The fifth annual First Voices Festival is a multifaceted celebration of Indigenous cultures based in Atlanta, Georgia. In November 2026, experience a Powwow, special film screening, and more!

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A Meal
by Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya with the LEIMAY Ensemble & Guests

September 17-19, 2026 at 7 Stages

A multi-sensorial live performance: part ritual, part celebration, part installation, and part shared cooking experience by critically acclaimed multidisciplinary artist duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya. Produced by LEIMAY, A Meal explores our deep connection with food—where it comes from, what we eat, and who we share it with.

This immersive experience takes you through a series of vignettes where you’ll partake in the act of cooking and eating together, witness performances by mythological creatures, and encounter offering songs and evocative sound/video movement installations. The layered work features evocative images and dances, resonating with our post-industrial relationship with food and the Japanese and Colombian roots of the co-creators.

For A Meal, Ximena and Shige bring together new and long-time collaborators to their LEIMAY Ensemble, alongside guest performers, composers, and vocalists. These include Masanori Asahara, Krystel Mazzeo Akane Little, Synead Cidney Nichols and Drew Sensue-Weinstein. Join us for a memorable journey that celebrates food, culture, and community.

LEIMAY is an organization founded by Shige Moriya from Japan in 1996, and Ximena Garnica from Colombia joined in 2001. Since then, it has been led by immigrant artists from the Global Majority. It serves as a dynamic platform for artists to experiment, innovate, perform, and exhibit their movement-based interdisciplinary work. LEIMAY currently carries out activities in New York City and Bogotá, Colombia, where it has been legally established and is directed by Ximena Garnica. The organization and the dancers who are part of it collaborate in community pedagogy processes in New York, Bogotá, and different regions of Colombia; they offer classes, workshops, and artistic labs open to the public, foster exchanges of knowledge around artistic practice and socio-environmental causes, and collaborate with guest artists in workshops, as well as in the creation, production, and circulation of tangible and intangible artistic works in different public and private cultural spaces, with themes that question existence and the interrelationship between human beings and non-human beings.

Their collaborations manifest in live performances, photography, sculptures, video, lighting, and mixed-media installation art, as well as publications, research, and training projects. Their work is related to space, the body, materialities, and time; and exists in different domains, from proscenium settings, museums, and galleries to open-air public spaces. Their works reflect on questions of being, perception, interdependence, and coexistence.

LEIMAY Ensemble is a group of national and international dancers, performers, musicians and artists who create body-centered works around the principle of LUDUS, a practice that explores methods to physically condition the body of the performers and develop a sensitivity to the “in-between space.” Founded in 2012 by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya, the group took form through the creation of the Becoming Series pentalogy, of which three parts have been created: Becoming Corpus, borders, and Frantic Beauty (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2013-2017).

Core members of the group hold a regular practice at their studio in Brooklyn, where they engage in the creation of new work in addition to teaching, training, research, and distillation of years of direct transmission of embodied knowledge by Japanese Butoh pioneers, Noguchi Taiso practitioners, and Experimental Theater innovators. Other members join as guest artists for specific projects. Additionally, some Ensemble members support LEIMAY via scenic and costume creation and through administrative and technical roles. The LEIMAY Ensemble and LEIMAY artistic collaborators have formed a constellation of creatives who develop deep connections with each other and with Ximena and Shige’s work.

Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya are a Colombian-born and Japanese-born artist duo based in New York City, known for their multidisciplinary work as artists, directors, and choreographers. Their creations span sculpture, video, light and mixed-media installations, photography, film, contemporary dance, theater, publications, relational artworks, and research-driven projects. Their practice weaves together diverse ways of knowing—from scientific to ancestral, embodied to conceptual—fostering dialogue, connection, and transformation.

All their work is interconnected through what they describe as the entanglement—a nonlinear journey that sees transformation not just as an aesthetic pursuit but as a way of being. Whether creating kinetic sculptures activated by bodies, AI-driven environments of light and sound, or analogue choreographies, their projects dwell in porousness, dissolving binaries and inviting multiplicities. Their eco-poetic films, immersive culinary performances, publications, community rituals, evening-length proscenium movement-based works, residencies, and pedagogical platforms offer layered, long-form engagement with audiences and collaborators.

