2026 NOW Festival: Week 2

Brenda Barrios Muñequita Muy Muy Drawing inspiration from her experience as a first-generation Mexican American, Brenda Barrios ‘ Muñequita Muy Muy blends cultural symbolism, queerness, and disability into a celebration of healing and visibility. Barrios uses sculpture, dance, song, and storytelling to bring life-size replica dolls and a motorized truck onstage alongside live musicians and performers. Barrios composes and performs original music combining pop music and Mexican operatic vocal traditions with ranchera and rock en español, alongside extended vocal techniques including el grito mexicano. Her detailed, hyperrealistic sculptures transform familiar objects into milagritos—Mexican charms to meditate on how bodies hold histories of care, struggle, and evolution. Cody Perkins / Algorythm.Code Motherboard Can machines support empathy, rather than extraction? Choreographer, composer, and director Cody Perkins / Algorythm.Code (Art and Technology MFA) takes up this question about technology and intimacy in Motherboard. In this dance and music piece, performer Gretchen Ackerman enters into an evolving relationship with the Motherboard shrine—an independent electronic device onstage that observes, responds to, and directs her body. Perkins draws a connection between women and machines, recognizing that both have historically been controlled and discarded within systems of power. Through movement, sound, ritual, and interaction with the Motherboard shrine, a shared history of exploitation evolves into a duet of care and exchange. SUUVI REGENESIS REGENESIS is a multidisciplinary work exploring the intertwined cycles of life, death, transformation, and renewal. Drawing connections between regenerating ecosystems and the continual processes of decay and emergence that shape the natural world, the work weaves SUUVI’s personal experience of grief and loss into a broader meditation on the processes of dissolution and renewal through which living systems continually transform. Composed, directed, and performed by multidisciplinary artist SUUVI, the work brings together original music for cello and electronics, live dancers and choreography by Megan Paradowski, cinematic projections and lighting design by Matt Brown, and painted elements by Reed Gibson, creating an immersive work that considers endings as part of an ongoing process through which new forms, memories, and possibilities emerge. Please note: Muñequita Muy Muy contains flashing lights, loud sounds and mature content; Motherboard contains nudity and loud sounds; REGENESIS contains flashing lights, loud sounds and mature content. NOW 2026: Week Two will be presented as one shared program of all three works on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.