JACK Launches 2022 Performance Festival RADICAL ACTS

After a thrilling inaugural festival in 2021, JACK returns to its DIY roots for their annual performance festival: Radical Acts. From November 9 - 19 JACK will be home to all things radical - radical joy, radical mayhem, radical vulnerability, and radical confrontations with today's pressing issues. Each night of the festival a different artist will share their response to the prompt, "What is radical?" In addition, artists will embrace JACK's flexible space, embracing experimentation outside proscenium staging.

FESTIVAL ARTISTS & SCHEDULE

November 9th: Courtney Desiree Morris & Dragonfly (aka Robin LaVerne Wilson) + Dendarry Bakery at 7:30pm

November 10th: Asia Stewart + Hector Canonge at 7:30pm

November 11th: Zhen Yu Yao & Kangdeng (Kally) Zhao at 7:30pm

November 12th: Xalvador + Shawn Escarciga at 7:30pm

November 13th: Han Van Sciver at 5:00pm

November 16th: Ian Askew + Lydia Jialu Li 黎珈璐 & Kai-Luen Liang at 7:30pm

November 17th: Martin Gohary + Charlene Jean & Bryanna Bradley at 7:30pm

November 18th: César Alvarez & Emily Orling at 7:30pm

November 19th: Fana Fraser + Nia Calloway at 7:30pm

Festival Lighting Designer: Wyatt Moniz

From Co-Director Jordana De La Cruz: "What is radical? No seriously - tell me, or better yet, show us! This was the invitation we offered in the open call, encouraging artists to be part of this year's Radical Acts Festival. Each artist will have one performance to share their interpretation of radical. The result is 9 days of raw, urgent, and imaginative performances. You'll experience performance art, concerts, installations, dance-theater, and if you so choose, you'll have opportunities to engage with the artists themselves. The one constant in all performances is they are shared with the vulnerability and electric energy you only encounter at the origin of something great."

SHOW DESCRIPTIONS

NOVEMBER 9 at 7:30pm (Double Bill)

Courtney Desiree Morris & Dragonfly (aka Robin LaVerne Wilson)
Orisha Wedding

Orisha Wedding is a queer re-imagining of the relationship between Shango and Oya, two powerful deities in the Yoruba religion who control the elements of of fire, thunder, lightning, wind, and storms. This performance ritual is an erotically charged exploration of what it means to love the earth and to live with fire in a moment of climate crisis.

Dendarry Bakery
You Will Be Played

You Will Be Played is an interactive concert that invites the audience to play dress up in wearable graphic music scores created by Dendarry Bakery. Each score explores the various uses and politics of play - playing music, child's play, the criminalization of play, getting "played" by capitalist forces, and play as an important part of queer discovery.


NOVEMBER 10 at 7:30pm (Double Bill)

Asia Stewart
Retail Therapy

Retail Therapy is a performance in which Asia Stewart creates a dress made of translucent plastic hangers and clothing donated by the audience. In Stewart's performance, she challenges the capitalist desire to accumulate goods and asks the question - "Why is it that we collect so many 'things?' "

Hector Canonge
ALTIBAJOS (Ups & Downs)

ALTIBAJOS (Ups & Downs) is a dance-theater performance that calls for reflection on ancestral heritage, cultural integration, and identity politics. In these times of social conflict and inadequacy, Canonge's allegorical embodiment of transformation and resilience makes a much needed call for radical change.

NOVEMBER 11 at 7:30pm

Yao Zhen Yu 姚震宇 & Kangdeng 康登 (Kally) Zhao
THE White Pretender(S)

Part sitcom. Part history lesson. Part open rehearsal. THE White Pretender(S) is an experimental theater piece that chronicles the history of "Fake Asians," aka White people who are obsessed with pretending to be Asian. This play is not just an autopsy of racial capitalism, but also a wild, virtuosic experiment which attempts to radically subvert the White gaze (and, by extension, Whiteness).

