Crossroads: Darvejon Jones, Catherine Chen + Annie Ming-Hao Wang, Hunter Sturgis
Curated series presented by Pioneers Go East Collective
Saturday, June 7, 2025
6 – 7:30 pm
RSVP Free HERE
A curated series presented by Pioneers Go East Collective, Crossroads Series features
interdisciplinary artists who explore new genres and known performance and art-making
modes to share their creative practices with other artists and their audiences. Each evening, we
witness different generations of artists dealing with actual, day-to-day, contemporary
challenges to further discussion between artists and to activate a network of exchange and
inclusion with social and artistic intervention.PERFORMERS
Darvejon Jones
Catherine Chen
Hunter Sturgis
Bio
Darvejon (dar – vee – yawn) A. Jones (he/him)
Darvejon A. Jones is a father + a dance-based multimodal artist who creates Black work. His research, deeply rooted in the phenomenological hermeneutics (messengers and tricksters) intrinsic to Black dance, highlights the historical context of Blackness in the United States as a Western phenomenon and mechanism. Darvejon’s process, always drenched in sweat, is responsive and available to influence from current events, history, poetry, visual art, rap, jazz, radical imagination, the little assumptions people make, language and rage. Constantly negotiating his role in the care-taking of his audience, he aims to create works that incite action and courage for our collective liberation.
Catherine Chen
My practice spans poetry, painting, movement, and performance making. I work with and against language to explore the ways disappearance materializes across embodied sites, like memory and grief, or gender and labor. How can these material disappearances be woven together or dispersed to explore a multifaceted temporality? In my work, time is a character who not only withstands the effects of colonization but also adapts to its violence. The poetic lens of disappearance is further informed by my cultural and political identity as a queer Asian diasporic woman. From the Chinese cultural practice of removing women from their family lineages to the sex trafficking of Asian women as “comfort women,” disappearance is a design of genocidal and colonial systems to displace people from their land and bodies, to make collective care and resistance impossible. Working within this unease, I look for ways to explore the difficulty of archiving and embodying disappearance in conversation with emergent modes of technology.
Hunter Sturgis
Hunter Sturgis is a Queer Dance Artist based in Bushwick originally from McAllen, Texas. Sturgis received his BFA from University of Texas at Austin (2017), under the direction of Charles O. Anderson, where he had the privilege to work with choreographers such as Charles Anderson, Erica Gionfriddo, Kate Watson-Wallace, Manuel Vignoulle, Dorothy O’Shea Overbey, Abby Zbikowski, and Oluwaseun Olayiwola. Hunter came to NYC in 2018 for Sidra Bell’s Winter Module and fully did not get on that return flight. He teaches Pilates and freelances all over the city working with various companies, organizations, collectives, choreographers, singers, filmmakers, as well as presenting his own solo works. Hunter has shown his choreography at Arts On Site, Triskelion Arts, The Bronx Academy of Arts & Dance, 14 Street Y Manhattan, and now Socrates Sculpture Park.
About Pioneers Go East Collective
Pioneers Go East Collective is a radical Queer laboratory collective dedicated to dance-theater and video art to empower the LGBTQ experience. An artist-driven collective, we create works of high artistic merit, speak out about social issues and build a platform to positively impact the LGBTQ community. Based in NYC, the collective is led by BIPOC and/or immigrant artists and cultural organizers Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Daniel Diaz, Philip Treviño, Joyce Isabelle, Joey Kipp, Remi Harris, and Anabella Lenzu. We portray same-gender-loving experiences, memory, and marginalization that resonate with contemporary lives. The collective combines stories of vulnerability and courage with popular culture to facilitate communal meaning and advocate for cultural integrity. Our work has been widely presented in NYC at Judson Church, La MaMa, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, St Ann’s Warehouse, The LGBT Center, JACK, Exponential Festival, LMCC’s Process Space at Governors Island, Chashama Gallery, Incubator Arts Project, New Dance Alliance, and Goethe Institut. For more information about their work please visit their website here.
Image: Darvejon A. Jones Performance. Photo: Owen Burnham