May 22-24, 2026

STAGES OF CHANGE, SPRING, 2026
Featuring Irina Kruzhilina, Aaron Landsman, Nisha Sajnani & Stephen Koplowitz

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

Site, Society, Community: An Introduction to a Toolkit for Site Performance

 is an introductory workshop on the fundamentals of socially engaged, site-responsive performance. Participants will explore how public spaces and civic structures shape community experience, and how these forces can be translated into theatrical/choreographic ideas, images, and performance scores. The workshop’s goal is to help participants gain access to a concise toolkit that supports the creation of storyboard sketches and conceptual proposals for developing site-specific art performances in dialogue with communities and their stakeholders.

Stephan Koplowitz is a multifaceted artist who has created a diverse portfolio of works over the past forty years, including interactive media installations, short films, photography, and site-specific and concert dance-theater performances. Koplowitz’s site creations aim to alter people’s perspectives of place, site, and scale and offer communities a chance to rediscover shared spaces through an artistic experience. As a long-time practitioner of site-specific performance, he is dedicated to creating original works wholly inspired by the site, its history, and social/political context. Visit (www.skoplowitz.com) for more information.

Activating Public Space: Performance as Civic Action
The workshop approaches performance as a tool for encounter, visibility, and social engagement, asking how artistic gestures can reframe public space and generate moments of connection, agency, and collective experience. Explore how artists can temporarily transform public space through collective action, participation, and performative intervention. Participants will experiment with practical strategies for activating everyday environments through spatial interventions, movement, and shared presence.

Irina Kruzhilina is an award-winning theater maker whose roles include director, scenographer, experience designer, playwright, professor, and artistic director, creating work at the intersection of visual art, live performance, and civic engagement.
In 2023, Irina created SpaceBridge, a workshop and theatre project bringing together refugee youth and their American-born peers to build a more welcoming world where new friendships can grow. Irina is a La MaMa resident artist and a recipient of the 2024 Joan D. Firestone Fund Award and the 2024 Elliot Norton Award. https://irinakruzhilina.com

Sociodrama: Rehearsing the World

Sociodrama is a group-based, improvisational method that uses role play to explore shared experiences, social roles, and systems. In this workshop, participants will co-create and enact scenes drawn from real-life social and organizational challenges, examining how power, identity, and relationships play out in everyday interactions. Through guided reflection and play, we will surface multiple perspectives, expand empathic understanding, and rehearse alternative responses that support more just and caring ways of being together.

Nisha Sajnani is the Director of the Graduate Program in Drama Therapy and the Theatre and Health Lab at NYU. She is a past-president of the North American Drama Therapy Association, founding editor of Drama Therapy Review, and founder of the World Alliance of Drama Therapy. She is also a founding co-director of the Jameel Arts & Health Lab, established in collaboration with the World Health Organization. Links to your work, website, etc.:  NYU website profile, Jameel Arts & Health Lab.

Perfect City: Tools for Creative Civic Action

Our work uplifts residents’ knowledge about their own communities and the policies and design choices governing them. We draw on theater, popular education, and design thinking for social justice. We make avoidance maps as a way to begin a conversation about policy, how to craft testimonies for local government meetings, and how to see new ways to participate together to develop more vibrant communities.

Aaron Landsman is a New York City multidisciplinary artist obsessed with cities, communion, anonymity and how we perform power. His recent work Night Keeper premiered at The Chocolate Factory in 2023. He is the founder of Perfect City, which works at the intersection of art, organizing, popular education and design. Aaron’s projects have been commissioned and presented in NYC by The Foundry Theatre, HERE, Storefront for Art and Architecture and other spaces, and presented in the US, Europe, the UK and Australia. He is a recent Creative Capital Awardee, Guggenheim Fellow, ASU Gammage Residency Artist and Princeton Arts Fellow.

La MaMa Community Space, 74 East 4th Street, New York City

Information and Registration