NOVEMBER 12 at 7:30pm

Xalvador + Shawn Escarciga
I'm Going to Marry Your Dad & Miss Lady Salad

Queer performance artists/notable online trolls I'm Going To Marry Your Dad and Miss Lady Salad take you on two intimate journeys to the essence from within - which is inevitably cringe. The artists bring together two one acts that highlight internet culture on an IRL stage through music, dance, alt comedy and video. Together they unpack the deeper psyche of today's current emotional climate.

NOVEMBER 13 at 5:00pm

Han Van Sciver
Happy Birthday Han

When you lose something they say to retrace your steps. A coming-of-age spasm packed with unreliable memories, chaotic gay dancing, and a very earnest triangle solo. Happy Birthday Han is a cohesion ritual for healing your inner child, and loving your present flailing self.

NOVEMBER 16 at 7:30pm (Double Bill)

Ian Askew
Until Other Times

You are invited to attend a musical memorial service, a dream confessional, and a slow dance in the middle of the end of the world. Until Other Times is a performance project considering the fabrication of scarcity and how we have come to accept limitations on our bodies, our environment, and our capacity to care for one another.

Lydia Jialu Li 黎珈璐 & Kai-Luen Liang
Ryotatio 回马枪 - 例

Ryotatio 回马枪 - 例 is a dance theater piece that tells the story of a young girl who listened to her imagination and generated electricity, love, and revolution in defiance of The Unspeakable. This piece is a love letter to Yaoi and a battlecry to censorship.


NOVEMBER 17 at 7:30pm (Double Bill)

Martin Gohary
Camp 7

Camp 7 follows musician Martin Gohary as he finds his identity as an Iranian-American in a post 9/11 world. Alternating between compositions inspired by Martin's childhood of listening to Persian Classical Music and the violent, torture techniques that were used at Camp 7, Martin takes us on journey of torn emotions and beauty of Persian culture.

Charlene Jean & Bryanna Bradley
SHIT IN THE BLOOD: A Biomythography of Recipes

SHIT IN THE BLOOD: A Biomythography of Recipes is a 'digestion play' concerned with what is lost due to the demands of assimilation that have been forced onto and seduced Black American and Black Immigrant communities. Co-devised by Charlene Jean and Bryanna Bradley and featuring music by Pharaoh Rapture (AKA Myles E. Johnson) and producer Sergio Rivera the piece places generational cultural voids in conversation with digestive tract diseases. Co-devised by Charlene Jean and Bryanna Bradley and featuring music by Pharaoh Rapture (AKA Myles E. Johnson) and producer Sergio Rivera.


NOVEMBER 18 at 7:30pm

César Alvarez & Emily Orling
Egg

Egg is a whimsical night of songs and live ceramics by César Alvarez and Emily Orling. In this performance experiment, César and Emily call up unthinkable thoughts about creative kinship, small town futurism, trans middle age, mediocre parenting, and the ancient unreliable religion of art making.

NOVEMBER 19 at 7:30 PM (Double Bill)

Fana Fraser
A Siren Song

Timed in a fantasy paradise where dreams become reality for an extended present moment, this new work dances Fraser's ongoing exploration of a queer Trinbagonian femmehood.

Nia Calloway
Great org*smic Dance (GOD) or Earth is Not One of Your Lil Friends

Planet Earth is screaming. Are you listening?

A three-act reclamation of body, space, and pleasure told from an eco-feminist point of view. The Earth is a landscape of political warfare, BIPOC bodies and women's bodies are landscapes of political warfare, and god is a landscape of political warfare.

