Bushwick Starr and Brooklyn Gypsies to Host OYE! AVANT GARDE NIGHT Festival

OYE! Avant Garde Night is an annual festival devoted to the development of new performances by artists from Bushwick and surrounding areas. Brooklyn Gypsies created OYE! as a platform to celebrate and share what is unique about Bushwick's converging arts communities. Join us for a night of eclectic theater, dance & film, including a melodrama puppet opera of two electrons in the throes of Nitrogen Fixation and a man wandering the silk road. Performances followed by music, conversation, food and dancing.

OYE! Avant Garde features Actors, Dancers, and musicians, including Robert Greene, Fernando Ruiz, Sam Soghor, Union Docs, Claire Moodey, Mark Sitko, Samuel T. West, Daniel Broadhurst, DJ JoJo Soul, James Cronin, Jonah Rosenberg, Ian Gallagher,Taylor Donofrio, Jenna Purcell, Ace Salisbury & Ryan Campos, Andrew Parsons, Laurie Sumiye

Produced by Brooklyn Gypsies, OYE! Avant Garde is curated by Modesto Flako Jimenez, Lighting & Tech by Jay Maury, Technical assistant Ren Humphrey, Production Assistant Sylvana Carmella Dole.

The Bushwick Starr theater is located at 207 Starr Street, Brooklyn, NY [between Irving and Wykcoff]. Directions Via Subway: take the L Train to Jefferson Street, exit at Starr Street, walk against traffic on Starr, and the theater is 3/4 of a block on the right. For detailed driving directions visit: www.thebushwickstarr.org/DIRECTIONS. Tickets are $15 in advance, and $18 at the door. Ticket link: www.thebushwickstarr.org.

Flako is a Dominican-born actor, writer and arts educator raised in Brooklyn. While still in high school he co-founded Real People Theater, a company best known for reworking classic plays by combining language of the original text with street slang and Spanish, including Milton's Paradise Lost and Shakespeare's Hamlet. He has performed on stage with the Wooster Group and Repertorio Español in New York and has been featured on broadcast and online radio to discuss politics throughout the Spanish-speaking world and to share his poems and stories. Has also appeared on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, BK Live, NY1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and has shared the stage with Wallace Shawn, Frances McDormand and Maura Tierney. He is a proud board member of Brooklyn Poets. In 2012 he published a poetry collection addressing gentrification called Oye, Para Mi Querido Brooklyn (Listen, For My Dear Brooklyn).

According to Brooklyn Exposed, "The event spoke for itself. The night revived the notion that opening oneself to new people and experiences is part of living in New York City. So embrace." Bushwick Daily stated, "Bushwick needs gatherings and platforms like Flo-etry night at The Bushwick Starr where people can meet and talk. Bushwick needs people like Flako to bring us closer and help us understand."

The Bushwick Starr is an Obie Award winning non profit theater that presents an annual Season of new work in theater, dance, and puppetry. We are an organization defined by both our artists and our community, and since 2007, we have grown into a thriving theatrical venue, a vital neighborhood arts center, and a destination for exciting and engaging performance. The Bushwick Starr's mission is to help ambitious artists and ambitious audiences find each other. We provide a springboard for emerging professional artists to make career-defining leaps, and we are a sanctuary where established performance companies come to experiment and innovate. Our past seasons have included new work from cutting edge companies such as The Debate Society, the TEAM, Elevator Repair Service, Half Straddle, and Witness Relocation. The Village Voice called it "A home for gutsy experimental work."