JACK Sets Summer 2016 Season on Dance, Theatre & More

This summer, JACK presents the premiere of Toshiki Okada's Quiet, Comfort, commissioned by Hoi Polloi and directed by Alec Duffy, a duo of singer/performer Helga Davis and choreographer/dancer Ji?í Bartovanec (of the Sasha Waltz Dance Company), the premiere of the play The Animals, by Amina Henry, a new piece by choreographer Biba Bell, the second annual Brooklyn Experimental Song Carnival, curated by Valerie Kuehne, plus several concerts throughout the season.
SCHEDULE: MUSIC:

• Heroes are Gang Leaders, with Lindsey Wilson and the Human Hearts Trio | Tuesday, June 7

• Charmaine Lee/Tyshawn Sorey and guests | Sunday, June 12

• Brooklyn Experimental Song Carnival | June 16 - 18

• thingNY: work by Gelsey Bell and Rick Burkhardt | Sunday, July 17

MUSIC + DANCE:

• Prague - New York Effects: Helga Davis and Ji?í Bartovanec | Saturday, June 25

DANCE:

• Movement Research Festival, Day 6 | Saturday, June 11
• Biba Bell: together (world premiere) | July 14 - 16

THEATER:

• The Animals, by Amina Henry (world premiere) | June 30 - July 9

• Hoi Polloi: Quiet, Comfort | By Toshiki Okada and directed by Alec Duffy (world premiere) | August 11 - 26

FULL INFO Heroes are Gang Leaders
with Lindsey Wilson and the Human Hearts Trio
Tuesday, June 7 at 8 pm
Tickets: $12
8 pm: Singer/Songwriter Lindsey Wilson and the Human Hearts Trio -
Reggie Sylvester (drums) and Michael Trotman (bass), with special guest, spoken-word artist, Rachel Righteousluv,
9 pm: Heroes are Gang Leaders
Fronted by poet Thomas Sayers Ellis and saxophonist James Brandon Lewis, this 8-person ensemble combines elements of poetry, spoken word, jazz, and their own brand of stage theatrics in its performances.

Movement Research Festival, Day 6: history/mystery/periphery/party
Saturday, June 11 at 8 pm and 10 pm
Tickets: $10 for each event or $15 for both events
Movement Research settles into JACK for the final night of its six-night multi-venue annual festival.
8 pm: Performances by Jonathan Gonzalez, Michael Mahalchick, Lily Bo Shapiro, and Social Health Performance Club (Ivy Castellanos, Ayana Evans, Zachary Fabri, Maria Hupfield, Geraldo Mercado).
10 pm: REVEL | PERFORMANCE PARTY
Hosted by Becca Blackwell and Bashir Daviid Naim with special guest performances.

Charmaine Lee and guests
Sunday, June 12 at 8 pm
Tickets: $10
Improvising vocalist Charmaine Lee performs with Tyshawn Sorey, Joanna Mattrey, Henry Fraser, Leila Bordreuil and Sean Ali.

Second Annual Brooklyn Experimental Song Carnival
Thursday - Saturday, June 16 - 18 at 8 pm
Tickets: $10
The previously itinerant Brooklyn Experimental Song Carnival moves fully into JACK for its second year, curated by Valerie Kuehne and featuring artists who orbit the notion of song as a creative medium that surpasses and/or undermines popular notions of what songs "do". Over the course of three nights, musicians, composers, performance artists, and songwriters will question what "song" is and present work that unifies sound, voice, and narrative in surprising and innovative ways, presenting performances with care, abandon and absolute celebration for the human narrative, in all its bizarre and loving incarnations. The festival features, among others, Irrevery, Brian McCorkle, Caitlin Baucom, Audrey Harrer (Boston), Clapperclaw, Twin72 (Detroit), Okapi and Public Speaking.

Prague - New York Effects: Helga Davis and Ji?í Bartovanec
Saturday, June 25 at 8 pm
Czech Center New York collaborates with JACK to present the premiere of a performance duet of luminous New York-based singer/performer Helga Davis (Einstein on the Beach - 2014 version) and Ji?í Bartovanec, a Czech dancer & choreographer best known for his work with the Sasha Waltz Dance Company.

The Animals (world premiere)
By Amina Henry
June 30 - July 9
Tickets: $18
The Animals is a wicked look at a year in the life of the teachers at Peabody Elementary School, depicting their quarterly struggle to maintain their humanity. Directed by Gretchen Van Lente, this darkly comic play alights in the teachers' break room every month, tracking their progress and regress over the course of the year. New recruit Dot Banks strives for perfection while dealing with a wayward student, a demanding mother, an alarming eating disorder and the dramas of the veteran teachers at the school. With exhilarating highs and devastating lows, the schoolteachers work their way through the school year amidst demanding parents, unruly students, standardized testing and the piling-on of personal crises.