Ximena and Shige are the founders of LEIMAY, which is a platform for their joint practice, a performance ensemble, and an organization with roots in New York and Colombia. LEIMAY evolves as a living organism shaped by questioning, experience, and action. Their work has been recognized by major institutions in both the U.S. and Colombia. Their project Extinction Rituals received the 2023 Creative Capital Award. In 2024, they were awarded the NYFA Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Practice and the NYFA Women’s Fund Award. LEIMAY, under their leadership, received a transformational grant from the Mellon Foundation for its interdisciplinary and community-driven work. Their multi-year project A Meal was awarded NDP and NPN support. Their project Kinetic Resonances was awarded the Colombian Ministry of Culture’s 2024 Beca Nacional de Creación en Artes Expandidas de Larga Trayectoria. Additional major support has come from the NYCT, Gilman, Mertz Gilmore, NEA, NYSCA, and DCLA.

Ximena has held teaching positions at institutions including UC Riverside, Sarah Lawrence, Marymount Manhattan, MIT, NYU, and is currently teaching at Harvard University. Both artists are committed to cultural equity and sustainability: from 2014–2019, they played key roles in policy efforts for affordable live-work spaces in NYC. In 2021, through LEIMAY, Ximena co-founded the Cultural Solidarity Fund, which distributed over $1 million in relief to NYC artists impacted by COVID-19.

Together for over two decades, they challenge, merge, and reshape the boundaries of their personal and creative lives. Their collaborative practice—defined by “generative confrontation”—is a constant exploration of entanglement, materiality, relationality, and the poetic potential of the in-between.

Learn more at leimay.org

Masanori Asahara, Originally from Japan, he has lived and danced in New York since 2004. He studied at Dance New Amsterdam and creates his own works. He has worked with renowned groups and artists such as Janis Brenner & Dancers, Company So-GoNo, Wendy Osserman Dance Company, and Kota Yamazaki/Fluid hug-hug. His career spans diverse styles and collaborations within the New York dance scene. Currently, he is Choreographic Assistant and Senior Dancer at LEIMAY.

Krystel Mazzeo is a New York-based artist who has developed her facets as a dancer, performer, touring artist, and LUDUS instructor as part of the LEIMAY Ensemble since 2016.
She is a proud daughter of immigrants from Argentina and Portugal.
In addition to her experience with LEIMAY, she has worked with renowned artists, including Amanda Hameline, Georgia B. Smith, Gesel Mason, and many others, as well as having created and performed in her own works.

Akane Little is a Brooklyn-based dance artist approaching the body and performance as sites of ritual porosity, enlivened by flesh, blood, and attention to activate states of dimensional liminality. They have freelanced in Cleveland, OH (Catherine Meredith, Megan Young, Madi Jackson, Rebecca Burcher, and more) and New York City (Kinesis Project, Boy Friday, Hivewild, Hard/Femme Dances, God Complex x Aeon Andreas, Nick Brooke, Chaesong Kim, Glenn Potter-Takata, and more). Commercial credits include Bridget Kearney (Lake Street Dive), Carolina Oliveros (Combo Chimbita), Tom Petty, and Sam Smith. Since 2023, they have been a core member of the Bessie-nominated LEIMAY Ensemble under the direction of Ximena Garnica & Shige Moriya.

Synead Cidney Nichols – A queer poly-disciplinary performance artist and expressionist, Synead’s inspiration and motivation is deeply rooted in her quest for collective healing, self-awareness, and the freedom and advancement of queer, black and indigenous people of color. Through her interdisciplinary studies of black radical feminist theories, experimental theater-making, movement-based healing practices, and sonic exploration, she strives towards dismantling fear-based thinking to help self-actualize one’s deepest creative desires. Synead’s artistry is not bound by medium, but bound to the varied expressions of living a full and ever-present life.

Drew Sensue-Weinstein is a multidisciplinary theatre and sound artist, serving as the composer for A MEAL. His work often involves the integration of electroacoustic sound with music and live performance to create a heightened sensory experience for audiences. Drew co-created and directed SYNTHESIS, performed as part of LEIMAY’S SOAK 2017; he also produced LEIMAY’s FRANTIC BEAUTY (BAM) and KALAVINKA, LEIMAY’s gala event honoring Meredith Monk. As a designer and composer, Drew’s work has been experienced in New York at HERE, The Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival, and Abrons Arts Center and in DC at Anacostia Arts Center (DC), among others. His work as a director has been seen in New York at HERE, JACK, wild project, Dixon Place, and more. Drew is Artistic Director of Nocturne Productions and a member of the theatre collective Unattended Baggage.