ARTIST BIOS

Dendarry Bakery is an experimental performance trio composed of Gladstone Butler, Mobéy Lola Irizarry, and Samira Mendoza. The trio combines Afro-Caribbean and electronic percussion, bass, improvisatory Spanglish vocal performance, and children's games to pose reflections on mother-tongues, queerness, transness, and liberation. IG: @dendarrybakery

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and conceptual artist as well as an assistant professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of the forthcoming book, To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women's Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press). As an artist, her work is primarily concerned with ancestral memory, ritual work, ecology, climate change, death, mourning and funerary practice, and black feminist aesthetics. Her work focuses primarily on examining ancestral narratives and everyday ritual aesthetics among communities throughout the African Diaspora, with a particular emphasis in North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, and West Africa. She works primarily in the fields of large-format portrait and landscape photography, experimental video, performance, social practice, and installation art. She has shown work and performed nationally and internationally. She lives and works in Berkeley, CA. (WC 142) https://www.courtneydesireemorris.com/

DRAGONFLY is Robin LaVerne Wilson was born in Detroit, Michigan; raised in San Antonio, Texas; and has been a resident of the NYC Metro since 2003. She descends from enslaved Africans and is the Gen X daughter of a career US Army combat medic (Korea and VietNam), and a military wife/homemaker/non-domestic cleaner. The unresolved intergenerational traumas of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform her work as a conceptual, multidisciplinary artist. Dragonfly's work interweaves a lifetime of professional experiences in radio, filmmaking, stage and street theater, photography, design, journalism, spoken word, music, activism, facilitation, and guerilla marketing.

Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body.. Her works in video and installation have been exhibited at venues across the United States, including the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. Her first series of prints is also now held in the permanent collection of the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC.

Hector Canonge is an American artist of Catalan and Bolivian descent. His work incorporates various forms of artistic expression: Performance Art, Experimental Dance, Butoh practice, and Socially Engaged Art. His projects explore constructions of embodiment, spatial relations and ritualistic somatic manifestations. His dance projects have been featured at Triskelion Arts, Green Space, Boston Center for the Arts, HOWL Gallery, Queer Butoh Festival of NYC, Movement Research at the Judson Church, La Guardia Performing Arts Center, Queens Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, BAAD, and La Mama among others. His performances and media installations have been presented and exhibited widely in the United States, Latin America, Europe and Asia.

Kangdeng 康登 (Kally) Zhao [she/ta] is an independent multidisciplinary arts producer and curator. She strives to foster a cultural ecosystem that supports community-engaged art-making for the Chinese diaspora community. She initiates artistic projects that simultaneously capture, question, and transcend the zeitgeist of the current world. Kally served in various leadership roles in producing, directing, fundraising, and marketing art projects. Highlights from past art projects include filMarathon (Shanghai, 2018-present), Mandarin Musical Man of La Mancha (off-Broadway, Symphony Space, New York, 2019), CineCina Film Festival (New York, 2019), Association of Chinese International Student in Theater (Virtual Conference, 2020), B·O·N·D International Virtual Performance Festival (Virtual, 2021), MandarinWorks Theatre Festival (Rattlestick Theater ,2022).

Yao Zhen Yu 姚震宇 [he/they/ta] is a Chinese multi-disciplinary artist based in NYC invested in creating a social and civic practice that is fundamentally engaged in AAPI communities. Recently selected as a Finalist for Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab, he made his Mandarin playwriting debut earlier this year with Ripples from a Lost Song (Rattlestick, 2022). Plays include: the desert is not a circle (Pipeline Theatre PlayLab Finalist) and Precipice: The Escape Room Experience (NYU Tisch). He was a NYFA City Artist Corps recipient and first place winner for NFFTY's Editing Challenge 2022. Other: Reality Show (NYU Shanghai), Man of La Mancha (Symphony Space). Zhen Yu holds a MA in Arts Politics and a BFA in Drama from NYU Tisch. Website: vyao.co

I'm Going To Marry Your Dad (Xalvador) is a performance artist/satirist/meme step-parent based in Brooklyn, NY. Their previous work includes Bernie Sanders Wants To Take Away My Fire Island Time Share - a gay fantasia on national themes (Exponential Festival), a presentation of memes and mental health at Taffe Gallery, A Night Inside with Claywoman and Christeene, and host/curator/co-creator of Seize The Memes of Production, the original meme making game show. Their performance work has been presented at The Glove, LifeWorld and the Brick Theatreas well as No Nation Arts Lab in Chicago. Xalvador isa founding member of the experimental performance collective I Don't Wanna See That. Upcoming; Gay Hour of Boundless-wonders as part of the 2023 Exponential Festival. Instagram: @ImGoingToMarryYourDad

