Silas Borgstrom Ruesler

Touch Tank

An Ecosystem of Aqua-Genitalia

We all deserved a better sex-ed when we were in school… especially Queer folks. How can we call it education when it makes curiosity a sign of depravity? So many of us grew up scared of our own bodies and what we might find in between its folds and orifices. Scared of pleasure. Of exploration. There must have been a better way.

Silas Borgstrom Ruesler answers our call with an alternative: the Touch Tank. Populated by a myriad collection of silicone creatures modeled on human anatomy, it provides a safe (adn weird) space to explore an ecosystem of aqua-genitalia creatures. These creatures are ready to engage with visitors and show them a way to interact with them based on play, curiosity and respect. With Silas along as the resident genitocryptozoologist, leading hands-on tours for those who want some guidance as they plunge into this new world, Touch Tank will be a strange and wonderful addition to our warehouse installations.

More about the artists:

Silas Borgstrom Ruesler (they/he) is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring identity, vulnerability, and the body with a satirical and surreal approach. Raised by a high-school biology teacher in Los Angeles, CA, they are heavily influenced by natural forms and human anatomy. Silas received their BFA in studio art from Cal Poly SLO in 2020 and participated in the Inverse Performance Art residency in 2019 and 2020. They continue their work with interactive, visual, and sculptural arts as a means of communication, commentary, and catharsis. He has recently exhibited pieces at Umpqua Valley Arts and Maude Kerns Art Center in Oregon. Silas currently lives in Portland, OR, where he works in deathcare to support his artistic practice.

This installation will be in operation in the warehouse through-out the Festival, with regular tours between 6p and 7p each night.

Sarah Vitak

Body Doubling

The shape of anxiety, made visible

There are few things more exciting than the moment of recognition that passes through a story shared; an axon making contact with the next neuron; a bridge stretching over a divide. Sarah Vitak’s (they/she) work finds points of connection in stories that others might miss. Their experience in journalism, installation and audiovisual art, and science allows them to lead us into new and exciting worlds like an immersive balloon-neuron brain, a micro-organism petting zoo, or a medical storytelling podcast.

Body Doubling is a project that has been brewing for more than seven years. Through an interactive audio installation, Sarah explores the relationship between our physical bodies (along with the reactions that happen inside of it) and storytelling. It explores anxiety and dysregulation in a way we had not seen before. This year’s Festival of New Performance will be the first time they can gauge the way that a live audience interacts and responds to the piece, which, hopefully, will give them tools to develop and further polish the experience to then be shared with podcast/audio maker/media festivals.

More about the artists:

Sarah’s audio work has won a Webby and a Signal Award. In 2023, they were selected as an Audio Tune Up Mentee at RESONATE.

They were an Art-Science resident with Guerilla Science in 2018 and were shortlisted for the Ginkgo Bioworks Creative Residency in 2020. They have received two Awesome Foundation Grants and were shortlisted for the Denver Center for the Performing Arts Off-Center Residency in 2021. That same year, they participated in Odyssey Works’ Experience Design Incubator.

This installation will be in operation in the warehouse through-out the Festival.

kelly langeslay

[an]archive

history as it should be made

Objects can conjure ghosts and invite them to walk among us. Memories, songs, flavors, games… ways to interact with them; make them dance. kelly langesley invites our ghosts to Risk/Reward’s Festival of New Performance through their installation piece [an]archive. The installation collects both objects commonly associated with academic archival work (journal articles, texts, historical dance films) and ones that exist outside of the regular sense of what “deserves” to be preserved (pop music, video games, personal narrative).

[an]archive is haunted by a lineage of dead queer artists – writers and dancers and filmmakers and musicians and loved ones. It is built around a history of queer performance that has been pushed to the side in favor of dominant (white, cis, and heteronormative) cultural narratives. They serve as a medium, walking us through the veil that weaves our pasts with our queer ancestors; kelly brings ghosts into the present to imagine potential for alternative futures.

More about the artists:

kelly langesley is currently choreographing a work for Velocity Dance Center’s Bridge Project, which will be presented February 2025. kelly is in the process of researching, building, and producing their first solo evening-length work, which is supported by 4Culture and Northwest Film Forum and will be performed in Spring of 2025. They have also danced in Alice Gosti’s company MALACARNE.

https://www.instagram.com/kelly.langeslay/

The performer will be present in this installation from 6p to 7p each night of the Festival, in the hour before the Mainstage performances, as well as 9p to 10p on Saturday the 21st (before our LateR/R Night presentation).

