Fall 2020 Season
This fall, we have re-imagined our artist residency program to meet the needs of artists and audiences in the time of COVID-19. With our new Virtual Performance Residencies, we are opening our Sanctuary Space to our resident artists to develop and record works of theater, dance, music, opera, and interdisciplinary performance to share with viewers at home, all in accordance with New York State safety guidelines. Our Fall 2020 season includes live streamed performances from our Sanctuary, streaming premieres of recorded performances, public conversations with the artists, podcasts, interactive virtual events, and more.
While in residence at the Center, our artists receive free space, marketing and fundraising support, and 100% of all ticket sales and artist-specific donations. Our goal is to make it easier for these diverse, exemplary, and essential artists to make their work and share it with audiences and people like you in this extraordinarily difficult and isolating time.
We invite you to join us this season in virtual space and become part of a very real creative community where we can be a light for each other to help find our way through the darkness together.
Hamlet Isn’t Dead: Timon of Athens
To celebrate the end of their Timon of Athens deep dive, Hamlet Isn’t Dead is holding a launch event hosted by the show's director and a handful of the cast on September 28. Hear about their process and see some of the discoveries we made along the way. Ask questions of the cast and crew as we explore the themes of this under-known Shakespearean classic.
Thinkery & Verse and Butch Mermaid: GHOST HUNT
Part podcast, part interactive gaming murder-mystery, part theatrical production, this unique, entirely COVID-19 safe adventure uses the free gaming app GeoCaching to let audiences track, hunt, and discover hidden caches at locations tied to Hall-Mills murders. GHOST HUNT: The Hall-Mills Double Homicide is a geo-cached audio adventure that invites participants to experience the story of a tragic double homicide at the sites where the murders occurred and justice was lost.
Jody Sperling / Time Lapse Dance:
Plastic Harvest
Plastic Harvest, a Covid-era dance-film directed by choreographer Jody Sperling, explores the scourge of plastic pollution. In Covid’s wake, Sperling began rehearsing Plastic Harvest remotely with the six dancers of her company, Time Lapse Dance, who were newly dispersed across the country. Each dancer fashioned a unique costume for herself from plastic bags and investigated a different relationship to the material. Ultimately, the work blurs the boundary between the precious and the expendable.
A virtual work-in-progress-screening of Plastic Harvest, followed by a special artist talkback, will take place on Tuesday, December 15th at 7pm. Attendance is open to all and free with registration.
MAXA: The Maddest Woman in the World
Written by Mika Kauffman (book and lyrics) and Thomas Jacobsen (music), MAXA, The Maddest Woman in the World is an epic rock horror musical capturing the life story of Paula Maxa, the famed French tragedienne who died thousands of deaths for the patrons who haunted the infamously bloody theater known as the Grand Guignol. In 1940's France, it becomes Paula’s strange destiny to carry the very same horrors of the Grand Guignol into her private life; only then does she confront the night that changed her existence forever.
Ensemble Pi: Reparations NOW!
Inspired by the Movement for Black Lives, this concert features world premieres by Allison Loggins-Hull, Angélica Negrón, and Trevor Weston, and a composition by Courtney Bryan, all commissioned by Ensemble Pi. The concert premiere will be streamed on Thursday, October 29 at 7pm.
Debra Ann Byrd: BECOMING OTHELLO:
A Black Girl’s Journey
Enjoy the virtual world premiere of award-winning actress Debra Ann Byrd’s Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey directed by NAC Medal of Honor winner Tina Packer/Shakespeare & Company. This multimedia theatrical production bursting with soulful songs, lyrical language and dynamic movement is the poignant and powerful story of Debra Ann’s trials and triumphs with race and the classics, along with her gender-flipped journey on the road to becoming Shakespeare’s noble general Othello.
The premier will be streamed on Monday, December 14th at 7PM. Attendance is open to all and free with registration.
spit&vigor:
Luna Eclipse
November 4th - December 13th
Live-streaming & prerecorded performances
In a one-shot live theatrical film, the mysterious Aine Luna invites the viewer into her home for a seance, in an attempt to track a mysterious inherited mental illness by summoning long-dead members of her family. The viewer then takes a deeply intimate, sometimes voyeuristic tour of the emotionally charged moments in the lives of deeply troubled individuals.
Lilach Orenstein: She Will Come On Her Own - Entering the Virtual
Two women explore the creation of intimacy through embodying sex positions in a Church. Join the unfolding of space through practicing viewpoints multiplicity in Lilach Orenstein's latest work-in-progress, She Will Come on Her Own - Entering the Virtual. Embrace in the unique experience of switching perspectives between various performance captions and curate your own virtual showing.
The project explores a new way to Queer a Space, a process in which the facilitator creates the conditions in which the participants are able to liberate themselves from the restrictions and expectations culture and society impose on them.
A live, presentation of this work-in-progress will take be streamed on Wednesday, December 16th at 7PM. Attendance is open to all and free with registration.
Yuguang Zhang &
Nuntinee Tansrisakul: Displaced
November 19th & 20th at 6PM & 7PM
A virtual event that investigates possibilities, nuances, and aesthetics created by an online performer-audience body. Networked: ONLINE invites performers and audiences to cohabit in a connected virtual space through webcams, microphones, keyboards, and sensors; to hear, meet and walk into each other’s digital existence and to collaboratively imagine, initiate, and perform together.
Object Movement Digital Puppetry Festival
A festival of new short pieces exploring the possibilities of puppetry and object theater for online audiences. Performances with post-show artist conversations November 20, 21, & 22 at 8pm.
Ju-eh: Outer Side
Outer Side is a multi-layered album/concert/installation that draws connections between human emotions and the solar system through ideas of time, duality, gender, and a provocative voice. Each music piece (also referred as sonic being) is inspired by operatic arias and the distance and texture of planets to create a multidimensional musical realm. Five young composers with different cultural scopes (Chinese, European, Iranian, Indian) sculpt such sonic beings that exist individually as well as rotate and orbit in dialogue with each other. Outer Side seeks a side in us contemplating the ways we are perceived outwardly versus the depth of our inner experiences and emotions.
A live open-studio presentation of Outer Side will take place on Friday, December 18th at 6:00PM. Tickets are $5-$10.