HERE Announces 2018-2019 Season Of Boundary Pushing Performance

HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director, and Kim Whitener, Executive Director) is proud to announce its 2018-2019 season, which marks the OBIE-winning institution's 26th year of producing of daring new hybrid performance by new artists from all disciplines - theatre, music, art, dance, puppetry, and media art.

Two centerpieces of the season are projects developed through HARP, HERE's signature, multi-year, $100,000 residency program, which was created in 1999 and serves as a national model. They include Soundstage (September 13-29), a live theater and film hybrid created and performed by 2014-19 resident artist Rob Roth alongside his on-film counterpart, actor Rebecca Hall. Cellist, singer and 2016-19 resident artist Leah Coloff premieres ThisTree (January 6-12), which glides between idyllic childhood memories, unanswered questions and Coloff's roller coaster ride of fertility treatments. ThisTree is also part of the seventh annual PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival, which returns January 5-13.

In March, HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program (Basil Twist, Artistic Director), which builds on HERE's decades-long commitment to commissioning adult puppet works, will present two new works. Ashes (March 12-17), from Yngvild Aspeli and her company Plexus Polaire, is the collision of two stories: a young man who sets houses on fire and a writer who seizes them as literary material several decades later. Nick Lehane's Chimpanzee (March 14-24) is inspired by true events and centers on an aging, isolated chimpanzee who pieces together fragments of her bleak life as part of a human family.

Having recently presented its 25th anniversary season, HERE will mark its official 25th birthday on October 29 with a performance party showcasing work by 25 of HERE's favorite artists of all time.HERE's annual CULTUREMART festival, where resident artists in the HARP program showcase beautifully produced, still in development new work, will take place March 5-10.

"As HERE heads into its next quarter-century, I couldn't be more excited about our striking 26th season," says Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting. "I am astounded by the adventurous artists who make HERE their home-opening our eyes to new ideas through their vast explorations of divas, family history, primatology, cannabis, blackness, McCarthy, and so much more. Plus, we get to celebrate HERE's 25th birthday with one hell of a party."

Additional details on the 2018-19 season can be found below.

HERE is located at 145 Sixth Avenue, just below Spring Street. Tickets are now on sale and can be purchased by calling 212-352-3101 or visitinghere.org. In person sales at the box office after 5pm only on performance days and two hours prior to curtain for matinees. For Group Sales, contact tickets@here.org.

HERE's 2018-2019 SEASON

Soundstage (world premiere)
Rob Roth
September 13-29

Soundstage is a live theater and film hybrid created and performed by HERE resident artist Rob Roth alongside his on-film counterpart, actor Rebecca Hall. Using the language of cinema, Soundstage reflects and refracts a 'meditation on the muse' and her remedy for loneliness. Through a queer lens, the piece focuses on alternative realities blending and dissolving in a metaphysical and alchemic journey where sound, time, gender, and fantasy transform.

Rob Roth is a multi-platform artist and director based in New York City who works in a variety of media utilizing theater, film, audio, and installation--to create richly textured and poetic work. His visual language springs from his initial training as a painter, and his mysterious works of deconstructed narrative flicker through a decidedly queer lens onto the subconscious. For more than twenty years, Roth has regularly collaborated with some of New York City's most progressive performance artists and theater troupes, including Narcissister, Justin Vivian Bond, Julie Tolentino, Big Art Group, Vangeline Theater, Amber Martin and Edgar Oliver. His original theater pieces include the award-winning Screen Test (PS 122), The Mystery of Claywoman - Screening and Lecture (featuring Amy Pohler, Alan Cumming & Ruth Maleczech), and Craig's Dream, an ongoing performance piece in which Rob plays his own alter ego, "Craig." Even while directing short films, such as Junkie Doctors, and directing music videos for a variety of artists, Roth has always kept a foot firmly planted in the underground progressive nightlife arena with legendary club nights like Jackie 60, Click + Drag and The Black Party. His unique dark vision has served him well in some of the more commercial projects he's taken on as well, for such artists as Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Blondie and David Bowie.

HERE'S 25TH BIRTHDAY PARTY
October 29

In 1993, HERE barged into Soho and threw one hell of a party. It's been 25 years and the world has changed, but the OBIE-winning producer and presenter is still HERE. On October 29, HERE will honor its quarter-century milestone in true HERE fashion: a wild party teeming with delicious food, strong drinks, and performances by 25 of HERE's favorite artists of all time.

