Performance barn in the Catskills.
SPACE COMMANDER is an art and performance space serving the New York theater, dance, and literary communities through our residency programs and workshops. We are located in a large and comfortably outfitted barn in the Western Catskills along the Delaware River in Long Eddy, NY. The Space
2026 Residency Artists
DAVID COMMANDER idiot void
David Commander writes, directs and performs in his particular style of modern toy and object theater. His work has been presented in NYC, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, and Chicago. As well as his collaborative efforts with Immediate Medium’s Rob Ramirez, Commander is a long time member of the legendary theater company Big Art Group.
Covered with wires, monitors, and action figures, Idiot Void’s dim stage becomes an abstract bunker where a lone figure recalls a future collapse of civilization. He obsessively goes over the details of his old job, people in his neighborhood who have disappeared, and the tightening grip of a clandestine police state.
Photo by Maria Baranova
June 2026
JILLIAN SWEENEY tether breath
Jillian Sweeney is a choreographer/performer/writer based in the Hudson Valley, NY. She practices a range of dance and somatic forms and creates rituals for performer and audience to experience together. Over the last 20 years, she has created several evening length dance works presented at The Chocolate Factory (Queens, NY), Incubator Arts (NYC) and University Settlement (NYC), among other venues. She often now works in short-form, devising bare-bones improvisational dances to edit for the camera. Videos are at @jilliancs (IG).
Tether Breath is a solo experiment combining choreographic scores and improvisation to tap into performer Jillian Sweeney's own breath cycle. It began as embodied research to create a threadbare soundbed in live performance - with no mics and no audio tech, only Sweeney's breath and bodily noise. Tether breath now continues to push the technology that is the body to connect performer and audience in a changing and present sense of place, time and rhythm.
Photo by Maria Baranova
July 2026
MARIA CAMIA aricala:13 rooms for liberation
Maria Camia is a Brooklyn based Filipino-American Visual Theatre Artist and Introspective Hypnosis Practitioner from Virginia Beach, Virginia, now living in New York for 12 years. She intends to make imagination useful in a traumatized society with her created world of Aricama, the land of practice, play, and healing. She has performed original productions for JACK, Chicago International Puppet Festival, Dixon Place, La MaMa, and Kino Saito. Maria received the Jim Henson Workshop and Production Grants for her full length shows NEW MONY! And The Healing Shipment. When Maria is not making art, she is an Introspective Hypnosis Practitioner which means she guides clients one-on-one through past memories to release the stuck energies and to bring in more empowerment into the body.
Maria will develop a new project/performance called ARICALA: 13 Rooms for Liberation, a multi-media, durational, guided art meditation/ puppet dance ritual celebration to reclaim the body from generational colonial oppression. This expands the 13 month Aricama calendar inspired by the Mayan 13 moon calendar but instead, each month represents a different body part. With influence of Back from the Crocodile’s Belly: Philippine Babaylan Studies and the Struggle for Indigenous Memory, a book resurfacing the Filipino Shamans lifestyle before Spanish colonization, Maria dives deep into her ancestry to reclaim her body back from pop culture and hyper-consumerism.
Photo by Bronwen Sharp
August 2026
BLAZE FERRER no service
Blaze Ferrer is an interdisciplinary performer and choreographer interested in the mainstreaming of queerness within the American capitalist hegemony, and pushing against the tautological stasis of contemporary performance. Blaze makes experiences that express the vibrancy and limits of embodiment through post-Judson choreographic scores and the incorporation of consumerist cultural iconography. As a lead artist, Blaze has made work for Pioneers Go East, Pageant, The Collapsable Hole, Prelude Festival, The Brick Theater, The Exponential Festival, Movement Research@Judson Church, Sundays on Broadway, New Dance Alliance, AUNTS, danceh0l0, Brooklyn Arts Exchange (NEEDING IT), HERE, Dixon Place, and various DIY events. Blaze has performed for and helped generate pieces with Stacy Lynn Smith, Yanira Castro, Ursula Eagly, Ilan Bachrach & Robert M. Johanson, minor theater, Sophie Weisskoff, and others. Blaze has been a resident artist at Urbana Dance Company (Urbana, IL), Magija Collective (Denver, CO), and has received funding through Brooklyn Arts Council, NYSCA, NYFA, Dance/NYC, and Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
No Service is an ensemble dance that incorporates prosthetic breast plates, a rhinestoned and lace-fronted mannequin head, elastic bands, and recursive patterning based on Hot Wheels track sets as a means to revitalize queer postmodern performance as urgent counterculture. NS deconstructs the drag queen body, and winks at consumerist feminine projections while grounding itself in a riot grrrl sensibility. NS rejects respectability politics in favor of full throttle, playful, propulsive movement. Contemporary faggotry at its core is shaped by the feminine, and I will wield it like a baseball bat. Yvonne Rainer working as a health inspector at the Gay McDonalds (and taking a dump in the parking lot).
Photo by Rachel Keane
September 2026
Who we are
Residency hosts and experienced multi-hyphenate arts producers Lisa Clair and David Commander are steadily building their network of overlapping support in the Delaware River Valley, hoping to establish collaborative relationships with local and regional arts organizations, camps, family networks, queer groups, and schools to make sure these events are rooted in the deep cultural soil of the Catskills.
Space Commander’s Residency program is made possible by Immediate Medium and their Agency Artist program and generous funding from New York State Council on the Arts
contact us
spacecommanderny@gmail.com
Location
18 Peake Rd.Long Eddy, NY12760