Biba Bell: together (world premiere)
Thursday - Saturday, July 14 - 16 at 8 pm
Tickets: $18
Both a combination of, and a departure from, the past few years of Bell's research and performance engaging dance through an affective, archi-historic lens of modernism and domesticity, together marks a new movement of portrayal. Developed in residencies that span from Germany to Austin, Texas, together significantly draws upon ample time spent in a glass box and its accompanying green space - a Mies van der Rohe live/work apartment couched in Detroit's Lafayette Park. From the solo silhouette to the celebratory ensemble, dematerializing walls and stepping out to the music, the search for home may be best conceived in this dance together.

Dr. Sandwich: Bell / thingNY / Burkhardt
New music by Gelsey Bell and Rick Burkhardt
Sunday, July 17 at 8 pm
Tickets: $15
Contemporary music ensemble thingNY presents an evening of new music-theater works by composers (Dr.) Gelsey Bell and (Dr.) Rick Burkhardt, including the world premiere of Burkhardt's Passover, and new scenes from Bell's game-piece opera Rolodex. Also on the program, Burkhardt's award-winning table-top music-theater piece, The Great Hymn of Thanksgiving, for three speaking percussionists.

Hoi Polloi presents:
Quiet, Comfort (world premiere)
By Toshiki Okada and directed by Alec Duffy
August 11 - 26
Tickets: $18
OBIE-winning theater company Hoi Polloi presents Quiet, Comfort, a newly-commissioned text by Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada, written specifically for actor Julian Rozzell, Jr. For the piece, director Alec Duffy fashions a dream world in which the audience joins both Rozzell, Jr. and Lelia Goldoni (of John Cassavetes' 1959 film Shadows) on a giant bed that fills the entire stage of JACK for a piece about travel, first-world privilege and the danger of a life lived alone. With set design by MacArthur "Genius" Award-winner Mimi Lien, and choreography by Stacy Grossfield, Hoi Polloi offers a mysterious piece that aims for the subconscious.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS (in order of appearance in the season)
Ji?í Bartovanec (Prague - New York Effects) is a dancer and choreographer who has worked with Sasha Waltz since 2003, having danced in noBody, insideout, Dido & Aeneas, Medea, Jagden und Formen, Continu, and Matsukaze and having taken part in Waltz´s Dialoge projects. His first solo When my mind is rocking, i know it´s 7 was presented by Sasha Waltz & Guests. His solo Aneho premiered in Ludwigshafen, 2010. He participated in MusicTANZ-Carmen, a 2012 educational project of Berliner Philharmoniker. Bartovanec danced in Waltz´s Sacre and L´Apres-midi d´un faune, and in 2014 exhibition Sasha Waltz Instalations Objects. His work GLOBE (2014) was nominated for Czech Dance Platform. In 2015 he worked with MAMAJEANGKIM in Seoul giving workshops. He has worked with Spitfire Company for Sniper´s Lake. He collaborated in Berlin with Farhad Payar and Yasmine Kalifa on Jack & Harun. In 2004 he danced in Mindgarden by Jochen Roller and in Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda and in the dance film Circulatura by Mirella Weingarten. He participated in Mayim Mayim and danced in Human Writes by William Forsythe and developed a site- specific project with Berliner Charite Raumausloten. His work Entropy premiered at Czech Center NY and the Moving Sound Festival. His latest choreographed work, Lessons of Touch, was created in collaboration with Tantehorse in Prague. Bartovanec teaches at Duncan Centre Conservatorium in Prague.

Helga Davis (Prague - New York Effects) has starred in the international tour of Einstein on the Beach, begun in 2014; Robert Wilson describes her as "a united whole, with spellbinding inner power and strength." She also starred in Wilson's The Temptation of St. Anthony, with libretto and score by Bernice Johnson Reagon of Sweet Honey in the Rock, Milton, by Katie Pearl and Lisa D'amour, and Elsewhere, with cellist Maya Beiser with music by Missy Mazolli. In 2011 Davis served as a "Sweet Peach" in Soho Rep's production of Jomama Jones, Radiate, a production that made New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als' top ten list. She is the recipient of the BRIC Fireworks grant and just completed her first full-length theatre piece, Cassandra. Davis may also be heard on the new VIA Records release, Oceanic Verses, a multi-media opera work written for her by composer Paola Prestini. In Fall 2015 Davis will perform in her fifth Next Wave festival at BAM in Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) and Andrew Ondrejcak's You Us We All. She hosts a radio program on WQXR's Q2, and was awarded an ASCAP Multimedia Award for hosting 24:33: twenty-four hours and thirty-three minutes of the playful and playable John Cage.

