Mare Nostrum Elements Presents: Emerging Choreographer Series 2026 - Highlights Festival

Saturday, May 9 | 7 PM – Performance + Reception
Sunday, May 10 | 1 PM – Performance + Q&A
TIME: Doors at 7 PM | Performance at 7:30 PM
Advance Tickets, on sale through Friday, 11:59 PM May 8: $15 
General Admission, starting May 9: $25

In celebration of their 25th anniversary, Queens-based performing arts organization Mare Nostrum Elements presents the ECS 2026 Highlights Festival, a program reviving standout works from over a decade of the Emerging Choreographer Series.

Since 2013, the Emerging Choreographer Series has supported more than 70 choreographers and 200 dancers with funding, mentorship, studio space, career development resources, and fully produced performances. The Highlights Festival honors that history by bringing some of the series' most memorable works back to the stage.

Featuring works by choreographers Garrett Parker, Heather Dutton, Lavy Cavaliere, Grace Tong, Makayla Peterson, and Edward Lathan.

Choreographers

Garrett Parker is a North Carolina-born dance maker and director of Detox Movement, through which he has produced multiple large-scale works with performers and collaborators from across disciplines including dance, drama, film, music, and design. His choreographic work includes site-specific commissions for the Winston-Salem Arts Council and dance films screened at the American Dance Festival. His ECS work Robots, Don't Cry is a narrative science-fiction movement piece exploring artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the human body under technological systems.

Heather Dutton (she/they) is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, teaching artist, and performer. Their work has been seen at Here Arts Center, the American Dance Festival, ODC Theater, Dixon Place, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Flushing Town Hall, and the Tank, among others. With a background in theater, comedy, and gender studies, Dutton creates work grounded in nuanced narrative and theatrical craft, exploring queerness, gender identity, and unconventional emotional relationships. She is a teaching artist with the National Dance Institute and founder of Middle Child Dance Theater. Dutton holds a B.A. in Dance (choreography and education) and a minor in Women's and Gender Studies from Muhlenberg College.

Lavy Cavaliere is a New York-based choreographer whose work Insulated on Rupture explores perception, surveillance, and digital identity through a queer, multidisciplinary lens. The work features an ensemble of queer female-identifying performers and draws on immersive soundscapes and costume design to examine the intersection of technology, identity, and self-expression.

Grace Yi-Li Tong (she/her) is a playful, experimental Chinese-American choreographer and performer based in New York City. Inspired by her collage practice, she creates movement works that draw on clowning, pantomime, make-believe, and contemporary dance theater to invite audiences into absurdist physical worlds. Her work has been presented at Flushing Town Hall, Triskelion Arts, the Center for Ballet Arts, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Arts on Site, and venues in Amsterdam, Munich, Berlin, Athens, Philadelphia, and Seattle. She is fiscally sponsored by New York Live Arts' Live Core Program. Tong holds a B.F.A. in Dance with a minor in Gender and Sexuality Studies from NYU Tisch School of the Arts, where she graduated summa cum laude.

Makayla Peterson is a dancer, choreographer, scholar, teaching artist, and founder and artistic director of Monét Movement Productions: The Collective. She holds a B.F.A. in Dance from Temple University and is a recipient of the Temple University Boyer College of Music and Dance Rose Vernick Scholar Award. Her work has been presented at the Mare Nostrum Elements Emerging Choreographer Series, the COCO Dance Festival, the Collective Thread Dance Festival, the Making Moves Dance Festival, and more. She currently dances with Enya-Kalia Creations and OKRA Dance Company and serves as a teaching artist with Notes in Motion and DMF Youth.

Edward Lathan - “UnMasc’d” is an abstract dance-theater work that follows a young man’s journey through identity, survival, and discovery as he confronts the masks he has worn to belong. Set to a collage of recognizable pop songs whose lyrics suggest fragments of a story, the choreography embodies narratives that cannot be spoken directly, translating them into movement, rhythm, and emotional presence on stage. Through abstract yet deliberate references to spirituality, astrology, neurodivergence, sexuality, and ancestral memory, the work ultimately asks what new possibilities emerge when the masks we create for survival are removed, allowing the body, mind, and spirit to speak honestly.