Miss Lady Salad (Shawn Escarciga) is an artist, organizer and administrator whose works intersect performance, memes, community-building, and push-back against gatekeeping. Shawn's work has been seen throughout galleries, museums, sex parties, and DIY spaces throughout New York City (Exponential Festival, Panoply Performance Lab, The Ear, Glasshouse ArtLifeLab, Queens Museum,MIX NYC, Triskelion, Grace Exhibition Space, Chinatown Soup, The Clemente, Real Estate Fine Art, Inferno, etc.), domestically (Boston, Chicago, Lexington, New Orleans, Miami, Fayetteville), and abroad (Berlin and London). Upcoming: Gay Hour of Boundless-wonders at Exponential Festival, 2023. More at @missladysalad

Han Van Sciver is a queer, trans, non-binary, multidisciplinary artist. Acting credits include the world premiere of At The Wedding at Lincoln Center, the title role in Sarah Ruhl's Orlando at Williamstown Theatre Festival, and MJ Kaufman's Galatea in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Most recently, they starred in Roger Q Mason's Hide and Hide in the inaugural Breaking the Binary Festival. Their solo show, Bicycle Face, has toured off-Broadway, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. Their full-length play, Dragon, was recently developed with New York Theatre Workshop. They have developed percussion scores with é boylan/Ars Nova, Storm Thomas/Baltimore Center Stage, and Hannah Cornuea/Joe's Pub. MFA: Brown/Trinity Rep. www.hanvansciver.com / @rhymes.with.man

Ian Andrew Askew is an artist working in music, theater, and performance. Their project SLAMDANCE began in 2019 and continued at The Performing Garage in 2021. SLAMDANCE TV was commissioned and premiered by The Kitchen online in 2021. Other projects include Frequency with Justin Allen and Yulan Grant at The Chocolate Factory and Sorry John Henry the song has no end, an upcoming experimental opera developed in residency at Baryshnikov Arts Center, Mercury Store, and Wake Forest University. As a musician and sound designer alongside Camila Ortiz, they have created scores for video, performance, and AR, including Kaneza Schaal and Christopher Myers' KLII (with performances at FIAF, REDCAT, and Walker Arts Center). As an associate with opera directors Kaneza Schaal and Zack Winokur, Ian has presented work with Lincoln Center, The A.R.T., The Met Museum, LA Opera, Detroit Opera, and Spoleto Festival USA.

Lydia 珈璐 Li 黎 is a Chinese and American performer currently nomading between LA and NY. A Hong Kong citizen born and raised in Beijing, and a world traveler grounded by the pandemic. They play in theaters and films, channeling intimate, colorful, weird, and grande stories about resistance, rebirth, romance, and the Chinese diaspora. Work highlights: The Hidden Territories of The Bacchae (Double Edge Theatre), Sonar Es Luchar by A Todo Dar Production (Pregones and Cara Mia Theatre), Little Red Book or Plural Bodies (NOW Festival, REDCAT), Rasgos Asiáticos by Virginia Grise, The Map by Robert Wilson (on pandemic halt), Book Of Survivor (Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai), and April 4th (feature film). Hold a MFA in Acting from CalArts. Learn more at lilydia.com.
Kai-Luen Liang is a Chinese-American sound and media artist and musician based in Los Angeles. His work explores various aspects of technology and erasure, surveillance/prediction, algorithmic divination,identity and migration, and shanzhai-hacktivism-piracy. He received his undergraduate in Asian American Studies from UC Santa Barbara and a MFA from California Institute of the Arts in Music Technology as well as a specialization at the Center for Integrated Media. His work has been shown at XCOAX Conference for Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X, South By South West(SXSW2017), ARS Electronica, Beijing 751 Design Week, Małopolski Ogród Sztuki and the Krakow Academy of Fine Arts Gallery. He has performed all over the world at venues and festivals including the Boiler Room (Beijing 2016), Shanghai International Jazz Festival, and Clockenflap Music Festival (Hong Kong). His music has been released on SVBKLT, Ran Music, Modern Sky, and Robox Neotech (Berlin). He currently is associate faculty at California Institute of the Arts teaching at the Center For Integrated Media.

