduction takes unexpected, personal and fantastical forms.
Chanel Matsunami Govreau will perform Separate the Spine from the Body on Monday, April 20, 2026 at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm.
ian hatcher
Slop Retrospective is an immersive parafictional gallery opening set in the near future, surveying the recent past. What might the art world look like if our troubled culture fully embraced generative AI aesthetics? Could "slop" become a reclaimed term of pride, even an identity? How would art taste if we all consumed it solely from a bottomless trough of pureed cultural detritus? Could we learn to like it? There are only two ways to find out: 1) wait a few years in mounting dread and suspense, or 2) come to this show. Wearing all black is recommended.
Ian Hatcher will perform Slop Retrospective on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm
Sam grabowska
Mother Country is a new/commissioned 1-act, 3-scene, 20-minute performance that interrogates our relationship with our mothers (genetics ‘nurture’), our countries (policies and violence), and our bodies (our personal experiences and the flesh we live in). It starts as an autobiographical exploration of the artist’s Polish family and the epigenetic information passed down to them: war, occupation, mental illness as a response to trauma, and impacts on/of parenting. It then focuses on the desperate attempt at reparation and repair. And lastly connects to current American politics (terrors) while soliciting audience participation.
Sam Grabowska will perform Mother Country on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 4:00 pm.
Amayas Gonzalez
What would it mean if I shot myself in the heart so no one did it before me? Amayas will explore that question with tender moments with themselves and the audience through dance, observation and connection.
Amayas Gonzalez will perform What would it mean if I shot myself in the heart so no one did it before me? on Tuesday, April 21, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 6:30 pm.
August black
The 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement featured a beautiful protest practice called "The People's Mic," an amplification method by which one person's voice would be repeated in short iterations by a gathered crowd, sounding like a human megaphone. In this interactive and participatory performance, the artist will ask gallery-goers to come together to form a similar kind of temporary DMZ (de-structured media zone) using our voices and mobile devices, but in a looped and fragmented acoustic space of repetition and overlay. Please come with your phones and ready to "connect".
August Black will perform All Our Voices, All Together, All at Once on Wednesday, April 22, 2026 at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm
tanniqua-kay buchanan
Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch is a ritual-based performance that gathers family memory as material, treating salt as both preservative and portal. Salt becomes a material language of protection and rupture, where when the “glass breaks”, a new beginning enters. The work considers ritual as a technology of survival and protection, where religion and spirituality coexist as tools rather than oppositions. It is a representation of the tools that Tanniqua-Kay’s family quietly whispers to her in conversation, a continued thread and representation of duality. The work considers how Black life moves in cycles of rupture, protection, volcanism, erosion, and cultivation of the land. It investigates the terror/fear and intimacy of immersion, drowning and resurfacing as embodied archives that refuse erasure. It navigates the space between religion and spirituality, honoring practices such as salting a home, grinding remedies as technologies of survival rather than superstition. The performance asks when transmission occurs and who gets to carry it forward in re-voicing ancestral memories. Ultimately, the act of sweeping becomes a gesture of accountability and care: tending one’s own “front porch” before crossing into inheritance.
Tanniqua-Kay Buchanan will perform Salt Archives: Sweep in Front of Your Own Porch on Wednesday, April 22, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 3:00 pm.
joel swanson
The Altar Call is the ritual concluding evangelical church services where congregants approach the pulpit to confess sins, accept Jesus, or rededicate their faith—all while a hymn loops continuously. During these prolonged moments of spiritual reckoning, the artist, as a child, secretly transformed hymnal pages into improvised "Plinko" boards, tracing pencil paths between the printed notes and words.
Via Negativa computationally reconstructs that childhood game as a four-channel graphic score. Four large screens, oriented vertically and arranged back-to-back to form a luminous central column, display hymn texts commonly sung during altar calls. On each screen, a dot descends through the text, colliding with and erasing words as it falls. When it reaches the bottom, it loops—just as the hymns once looped—creating a continuous, ever-diminishing score. Four professional vocalists stand facing the screens, vocally interpreting the fragmenting text in real time. As words vanish, familiar phrases become stuttered utterances, then silence. The piece cycles through four hymns with brief pauses between.
Joel Swanson will perform Via Negativa on Thursday, April 23, 2026, at the Emmanuel Art Gallery at 1:00 pm.
Past Performance Art Weeks
PAW XIII - April 14-17, 2025
PAW XII - April 22-26, 2024
PAW XI - April 18-19, 2023