Abrons Arts Center Announces Spring 2018 Season

On February 12, 1915, the Abrons Arts Center's Henry Street Settlement Playhouse opened its doors on the Lower East Side. Since that day, it has remained a vital cultural resource, providing audiences with artistically bold work while offering artists opportunities to dynamically grow. The OBIE Award-winning institution has drawn a diverse audience to its historic home at the Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side and has garnered a wealth of critical acclaim across artistic disciplines. The work Abrons presents reflects the social and political challenges of our times in ways that are programmatically integrated into broader conversations that affect New York City and beyond.

Abrons Arts Center's spring 2018 season, curated by Artistic Director Craig Peterson, celebrates the idea that a community is a place of intersecting ideas and action. Peterson believes that artists push society forward in ways that challenge our assumptions, politics and social welfare; that artists make room for voices that are too often silenced or sidelined.

Peterson remarks, "For more than 100 years, Abrons Arts Center at Henry Street Settlement has been a home to experimental artists, radical ideas, and burgeoning social movements. Abrons is both a physical place - with three theaters, galleries, and classrooms - and also a space that makes room for imagination, free expression, and diverging opinions. Come to Abrons to explore, laugh and engage. You are welcome here."

The lineup, comprised entirely of premieres, includes:

Six Groundbreaking Theatrical Works

In Pollock, written by Fabrice Melquiot and directed by Paul Desveaux, the beautifully tragic relationship of infamous artists Jackson Pollock (Jim Fletcher) and Lee Krasner (Birgit Huppuch) is rendered on stage. (February 15-25)

Writer and actor Modesto Flako Jimenez conjures his beloved borough in ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn, a bilingual elegy, told through poems, projections, and music. (March 15-31)

In The Wholehearted, from co-creators Deborah Stein and Suli Holum, spectators have a ringside seat for this "dazzling tour-de-force" (Los Angeles Times), a blood pumping revenge tragedy and intimate tribute to lost love. (March 16-April 1)

In Aloha, Aloha or When I Was Queen, playwright and performer Eliza Bent uses the creation of a childhood home movie to lead audiences on a journey that grapples with personal history, legacy, and cultural appropriation. (April 4-21)

Written by Kate Scelsa for Elevator Repair Service and directed by John Collins, Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf features veterans of the ensemble. In this irreverent parody of Edward Albee's iconic Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, no one is left unscathed by Martha's feminist ambitions. (June 1-24)

Just minutes from Downtown Manhattan, Awesome Grotto from the Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble endeavors to serve all New Yorkers as a site for reflection on the spiritual potential of digital connectivity. (June 7-30)

Four Visceral Dance Events

The ninth annual American Realness festival. (January 9-16)

Mariangela Lopez's COLOSSAL is a series of choreographic inquiries that attempt to traverse the commonalities of memory. (May 2-5)

Led by choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Alex Romania, KLUTZ is an exploration of destabilizing nonsense on the sick state of the American psyche. (May 9-12)

Sis Minor, In Fall, from Niall Jones, stages an ongoing entanglement with the object of the body, hallucinatory presences, and the excess sustained in minor architectures. (May 31-June 3)

A Mind-Expanding Music Event

OpenICE focuses on sharing the most essential elements of ICE's working process - creation, collaboration, and performance - with a wider audience, through free concert and activity programming. (February 10, April 14)

Six Diverse and Innovative Gallery Exhibitions

The New Minimalists explores the evolution of minimalism through the work of Abdolreza Aminlari, Niyeti Chadha, Noor Ali Chagani, Jordan Nassar, and Joseph Shetler. Curated by Sarah Burney. (January 27 - February 25)

If Happy Little Bluebirds Fly features works from the 2017 Fire Island Artist Residency by LGTB identifying artists Elizabeth Insogna, Marta Lee, Rodolfo Marron III, Charan Singh, Vincent Tiley and Bryson Rand. (March 3 - April 8)

