HERE Announces HERE THERE EVERYWHERE, In-Person and Expanded Online Programming

 

The OBIE-winning HERE, has announced HERE THERE EVERYWHERE, a return to live in-person events along with expanded online programming for its summer and fall 2020 season, featuring original relevant works by more than 235 diverse artists. A centerpiece of the season is #stillHERE: IRL, an adventurous new series that reimagines the live experience. Through this monthly program, HERE has commissioned a group of artists to develop and premiere new work to be experienced live, designed to be safe, socially distanced, outdoors and hyper-local. Commissioned HARP resident artists include singer/composer Gelsey Bell with Joseph White and theatre company The Drunkard's Wife, led by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin.

HERE's expanded online programming, #stillHERE: Online, will offer four premieres, four in-progress previews, and one artist talk. Taking place bi-weekly on Fridays at 1pm (with ongoing viewing opportunities), #stillHERE: Online features theatre artists and HARP alum Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle; Obie Award-winning composer and performer Heather Christian; HARP alum composer Kamala Sankaram, librettist Rob Handel, and director Kristin Marting (with a serial space opera spanning eight weeks); HARP artist Shayok Misha Chowdhury, HARP artists Baba Israel and Grace Galu; HARP artists Maiko Kikuchi and Spencer Lott; composer-performer collective thingNY; puppetry artists Rosa and Benjamin Elling; and HARP alums composer Dina Emerson and librettist Mariana Newhard.

HERE's popular watch party, HERE@HOME, will continue as a monthly series. Taking place every last Wednesday of the month on Facebook, HERE@HOME features full-length productions previously presented at HERE and will include HARP alums: Faye Driscoll's 837 Venice Boulevard (2008) on July 29 at 7pm, Bora Yoon's Sunken Cathedral (2015) on August 26 at 7pm and more to be announced.

Featuring over 100 artists, #COVIDEO, a sequential, community-built work of video art that is led by HERE artists and staff, will also continue throughout the summer and fall. Upcoming themes include Mutual Aid, NY Tough and Freefall with contributions from HARP current , alum and community artists: Lindsay Abromaitis-Smith, Lucas Baish, Nathaniel P. Claridad, Abigail Fisher, Álvaro Franco, Vanessa Gilbert, Kimille Howard, Yana Landowne, Alex Lee, Aya Ogawa, Laura Peterson, Paul Pinto, Hilarie Spangler, Joanna Settle, James Scruggs, Richard Stauffacher, Melissa Tien, Christopher Williams, Nicole Wolcott and many more. Community participation for future editions of #COVIDEO is encouraged and interested individuals can email covideo@here.org to join us.

HERE's Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting says, "In these times of ongoing isolation and protest, we are honored to share new relevant work - safely and hyper-locally - which connects our artists and audiences as they grapple together with the role that art can play in our survival and recovery. HERE continues to be a home in this challenging moment. As an anti-racist organization, we strive towards creating an equitable, diverse and inclusive environment in which all people have fair access to the resources they need to realize their visions. This past month has brought to light the immense work that must be done to combat systemic racism and white supremacy. We invite artists and audiences to forge with us, one step at a time."

Please visit here.org for more information.

HERE's SUMMER AND FALL 2020 SEASON

Cairns (premiere)
Written, composed, and narrated by Gelsey Bell
Additional composition by Joseph White
Green-Wood Cemetery, 4th Avenue entrance, Brooklyn
Launching July 31 as part of #stillHERE: IRL
$5 and up, downloadable on Bandcamp

HARP Artist Gelsey Bell kicks off #stillHERE: IRL with a soundwalk for Green-Wood Cemetery that leads the listener on a solitary poetic journey. Written and narrated by HARP Artist Gelsey Bell with music by Bell and composer Joseph White, Cairns is created for social-distancing New Yorkers to meditate on the land we inhabit, sink into an arboreal temporality, and unearth the stories of a few historic trailblazers.

