Dispatches

kaijo caggins (they/he) is a Black trans performance artist, educator and doula. they observe improvisation and defiance through pleasure in their performance practices. kaijo works with the body, sounding and disorientation; with an emphasis on queerness, somatics, and liberation as life force. they facilitate queer Contact Improvisation jams + teach CI based classes. living within Lenapehoking and Nacotchtank, he is currently in community with local CI enthusiasts, multidisciplinary artists, families, and the rivers. kaijo is pursuing their MA in Women’s, Gender + Sexuality Studies at The George Washington University.

what kaijo is working on:

‘disorient rituals for grounding — a practice in process’

this is a trio

a moresome

we are entering the fifth wall

can we orient ourselves differently

close your eyes

lay with me

hands to the sky

mouths open

‘disorient futures’ is a curiosity space working through practices of improvisation and asking questions. falling into the senses. trusting desire. saying no. activating manifestations of what it means to be with our own complexities + in community as worlds around us shift and crumble. ‘disorient futures’ teases methods of contact improvisation and sonic collage.

kaijo is presenting in the January Dispatches

Lu Donovan is a choreographer, performer, and teaching artist based in Philadelphia. His work prioritizes pleasure and researches strategies of queer-ing. He plays with other queer and trans artists to build widening worlds that create containers in which bodies can pump up, relax down, or find the sweetest way their hips move to a beat. As an amateur anatomist and physicist, his dance practice utilizes these “sciences” to open the possibilities of existing in a gendered body, offering more and more options for how to move about this world. 

Lu creates work alongside Micah Lockman-Fine, designer, curator, and installation artist. The two have shown their work together over the past 2 years through Dream Sweet, Rough Man and Rough Man’s Playground. Lu has also shown original pieces at the Icebox Project Space, Fringe Arts, Headlong, and Vox Populi, as well as self-produced in fields, basements, and apartments across Philadelphia. His work tends toward facilitation with a curiosity not only about how it feels to witness performance, but also to explore movement within oneself. Lu has taught at the University City Arts League, the Woodlands, Mascher Space Cooperative, and through the Philly Dance Share.

What Lu is working on:

Through Dispatches, Lu will work within music and dance to merge their research on drone tones, fractal patterns, sound waves, and the body technologies we’re equipped with to perceive these phenomena. He is inviting other sound and movement artists to the studio to collaborate on scores of repetition - looping patterns again and again and again until they break off and iterate into something new. In studying this emergence, Lu hopes to build techniques that allow the body to associate (not dissociate) through change.

Lu is presenting in the August Dispatches

Marisa (she/ they) is a movement and performance artist based in Philadelphia, land of the Lenape people. She is most interested in authentic movement, radical and expansive movement practices, and movement as a means of grounding toward collective liberation/revolution. In her work, she has been exploring themes of grief, rebirth, togetherness and queerness through performance. Marisa performed a solo dance theater show in the 2024 Cannonball festival called authentic grief baby monologue. They earned their BFA from the University of the Arts in 2016, and have worked with many incredible artists in the area since.

What Marisa is working on:

Marisa has been combining writing, movement, and storytelling practices lately, hoping to disarm her preconceived notions of artmaking and performance to unveil deeper, truer, and more playful possibilities. They have been writing about the grief of losing their mom to cancer in 2023, coming out of the closet during the pandemic, and exploring themes of mortality, transformation, playfulness, and rebirth. Her movement practice is based in authentic movement, an insistence on feeling deeply instead of shape making, and allowing oneself to both witness and be witnessed- despite the nearly unbearable vulnerability hangover that inevitably ensues.

Marisa is presenting in the January Dispatches

Jungeun Kim (J.e.) is a dance artist and educator. Her work focuses on connectedness accentuated by aesthetic simplicity and curiosity, and is often sourced from personal experience and relationality.  She works with both mediums of dance and digital media, such as video, moving images and animation to create live performance, experimental short video and animation works. Her dance and video works have been presented around the U.S., Europe and Asia. She has been teaching for over two decades, ranging from institutions of higher education, to dance festivals, to a community center for refugees and immigrants.  J.e. hails from Seoul, South Korea and now lives in Philadelphia.

What J.e. is working on:

On June 7, 2005 I departed from my homeland and arrived in a new land. Here I am still, living in the U.S., a place which was new for a long time but almost suddenly is not new anymore and not what I first imagined. I began this work through a lens of reflective practice while collecting and exploring assorted movements that I have learned, adopted, kept, repeated or unlearned over the past 20 years of my life. The collection of movements includes staying still, pushing and pulling my surroundings, hiding and remaining hidden, holding and letting go of my belongings, looking ahead, behind and down, closing my eyes and opening them with a hope of magic and stepping away.

J.e. is presenting in the August Dispatches