HERE Announces Additional Programming and New Puppeteer Residencies for Fall 2020 Season

The OBIE-winning HERE has announced additional programming for its HERE THERE EVERYWHERE fall 2020 season.

Premiering as part of #stillHERE: Online, HERE's expanded online programming continues to innovate with the serial space opera, Only You Will Recognize The Signal, featuring a libretto by Rob Handel, music by Kamala Sankaram, and direction by Kristin Marting. As creators of the world's first Zoom opera, All Decisions Will Be Made By Consensus, and the 2019 digital surveillance opera, Looking at You, this creative trio continue their exploration into the convergence of technology and opera through this new serial live-streaming experience These weekly 10-minute live revelations will premiere over 6 weeks each Thursday, October 29 - December 10 at 1pm EST, culminating in a 70 minute world premiere live stream on December 17 at 7pm EST. Formally, the seven-episode serial builds on the compositional flexibility, performer autonomy, and unexpected comedy for which the creators have been recognized.

Additional online events include Herstory by director Gisela Cardenas, an intimate take on revenge, isolation, and the personal prisons we all must overcome inspired by the female characters of Shakespeare's Tempest; The Blind, an immersive audio and visual meditation by Jeanette Yew and Mia Rovegno, adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's 19th Century symbolist play Les Aveugles; and a special digital international Puppet Parlor featuring artists from all over the world.

HERE's popular monthly watch party, HERE@HOME, wraps up it's seven month run. Since March, the series has featured 17 full-length productions previously presented at HERE and will conclude with The Fortune Teller, Phantom Limb Company co-founder Erik Sanko's first full-length puppet play which debuted at HERE in 2006 and returned for a limited engagement to sold-out audiences.

And featuring over 150 artists to date, #COVIDEO, a sequential community-built work of video art, will present two special editions showcasing dance and puppetry. From November 10-23, dance artists including Pele Bauch, Sophie Bortolussi, Sarah Dahnke, Rebecca Davis, Soomi Kim, Jinah Parker, Laura Peterson, Peekaboo Pointe, and Gabrielle Revlock will contribute 10 seconds of video in response to a to-be-announced theme, to create a 2-minute long sequence. Running December 1-15, puppeteers Michael Bodel, Kate Brehm, Trudi Cohen and Stephen Kaplan (Great Small Works), Maiko Kikuchi, Spencer Lott, Jono Lyons, Processional Arts Workshop, Jessica Scott, Lake Simons and Christopher Williams share 10 seconds of video art responding to the theme of "attachment" that builds into a 2 minute long exquisite corpse collage.

In addition to this continued online programming, HERE is proud to announce the recipients of Dream Music Puppetry Program's new Mini-Residency Initiative: Tau Bennett, Andrew Gaukel, Sara Outing, Lake Simons, and Christopher Williams. These hand-selected artists will create new puppetry works during this fall and winter, incorporating music and using a range of puppetry techniques, choreography and object work. These works will cover a range of themes around the human condition and our existence at this moment in history. HERE believes there is no better way to help foster new works by providing space to artists, and are happy to join a handful of other companies supported by the Jim Henson Foundation to launch this mini-residency initiative.

Please visit www.here.org for more information.

#stillHERE Online

Only You Will Recognize The Signal (world premiere)

Libretto by Rob Handel, composed by Kamala Sankaram, directed by Kristin Marting
October 29-December 10, Thursdays at 1pm

Final Premiere - Thursday December 17 at 7pm

Reservations Required. Pay-What-You-Can at here.org

A serial space opera from the creators of the world's first Zoom opera All Decisions Will Be Made By Consensus and the digital surveillance opera Looking at You.

The travelers aboard the Grand Crew, a very massive luxury emigrant craft, expected to remain in therapeutic hypothermia until arrival at their new home planet. Unfortunately, the technology has been compromised. Isolated in their pods, the unfrozen migrants find themselves entangled in a shared phantasmagoria that smells like sour gummi worms. They are stuck in mid-transition between planet A and planet B, between the end of the old life and the beginning of the new life, between memory and amnesia. They can't finish the job of erasing the past, and they can't move into the tenebrous future. Don't worry: the ship's computer, Bob, has a plan.

The team redefines the serial form with weekly 10 minute live revelations over 6 weeks each Thursday October 29 - December 10, culminating in a 70 minute world premiere live stream showing on Thursday, December 17 at 7pm. Formally, the seven-episode serial builds on the compositional flexibility, performer autonomy, and unexpected comedy for which the creators have been recognized.

Only You Will Recognize the Signal features performances by Paul An, Christopher Burchett, Hai-Ting Chinn, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones, Joan La Barbara, and Jorell Williams, with puppetry design and performance by Hanne Tierney.

The additional creative team includes David Bengali (Video Design), Normandy Sherwood (Costumes), Liminal Entertainment Technologies (Virtual Stage Engineer), David Kunz (Video Engineer), Paul Pinto (Audio Engineer), and Courteney Legget (Stage Manager).