Leap Century: Rutgers in New York, group exhibition showcases the culminating work of the MFA Class of 2018 at Mason Gross School of the Arts. (April 21 - May 11)

Making Art From Many Perspectives brings to light works of art from students of all 33 schools Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12 in District 1. (May 22-28)

Works from Abrons' AIRspace curatorial resident artists: Christopher Aque, Priyanka Dasgupta, Carl Hazlewood, Trokon Nagbe, Macon Reed, Gabriela Salazar, Patrice Renee Washington, and Chris Watts. Organized by Christian Camacho-Light and Alexis Wilkinson. (June 29 - August 5)

Details on the winter/spring 2018 season can be found below. Abrons Arts Center is located at 466 Grand Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets are now on sale can be purchased by calling 212.352.3101 or visiting abronsartscenter.org.

Media Contact: John Wyszniewski at Everyman Agency, john@everymanagency.com, 347-416-3881

ABRONS ARTS CENTER SPRING 2018 SEASON

[DANCE/PERFORMANCE]
American Realness
January 9-16; $25/show; $100 Abrons Festival Pass (good for 5 shows)

Founded, directed and curated by Thomas Benjamin Snapp Pryor, American Realness is an internationally recognized platform for the discovery of new works from subversive dance and performance artists, tearing at the boundaries of their forms. Now in its ninth year, American Realness commands attention for the proliferation of choreographic and performative practices transcending the traditions and rewriting the definitions of American dance and performance.

[EXHIBITION]
The New Minimalists
Abdolreza Aminlari, Niyeti Chadha, Noor Ali Chagani, Jordan Nassar, & Joseph Shetler
Curated by Sarah Burney
January 27 - February 25
The New Minimalists explores the evolution of minimalism through the work of five emerging contemporary artists. Featuring drawings, sculpture, video, and installation art, this exhibition highlights how this generation of artists has both maintained the sparse aesthetic of minimalism and injected a new energy into the genre by rejecting the monumental for the intimate, drawing inspiration from craft versus industry, and marrying formalism with the personal and political.|

[MUSIC]
OpenICE
February 10 and April 14 at 7:30pm; Free

This spring, ICE continues its OpenICE program, an initiative focused on sharing the most essential elements of ICE's working process - creation, collaboration, and performance - with a wider audience, through free concert and activity programming. The residencies in February and April include children's programming, performances, workshops, multimedia installations, and continued connections with underrepresented composers. Launched in 2015, OpenICE continues to develop, engage, and sustain diverse 21st-century listeners through an outpouring of free artist-driven programming that is open to the public.

[THEATER]
POLLOCK (New York premiere)
Written by Fabrice Melquiot
A production of Compagnie L'héliotrope
With Jim Fletcher and Birgit Huppuch
Directed by Paul Desveaux, Compagnie L'Héliotrope
Translated in English by Kenneth Casler & Myriam Heard
February 15-25

It is impossible to fully understand the brilliance and madness of Jackson Pollock without studying his marriage to artist Lee Krasner. POLLOCK explores the charged empty space between Pollock and Krasner; between his genius and her spirit; between the inhibitions of the former and the frustrations of the latter. The play might be called "a contemporary tragedy" but underlying such a vague classification is the question of artistic creation.

Fabrice Melquiot (playwright) has published about forty plays with L'Arche Editeur. Melquiot has received many awards including two from the Syndicat National de la Critique, France. He has worked closely with director Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota for many years, and continues to collaborate with Demarcy-Mota as current Director of Theatre de la Ville, Paris. In 2008, Melquiot received the Prix Théâtre de l'Académie Française for his entire body of work. His texts have been translated and performed in a dozen languages. Since 2012, he has served as director of Théâtre Am Stram Gram in Geneva, International Center of Creation for Children and Youth.