Gelsey Bell is a singer, songwriter, and scholar. She has released multiple recordings, is a current HARP Artist at HERE Arts Center, and has received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts award. She is a member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. Performance highlights include Dave Malloy's Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway) and Ghost Quartet, and Robert Ashley's Improvement. www.gelseybell.com

Joseph White is a composer, lyricist and performer working in music and theatre. Recent work includes The Wagging Craze (Ars Nova's ANTFest, Kyoto International Performing Arts Festival, upcoming at Prague Fringe), and feminine octagon (LPAC Rough Draft). He also composed for and music-directed Agnes Borinsky's Of Government (Clubbed Thumb Summerfest) and Ding Dong: It's the Ocean (HERE/JACK). www.joewhitenoise.com

BEAST VISIT (premiere)
By The Drunkard's Wife
Rubulad's sculpture garden (RSVP at here.org for address)
August 20-22 at 7:30pm as part of #stillHERE: IRL
Reservations Required. $10 and up at here.org

A sunset encounter with some lonesome creatures currently living in Rubulad's sculpture garden in Bushwick. This intimate outdoor experience by The Drunkard's Wife incorporates extravagant costumes, song, modular electronics, and a live band.

The Drunkard's Wife is a theater company led by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin that creates theatrical and musical spectacles in New York City. Our mission is to create and produce experimental musical plays and site-specific theatrical environments with a generous, maximalist design sense. Our plays are darkly comic, language-drunk, full of reverence for the hand-made and therefore wholeheartedly feminist and anticapitalist. We are drawn to represent festivals and celebrations in our work, as well as complex moments of moral and emotional ambiguity. As such, our theatrical style combines our impulses towards camp, the carnivalesque, and the maximal with an appetite for subtlety, complex argument and tenderness. We make music that draws from folk mountain music traditions and no-wave dissonance, and that incorporates complex time signatures and improvisation.

A Series of Landscapes (premiere)
By thingNY
Created and performed by Gelsey Bell, Isabel Castellvi, Andrew Livingston, Paul Pinto, Erin Rogers, Dave Ruder, and Jeffrey Young
July 10 at 1pm; July 11 at 1pm and 6pm as part of #stillHERE Online
Reservations Required. Pay-What-You-Can at here.org

A Series of Landscapes is a new online work of opera-theatre by thingNY set in the world of our dreams. Audiences are invited into a Zoom call where seven performers dive into the anxiety and serenity of this paradoxical moment, where yesterday's action in the street, today's paralyzing personal stasis, and tomorrow's online wedding are all refracted through the bizarre filter of social and emotional distance. You're outside of time and somehow you're everyone. "Is that me? Is that you? What year is it?" We're together with everyone we've ever known. Jeff's dad shows up to get us out of there. We might be in Texas. There will be absurdity, severity, sweetness, and uncanniness amidst moments of interaction, deluge, and connection.

In April, thingNY was one of the early "adapters" of making work within and responding to quarantine culture, creating and performing a series of etudes which toyed with the shortcomings of virtual performance: SubtracTTTTTTTTT. Praised in the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wire, and Steve Smith's Night After Night, the band returns with another chapter of socially distant live performance. A Series of Landscapes pushes our attention, our practice, and our technologies further.

Queen of the Nile (in-progress)
A new in-progress operetta by Mariana Newhard and Dina Emerson
July 24 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE Online

Born out of the news of journalist Lara Logan's sexual assault in Egypt, Queen of the Nile is a soundscape performance - an inquiry that explores everyday absorption of cataclysmic trauma. Merging women's voices - from the quotidien to the professional to the iconic- we unravel the sexualization of women and their bodies in media culture, politics and mythology. This hybrid utilizes extended vocal techniques, spoken word, tonal chorus, vocal landscapes, incantations and musical harmonies, and merges original and adapted text from Logan's interviews, media posts, and Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra.

Devised B-sides (in-progress)
Created by HARP alum Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle
August 7 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online

Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford, the duo that brought audiences the award winning all wear bowlers, machines machines machines machines machines machines machines, and Elephant Room come together to share all the cockamamy ideas that never made the cut. Join us for the dreams that never made the stage but always should have.....

Heather Christian (in-progress)
August 14 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online

Obie Award-winning composer and performance Heather Christian and guest will share some new material that has been developed in response to the protests.

vichitra (premiere)
By Shayok Misha Chowdhury
August 21 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE Online
Reservations Required. Pay-What-You-Can at here.org

An experiment in queer South Asian imagination. Check out episode 1: an anthology of queer dreams at www.vichitra.media. HERE is excited to present episode 2: englandbashi, a contemporary ghost story about taking reincarnation (too?) seriously.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury is a queer Bengali director, writer, and multidisciplinary artist. His performance memoir MukhAgni, co-created with Kameron Neal, was in Under the Radar 2020 at The Public Theater, and he is currently in residence at HERE Arts Center working on a new project called Rheology. Misha has also made and shown work at Ars Nova, Soho Rep, New York Theatre Workshop, Joe's Pub, SPACE on Ryder Farm, BRIC, The Drama League, The Flea, PlayMakers Rep, NYMF, New Orleans Film Festival, and Detroit Art Week. A Fulbright and Kundiman fellow, his poetry has been published in The Cincinnati Review, TriQuarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, Portland Review, Asian American Literary Review, and elsewhere. www.shayokmishachowdhury.com