PROTOTYPE Festival
January 5-13

PROTOTYPE returns with a stellar array of artists presenting groundbreaking new works: ThisTree by Leah Coloff; p r i s m by Ellen Reid & Roxie Perkins; The Infinite Hotel by Michael Joseph McQuilken & Leah Siegel with selected songs and lyrics adapted from Amanda Palmer & Jason Webley; Train With No Midnight by Joseph Keckler; Pancho Villa From a Safe Distance by Graham Reynolds & Lagartijas Tiradas Al Sol of Mexico City; Stinney: An American Execution by Frances Pollock & Tia Price; one project soon to be announced; PROTOTYPE: Out of Bounds, a series of short, free, site-specific works in public spaces; and the return of the PROTOTYPE Soirée at City Vineyard. For a detailed schedule, go to prototypefestival.org

PROTOTYPE is a co-production of HERE and Beth Morrison Projects.

ThisTree (world premiere)
Leah Coloff
January 6-12

Cellist, singer, and HERE resident artist Leah Coloff glides between idyllic childhood memories, unanswered questions and her roller coaster ride of fertility treatments in ThisTree. This world premiere weaves autobiographical storytelling, standard 8mm home movies, and Coloff's signature blend of blues, rock and non-traditional cello playing, supported by an all-female band, to investigate the vantage point of being the last branch on the family tree.

Leah Coloff is a cellist, singer, and composer described by The New York Times as "a combination of artful angularity and a rock-inflected assertiveness." Coloff has worked with composers such as Philip Glass, Joel Thome, Sean Friar, Michael Gordon and Ted Hearne. Credits include the premieres of Ridge Theater's Lightning At Our Feet as cellist/singer/performer and Beth Morrison Productions, Ted Hearne's The Source, as cellist. Recent discography includes: The Source (New Amsterdam), selected best classical recordings of 2015 by The New York Times and The New Yorker, Outlanders (New Amsterdam) and ThisTree (searchingeye) the album inspiring her multimedia autobiographical song cycle encompassing family, memory, secrets, and loss. Coloff is a regular performer at the Obie Award-winning Secret City and cellist for the Scorchio String Quartet, featured in the award-winning documentary, Inside the Perfect Circle: The Odyssey of Joel Thome. She has played with musicians such as Trey Anastasio, David Bowie, Michael Cerveris, Rufus Wainwright, Lou Reed and Damon Albarn among others. Coloff studied with Irene Sharp at The San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and with Bernard Greenhouse at The New England Conservatory of Music.

CULTUREMART
March 5-10

CULTUREMART is the annual festival for the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), where process becomes the focus. Beautifully produced, yet still, in development, CULTUREMART provides a platform for our current Resident Artists to blur the boundaries between dance, theatre, puppetry, music, new media, and visual art, melding these forms to support their adventurous visions.

Ashes (New York premiere)
Yngvild Aspeli / Plexus Polaire
March 12-17
Presentation of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program

Ashes is the collision of two stories a generation apart. In a small village in the south of Norway, we find a young man who sets houses on fire and a writer who seizes them as literary material several decades later. These two tragically ordinary beings bend under the onslaught of their demons, burning with a secret fire that consumes them. A story of the human condition, Ashes explores the beast lurking in everyone, and examines our silent agreement with it, not to be devoured.

Yngvild Aspeli, Norwegian born director of Plexus Polaire, explores a visual language mixing poetry and cruelty. Through images and words, sounds and gestures, imagination and substance, she gives life to the most deeply buried feelings. She has created the performance Signaux (2011), Opera Opaque (2013), Ashes (2014), Chambre Noire (2017) and is now working on the adaptation of Moby Dick.

Chimpanzee (world premiere)
Nick Lehane
March 14-24
Presentation of HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program

An aging, isolated chimpanzee pieces together the fragments of her childhood in a human family. Bleak reality bleeds to vivid memory in this non-verbal puppet play. Inspired by true events.

Nick Lehane's puppet work has shown at The Jim Henson Carriage House, St. Ann's Warehouse Puppet Lab, Puppet BloK at Dixon Place, Special Effects Festival at The Wild Project, and Pillsbury House Theatre in Minneapolis. Select puppet performance credits include Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning (HERE/international tour), The Islamic Solidarity Games Opening Ceremony (Baku, Azerbaijan), Doug Fitch's Petrushka (Barbican Centre/New York Philharmonic) and El retablo de maese Pedro (Bard SummerScape), The Old Man and the Old Moon (PigPen Theatre Co.), Little Red Fish (Puppet Kitchen/New York City Children's Theater), Pip's Island, James Ortiz's The Little Mermaid and "Lore" (Amazon). Nick studied at the Moscow Art Theatre School and holds a BFA from the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama.