Paul Desveaux (director) is the Director of the Company l'héliotrope founded in 1997. Desveaux has staged a large repertoire of works by authors including Frank Wedekind, A. Ostrovski, A. Tchekhov, Nathalie Sarraute, and Fabrice Melquiot. He has also directed trans-disciplinary projects such as Philip Glass' opera Les Enfants Terribles (2007), worked with Ensemble Intercontemporain on the opera Hypermusic Prologue (2009) by Hector Parra, and collaborated with scientist Lisa Randall and filmmaker Santiago Otheguy on Vraie Blonde etautres by Jack Kerouac (2002/2004). Desveaux has developed a regular collaboration with the choreographer Yano Iatridès and the composer Vincent Artaud.

[EXHIBITION]
If Happy Little Bluebirds Fly
Elizabeth Insogna, Marta Lee, Rodolfo Marron III, Charan Singh, Vincent Tiley and Bryson Rand
Works from the 2017 Fire Island Artist Residency
March 3 - April 8
Each summer since its inception in 2011, Fire Island Artist Residency chooses five emerging lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer identifying artists from hundreds of applicants to live and work together in Cherry Grove, a place long-steeped in LGBTQ history. FIAR hopes to bring both new creative perspectives and prestigious art professionals together in this extraordinary location to foster the creation-and preservation-of queer art-making in contemporary art.

[THEATER / SPOKEN WORD]
Modesto Flako Jimenez & Oye Group
¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn (world premiere)
March 15-31

"Listen to the beats / The rhythm of my Bushwick streets." Brooklyn impresario Modesto Flako Jimenez conjures his beloved borough in this bilingual elegy, told through poems, projections, and music. With lyrical brilliance and irreverent play, ¡Oye! For My Dear Brooklyn complicates our perceptions of race, language, and gentrification and calls us to be truly present to ask the question: "What is my moral worth?"

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised theater director, writer, poet, actor, producer, and educator. Flako is best known for original productions and three signature festivals - Ghetto Hors D'Oeuvres, One Catches Light, and Oye! Avant Garde Night! - produced with his company Brooklyn Gypsies Collective. Flako has appeared on TEDxBushwick, Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Early Shaker Spirituals (Wooster Group), Last Night At The Palladium (Bushwick Starr/3LD), Yoleros (Bushwick Starr/IATI theater), Conversations Pt.1: How To Make It Black In America (JACK). Take Me Home (3LD/ Incubator Arts Project), and Richard Maxwell's Samara (Soho Rep.). Modesto received the 2016 Princess Grace Award Honorarium in Theater.

[THEATER]
Stein | Holum Projects present
The Wholehearted (New York premiere)
March 16-April 1

Spectators have a ringside seat for this "dazzling tour-de-force" (Los Angeles Times), a blood pumping revenge tragedy and intimate tribute to lost love. Once a championship boxer, Dee Crosby was taken down in her prime by her own husband. Now that Charlie is freshly released from prison for her attempted murder, Dee is hell-bent on revenge, no matter the cost. But only Dee's true love, Carmen, can provide her with redemption. By turns "potent and enigmatic" (San Diego Union Tribune) and "boldly arresting" (Boston Globe), THE WHOLEHEARTED is an unsettling ride through the human heart.

Acclaimed co-creators Deborah Stein and Suli Holum (CHIMERA, Under the Radar) infuse THE WHOLEHEARTED with a pulse-pounding cinematic design and an original rockabilly score (by Obie winners James Sugg and Heather Christian). Performed by Holum, the creative team also includes sound designer Matt Hubbs (INDECENT), video designers Kate Freer and Dave Tennent (CHIMERA) with live camera operator Stivo Arnoczy, set designer Amy Rubin (QUIET, COMFORT), costume designer Angela Harner, lighting designer Stephen Arnold, associate director Kate Hopkins and stage manager Lisa McGinn.

[THEATER]
Aloha, Aloha or When I Was Queen (world premiere)
Written and Performed by Eliza Bent
Directed by Knud Adams
April 4-21

In 1993, at the age of 11, a young Eliza Bent, along with a friend, co-created, co-directed, and co-starred in an amateur historical film for a school project. In it, Bent portrayed Hawaii's last reigning monarch, Queen Liliuokalani. 25 years later, Bent uses her home movie as a jumping off point to lead audiences on a journey that grapples with personal history, legacy, and cultural appropriation.

