HERE Reveals 30th Anniversary Season and Departure Of Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting

For 30 years, the OBIE award-winning HERE has been a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines. HERE's 30th anniversary season exemplifies this vision of creating a home for artists who blend multiple genres—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual art and installation, spoken word and performance art—and defy categorizations.

 

At the heart of HERE's boundary pushing programming over the last 30 years has been the vision of Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting, who will depart the institution in June 2024. The 30th anniversary season marks Marting's final year of cultivating artists and programming HERE's spaces for annual audiences of more than 30,000. An accomplished director of over 30 works for the stage, Marting, along with fellow artists Tim Maner, Barbara Busackino, and Randy Rollison, founded HERE in 1993 as a welcoming, safe environment that could support and launch a variety of artists.

Reflecting on her final season, Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting says: “HERE started with the simple idea that boundary pushing hybrid artists could best realize their visions if they were invited into a creative home offering flexible resources to match their imaginations. Over the years, artists like Faye Driscoll, Eve Ensler, Young Jean Lee, Taylor Mac, James Scruggs and Basil Twist have flourished after making their breakthrough works at HERE. It has been my great honor to direct and creative produce the work of so many visionary artists and share it with our adventurous audiences through the years. I have continuously been inspired by and learned from our vibrant community of artists and am so grateful to HERE's board of directors (past and present), institutional funders, government agencies, and all of the individuals who have enabled HERE to serve our community of artists and audiences over the past 30 years.”

 

Board Chair Kevin Matthews states “HERE has thrived over the last 30 years because of Kristin's passion and vision, despite the singular challenges of running a progressive nonprofit arts organization in New York City and in the face of challenges like 9/11 and Covid. We are grateful for her leadership and the solid foundation she leaves.”

 

MacArthur Fellow and long-term HERE resident artist Taylor Mac said, “Kristin Marting is the most impressive human I've encountered in the America Theater. Hands down. She's a visionary, dedicated to the experiment, who's never really been given her due, due to the fact that she's put thousands of artists first. She's all the more impressive because she's managed to run an ethical arts organization, under a system of capitalism, while staying kind, inquisitive, and politically conscious. I love her madly.”

 

HERE's 30th anniversary season is directly connected to this founding spirit and a rare example of an institution staying true to its original mission, despite the pressures of a rapidly changing New York. HERE's women-led season of world premieres opens with Normandy Sherwood's Psychic Self Defense (September 12–30), the first of two premieres this year that have been developed through HARP, HERE's nationally recognized $125,000 artist residency program. A journey into abstraction, Psychic Self Defense allows audiences to experience mystery and mental spaciousness by way of that most basic of theatrical machineries– the curtain reveal.

 

As part of PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now, HERE will premiere Terce: A Practical Breviary (January 10-February 4, 2024), the latest musical incantation by Obie award-winning composer Heather Christian. Terce: A Practical Breviary is a radical rethinking of a monastic 9am mass and an adaptation that reimagines the face of the “Holy Spirit” through the lens of the Divine Feminine. Sung by a community choir of 30 plus female identifying care givers and makers, it is a wild meditation and celebration of the sacred mothers alive in all of us.

 

Nia Witherspoon's new work, Priestess of Twerk (Spring, 2024) is the second premiere of this 30th anniversary season developed through HARP, HERE's nationally recognized $125,000 artist residency program. Inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples, Priestess of Twerk presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.

The season will also include the eleventh annual Prototype Festival (January 10-21, 2024), a opera and music-theatre festival which is co-curated and co-produced with Beth Morrison Projects and the third annual edition of Puppetopia (March 20-31, 2024), a festival of new puppetry that presents fresh, live and fully realized works.

HERE is located at 145 Sixth Avenue, just below Spring Street. Memberships and single tickets are now on sale and can be purchased by calling 212-647-0202 or by visiting www.here.org. In person sales at the box office after 5pm only on performance days and two hours prior to curtain for matinees. For Group Sales, contact tickets@here.org. Memberships start as low as $100 for four flexible tickets and complimentary wine, with additional benefits offered at other levels. Single tickets can be purchased for as low as $15 for all preview performances. Students and seniors can access free tickets on a rush basis, subject to availability for each performance, and must be redeemed at the box office.

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