In The Belly of The Beetle
Exhibition and Performance
August 29 | Doors 7 PM | Performances at 7:30 and 9 PM
Join Leah Danze and collaborators Aída Reyes, Hamidreza Fallahi, Plumegirl, and Terri Mash for a performance exploring the unruly vitality of insects and the ways they inhabit and invade human designs.
Performances will take place at 7:30 and 9, as musicians and dancers respond to Danze’s painted images—and with one another.
"In the Belly of the Beetle" asks us to take insects’ ways of living seriously—to imagine these creatures underfoot as forces in their own right, with something to teach us about surviving systems that seek to contain, and eradicate. Insects burrow, wait, multiply, and slip around what is meant to keep them out. They outlast what threatens them, then feed on its remains—making waste of what held power and nourishment of its decay.
In Danze’s painted world, human and more-than-human bodies tangle together as bellies, dirt, wings, mouths—a tender kind of decomposition, where it is not always clear whether a body is being devoured or held. Here, survival is less about remaining intact than continuing in another form.
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This event is free and open to the public. Guests are welcome to bring pillows for seating. This project is supported in part by an Elevate Grant of Austin Arts, Culture, Music and Entertainment.
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"In the Belly of the Beetle" is produced by Leah Danze, a painter, psychotherapist, and art therapist whose creative practice responds to attempts at “ordering” nature and society. Their paintings become animated entities that extend beyond the canvas and into their surroundings, using play to subvert rigid frameworks. Their multidisciplinary, collaborative practice intertwines art with community building.
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Aída Hernandez-Reyes is a freelance dancer/performer/choreographer and interdisciplinary artist based in Austin, Texas. Since receiving their BFA in dance and performance from the University of Texas at Austin, Aída has worked with Michiyaya, Valleto, Sarah J Bartholomew, Mama Duke, Thee Gay Agenda, Andrew Schneider and Annie Saunders, Kelsey Oliver, Joy Alpuerto Ritter, ARCOS, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Performa/Dance, JKJK, and more. Aida’s creative process is inspired by a motivation to build stamina, rest, be upside down, craft and diy, appreciate the mundane, notice in it the sublime, and examine and embody their multiracial queer experience of this universe.
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Hamidreza Fallahi is a music performer and researcher born in Shiraz, Iran and based in Austin, Texas. He is a PhD student of ethnomusicology at the Butler School of Music at the University of Texas at Austin, where his research focuses on the poetry of Umar Khayyam and performance in southern Iranian music scenes. Hamid’s music is inspired by Iranian classical melodies, sonic possibilities of Persian Setar and the experiential nature of performance.
Over the past decade, he has been teaching, learning, and performing Maqam - a system and universe that is shared between various musical traditions. Hamid plays with various musicians and collectives in Austin, including the UT Bereket Middle Eastern ensemble, Tayyar, and Ushaq. Through these collaborations, he explores modal music as a meaningful medium for shaping human experience—informing how we relate to ourselves, one another, and the more-than-human world.
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Sowmya Somanath is a Texas-based musician and performer, specializing in Indian and western classical systems, with a music degree from the University of Texas at Austin. Sowmya’s first singing lessons were held at home by her mother; today, she has a school of her own, teaching multi-genre music and dance lessons to students of all ages.
Plume Girl is Sowmya’s solo experimental project, spinning a web of musical influences, evoking sonic color and mood through a lush field of electronics, found sound, and instruments. At its heart, Sowmya is asking human questions - of how to live, of divinity, of death and love - often fractured by thought. Sowmya has released two albums with mappa editions in Slovakia, In the End We Begin (2023), and Unnameable Glory (2025). Her latest release is a split LP with her husband Walter (Home Baker), titled Every Day I Weave on the Great Loom (2026).
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Terri is a composer and multi-instrumentalist living and working in Central Texas. Their history with music is rooted in the christian upbringing that is typical of our place and time, and though the church no longer factors in their life, a reverence for voice and sound are lasting legacies from childhood. A recording artist since 2006, Terri has maintained an ever widening songwriting practice under the moniker crushrose, with their third album angel house forthcoming later this summer. They are also woodworker, having been formally trained at the Vermont Woodworking School. For 10 years, they have been fabricating furniture, millwork, and cabinetry that have beautified public and private spaces in Austin. An avid social dancer, Terri loves 2-stepping to live music in town.
crushrose on instagram: @crushrose_
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Alf Bojórquez is a Yucatecan travesti novelist and musician. She is also a radio artist and public educator who has conducted workshops in Latin America, the United States, Europe, Morocco, and the Philippines. She is a 2024 winner of the Moving Narratives Award for artists with a social impact, awarded by the Prince Claus Fund and the British Council Arts. She is the author of the novel Pepitas de Calabaza (Fondo Blanco, 2023). Her second novel, Cocamex, is set in a contemporary Mexican revolution taking place in an alternate timeline.
Stay tuned for a writing workshop and ambient set expanding on themes from Danze's artwork with Alf Bojórquez on Saturday, September 5. The writing workshop with Alf will be from 12-2 PM and the ambient set will take place at 7 PM.