Claire Rigsby and India Roper-Moyes

stitch by stitch

a continuous cycle of making and unmaking

An installation exploring the continuous cycle of making and unmaking through yarn. Taking over a corner of our warehouse space with hanging yarn curtains, crocheted blankets, and yarn-bombed furniture, Claire Rigsby and India Roper-Moyes are ready to carve out a zone of comfort in the middle of Risk/Reward’s festival. Inside, visitors to stitch by stitch will find the pair working both together and in opposition, continually knitting and unknitting the same stretch of an infinite loop.

Claire Rigsby was previously seen at our 2023 Festival of New Performance, where she ensconced herself in a plexiglass box and invited audience members to pop balloons filled with paint on her.

More about the artists:

Claire and India are performers and fiber enthusiasts who connected over a love of yarn in theatre spaces. They are both graduates of PETE’s year-long Institute for Contemporary Performance. As fiber artists, they’re both interested in exploring the metaphors inherent in making something one stitch at a time. The flow of pattern. The undoing to make “perfect”, or the decision to move forward with a “mistake” immortalized in the work.

The performers will be present in this installation from 6p to 7p each night of the Festival, in the hour before the Mainstage performances.

Julie Hammond

Hindsight 2020

The daily words of 20+ artists during the pandemic brought to life

It’s been five years since the world turned upside-down. 

This project began in late 2019 as a year-long collaborative writing experiment. At the time, before the year turned, Julie assembled a collection of 20 people from four different countries to keep diaries of their thoughts, feelings, and actions over the course of 2020. Incredibly, as the year progressed through pandemic, lockdowns, protests, and a fraught election, the chroniclers kept with the project, generating hundreds of pages of material for Hindsight 2020.

Now, Julie and a full team of technicians and designers are putting these diaries into the mouths of seven actors for an ultra-marathon 9-hour-long reading of the full text, one time only, on Sunday, June 22nd, at the Risk/Reward Festival.

The ensemble knows how the piece starts and how it ends, but the in-betweens are open to what emerges from the actors and designers. The space will evolve over the course of the day. The actors will get tired. People will come and go. The team has been spending a lot of time thinking about strategies for survival – how everyone, both performers and audience, can make it through nine hours of performance. Julie believes that the answer might live within a contract of trust: the performers are looking out for the audience, and the audience is giving them someone to talk to. 

At the moment, there are no future plans for the piece—unless someone comes knocking. Hammond jokes about doing it again in 2040. “So… maybe check back in 15 years.”

 More about the artists:

Julie Hammond (Project Director) is a mother, theatre maker, dramaturg for multidisciplinary performance, and instigator of public projects currently based in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a theatre director has toured and been presented by On the Boards (Seattle), Artists Repertory Theatre (Portland), Z Below (San Francisco), the Alliance of Jewish Theatres (Boston, MA), and the rEvolver Festival (Vancouver, BC), among others. From 2015-2019 she co-created 14 shows with Hand2Mouth Theatre. Recent participatory public art projects include an ongoing re-signing and community history of Portland’s Peninsula Park, a year-long residency through the Vancouver Park Board, a community performance/installation for Richmond Public Art, soundwalks for Vancouver New Music, Third Angle New Music, and New Works Calgary, and collaborations with students in elementary and secondary schools exploring historical landmarks, site, and boredom. juliehammond.net

Peter Ksander (Scenographer) is a scenographer and media artist whose work has been presented both nationally and internationally. He was a founding curator of the Incubator Arts Project in NYC, won an Obie Award for the scenic design of Untitled Mars (this title may change), and a Bessie Award for the visual design of This Was the End. Recent Portland credits include designs for The Americans, Apoptosis, The Cherry Orchard, Fronteriza, The Weather Room, Sweat, Indecent. He holds an M.F.A. from CalArts, is a professor at Reed College, and is a member of the Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble (PETE).

Jen Mitas (Dramaturg) got her start in queer solo performance in New York in the late 1990s. She has spent the last twenty-five years helping artists and organizations hone and realize their visions. As a facilitator for The Field in New York she led workshops using the feedback technique (Fieldwork), including week-long artist residencies. As a lecturer and researcher in the UK, she led courses in performance devising, theory and history with BA and MA students at Queen Mary University of London and University of Falmouth. Upon her return to the US she was Hand2Mouth Theatre’s Executive Director for 7 years, producing projects, tours, stewarding conversation events, and developing/ managing a community arts space (Shout House). Recent projects include dramaturgy for Katherine Longstreth and co-creating Slumber Party.

You can catch this piece on Sunday, June 22nd, between 10am and 7pm. Tickets are not required, and the audience is free to come and go as they please at any time through-out the runtime. There will be snacks.