Amina Henry (Playwright, The Animals) is a playwright and arts educator. Her work has been produced, presented, and/or developed at: Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Kitchen Dog Theater, The Flea (NYC), The New Group (NYC), Clubbed Thumb (NYC), Barefoot Theatre (NYC), Little Theater @ Dixon Place (NYC), National Black Theater (NYC), the cell (NYC), Theatre for the New City (NYC), HERE Arts Center (NYC), Drama of Works (Brooklyn, NY), The Brick (Brooklyn, NY), and HERO Theater, as well as Brooklyn College and Texas State University. She was a 2012-2013 Core Apprentice playwright at The Playwrights Center. She was a 2013 Finalist for the Leah Ryan FEWW Playwriting Prize for her play Bully, a play that is on the 2015 Kilroy List, a curated survey of the top 7% recommended plays by female and female-identified playwrights in the US. She is a graduate of Yale University, the NYU Performance Studies MA program and the Brooklyn College MFA Playwriting program.

Gretchen Van Lente (Director, The Animals) is a freelance director and the Artistic Director of the award-winning multidisciplinary company, Drama of Works (www.dramaofworks.com). The company has created over a dozen shows, received seven Henson Foundation grants, participated in multiple developmental series and performed in international festivals in over five countries. Outside of DOW, she has directed or assisted with productions at Theatre for the New City, Brooklyn College, {Your name here}, Bond Street Theatre, New Georges, Dixon Place, at various festivals, and many others... Gretchen is also a full-time theater teacher in the NYC Public School System, working with elementary students with special needs. She received a BFA in illustration from Parsons School of Design, a BA in theatre from Eugene Lang College, an MFA in theater direction from Brooklyn College, and is working toward her MS in education from Pace University.

Biba Bell (together) is a writer, dancer, and choreographer based in Detroit. She earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies from New York University. Bell's performance work has most recently been seen at Bas Fisher Invitational (Miami), the Kunstlerhaus (Bremen, Germany), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, and in a Mies van der Rohe apartment in Detroit's Lafayette Park. Bell was a 2015 DAAD guest professor of Experimental Performance at the University of the Arts (Hochschule für Künste) in Bremen, Germany, and is an Assistant Professor in the Maggie Allesee Department of Theatre and Dance at Wayne State University in Detroit. Alongside Mariana Valencia she is a co-editor of Critical Correspondence, Movement Research's online journal, and is on the editorial board for Detroit Research Journal of which she edited a special issue on choreography. She has been impacted by her work with MGM Grand (Modern Garage Movement), Maria Hassabi, and Walter Dundervill amongst others.

Hoi Polloi (Quiet, Comfort) is an OBIE-winning New York-based collaborative theater company formed in 2007 by director Alec Duffy. The company creates original work that strives to explore how we, as Americans, come together and how we fall apart. Hoi Polloi is also dedicated to collaborating with the most imaginative of today's playwrights and of interpreting older work. Recent work includes, at JACK, Republic, Beckett Solos and Shadows, and at the Incubator Arts Project, All Hands, Three Pianos and The less we talk.

Alec Duffy (Director, Quiet Comfort) is an OBIE-winning theater-maker and founder of the theater company Hoi Polloi and of the performance venue JACK. Recent directorial work includes Our Planet, Shadows, Baal, All Hands, and The less we talk and Murder in the Cathedral. He was one of three creator/performers of Three Pianos. Duffy is a Drama League Directing Fellow. He studied at Duke University and at the Ecole Jacques Lecoq.

Toshiki Okada (Playwright, Quiet Comfort) is a Japanese playwright and director, who, in 1997, founded the theater company chelfitsch to present world premieres of his work. He is known for his use of hyper-colloquial language in his plays and, as a director, for his unique choreography. In 2005, he won the prestigious Kishida Prize for Drama (the Japanese version of the Tony Award) for his play, Five Days in March. As the representative of his country, he took part in Stuecke'06 International Literature Project and in December of the same year, he presented Enjoy at New National Theatre, Tokyo. In 2007, his collection of two novels, The End of the Special Time We Were Allowed, was published, and was awarded the Kenzaburo Oe Prize. In recent years, Okada has drawn the attention of not only the theater world and the contemporary dance scene, but also the fine arts and literary worlds. His work has been presented internationally at the Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago), Kunsten Festival des Arts (Brussels), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), and Festival d'Automne (Paris). His stories and plays have been translated into many languages and published abroad. In 2009, his piece Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and The Farewell Speech premiered in Berlin, in co-production with Hebbel Am Ufer (Berlin). As Okada continues touring new work with his company chelfitsch, his work is increasingly produced in English-language versions by American companies, including Pig Iron Theater Company, PlayCo and Witness Relocation. His play, The Sonic Life of a Giant Tortoise, was produced by PlayCo at JACK in June 2014.

JACK's programming is made possible by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and Councilmember Laurie Cumbo, by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, by The Peg Santvoord Foundation, The DuBose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, the Mental Insight Foundation and by The Nathan Cummings Foundation.

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