NTU the Stage, Part III: Dream Seance for Universal Love
On Friday, September 26, 2025, from 7 to 10 PM, Rafael Sanchez will complete a polyptych performance ritual to honor the timeless connection between the breath, the body, and the cosmos. Each thirty-minute action will invite the audience to enhance their awareness of their sensual/spiritual connection to nature through breathwork, movement, and communal gestures that channel a gratitude and grace that live inside all sentient beings.
Here’s the rundown:
7:00-7:30— “Coltrane Coldtrance (Happy 99th Birthday, John Coltrane)”
7:30-8:00— “Vagus Nerve Stimulation Ritual #3”
8:00-8:30— “‘Tone, Bone, [Drone]’ (Happy Belated Birthday Arthur Russell)”
8:30-9:00— “Lace Me in Water and Light (Agape Seance #1)”
9:00-9:30— “Peace and Love, Yana Evans (A Belated Birthday Performance for Ayana Evans)”
9:30-10:00— “Do the Intergalactic Thing (Cosmic Dance Party)”
RAFAEL SANCHEZ [CUBA/USA]
“Art enters into the person and the person enters into the work of art, no?”
— Joseph Beuys
On a Friday in March of 1995 during English class, viscerally enamored with Nine Inch Nails’ “March of the Pigs,” Rafael Sanchez writhed and grunted before his classmates, haranguing the United States for its long history of violence against indigenous and African people. Even then, at 16—without having read Flash of the Spirit or Black Skin White Mask, he understood that art can become a sacred language through which the ancestors commune with the living. He knew, to quote Lyn Hejinian, that “words [were] not equal to the world,” and the medium called performance art could empower him to find a release from this matrix of illusions called reality. Over the last thirty years, his deep reverence for the cosmic, nurturing energy of creative expression has beckoned him to chase MTA and NJ Transit buses bound for Africa, honor the brackish waters of the Hudson River by covering himself in honey and salt, uncontrollably shiver in a bathtub of ice while holding the Cuban flag, and honor the brilliant spirits of Arthur Russell, Audre Lorde, Ghazala Javed, and James Baldwin with simple and cathartic bodily gestures that channel each artist’s ethos. Because of the mimetically wondrous nature of the creative process, Rafael Sanchez believes that his art is solely a reflection of everyone and everything that he has encountered during his 47 years of life. He asks that the audience make a psychoeducational commitment to understanding his work.
Gathering forces, gathering knowledge, gathering wisdom, gathering hearts. Grace Exhibition Space now starts a series of local, national and international performance art evenings, dinners and talks delving into questions and reflections on our connections with Nature. In this can be culture, agriculture, embodied culture, connection to animals, plants, trees, bodies and the likes. Humans are part of the deep collaboration, but we have a long tradition of abusing, consuming and ruining our connection. How can we connect through our human way of living today? What changes can we make? What life rituals could be different? We gather performance artists with different backgrounds, a mix of indigenous, native, nature people and city dwellers, reflecting on their connection and belonging to the natural world, land and to each other.
The goal is to create soulful and self-searching performance art that blows our minds, conversations that can trigger our inner marrow and meetings that are deep and meaningful. Our mode of communication is Performance Art, a form that is in movement, space and time, that can involve all art forms, including actions and everyday objects, sharing complicated and deep thoughts and ideas.
We will revolve around the loss of the third wall, an imaginary boundary, allowing the artists and the audience-participants to create a direct dialogue between one another. We will be questioning the boundaries that separate us, how the natural world has no walls, while many of the societies that man has created are limiting. Building societies that are collaborative, but include destruction and violence, while emulating a cohesive order and balance. We are encouraging sharing communities that help one another through music, listening, healing, feeding and giving.
Grace Exhibition Space opened in 2006 as a home for International Performance Art. GES has hosted numerous performance artists, participating in multiple international festivals and art fairs. Our hope is to create the appropriate environment and means for collaborative research between the multicultural neighborhoods of metropolitan New York. We work to establish an environment that promotes our mission, as we seek to bring together local and international artists who will be interested in open exploration and collaboration with the members of our community.