ILVS STRAUSS

ñ

What do we hear? What do we want to hear?

ILVS is back!

For their fourth offering at Risk/Reward, they’ll present a multimedia performance that blends sound exploration, personal narrative, and movement, to guide the audience through an intentional soundscape. An audiophile delves deep into their experience of a specific song, dissecting the nuances of hearing it on high-end speakers. At the same time, ñ explores the physics of sound, the origin of language, and the basic human need for connection, all wrapped up in humor, introspection, and a bit of mischief from the show’s lead character—a green rabbit. Dueling English / Spanish language supertitles complicate and deepen the show’s themes of connection, digression, and what it really means to perceive something.

Ultimately, ñ (enye) is about exploring what it means to hear, to listen, and to be heard. It’s an invitation to consider the power that sound and language have in shaping the world around us and the way we experience it.

 More about the artist:

“From a sociodemographic standpoint, I am a 45 year old educated, queer, mixed-race, white-passing, female bodied, Honduran-American artist. From a non-sociodemographic standpoint, I’m still those things, but manifest in 3D by the ethereal: experience, values, judgement, desire, need, love, motivation, inspiration, etc.

I once had a job as an analytical chemist for a pharmaceutical company (BA Chemistry – OSU) but then slowly pivoted to the arts (MFA Interdisciplinary Arts – SFU). The hats I wear are many and at times I have been known to wear several at once: multi-disciplinary performance artist, writer, dancer, facilitator, technical director, lighting designer, and sound engineer.

Born in the Los Angeles area, I grew up in Portland then moved to Seattle before coming up to Vancouver BC. At present, I have no intention to move further north.”

www.ilvsstrauss.com

You can catch this piece as part of the 7pm Mainstage show, each night of the Festival – June 20th to 22nd. Tickets available here!

Jordan Isadore

you look good, bud

A Refusal to be Neatly Packaged

Following an early development residency at New Expressive Works, Jordan Isadore is landing at Risk/Reward for the next iteration of his exciting piece. As an exploration of specific moments in his life, ranging from joyful to uncomfortable, Jordan will venture into the complex terrain of memory, queerness, and race, and explores how these elements have shaped his identity.

you look good, bud refuses to be neatly packaged. It’s dance, theatre, performance, and visual art, and embraces the complexity of human identity: the joy of self-expression and reclamation, the isolating otherness, the liminality of the in-betweens.

This 20-minute iteration of you look good, bud is what Jordan has named a “balancing act” that brings out the emotional core of the piece while still allowing the textures – sound, props, projections, and movement – to speak.

Jordan is currently working on expanding the piece into a full-length solo with a premiere slated for November in collaboration with Open Space Dance and support from the Regional Arts and Culture Council. He finds that sharing his art at Risk/Reward is an exciting step in figuring out what resonates, what sticks, and what wants to grow.

 More about the artist:

Jordan Isadore is a dancer and choreographer originally from Northern California who has established himself as a versatile and accomplished artist in the contemporary dance world. He began his professional career with Los Angeles-based company BodyTraffic, performing works by Barak Marshall and Alex Ketley. In 2011, Isadore relocated to New York.

There, he has collaborated with Shen Wei Dance Arts, becoming a core member of the company and performing in global and international stages including the David H. Koch Theater, Mariinsky Theater, Park Avenue Armory, and tours throughout China, South America, Europe, Brazil, Italy, and Russia.

Beyond traditional dance performances, Isadore has showcased his versatility by directing movement for Solange Knowles and performing on the Conan O’Brien show with Devonté Hynes of Blood Orange. His artistry has been captured by renowned photographer Lois Greenfield.

You can catch this piece as part of the 7pm Mainstage show, each night of the Festival – June 20th to 22nd. Tickets available here!

Joe Kye

Love and Lineage

Blurring History and Identity

Love and Lineage will be a deeply personal multimedia performance by Portland-based musician and storyteller Joe Kye. Using looping violin, vocals, Korean instruments, and spoken word, Joe weaves together the story of his grandfather – a refugee who fled North Korea after the country’s division in 1948 and who later fought in the Korean War – to explore themes of love, survival, and generational trauma. Joe Kye will be joined by Qi You, a visual artist who will be creating live, improvised visuals and collages through-out the piece.

The piece combines traditional Korean rituals with modern music and technology to become both a concert and a healing ritual; Joe blurs the lines between past and present, history and identity, and invites the audience to collectively hold onto and consider the brutality of empire and our intimate place within it.

