The Chocolate Factory Theater Announces Its 2023/2024 Season

The Chocolate Factory Theater has announced its 19th season of performances - the third at its new permanent facility - featuring 12 Commissioned Premieres, 1 Supported Creative Residency (with several others TBA), new work by The Chocolate Factory's Co-Founder / Artistic Director, and partnerships with Abrons Arts Center, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, On the Boards, Villa Albertine, and EMPAC.

Unless otherwise noted, all events will take place at The (New) Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Details and tickets at chocolatefactorytheater.org.

Wanjiru Kamuyu - A disguised welcome…
Co-presented with Villa Albertine
September 22 – 23, 2023

 

A solo exploration of the experience of displacement, A disguised welcome… draws inspiration from Kenyan-born, France-based choreographer Wanjiru Kamuyu's experiences in Africa, North America, and Europe, offering a bitingly satirical look at the notions of center and periphery.    

Takahiro Yamamoto - NOTHINGBEING
Co-commissioned with Portland Institute for Contemporary Art and On The Boards
October 5-7, 2023

In NOTHINGBEING, Portland, Oregon-based choreographer Takahiro Yamamoto uses highly physical movement, communal meditation, and the internal activation of sensory memories to construct a sustained and complex meditation on subjectivity and erasure within and between states of “nothingness” and "being". Three performers (David Thomson, Anna Martine Whitehead, and Yamamoto) form the center of a collective gathering, in which intangible states - thinking, not thinking, feeling, surrendering, transforming, conjuring, and forgetting - are brought to the surface in starkly physical form. What does it feel like to shed? To unlearn? And how can we do this together? What does it mean to “be”, and to “be nothing”, and to be present, somehow, in between?

Created and performed by Takahiro Yamamoto in collaboration with David Thomson and Anna Martine Whitehead. Thought Partner: Samita Sinha. Sound Design: Coast2c. Costume Design: Alison Heryer. Lighting Design: Jeff Forbes.

Antonio Ramos and the Gangbangers - CEREMONIA
October 19-21, 2023

Co-commissioned with Abrons Arts Center. Presented in partnership with The Clemente. Performances will take place in the Playhouse at Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, NYC.

The Gangbangers blossom and wilt in a dance-theater performance conceived by choreographer Antonio Ramos. In a mixtape extravaganza of cultural misappropriation and reappropriation, Ramos calls on his ancestors and carries the audience on a journey to the bottom of the ocean and back again. This piece is a ceremony.

chameckilerner - Aging Prelude
October 20-28, 2023

Aging Prelude - chameckilerner's first live performance since 2007 - explores co-creators Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner's shared experiences with their aging bodies, and their shifting relationship to a visual landscape that idealizes the “perpetuation of youthfulness,” where bodies are eternally young and beautiful, where any sign of the passage of time is not an option, and where the aging process erases any signs of histories and futures. With Aging Prelude, chameckilerner aims to make visible “the body that registers time through its skin.”

Aging Prelude will use a physical vocabulary appropriated from paintings and sculptures of famous nudes throughout art history. These well-known nudes will be reenacted by a community of nine performers of different ages, genders, and racial backgrounds, denying any “default body” to take the power of the visual landscape. Instigated by personal histories, chronology, and sediment deposited in these bodies, Aging Prelude activates a space where time is elastic, and no one true self is defined by age; one is defined by a continual pulsation between its older and younger self. 

Andrea and Rosane will be joined by a cast of performers and collaborators that includes Bria Bacon, Walter Dundervill, Anne Gridley, Cristina Latici, Bobbi Menuez, Jody Oberfelder, Jailyn Phillips-Wiley, Viviana Rodriguez, and Fabio Tavares.

Michelle Ellsworth - Evidence of Labor and the Post-Verbal Social Network
Co-commissioned with EMPAC
November 9-11, 2023

Michelle Ellsworth returns to The Chocolate Factory with two distinct but related and intermingled premieres: Evidence of Labor and Post-Verbal Social Network.

Evidence of Labor: State of the Kitchen

Evidence of Labor functions as a reverse Turing test and a prototype for life After-AI (AA).  By putting the allegory back into algorithm, Evidence of Labor reconstructs our accident and considers the ethics of living in a cave with shadows and smoke, using dance's innate methodologies (black box) to replace the labor of AI to create glitch-heavy kitchen hygiene. Evidence of Labor is the sequel to the Post-Verbal Social Network, and continues to propose that the labor involved in disseminating  ideas should be more proportional to the impact of the disseminated ideas.