Qualified Alien (premiere)
Created and Performed by Rosa Douglas & Benjamin Elling
September 4 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online
Reservations Required. Pay-What-You-Can at here.org

A puppet and their assistant petition to join the circus. Rosa Douglas and Ben Elling light a candle for the meritocracy in this short puppet play, adapted for screen.

Rosa Douglas is a collector and creator. She uses found treasures and reimagined trash to create strange and beautiful puppet-creatures. Her work has been shown in theaters in New York City and across the UK. Ben Elling is a set designer, puppeteer and technician. He has a passion for visual theater and has performed in Basil Twist's Rite of Spring, and Symphonie Fantastique at HERE.

Cannabis! A Theatrical Concert (in-progress)
Created and performed by HARP artists Baba Israel and Grace Galu
September 18 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online

Baba Israel, Grace Galu, and their band Soul Inscribed use music and spoken word to explore the history of cannabis. This theatrical concert is based on Smoke Signals: A Social History of Marijuana - Medical, Recreational, and Scientific by Martin A. Lee (2012). Grounded in the Hip Hop tradition of the remix, the show mashes-up iconic music from La Cucaracha of the Mexican Revolution, Louis Armstrong and other Jazz "vipers," to the Beat era, 60's Rock n' Roll, and Reggae. Israel adapts the stories of countercultural icons, grassroots activists, and the plant itself, weaving a time-traveling tale of jubilation, injustice, and transformation.

9000 Paper Balloons (artist talk)
Maiko Kikuchi & Spencer Lott
October 2 at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online

Japanese Visual Artist Maiko Kikuchi and American puppeteer Spencer Lott discuss their first collaboration - a new puppetry work, 9000 Paper Balloons, to premiere at HERE. Inspired by a remarkable true story, Kikuchi and Lott will share a peek into their artistic process through collages, storyboards and puppet designs and more.

Maiko Kikuchi is a Brooklyn based artist, who received her M.F.A in Sculpture from Pratt Institute, in 2012.

Kikuchi has extensive multi-faceted professional experience in the areas of Illustration, painting, drawing,

collages, sculpture, animation and puppetry/performance.

Spencer Lott is a puppeteer, designer and director. His puppetry credits include credits include A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (starring Tom Hanks), Sesame Street, and more. www.misterlott.com

Only You Will Recognize The Signal (premiere)
Libretto by Rob Handel, composed by Kamala Sankaram, directed by Kristin Marting
October 2-November 13, Fridays at 1pm as part of #stillHERE: Online
Reservations Required. Pay-What-You-Can at here.org

A serial space opera from the creators of the 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. Just as each fingerprint is unique, no two people's dream lives can really mesh. But strange things happen in space and between memory and amnesia lies a potentially fatal mystery.

The team redefines the serial form with weekly 10 minute live revelations over 8 weeks each Friday October 2 - November 13, culminating in an 80 minute world premiere live stream showing on November 18th at 7pm as part of our HERE@Home Series. Formally, the eight-episode serial builds on the compositional flexibility, performer autonomy, and unexpected comedy for which the creators have been recognized.

HERE@Home
837 Venice Boulevard (2008)
Created by Faye Driscoll
July 29 at 7pm as part of HERE@Home

Using physical manipulation and humor, 837 Venice Boulevard paints the lonesome emotional landscape of a neglected kid left to her own fantasies and fears, while exploring universal themes of identity, blame, and how exhausting it is to have to "be somebody" all the time.

Sunken Cathedral (2015)
Composed and performed by Bora Yoon
August 26 at 7pm as part of HERE@Home

A musical and archetypal journey through the subconscious, Sunken Cathedral is a multimedia performance by Korean-American composer, sonic surrealist and TED Fellow Bora Yoon, fusing voice, electronics, and instruments from various cultures and centuries with evocative video design. Set in a house where things are not what they seem, and where architecture illuminates the various chambers of the mind, body, and spirit, each chapter of this work excavates blood memory, cultural identity, and the intersections where our greatest diamonds and demons are held.

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