Correspondences: On-Demand

by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya

Performed by the LEIMAY Ensemble

Oct 1-Nov 30

www.ondemand.leimay.org

From October 1-4, HERE and LEIMAY presented LEIMAY's Correspondences, a new performance-based, public art installation by HERE resident artists Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya at Manhattan's Astor Place. Now, for a limited time, two different art films capturing the meditative nature of the work will be available for on-demand access at ondemand.leimay.org through November 30, 2020. Correspondences offers spectators multiple entry points to engage with questions of being, interdependence, and coexistence. Performer, observer, machines, natural elements, and the urban square mingle in an entangled poetic microcosm while opening inquiries into animate life and environmental ethics.

Correspondences is performed by the LEIMAY Ensemble which includes Masanori Asahara, Krystel Copper, and Ximena Garnica, along with guest performers Ricardo Bustamante and Brandon Perdomo. The creative team includes Jeremy D. Slater (soundscape) and Irena Romendik (costume fabrication).

Live Talkback on LEIMAY's Correspondences

November 6 at 5pm

A conversation with creators Ximena Garnica, Shige Moriya, guest activists, scholars, designers, and scientists, this discussion will explore what "decentering the human" means and how this action relates to issues of environmental ethics and social justice.

Herstory

By Gisela Cardenas

November 11 at 6pm

An elderly woman dies from dementia, leaving an inheritance. Two younger women who have apparently no relationship with each other will receive it, if they create a book together. Excavating the drawings and short stories of a woman whose past has been lost, these two women will come out of their personal isolation by giving life to a woman's story. How can we start telling the stories written in our genes and passed from one generation to another? Inspired by the female characters of Shakespeare's Tempest, Herstory attempts to write an intimate take on revenge, isolation, and the personal prisons we all must overcome.

The Blind

By Jeanette Yew and Mia Rovegno

December 4 at 1pm

The Blind is an immersive audio/visual meditation journey adapted from Maurice Maeterlinck's 19th century symbolist play Les Aveugles. A community of sightless people who reside in a monastery are on a daily walk with their priest when they discover he has passed away as they rested in the deep forest. Reaching through darkness to find their way home, they struggle to assert their autonomy when faced with the paradox of uncertainty and agency.

This dream allegory of a leaderless people grappling with fears of a rapidly changing environment and an unknown future holds a timely mirror to our current economic and environmental crises amplified by a global pandemic. Wearing headphones, audiences are immersed in a journey through the senses as a hypnotic and disorienting landscape of sound, object, light, animation and shadow puppetry invokes an intimate meditation on our current human condition.

Digital International Puppet Parlor

December 9 at 1pm

HERE's annual celebration of puppets returns, this time in a digital space,featuring puppet artists from all over the world. The current lineup includes works by the Franco-Finnish company Aurora Théâtre d'Illusia, the Chilean company Silencio Blanco (Chiflón, El Silencio del Carbón, HERE 2017), and the French-Norwegian company Plexus Polaire (Ashes, HERE 2019). Additional performers to be announced shortly.

HERE@Home

The Fortune Teller (2006)

October 28 at 7pm as part of HERE@Home

The Fortune Teller, Phantom Limb Company co-founder Erik Sanko's first full-length puppet play, debuted at HERE in 2006 to a sold-out audience.

Dream Music Puppetry Program Mini-Residency Initiative

While theaters still remain closed for public performances in New York City, HERE has created a safe and effective reopening plan for small rehearsals, workshops, residencies, and filmings in its space and is excited to use this moment and opportunity to provide puppeteers with additional resources and support to develop projects in our theaters. Supported by the Jim Henson Foundation, these mini-residencies will include:

Tau Bennett's new work-in-progress, featuring a music band in the style of Amanaz, Zap Mama, Os Mutantes, Osibisa + doo-wop. Built in the puppetry style of Bunraku, these expressive and colorful puppets will perform bellowy and resonate vocals as they draw upon the movement and performance styles of Rick Danko and George Harrison.

Andrew Gaukel's residency will develop a new work that explores the lives of homeless and transient New Yorkers. Inspired by New York City's Hart Island, located in the northeastern Bronx where the remains of more than one million people -- mostly transient and homeless -- have been buried, Gaukel's puppetry will examine ideas of humanity, loneliness and stillness in the transient community.

Sara Outing's new work is an allegory about how humanity has arrived at the modern day crossroads of truth, doubt and misinformation. Using tropes, characters and language of folktales and fables, Outing creates a piece that is not an answer to our questions, but rather, an exploration of the questions and an embodied quest for their root. Featuring puppeteers with harmonized voices, the work will incorporate live foley sound and string music to underscore this journey into the earth.

Lake Simons' Prairie? What Prairie? is solo puppet work that examines how a mother lives with her dementia, giving voice to a woman who no longer has one. As her shell-like body curls inward, a closed door opens to the sound of wind, tall grasses and open sky.

Walking Iris is an absurdist puppet/dance work co-created by puppet artists/choreographers Christopher Williams and Patti Bradshaw. Inspired by botanical wonders such as the walking iris (Neomarica gracilis), winged immortals including the Greek goddess Iris (personification of the rainbow and sister of the harpies) and the Boreads (wind brothers), and the mystery of the recreated "Ladies in Blue" fresco found in the Minoan palace of Knossos on the island of Crete, Walking Iris aims to present a meditation on the world of the unseen and the fleetingness of life and its risk of erasure by time.

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