Artists & Projects We Support
CRS supports artists and creative communities whose work grows through sustained inquiry, experimentation, and collaboration. Our relationships take different forms according to what each artist or project needs — including commissioning, developmental support, producing and presenting work, creating opportunities for exchange, and helping artists build new partnerships and audiences.
Much of the work we support crosses boundaries between disciplines, cultures, and artistic traditions. What connects these projects is not a particular medium or style, but a commitment to discovery: artists listening deeply, taking risks, and finding forms through which something not yet fully known can emerge.
Artist + Developing Work
Jen Shyu
Fertile Land, Fertile Body
Composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist, dancer, and performer Jen Shyu is developing Fertile Land, Fertile Body, an expansive multilingual ritual opera combining ancient and original music, movement, text, and projection. The work explores loss of mother and motherhood alongside environmental toxicity, war, climate change, and fertility, connecting the vulnerability of human bodies with that of the land. CRS has supported the project through multiple stages of its continuing development and presentation.
Artist + Developing Work
Layale Chaker
Enheduanna
Violinist and composer Layale Chaker is creating Enheduanna, a transdisciplinary opera inspired by the Sumerian high priestess and poet Enheduanna, considered the earliest named author in recorded history. Reimagining this ancient female voice within a contemporary landscape, the work explores exile, social upheaval, war, gender, storytelling, and our relationship with the forces of nature. CRS is supporting the work as it develops.
Performance Collective
Dreamborne Theater
Dreamborne Theater is a New York-based performance collective developing cross-cultural work rooted in dreams, myth, memory, ritual, and experimentation with theatrical form. CRS has supported several of the collective’s developing productions, including angels, by Tara P. Nyingjè; Everyday Is a Pig’s Birthday; and Pre-Ontic. Across its projects, Dreamborne uses theater, movement, sound, and imaginative world-building to investigate identity, relationship, memory, care, and transformation.
Dreamborne Theater →angels, at CRS →Everyday Is a Pig’s Birthday →
Artist + Ongoing Collaboration
Megumi Eda
CRS has maintained an ongoing artistic relationship with Berlin-based interdisciplinary artist Megumi Eda, supporting the development and presentation of work across dance, theater, film, and autobiographical performance. Projects have included DIVINE, created with Yuko Kaseki and commissioned by CRS; Please Cry; the autobiographical solo fish άɪ lens; YORIDOKORO – Silent Anchor, created with composer Reiko Yamada; and Turning Your Story Into Movement: An Autobiographical Workshop. Her work moves fluidly among memory, migration, aging, motherhood, identity, and embodied experience.
International Collaborative Project
KOTOHOGI
KOTOHOGI is an ongoing collaboration among butoh artist Yuko Kaseki, calligrapher and visual artist Kanako Sehara, and performance and vocal artist Miho Tsujii. Interweaving butoh, sumi calligraphy, Noh-derived movement and vocalization, storytelling, sound, and site-responsive performance, KOTOHOGI evolves through encounters with particular places, communities, histories, and cultural traditions. CRS has provided continuing support for the project’s development and its artistic exchanges between Japan and Europe.
Interdisciplinary Performance
zOne
Created by butoh artist Yuko Kaseki and sound artist Mieko Suzuki, zOne is an interdisciplinary performance exploring dementia, memory, forgetting, and the shifting boundaries of identity. Kaseki’s movement and Suzuki’s immersive sound environment search for traces of experiences that may disappear from conscious memory while remaining inscribed elsewhere in the body and mind. CRS supports the project as part of its longstanding relationship with Kaseki and its interest in artistic approaches to aging, memory, and human experience.
Documentary Film
Alicia Qian
嘚瑟嘚瑟 (When Are You Coming Home?)
Filmmaker Alicia Qian 钱崇琪 is directing 嘚瑟嘚瑟 (When Are You Coming Home?), a documentary that began as an attempt to discover who her mother is beyond the familiar roles of mother and wife. Through her mother and a close-knit circle of fellow Chinese immigrants in California, the film opens onto questions of friendship, immigration, middle age, family, legacy, and the unexpectedly expansive lives that exist beyond the identities others assign us. The project marked CRS’s first direct support of a documentary film production.
Dance + Theater
Soomi Kim
GUT (굿)
Performance artist and theater maker Soomi Kim is developing GUT (굿), an autobiographical hybrid dance-theater work and the concluding installment in her series exploring mortality in Korean and Asian American lives. Blending movement, text, projection, family history, and personal memory, the work examines grief, inherited experience, immigration, and the complicated bonds between generations. CRS is supporting the project during its continuing development.
Artist-Led Community
Chaospace
DramaEtMusica
Founded in New York by artists including Shinya Lin and Chen Shuhe Yue, Chaospace is an experimental arts community supporting Asian artists as curators and creators across disciplines. CRS is supporting Chaospace and the continuing development of DramaEtMusica, led by Chen Shuhe Yue. Dedicated to music theater and experimental opera, the series brings together artists working across music, theater, movement, visual media, technology, and performance, creating a platform where new interdisciplinary work can be tested, developed, and shared.
Art + Technology
Turbulence Creative
Turbulence Creative works at the intersection of art and advanced technology, bringing engineering expertise into collaboration with artists, designers, and cultural organizations. CRS is supporting its efforts to make sophisticated technical knowledge, collaborators, and resources more accessible to emerging artists. The relationship extends CRS’s commitment to experimentation into another essential area: helping artists cross disciplinary boundaries and give technological or physical form to ideas they might otherwise be unable to realize.