Eliza Bent is an Abingdon Theatre resident artist and an alum of SPACE on Ryder Farm's "Working Farm" writer's group, a MacDowell Colony fellow, a Target Margin Institute Fellow, the recipient of an LMCC Process Space grant, a Bay Area Playwrights Finalist, and a New Georges Audrey Residency artist. Bent has developed and presented work at Abrons, JACK, the Bushwick Starr, ICE Factory and the Brick. Bent is a former senior editor at American Theatre magazine, where she still writes, a frequent performer with the Obie-award winning company Half Straddle, and an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College where she received an MFA in playwriting.

[EXHIBITION]
Leap Century: Rutgers in New York
Colleen Billing, Sedrick Chisom, Yu Rim Chung, Nabila Dadabhoy, Christhian Diaz, Julian Gilbert-Davis, Amiko Li, Renana Neuman, Beatrice Orlandi, Jett Strauss, Catalina Tuca, Jack Warner, & Stephen Williams
April 21 - May 11
This group exhibition showcases the culminating work of the MFA Class of 2018 at Mason Gross School of the Arts. Established in 1962 as the first non-disciplinary specific fine art graduate program in the USA, Rutgers' MFA in Visual Arts continues to promote that freedom today. We exist in the in-between, seeking to define what the art of now is, a leap into the unknown, beyond.

[DANCE]
Mariangela Lopez
COLOSSAL (world premiere)
May 2-5
COLOSSAL is a series of choreographic inquiries that attempt to traverse the commonalities of memory. It is a journey of six performers in search of performative rituals capable of transforming their individual bodies into a collective organism. Set against a primal landscape distilled from personal memories, COLOSSAL navigates the vastness of dreams, fears, and desires Past experiences are juxtaposed with future possibilities as an imagined, multi-layered re-discovery of ancestral identity.

Mariangela Lopez is a Brooklyn based choreographer and performer from Caracas, Venezuela. Her work is known for enabling the participation of performers from various disciplines and backgrounds to take part of her creative process.

[DANCE]
Alex Romania
KLUTZ (world premiere)
May 9-12

Led by choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Alex Romania, KLUTZ is an exploration of destabilizing nonsense on the sick state of the American psyche. This multidisciplinary performance work utilizes speech, video, sound, and action to form absurd and poetic thought memes; wanderlust-nowhere, apocalypse-nostalgia, sublime horrors of the spectacularly mundane, and ______________________, emerge as dregs of this 'Orwellian slop sink'. Almost a basement-sci-fi-space-epic, this genre busting C-performance joins the pileup of hot consumer trash in the looming obsession with The End.

KLUTZ is created by Alex Romania in collaboration with performers Andrew Braddock, Millie Kapp, Raquel Mavecq, and contributing artist Butch Merigoni, music collaborators Marc Mosteirin and Ben Wohlfarth. Video and costumes by Alex Romania with video performances B. Arthur Romania.

Alex Romania is a multidisciplinary performance-maker, visual artist, organizer, and teacher based in NYC who has taught and shown work nationally and internationally. His work pivots between the worlds of dance and performance art, often involving installation and video elements. He uses his choreography to create an unattainable pathway for the performers, where they must navigate boundaries and create friction that is both premeditated and spontaneous. Romania has performed in works by Luciana Achugar, Kathy Westwater, Catherine Galasso, Andy de Groat, De Facto Dance, Eddie Peake, Jacob Slominski, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Simone Forti, Steve Paxton and has collaborated with a handful of performance art collectives, amongst other artists.

[EXHIBITION]
Making Art From Many Perspectives
New York City Department of Education School District 1
May 22-28
Honoring the diversity and creative growth of the students from New York City School District 1, this exhibition brings to light works of art from students of all 33 schools Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12.

