multimedia performance
UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL
2022-2024
UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL is a party and multimedia performance that uses the vibrant aesthetics of queer nightlife culture to reveal how cognitive bias connects us all. This piece tells the story of humanity coming to grips with our collective inheritance, a ramshackle meshwork of cognitive processes evolved to survive, not for self-awareness. An interdisciplinary approach invites the audience to meditate on what might be unfinished about human cognition and how these biases keep us from building a better world together.
This story is told by Nonfatal_Error, a multimedia collective catalyzed by Creative Director MX Oops.
A four-month research trip in 2022 included photo shoots/filming, collaboration, music production, site visits, performances, and ceremony in Hawaii with collaborator Renee Alberts, a residency in Trinidad with the Dance and Performance Institute, a creative residency with TR!GGERED MUSIC at the University of Florida, and at BloomFest Ghana in Accra.
UnFiNiShEd aNiMaL is in development in the Live Feed Residency Program at New York Live Arts toward a spring 2024 premiere. It has been awarded the NPN Creation Fund grant with co-commissioners 651 Arts, the Clarice Smith Center for the Performing Arts, and Dance Place. With additional support provided by The Research Foundation CUNY.
"so real it ain’t real" [2021]
MX Oops & TR!GGERED
Performed in the New York Live Arts LIVE IDEAS Festival 2021as a part of Drexciya Redux: An Afrofuturist Cabaret
PLASMA
2020-2018
Plasma is a multimedia dance performance ritual honoring the Divine Femme. Plasma is nectar. Rap, vogue, and general relativity collide in a lecture presentation turned hybrid nightclub spectacle. Plasma is a meditational booty bass invocation. Mx. Oops, master of ceremonies, weaves wildly appropriative ritual ceremony with nightclub ecstatics. Plasma is ecstatics over aesthetics. Who would have thought that the dance floor is the place to look for modern mystics? Come join us for a ritual investigation of the cosmic booty pop. Come get drenched in your own indeterminacy.
choreography, costume & video design | Mx. Oops
vocal artist/music composer | Stefa Marin Alarcón
music composer/performer | Xavier Ryan
poetry | Renée Alberts
makeup artist | Rodrigo Salles
creative advisor | Thomas F. DeFrantz
photography | Oscar Diaz
Creative Residency | CultureHub NYC | Resident Artist | 2018-2019
Creative Residency | SLIPPAGE LAB | Duke University | April 2019
60 min Dixon Place | World Premiere | December 2019 | NYC
15 min EveryWoman Biennial | May 2019 | NYC
15 min COCO Dance Festival | October 2019 | Port of Spain, Trinidad
Plasma was commissioned by and first presented at Dixon Place in NYC with public funds from the SY State Council on the Arts with the support of Gov. Andrew Cuomo, the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and private funds from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, Jerome Robbins Foundation, and Harkness Foundation for Dance. This project was also supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
carrying capacity
2018-2016
60 min American Realness | Abrons Art Center | January 2017 | NYC
Beyond identity there is the plasma of oneness; a dream space, both physical and energetic, that can hold the fullness of we. Carrying Capacity is a speculative journey mixing sacred and profane. It asks — what is the connection between our capacity to love ourselves as simultaneously sexual, spiritual, and social beings with our collective future on this dusty rock? Mx. Oops performs a multimedia ritual using sound meditation, urban dance, video projection, and rap, within an installation by sculptor Jasmine Murrell; featuring guest choreography and performance by Slim Ninja. The soul is invoked, gender is rendered ephemeral, and together we contemplate, in celebration, the sometimes unfortunate profundity of embodiment.
Choreography, Video, Costume, Music / Lyrics | Mx. Oops
Music | Omen Phaze
Sculpture | Jasmine Murrell
Costume (Singlets) | Yozmit
Jewelry | Renee Alberts
Choreography, Performance | Jason A. Rodriguez / Slim Xtravaganza
Performance | Timothy Edwards
Performance | Shekoya Gordon
Performance | Graziella Murdocca
Performance | Phe-Be Smith
This project was made possible in part by Lower Mahattan Community Council's Fund for Creative Communities.
