The fifth edition of CARVALHO’s acclaimed performance series opens with a living meadow, a verdant expanse sculpted by Nicole Rossi encasing the latest choreographic work by international choreographer Andrew Skeels. Titled Meanwhile and performed by two of contemporary dance’s most distinctive artists, Lloyd Knight (Principal with Martha Graham Dance Company) and Jacquelin Harris (of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater), the collaborative work brings choreography and landscape into dialogue, tracing parallel temporalities unfolding across bodies and environments.

Rossi's installation, Desire Path, recreates the natural world in miniature within the gallery, a composition of reeds, willows, verbena, hare's tail, and steel grasses. Taking its title from the informal routes forged through repeated passage in nature, the work considers how instinct, attraction, and need are made visible through repetition—movement becomes trace and intention finds form. As Knight and Harris return to the space across the six-week series, choreography and environment evolve in tandem. Here, the relationship between the performers and the landscape is not illustrative, but reciprocal—two distinct yet interconnected rhythms. Each undergoes its own process of change, neither serving as backdrop nor subject to the other.

Through the series, time becomes perceptible not as an abstract measure, but as a material force acting upon bodies, relationships, and living systems alike. Drawing from a relationship spanning two decades, Skeels' choreography moves through a fluid and intricately woven language, continually threading the performers together as their points of connection shift. As phrases return in altered forms, the duet reveals itself less as a narrative arc than as an accumulation of gestures, tensions, and shared memory. Through cycles of alignment and autonomy, what emerges is not a distilled definition of intimacy, but a layered portrait of connection—how it absorbs repetition, accommodates transformation, and persists through subtle change as it is lived.

Performance series are commissioned by CARVALHO, New York, and curated and produced by its founder, Jennifer Carvalho. The biannual series invites both visual and dance artists to reimagine their creative processes. It draws dance out of the theatre and into the collective consciousness, while bringing visual art into the realm of movement and performance—opening possibilities for both forms. Commissioned collaborations between performing and visual artists consider how disciplines are transformed through collaboration, as limitations are eclipsed, creating new intersectional approaches and total, synthesized works.

Andrew Skeels – Choreographer
Nicole Rossi – Installation Artist
Lloyd Knight – Performing Artist
Jacquelin Harris – Performing Artist
Jean-Sébastien Couture – Rehearsal Director
Jennifer Carvalho – Curator + Producer