Lucy Kerr
while you were away
Returning LEIMAY Fellow Lucy Kerr returns with an intersection of film and performance, realizing the poetic relationship between human landscape and loneliness. Kerr immerses performers in images of absence, both reflecting and revealing what is not there and what could be there.

Alexa Salamé
Island
Ariadne, daughter of Minos, helps helps Theseus defeat the Minotaur but when Theseus does return to his homeland, it is without Ariadne; somehow, she is left alone on a distant shore after they stopped to rest, and she wakes to find herself abandoned by the man she gave up everything for.  Salamé uses a self-developed physical and vocal form to examine that of forsakeness and wreckage, embodying an abstracted imagining of this unknowable moment in Ariadne's life.

Danielle Russo Performance Project
Study No. 2: First, fall from the weight of your thenar eminence
An excerpted sampling of a larger duet, this solo study is a glimpse into a larger exploration that began from the geometric dissections mapped by the laws of the golden ratio in the hands, arms, and head; as such, a gestural lexis is established, deconstructed and rendering the upper body onto the lower periphery. Marrying this movement with postures frequent in visual representations of “Via Crucis/Stations of the Cross”, these configurations are further fragmented and reconciled by timed accelerations based on a numerical series of binary strings according to Fibonacci.

Kathleen Kelley
Frozen Baby
Through the integration of digital projections, mobile light design, and a sound score that travels through headphones and small portable speakers, Kelley investigates the physicality of secrets by interweaving the moving body with technological and digital landscapes. Kelley’s solo moves from highly nuanced gesture into a lushly feminine virtuosity.


Alexa Salamé is a Lebanese-American performance artist based in NYC. A graduate of NYU-Tisch, her work has been featured at Dixon Place, Shakespeare on the Sound, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Danielle Russo has been presented nationally at the American Dance Festival, Jacob's Pillow and The Yard; and internationally in Austria, Belgium, Canada, France, Mexico, Panama, South Korea, Spain and Sweden. Outside of her own choreographic endeavors, Russo performs with the Metropolitan Opera and teaches on faculty at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. BFA NYU/TSOA, MFA Hollins/ADF.

Lucy Kerr is a choreographer, filmmaker, installation artist, and writer. Kerr's work explores the structures and unknowns of personal experience. She graduated from the UT Austin and was the winner of the 2014 Mitchell Awards.

Kathleen Kelley is a choreographer and media artist who serves as an Assistant Professor at Montclair State University. Her work investigates the interactions between technology, feminism, improvisation, and the body through live performance and videos.

SOAK is a festival presenting a stream of AcTS and training in theater, butoh, dance, music, and performance art every summer-spring season. SOAK is molded by LEIMAY, the interdisciplinary ensemble and producing organization behind the acclaimed New York Butoh Festival.  SOAK takes place at LEIMAY’s home, CAVE, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

SOAK broadens the perceptions of our artists and audiences with work that is experimental, rigorous, and thought-provoking. The festival showcases finished and in-progress work by international, local, and fellow artists, and blends them together in a concoction that inspires audiences, fuels the artists, and stimulates the community surrounding LEIMAY’s activities.