According to Joe, Love and Lineage pushed Joe to experiment with scripted storytelling and ritual-making – forms he hadn’t fully explored before. This marks an important step for Joe as he moves beyond his work as a musician and leans into a hybrid form of performance art authentic to his multifaceted artistic identity. In that spirit of boundary-pushing art, Risk/Reward is over-joyed to bring Love and Lineage to the stage.

 More about the artists:

Portland-based musician and storyteller Joe Kye discharges worlds of emotion with his lush string loops and eclectic style. Born in Korea and raised in the United States, Joe shares his multifaceted identity with humor and vulnerability. Kye has performed for Carnegie Hall’s Migrations festival, recorded a Tedx Talk, and been featured on PRI’s The World .

His recent project, Love & Lineage, is a deeply felt narrative ritual, a migration through multiple generations and geographies of his Korean family. Looping violin, vocals, and traditional Korean instruments, Joe’s improvisations swirl with stories and deep ancestral connection as he invites the spirit of his grandfather into the performance space. Joe will be joined by Portland visual artist Qi You, who will augment the piece through live altar-building and ritualmaking.

Qi You is an American visual artist, designer, and dreamer based in Portland, Oregon. Qi explores the languages ranging from two-dimensional to time-based media. She uses design as the tool of care and wholeness, breaking down the barriers, to rediscover and reconnect, from herself to the rest of the world around.

Qi holds an MFA in Expanded Media from the School of Art and Design, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and a BFA in Design from China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Qi You’s work has been shown and screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Oregon Contemporary, Portland Chinatown Museum and the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon. Qi is currently working on the future memorial of altar design at Block 14 in Lone Fir Cemetery. https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/honoring-untold-stories-lone-fir-cemetery

You can catch this piece as part of the 7pm Mainstage show, each night of the Festival – June 20th to 22nd. Tickets available here!

Fox Whitney

NOT TRIO A

Dance-As-Protest

In this performance, Fox and his artistic collaborators will revisit TRIO A WITH FLAGS by Yvonne Rainer – a key moment in the history of dance-as-protest– and shift the lens to queer and trans identities, exploring how the body can be both a site of resistance and of self-expression, and how movement can be a strategy for defiance. The performance will open with a direct reference to Rainer’s photograph that is then infused through movement (both physical and political), dance, music and drag to delve into Fox’s own stories and political identity.

NOT TRIO A is an excerpt from Fox’s full-length project LOOK OUT, that will mix autobiography, experimental drag, and the energy of Seattle’s queer nightlife into something that Fox describes as a “love letter to other trans and queer body-based artists and a slightly autobiographical dance adventure.”

 More about the artists:

FOX WHITNEY [he/him] is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, music, film+video, theater, writing and visual art. Fox is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and how personal and collective identity is an ever shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. He founded the interdisciplinary performance project Gender tender in 2012 and the trans-futurist psych band Light Aloud in 2023 The band grew from his ongoing series of performances MELTED RIOT. Inspired by the stonewall Riots of 1969, MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer.
Fox’s work has been commissioned and produced by the Henry Art Gallery; On the Boards; Velocity Dance Center; Seattle International Dance Festival; Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival and was selected for the inaugural season of Seattle’s Gay City Arts. Light Aloud has played at Trans Pride Seattle, Capitol Hill Block Party and the Seattle Art Fair. He has performed in work by Meg Foley, Will Rawls, keyon gaskin, Morgan Thorson, Andrew Schneider, CommonForm Dance Project, Malic Amalya and Gabrielle Civil. He got his MFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has exhibited his short films and visual art nationally. Fox is also a yoga and meditation teacher, movement teaching artist and arts journalist. He was the Artistic Director of Velocity Dance Center from 2020-2022. www.foxwhitney.com

WILL COURTNEY [all pronouns] is a multifaceted transgender artist, Light Aloud band member and Gender Tender performance project all-star. She was the first performer Fox invited to dance with him for Gender Tender research and development when it all started in 2012. Will has been a lead performer for many GT projects and after the first few years of performing began to expand his role in GT working with Fox as an artistic consultant, rehearsal director and producer. As a performance duo, Fox and Will gleefully mine the blurry line separating their longstanding friendship and their very queer performance chemistry.

VLADA KREMENOVIĆ [she/her] is an immigrant performer and filmmaker currently based in Seattle, WA. Originally from Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina, she graduated from Middlebury College in 2017 with a joint degree in dance and film. Since moving to Seattle, she has danced with Heather Kravas, Alice Gosti, Melissa Riker, Petra Zanki, Karin Stevens, Jordan Macintosh-Hougham, Fox Whitney and Noelle Price, as well as worked on several short and feature-length film projects. Her work has been presented by Studio Current, Velocity Dance Center and Freeway Park. She is interested in combining her postmodern, interdisciplinary education and Slavic heritage to create choreographic containers for radical empathy and to raise awareness of the issues in Balkan countries.