Evidence of Labor: Dish Towels Division

A subsidiary of “State of the Kitchen,” “Dish Towels” are less technically complex but share the Kitchen's commitment to alternative language-based thought representations and publishing platforms. Predictably, the venue of the “Dish Towels” is 100% cotton fabric dish towels. The content includes several original kinetic alphabets and multiple new fonts (including sand ball font, dead-man pant font, ceramic q-tip font, and hair font), as well as instructions on how to make several language disposal systems. Central to this work is the knowledge that if the language-based ideas expressed on the “Dish Towels” are unhelpful intellectually/politically/spiritually - they are at least still absorbent.

Evidence of Labor: Audience Division

People who like the idea of going to Evidence of Labor (but don't actually want to go) can pay other people to go for them.  Patrons get full credit and are provided evidence of audience labor  - (they receive a physical ticket, a dish towel, and photo of their paid proxy attending) for supporting Ellsworth, The Chocolate Factory, EMPAC, and Art - but don't have to go to “another” show. Modeled after the Mormon practice of baptisms for the dead (also called proxy baptisms) and sex work, this new audience opportunity liberates patrons to simultaneously be responsible citizens of an art eco system, while doing what they really want.

The Post-Verbal Social Network is an expanding collection of prototypes that use contemporary and pre-industrial technologies to augment the physical labor of choreography and community.  

Post-Verbal Social Network employs both contemporary and pre-industrial technologies to augment the physical labor of choreography and community. In a series of prototypes, Ellsworth and friends commingle simple mechanical apparatuses, choreography, and code to test possible non-language based human-to-human systems.

Evidence of Labor

Creators: Michelle Ellsworth and Satchel Spencer. Dancers: Jadd Tank, elle Manayan, Ondine Geary, Uli Miller, Onye Ozuzu, Michelle Ellsworth. Lighting Designer: Madeline Best. Sound and Video Designer: Max Bernstein. Programmer: Satchel Spencer. Apparatus Builder: Bruce Miller.

Post-Verbal Social Network

Creator: Michelle Ellsworth. Dancers: Lauren Beale, Jadd Tank, Michelle Ellsworth, Ondine Geary, Uli Miller, Laura Kim, Rick Manayan, Laura Ann Samuelson, Constance Harris, Kevin Sweet, Luke Iwabuchi, Ondine Geary, Max Bernstein, Zoe Scofield, Ryan Seeling. Lighting Designer and Reactive Artist: Ryan Seelig. Sound and Video Designer: Max Bernstein. Programmer: Satchel Spencer. Apparatus Builder: Bruce Miller. Production Manager: Emily Rea.

Jen Rosenblit and Phil Hayes - Deception (creative residency)
November 2023

Emerging through mannerisms and characteristics of “characters“, Zurich-based actor/creator Phil Hayes (known for his work with Forced Entertainment) and choreographer/performer Jen Rosenblit (who last appeared at The Chocolate Factory in 2019) play Grifters, Hustlers and Tricksters in search of the promised land…

Brian Rogers - Small Songs
December 6-9, 2023

Returning with his first new work since 2018, Chocolate Factory co-Founder / Artistic Director Brian Rogers constructs a “performed listening environment” for the release of Small Songs, an LP of short form synthesizer works (recorded 2019-2022), with audio/video/vocal/bodily/extrasensory contributions by lighting designer (and long time collaborator) Madeline Best and writer Claudia La Rocco.

Ursula Eagly - Dream Body Body Building
March 7-9, 2024

Dream Body Body Building choreographs lucid dreamwork, automatic movement, breath and other territories in which the unconscious touches the conscious. It physically feels good to watch, a sensitive sensory nuanced and gentle unexpected adventure.

Created and performed by Ursula Eagly in collaboration with Madeline Best and Lala Misosniky. 

Stacy Grossfield - metamorphosis 2
March 2024

Womxn suffer, alone and in relationships. Those who have not suffered, are not human beings. So many different kinds of pain, from the physical to the societal/mental. This work will juxtapose the macabre with the naive bubble of the un-real beings in this world...are they not of this world? Oftentimes, the uncomfortable makes us laugh. The performers will be characters inhabiting The Chocolate Factory's vast warehouse space and because there is safety in numbers, the audience size will be small. (Don't be afraid, no one will actually get hurt.)

Choreography by Stacy Grossfield. Performed by Alexandra Albrecht and Nola Sporn Smith. Video Design: Gil Sperling. Special Effects: J & M Special Effects.

Leslie Cuyjet - For All Your Life
April 2024

For All Your Life is a performance event and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and Black death. The performance includes live performance and video that exhibit abstracted growth charts, the history and mechanism of life insurance, to offer a complication between proprietorship and legacy. 

Created and performed by Leslie Cuyjet. Dramaturgy and Direction: Sean Donovan.

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