Martin Gohary is pianist/composer that has always pushed the limits while remaining focused on developing his craft under the mentorship of Brian Marsella. Over the past decade, he has been steadily recording original compositions, playing live shows, collaborating with multiple musicians and producers, and inventing new pathways to channel his artistic vision beyond the boundaries of Jazz or Experimental music.

Leo Weisskoff is a bassist, composer, and educator. He is currently attending the New England Conservatory of Music where he has studied with greats like Cecil McBee, John Lockwood, Dave Holland, Joe Morris, Jerry Leake, Dominque Eade, and Frank Carlberg. Weisskoff is already an active presence in the Boston scene, frequently playing at venues such as Wally's Jazz Cafe, the Bebop, and Virtuosity. He has additionally performed in venues like Boston's famed Symphony Hall and Jordan Hall, The Queen (Wilmington DE), and in festivals like Newport Jazz Festival, under the direction of Darcy James Argue; The Clifford Brown Jazz Festival, and Litchfield Jazz Festival.

Kathleen Jara is an arts educator and violinist working to use sound and artistic creation as a social activism. She sees the artistic process as a means of teaching communication that crosses barriers of race, gender, age, income and culture.

Charlene Jean is trained in the methodology of BLACK LISTENING via Avery R. Young and the Poetry Foundation's Inaugural O|Sessions. She is a 2022 MAP Grant Fund awardee, a finalist providing eligibility for the 2023/2024 Creative Capital WILD FUTURES award, a Semi-finalist at Barbara Ann Teer's National Black Theatre's 2023 SOUL SERIES: I Am Soul - Playwrighting Residency, with multidisciplinary works presented at Weeksville Heritage Center, Harlem Film House, Mother New York, International Society of Curational Programming, and now JACKS Radical Acts Festival. Charlene Jean is Haitian on both sides. She thanks her collaborator, Bryanna, for being that girl. You is it. Thank you to the Lwa who walk with me. Thank you, Gabriel Antonio White, my husband. IG: @psalmsofchar

Bryanna Bradley (she/they) is a Long Island born (Matinecock) and Southeast Queens (Lekawe/Lenape) bred multidisciplinary performer with a Berkshires Massachusetts (Mohican) twang. Her work lives at the intersection of dance, theater, and performance art. Bryanna has the distinct ability to be raw, unfettered,and instinctual with clarity, precision, and focus. As a dancer, she trained with Urban Bush Women at The School at Jacob's Pillow and shadowed Camille A. Brown through her Black Girl Spectrum Program. As an actor, she was a lead performer in 2022 MacArthur Fellow Tavares Strachan's Spring 2022 exhibition The Awakening at the New York Marian Goodman Gallery. As a performance artist, her debut performance work buck:an exploration of black masculinity premiered in visual artist Nick Cave's exhibition Until at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA). Bryanna is eternally grateful for Charlene Jean, the doll, and our ancestors. Follow on IG: @bryannabradlee

César Alvarez (they/them) is a composer, lyricist, playwright, and performance maker. They create big experimental gatherings disguised as musicals in the key of inter-dimensionality, socio-political transformation, kinship and coexistence. With a background as a jazz saxophonist, band leader and sound artist, César's work inhabits a space between the worlds of theater, music, performance art and social practice. César has written five full-length musicals, FUTURITY (2016 Lortel Award for Outstanding Musical); The Elementary Spacetime Show; The Universe is a Small Hat; NOISE (a commission of The Public Theater); and The Potluck. César also composed the music for An Octoroon (Soho Rep, TFANA. Drama Desk Nomination), and The Foundry Theater's Good Person of Szechwan (LaMaMa, The Public Theater. Drama Desk Nomination). César was a 2018-20 Princeton Arts Fellow, 2020-22 Hermitage Fellow, a recipient of The Jonathan Larson Award in 2016, The Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre for Lyrics in 2022. César is an Assistant Professor of Music at Dartmouth College. www.cesaralvarez.net

