Complete Cast & Creative Team Announced for ARDEN: A RITUAL FOR LOVE AND LIBERATION

The Flea announced today additional company members that complete the cast and creative team of ARDEN: A Ritual for Love and Liberation, a genre-bending, boundary-breaking, and interactive new work commissioned by The Flea and led by Black and queer artists. Rehearsals for ARDEN begin today, with previews commencing on February 6, 2022 and an official opening night set for February 11, 2022. This strictly limited engagement will play through March 6, 2022.

ARDEN is a new performance ritual that creates space for grace and communal practice in the face of indifference and division. It was developed in collaboration by Niegel Smith, Diana Oh, Peter Born, and MacArthur Fellows Okwui Okpokwasili and Carrie Mae Weems.

Smith and Nia Witherspoon co-direct a group of performers that includes Smith, Weems, Oh, Okpokwasili, Born, and Jack Fuller.

Oh and Fuller also serve as Co-Music Directors.

ARDEN's band features Serena Ebony Miller (bass), Bernice "Boom Boom" Brooks (percussion), and Viva DeConcini (guitar).

The design team includes Born (Environmental Designer), Tony Award winner Linda Cho (Costume Designer), and Hao Bai (Projection, Sound, and LX Design).

The Flea's Artistic Director, Niegel Smith, says, "I am thrilled that this is our first major work under our new mission. Framed by Carrie Mae's visual landscape, Arden's new songs, dances and testimonies create exactly the kind of communal experience we deserve during this pandemic - raw, honest and achingly beautiful. As my grandma would say, these artists have really 'put their foot in it.' I can't wait until February 6th when the rest of the world can join us."

To view and download the trailer and photos, click here.

Tickets for ARDEN are priced $15-$35 and are available now at www.theflea.org.

Love. Liberation. Ritual. Let's light a light and lay it all down. ARDEN invites you to take a walk down a path that leads to a clearing. In this clearing, you are invited into a strange, raw and delightful ritual full of song, dance, and testimony. Come to Arden and happen upon a kind of love that feels too dangerous for the world we live in.

Bring your hopes. Bring your fears. We'll stir them together and pass them through our sieve. And hopefully, we will re-emerge with a newfound sense of awe and possibility for ourselves and the others with whom we move through this world.

This last year has been a momentous transformation for The Flea. They have proudly focused their new mission to support and invest in experimental art by Black, brown and queer artists, and are the only theater in New York City focused on supporting experimental work at this intersection.

For all information, please visit www.theflea.org.

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