OPEN AiR | Kat Sotelo: A DEVOTION TO FAILURE

A DEVOTION TO FAILURE is a compilation of scenes, dances, vignettes, costumes, and set pieces that failed to make the cut for 2025 AiR Kat Sotelo’s premiere A DEVOTION TO SERVICE (at Abrons Art Center on September 26-27, 2025). A weaving of of B-sides and rarities, this piece will further explore themes of eroticism and servitude from a Filipino American sex worker lens. It will also further interrogate failure and embarrassment as generative forces, vehicles for surrender, ego dismantling and reassembly — ultimately locating absurdity not as an accident but as a radical strategy within art-making.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kat Sotelo is a first-generation Filipino American performance artist, choreographer, and set designer whose practice blends movement, satire, and constructed environments. She explores the body as a site of commerce, using her experience in exotic dance to examine fantasy, cultural hybridity, and the labor of spectacle. With roots in film, Sotelo’s compositions also integrate elements of cinema to create layered realities. Her current body of work focuses on eroticism and servitude through a Filipino American lens – at the intersection of nostalgia and melancholy, rage and humor. By weaving video, personal archives, and Philippine folk traditions, she critiques the commodification of art and identity with kaleidoscopic visions. Sotelo is currently an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research, CPR – Center for Performance Research, and GALLIM Dance Company, as well as a Hybrid Arts Lab Fellow at Theater Mitu. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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