Emily Orling (she/her) is a visual artist, designer and poet working with paint, clay sculpture, fabric and installation. Since becoming a mother Emily has worked with textiles and ceramics to build art objects and garments that live and function in performance and alongside children. Emily's work on the musical FUTURITY earned her Lortel and Drama Desk nominations for Set Design. Set and Costume Design: FUTURITY (Soho Rep/Ars Nova; A.R.T.; Walker Art Center; MASS MoCA) Set Design: Joy(us) Just(us) for Contra-Tiempo (Jacob's Pillow, National and International Touring) NOISE (NYU. Upcoming: Hopkins Center for the Arts) Costume Design: The Universe is a Small Hat (Babycastles, Sarah Lawrence College, Princeton University); Full Still Hungry for Contra-Tiempo (Dance Motion USA, National and International Touring). Emily is the co-book writer and contributing lyricist on The Elementary Spacetime Show (NYSAF, NYU, UArts, Polyphone, Philly Fringe, EST/Sloan Commission, developed at Ars Nova). Solo Exhibitions: Lo River Arts Gallery, 473 Broadway Gallery, Dactyl Gallery. Group Exhibitions: 95 1/2 Main (Nyack, NY), Cal State Fullerton, Corridor Gallery.

Nia Calloway is a multi-disciplinary artist who traverses the worlds of theatre, poetry, music, dance, and the healing arts. Through the combination of written word, sound experimentation, and explorative movement, she aims to create spaces of healing and introspection for her audiences. Driven by the desire to relate the natural world, supernatural phenomena, and the cosmos our bodies, Nia's art serves to heal and reorient our collective stories around female bodies, QBIPOC bodies, and especially Black femme bodies. Nia's NYC Off-Broadway credits include Behind the Sheet (Betty) with Ensemble Studio Theatre & How To Save The World In Ninety Minutes (Aaliyah) with The Cherry Lane Theatre). Nia has also performed her original poetry regularly at Symphonics Live (NYC) and has featured her work at the 2021 Berlin Poetry Festival (Berlin, Germany), Bowery Poetry Club (NYC), and Berlin Spoken Word (Berlin, Germany).
Fana Fraser is an interdisciplinary artist and director. She is a BAM 2022 Jack Nusbaum Artist in Residence; 2022 Petronio Residency Center RETREAT & RESTORE awardee; 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Dance; and 2021-22 Performance AIRspace Resident at Abrons Arts Center. A 2021 Caribbean/The Future Space resident artist, Fana was shortlisted for the 2020 BCLF Elizabeth Nunez Caribbean-American Writers' Prize. She is a full spectrum doula from a Reproductive Justice lens. Her work has been presented at Abrons Arts Center, BAAD!, Brooklyn Museum, Gibney, ISSUE Project Room, Knockdown Center, Movement Research at the Judson Church, region(es), Wassaic Project, La MaMa Moves!, BAX, Emerging Artists Theatre's "Best of New Works Series", Dixon Place, WestFest, the CURRENT SESSIONS at The Wild Project, the Dance & Performance Institute, and Trinidad Theatre Workshop. fanafraser.com

Wyatt Moniz is a Brooklyn based designer with a BFA in Design and Technical Theater from Brooklyn College. Wyatt's work has taken him through multiple disciplines of design such as costumes, lighting, projections, scenic design, and prop design. He is often inspired by new works that challenge traditional storytelling and bring important social and political issues into conversation. He is also drawn to New works on cultural conflict, sexuality, identity, globalization, and technology. Learn more at wyattmoniz.wixsite.com/design.

JACK is a non-profit Obie Award-winning performance meets civic space located in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Founded in 2012, JACK was created to fuel experiments in art and activism, collaborating with artists and neighbors to build a more just and vibrant society. We present over 75 shows a year in theater, dance, and music as well as hold conversations that are vital to the local community. JACK's programming centers artists of color and those dedicated to our collective liberation. www.jackny.org

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