ABOUT THE HERE ARTIST RESIDENCY PROGRAM (HARP)

Through HARP, HERE commissions and develops new hybrid works over multiple years. Throughout the year, HARP artists show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full-scale premieres.

In addition to the 2018-2019 season world premieres by resident artists Rob Roth and Leah Coloff, projects currently in development in HARP include:

Writer/director Gisela Cardenas' Hybrid Suite No. 2: The Carmen Variations, a devised theater opera inspired by Bizet's Carmen. Mixing opera, text, and movement, this project seeks to cross time and geographical borders to understand the potentially different faces Carmen might possess.

Writer/director Zoey Martinson's The Black History Museum According to the United States of America, which delves into the fraught relationship between Black bodies and the value America has placed on those bodies. Starting from the founding of this country traveling through modern day this immersive production will explore 'Blackness' from its constitutional conception to its currency.

Choreographer Ximena Garnica and Video Artist Shige Moriya's A Meal, a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together experienced as part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner.

Puppetry artists Spencer Lott and Maiko Kikuchi's 9000 Paper Balloons, a new work of puppet theater about the mother and five children, who were killed by a bomb carried by a giant paper balloon launched from the Japanese coast in 1945, the only enemy inflicted casualty on the U.S. mainland during WWII.

Choreographer Raja Feather Kelly's The McCarthy Era (Working Title), a dance-theatre production that addresses the status of the artist in the McCarthy era, showing the ways in which, through a brutally effective mechanism, artists were directed to disengage from issues facing the real world.

Writer/director/hip-hop artist Baba Israel's Cannabis! (Working Title), a live multimedia performance telling the history of cannabis and tracing its impact on humanity by creating an "up on your feet" musical concert with spoken word, video, and immersive theatre.

Composer/singer Imani Uzuri's Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna, a large choral and chamber orchestra work inspired by the iconic figure of the Black Madonna, a rare holy Marian figure visually depicted with Dark Skin and currently worshipped within the Catholic and Orthodox Marian pantheon but who can be traced back to pre-Christian pagan images.

Taylor Mac has been HERE's resident playwright since 2016 and is currently working on Socrate, which Mac envisions as an adaptation of The Apology of Socrates and Satie's Socrate. The piece is part of the playwright's continued quest in navigating the evil forces of the world with beauty and contemplation.

About HERE

The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Executive Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre byTime Out New York, is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performance viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines-theater, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

Standout productions include Eve Ensler'sThe Vagina Monologues, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and Arias with a Twist, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs' Disposable Men, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Kamala Sankaram's Miranda and Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, and original works by Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting, among many others. In 2008, following an extensive renovation, HERE re-opened the doors to its long-time downtown home for the arts, where it continues as a vibrant, welcoming haven for artists and audiences alike.

The HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) has been HERE's signature development and producing program since 1999. HARP commissions, develops and premieres new hybrid performances. Productions developed at HERE challenge existing boundaries between disciplines -- theater, dance, music, opera, puppetry, media, visual arts, installation, spoken word and more. Through HARP, the Resident Artists are given the unique opportunity to develop their projects for up to three years through free works-in-progress showings, workshop presentations in HERE's annual CULTUREMART festival, culminating in full-scale productions.

Each season, HERE premieres several of these Resident Artist productions as mainstage works. These innovative projects are grown in a diverse artistic community where artists receive career development resources and hands-on training. HARP has been widely recognized as a unique model for artistic development for the field to emulate. In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, "it's become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development and that theatergoers can sample the exciting results."

HERE proudly hosts adventurous artists, companies, and productions, whether emerging or acclaimed, through its SubletSeries. It also presents work from New York, across the country, and around the globe through the Dream Music Puppetry Program (co-curated with Basil Twist), and the widely acclaimed PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now festival of opera-theater and music-theater, co-produced with Beth Morrison Projects.

HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. This program was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist's OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE's Dream Music is also proud to house the Griff Williams Puppetry Collection. The 6 antique marionettes of Harry James, Griff Williams, Cab Calloway, Arturo Toscannini, Ted Lewis and Paul Whiteman were all performed with The Griff Williams Orchestra in the 1930s & 40s throughout America's big band era. They have a permanent home outside the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE.