As in-person performances are returning, yet digital work appears here to stay, dance, theater, and performance artists are at a crux of evolution and discovery. In this live-streamed conversation, Creative Capital Awardees Raja Feather Kelly, Faye Driscoll, and Carmelita Tropicana discuss how they transformed their recent performances to include digital variations. What new perspectives—on collaboration, technology, risk, care, the body, the voice—did they discover? How does an artist’s creative process change as a result? What are performing artists carrying forward? And how will this present new opportunities? The conversation, moderated by Shanta Thake will include audience Q&A via YouTube chat.

Carmelita Tropicana has been performing in New York’s downtown arts scene since the 1980s, straddling the worlds of performance art and theater in the U.S., Latin America and Europe with her irreverent humor, subversive fantasy and bilingual puns. Works online include That’s Not What Happened, podcast with long time collaborator Ela Troyano for Soho Rep, (2021), Rad Women for Pandemic Times, 100 Years / 100 Women, The Park Avenue Armory (2020). Tropicana is a 2020-21 artist in residence at Soho Rep’s Project One Cohort, a 2021 United States Artist Fellow, a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2016 Creative Capital award recipient, and 1998 Obie recipient. Publications include Memories of the Revolution: The First 10 Years of the Wow Café Theater, (2015) edited with Holly Hughes and Jill Dolan and Carmelita Tropicana: Performing Between Cultures (2000). Tropicana was an original member of the WOW theater collective, served on the Board of Directors of PS New York, and presently serves on the New York Foundation for the Arts board.

Faye Driscoll is a performance maker and artist who has been hailed as a “startlingly original talent” (Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times) and whose most recent exhibition, Come On In, was celebrated as “experiential training in how to inhabit this unbearable new world” (Miriam Felton-Dansky). She has received numerous prestigious awards, including Doris Duke Artist Award, United States Artist Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, and is currently New York Live Arts’ Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. Her work has been presented nationally at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Art Center, The Institute for Contemporary Art/Boston, MCA/Chicago and BAM/Brooklyn Academy of Music, and internationally at La Biennale di Venezia, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, Melbourne Festival, Belfast International Arts Festival, Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens and Centro de Arte Experimental in Buenos Aires. Her first solo museum exhibition, Come On In at Walker Art Center in 2020, offered gallery-goers an experience of six distinct audio-guided choreographies. Driscoll also choreographs for plays and films, including the Broadway production of Young Jean Lee’s Straight White Men, and Josephine Decker’s award-winning feature film Madeline’s Madeline.