Raquel André Comes to The Chocolate Factory Theater

The Chocolate Factory Theater (www.chocolatefactorytheater.org) continues its Thirteenth Anniversary season with the New York premiere of Collection of Artists, a new performance by Lisbon based artist Raquel André, presented in association with the Portland Institute of Contemporary Art and the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati. Tickets are $20 and may be purchased in advance at (212) 352-3101 or www.chocolatefactorytheater.org.

Collection of Artists is the third movement of the Collection of People. Is it possible to access an artist through learning a moment of his/her creation? Can one access their story? Raquel André uses her own body as an archive, learning and keeping the arts of others so she can tell their stories. She creates a collection that cares about each artist, their different practices, disciplines, conceptual perspectives and work tools. We also find personal desires and thoughts about the ways of being and their relationship with their artistic practice and biography. By collecting artists, Raquel navigates over frontiers of reality and fiction, fantasy and possibility, daily life and artistic life, seeking to collect the ephemeral, and transform it into something concrete and palpable, through an artistic and poetic medium. In 2018 and 2019, Raquel André collects artists in partnership with various institutions in various cities around the world: Bergen, Salzburg, Faro, Warsaw, Cincinnati, New York, Loulé, Berlin, Orléans, Montemor-o-Novo, Porto and Lisbon.Created by António Pedro Lopes, Bernardo de Almeida and Raquel André. Production: Missanga.This work is part of multi-year project entitled Collection of People: Collection of Lovers, Collection of Collectors, Collection of Artists and Collection of Spectators.The Chocolate Factory performance of Collection of Artists will coincide with a one-week creative residency.Support: Direcção Geral das Artes - Ministério da Cultura, Governo de Portugal, FLAD, apap-Performing Europe 2020-a project co-founded by Creative Europe Programme of the European Commission.

The Chocolate Factory Theater exists to encourage and support artists in their process of inquiry. We engage specifically with a community of artists who challenge themselves and, in doing so, challenge us. We believe that by supporting the labor of these artists, we contribute to elevating New York City as a thriving and more equitable marketplace of ideas.

The Chocolate Factory embraces artistic practice as an integral part of the artist's whole life, an essential component of the life of our community and a key element of a larger national and international artistic dialog. As such, we host artists as our equal partners with shared autonomy, trust and appreciation. While we seek to make big ideas and extended relationships possible, we commit to working at a small, intimate and personal scale, with few artistic compromises or boundaries. We achieve all of this by creating a vessel for artistic experimentation through a residency package serving the whole artist - salary, space, responsive and flexible support for the development of new work from inspiration to presentation.