45 min House of Realness | Weiner Festwochen | May 2017 | Vienna, Austria
"Curated by NYC based American Realness founder and curator Ben Pryor, House of Realness features: vogue ritual healing practice from Mx. Oops with musical performance by STEFA* and guest choreography and performance by Slim Extravaganza; spectacle rich performance and video works that question representations of gender, racial and sexual identity from Narcissister; song and story of “glamour as resistance” from trans-genre artist Justin Vivian Bond with Matt Ray on piano, Claudia Chopek on violin and Nath Ann Carrera on guitar; white-guy, medium sized dick, bi-sexual, feminist Emminem on steroids rap from Champagne Jerry who is funny enough for comedy clubs, tight enough for rock clubs, and weird enough for art venues.
Set in a two-stage environment designed by Diego Montoya with Michelle Sutherland under lighting by Sarah Lurie and surrounded by video animations from Mx. Oops and Ethan Weinstock, House of Realness offers a space of respite and recharge in a landscape of queer futurity. Get lost, find your future and build it forward."
EXILE
2016-2015
submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of fine arts at hunter college the city university of new york
13 min | Watusi Regime | April 2016 | NYC
Performed in a group show, Watusi Regime, in The Sanctuary at West Park Presbyterian Church, NYC.
Choreography, Video Design, Costume | Mx. Oops
Music | Omen Phaze & Mx. Oops
Performance | Isabelle Diaz, Timothy Edwards, Graziella Rose
Body Paint | Charly Joaquin Dominguez
Documentation | Tiana Marenah
FAMILIAR PLACES
2014
7 min | PRODUCT PROCESS FESTIVAL | MARCH 2014 | CHESHIRE, UK
Performed in shared evening at the Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire campus. The festival focused on artists engaged with improvisation, curated by Professor Vincent Cacialano.
Choreography, video Design, Sound Design | Mx. Oops
Music | Akira Rabelais, and Alec Empire vs Merzbow
Camera | Alan McDermott
Special thanks to Vincent Cacialano, Axis Art Centre, and Manchester Metropolitan University
LOST IN FAMILIAR PLACES
2013-2012
8 min | Dixon Place | July 2013| NYC
13 min | Connecticut College |March 2013| New London, CT, USA
This work was develop as an Artist in Residence at the Connecticut College Dance Department, in collaboration with the Ammerman Center for Art and Technology. Audience members we connected to sensors that gauge variation in heart rate, which has been show in studies to be tightly related to shift in emotion. This was an experiment to understand the relationship between how experiencing live performance can shift audience physiology and states of awareness. When the audience has less coherence in their heart rate variation, there is more static in the video projection, when they have relatively higher coherence in their heart rate variation, there is less static in the video projection.
[BODIED]
2012-2010
New York Live Arts Suitcase Fund| 2012
Mombassa & Nairobi, Kenya
Artistic Direction | Mx. Oops
Technical Direction and Strategy | Shalonda Ingram, Nursha Project
Featuring: Esther Wambui, Papa Omugataya, and Jade Pesaa
"Stronger" in collaboration with: Frankie Dee, Sis P, Botta Babie, Nick Mumba, Civilizer, Rabizzle TheDoctor, and Rosemary Wambui.
Specila thanks to New York Live Arts Suitcase Fund, 2nd Chance Movement, Big Sound Records, YOUth Shift Africa, GoDown Arts Centre, Dance Forum Nairobi, and Holistic Community Kenya.
American Dance Festival Henan | August 2012
Henan Normal University | Xinxiang, China
Magpie summer Improvisation Workshop | August 2012
Amsterdam, Netherlands
Progress Report #10:
Nothing, Like Dying
2010-2008
Nairobi, Kenya | Washington D.C. | Gloucester, MA
Dance, Video, Music | Mx. Oops
Music | Guillermo Brown
Featuring Asya Zlatina & Stephen Clapp