Show Time: Holland Andrews, Taja Cheek, Cole Escola, Moriah Evans, Carlos Martiel

From the Whitney Biennial, which this year features a dedicated performance program, to Off-Broadway theaters and beyond: New York’s cultural spaces are alive with performers. Working across music, dance, comedy and performance art, meet five of the city’s stars on the rise, as captured in these portraits—and specially commissioned short film—by photographer and director Tess Ayano.

Holland Andrews

Listen out for Holland Andrews at this year’s Whitney Biennial. In the museum’s elevator, the artist’s cocooning sound work Hyperacusis Version 1: Sleeping Bag is installed, while in the stairwell is Air I Breathe: Radio (both 2024), a disorienting sonic landscape of synth, drone, static, breath and echoes. Drawing on traditions including opera and extended vocal technique, voice is central to Andrews’s multidisciplinary work (also performing under the moniker Like A Villain, as a recording artist they have three albums and three EPs on Nils Frahm’s Berlin-based label LEITER under their belt). This summer, they will return to the museum to perform Speaker, a new commission in which the artist seeks “somatic catharsis through sound,” as part of the biennial’s performance program.

Cole Escola

Combining close observation with poignant surrealism, Cole Escola has a genius for realizing characters as human as they are unhinged. See Fifi, the kind-hearted brothel madam in the masterful pastiche Our Home Out West (2023, stream it on YouTube). Championed by the likes of Amy Sedaris and Julie Klausner, Escola’s breakthrough may be Oh, Mary! (2024), an Off-Broadway smash written by and starring Escola as Mary Todd Lincoln: with the late president’s wife reimagined as a highly strung, dipsomaniac showgirl, desperate to trade the White House for the stage. One recent performance was attended by Steven Spielberg and actress Sally Field (who played the First Lady in Spielberg’s 2012 Lincoln). When the show’s run ends this month, there’s nothing for Escola to hit but the heights.

Carlos Martiel

For the 2021 performance Monumento II, Carlos Martiel stood for two hours on a pedestal in the rotunda of the Guggenheim: naked, handcuffed and immobile, a living memorial to injustice. Born in Havana, Martiel has taken part in biennials from Venice to Vancouver, Cuenca to Casablanca, but this May sees the Cuban American artist’s New York homecoming with “Cuerpo” at El Museo del Barrio. His first solo museum exhibition in the city, the survey details the artist’s commitment to intensive, durational performance and efforts to make the operations of power viscerally apparent: in 2023’s Nobody, a flagpole becomes a whipping post. “Cuerpo” results from Martiel’s receipt of the Maestro Dobel Latinx Prize, supported by Maestro Dobel Tequila.

Taja Cheek

Taja Cheek is on a tear right now. Following roles at Creative Time, High Line Art and MoMA PS1, in December, co-organizers Chrissie Iles and Meg Onli invited Cheek to curate the performance program for the Whitney Biennial; in March, she was announced as the artistic director of Performance Space New York. Meanwhile, as multi-instrumental musical act L’Rain, she is touring the US and beyond with her acclaimed third album, I Killed Your Dog (2023): a kaleidoscopic opus that shifts from reverie to brittle emotional immediacy. “Performance art in general has a shroud of mystery covering it,” she told the New York Times this year, clarifying: “I think performance is about people.”

Moriah Evans

Performed at Sculpture Center and Rockaway Beach among other settings, choreographer Moriah Evans calls her dance works an “existential fidget.” Rich in the movements and processes of daily life, they also circle, sometimes furiously, the big questions: What is knowledge? What is collectivity? What is dance? Staged in 2022 at Performance Space New York and at MOCA, Los Angeles last October, Evans’s acclaimed Remains Persist is a porous, four-hour open work in which nine dancers instruct and interrogate each other (“What does the body have to say right now?” “Is part of your flesh in someone else’s flesh?”), exploring what information is encoded in movement. Watch her next moves closely.

This article first appeared in Frieze Week New York 2024 under the title “Show Time.”

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