[DANCE]
Niall Jones
Sis Minor, In Fall (world premiere)
May 31-June 3
Niall Jones assembles and lingers inside unreliably situated structures that engage [im]materiality, [in]visibility, and [dis]orientation. Sis Minor, In Fall stages an ongoing entanglement with the object of the body, hallucinatory presences, and the excess sustained in minor architectures.

Niall Jones is a dance artist and educator working as a visiting professor in the Performance + Performance Studies graduate program at Pratt Institute and as Assistant Director for the School of Dance at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Niall's research slips between performance and visual art practices engaging disorientation, pleasure, and materiality as multiple frameworks for considering the structures of time and exhaustion.

[THEATER]
Elevator Repair Service presents
Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf (world premiere)
by Kate Scelsa for Elevator Repair Service
Directed by John Collins
June 1-24

In this irreverent parody of Edward Albee's iconicWho's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, no one is left unscathed by Martha's feminist ambitions. Rubbing alcohol will be consumed, imaginary pregnancies will be indulged, and gender constructs will be destroyed once and for all. Written by Kate Scelsa, longtime ERS company member, and directed by John Collins, Everyone's Fine with Virginia Woolf features a cast of Elevator Repair Service veterans.

Now celebrating their 25th season, Elevator Repair Service is an OBIE Award-winning company known for their original theater pieces built around a broad range of subject matter and literary forms, best known for Gatz, their verbatim staging of The Great Gatsby.

Kate Scelsa's debut novel Fans of the Impossible Life has been translated into nine languages and was an Indie Next and Rainbow List Top Ten Pick. Kate is a 2016-2017 New Georges Audrey Resident, and her writing for theater has been seen at the Bushwick Starr, Dixon Place, BAX, and Five Myles. She has been an ERS company member since 2002, and has performed with the company in Gatz, The Sound and the Fury and The Select (The Sun Also Rises).

[THEATER / PERFORMANCE / EXHIBITION]
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble in
Awesome Grotto (world premiere)
June 7-30

Just minutes from Downtown Manhattan, Awesome Grotto endeavors to serve all New Yorkers as a site for reflection on the spiritual potential of digital connectivity. The space will be open to the public as an immersive video and sound installation for the amplification of Like-Energy, the positive current of connectivity flowing through social media, represented by the thumbs up, the heart, and the star. Awesome Grotto will be activated at scheduled intervals through ritual performances, healing sessions, seminars, and screenings by ROKE and curated guests.

Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble (Tei Blow and Sean McElroy) is a musical priesthood that explores the mythologies of love and courtship at the end of the 20th century. By appropriating strategies of installation art, opera, and theater, ROKE creates multimedia installation-performances with original music to create modern-day rituals out of found text and video sources.

[EXHIBITION]
Airspace 2018
Christopher Aque, Priyanka Dasgupta, Carl Hazlewood, Trokon Nagbe, Macon Reed, Gabriela Salazar, Patrice Renee Washington, & Chris Watts
Organized by Christian Camacho-Light & Alexis Wilkinson
June 29 - August 5
Abrons' 2017-2018 AIRspace Program awarded eight visual arts & two curatorial residencies. AIRspace strives to build and serve a broad community of artists working on projects at various stages of development in a collective environment that promotes and encourages cross-disciplinary collaboration and spontaneous creative intersections. Audiences are invited to learn more about artistic creative processes through open studios, discussions and work-in-progress showings in ongoing ways.

About Abrons Arts Center

The Abrons Arts Center is the OBIE Award-winning performing and visual arts program O. Henry Street Settlement. Abrons supports the creation and presentation of innovative, multi-disciplinary work; cultivates artists in all stages of their practice with educational programs, mentorships, residenciesand commissions; and serves as an intersection of engagement for local, national and international audiences and arts-workers.

Each year the Abrons offers over 250 performances, 12 gallery exhibitions and 30 residencies for performing and studio artists, and 100 different classes in dance, music, theater, and visual art. The Abrons also provides New York City public schools with teaching artists, introducing more than 3,000 students to the arts. For more information: www.abronsartscenter.org.