MOONFLOWER (He/They) is a Queer Two-Spirit Transmasculine Mescalero Apache Latinx and Chinese performing artist, actor, and Draglesque performer. He is an advocate for erotic embodiment, queer trans joy, and pleasure expansion. Kink, art, and performance are an integral part of of their life, as they are practices that help them abolish and break free from oppressive, colonial, and societal disciplines. He is passionate about creating and contributing to radical containers of play that allow himself and others to go to a place of deep transformation, exploration, and healing. You may have recently seen him onstage with Seattle Rep, Village Theatre, ArtsWest, VALTESSE, The Dirty Darlings, and AZNGLO / RICEGLO. When not onstage you’ll find him in the kitchen cookin’, in the mountains, or in the nearest body of water!

You can catch this piece as part of the 7pm Mainstage show, each night of the Festival – June 20th to 22nd. Tickets available here!

The Bonnies

Picklehole

Simply, a piece about pickles… right?

Picklehole is inspired by a scene in the Czech new wave film Daisies where the two main characters feed each other pickles in bed – but both the scene and the Bonnies’ new piece uses briny cucumbers to get at deeper themes about sexuality (and the awkwardness that comes with it), rebellion, and even joy.

That said, the Bonnies chose the name Picklehole first and foremost because it made them laugh. Still, it manages to subtly point toward the ways femme-bodied people are often made to feel within relationships and society at large. The pickle, then, serves as a multilayered symbol—goofy, grotesquely phallic, and yet oh-so-beautifully capable of transformation and preservation (just like art! (And life!)) 

In developing the piece, Kaitlin and Jenny have followed a single compass: joy– joy in goofiness, in, fantasy, in beauty. “We hope that if we do what resonates with us, it will resonate with other people too,” Kaitlin says. Their shared history as collaborators making strange performance works since 2013 has allowed for them to explore all desires, impulses, and wishes. Kaitlin describes the rehearsal space as one with plenty of dialogue, intimacy and several trials and errors involving DIY silicone mold-making. 

(On Risk/Reward’s side, it’s not the only piece involving silicone molds of objects that definitely aren’t genitalia – make sure you stop by Silas Borgstrom Ruesler’s Touch Tank installation before seeing Picklehole in the 7pm mainstage.) 

Musically, Jenny has been deconstructing and manipulating the soundtrack of the John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut porn film. “I love working with already-existing cultural references,” she says. “They carry so many layers of meaning. Plus—it’s just funny.”

Once Risk/Reward’s festival is over, Kaitlin and Jenny will dive into creating their evening-length work I’m on Fire, You’re on Fire, We’re on Fire, set to premiere as part of Velocity’s 2026 spring season. The piece is a hugely ambitious endeavor, with Jenny composing and recording the sound score and Kaitlin designing and building the visual elements. Some material from Picklehole will likely be transformed and absorbed into this larger work. The duo has a couple of developmental residencies lined up over the summer to explore and refine their ideas, and they anticipate that their experience performing at Risk/Reward will play a key role in shaping the direction of the new piece. Audiences can look forward to seeing it in early March in Seattle!

 More about the artists:

Kaitlin McCarthy and Jenny Peterson have been making strange performance works together in Seattle, WA since 2013. Often performing as “The Bonnies,” they gravitate to the grotesque/off-kilter/marvelous like moths to the flame. They have performed at WET’s Six-Pack Series, Velocity’s NextFest, OTB’s Open Studio, Boost Dance Festival, NEPO 5k, Seattle Intl Dance Festival, High F@ggotry, and other underground art salons and nightlife performance venues. In 2024 they premiered their first evening-length work, DRIVE WOLVES MAD, and toured it to Portland, OR and San Diego, CA.

One of us is tall, one is short, both are Type A weirdos. Jenny is a Seattle artist working in dance, photography, and music/sound. She grew up a competitive gymnast in the Chicago suburbs and has never recovered. Jenny boasts 17 years of performing professionally in Seattle, including with the Pat Graney Company since 2008. She holds a B.A. in Dance and Visual Arts from UC Irvine and is a licensed massage therapist. Kaitlin is a Seattle-based dance artist, teacher, and journalist. She has performed with countless choreographers since 2010, including as a core member of Alice Gosti’s company MALACARNE. A prominent dance writer about town, she edits the publication SeattleDances and has a decade of experience specializing in teaching adult beginning dance

You can catch this piece as part of the 7pm Mainstage show, each night of the Festival – June 20th to 22nd. Tickets available here!