HERE to Launch New Virtual Performance Platform URHERE in November

 

The Obie Award-winning HERE will be launching URHERE, a new one-of-a-kind, rigorously curated virtual platform for outdoor and digital premieres. URHERE aims to occupy an important part of the art ecosystem which nurtures experimentation, sparks dialogue, and creates engagement with the local community. Supporting independent artists and ensembles, URHERE expands on HERE's mission to support multidisciplinary work made by artists at every stage of their careers. While projects may take many different forms, the platform will focus on artists whose work captures a rich cross-section of risk-taking, new perspectives, and artistic disciplines. The platform will launch November 15, 2022 and will be located at urhere.art.

Responding to all of HERE's virtual programming and non-traditional outdoor experiences, URHERE will house archival works from the HERE vault, and provide a seamless viewing and/or listening experience for new native digital and outdoor premieres. The works will primarily identify with one of the following two categories:

Digital invites audiences from all over the world to experience new work by way of their computers, phones or headsets for a range of digital productions. Our platform will include native digital - virtual, augmented, and mixed reality - as well as live-streamed programming and more.

Outdoor invites audiences to view free and accessibly-priced public works that transform both the public spaces of the city as well as public expectations of the role and potential of art existing beyond the borders of museums and stages. We will offer both local and internationally renowned artists the chance to share their work for a fixed period of time.

Whether engaging with a virtual performance, soundwalk or live-streamed event, audiences will access everything they need from one interface, cleverly designed as an interactive play space inspired by the well-loved strategic board game GO. For the first season, HERE has commissioned four artists to create new work to beta-test and help the organization evolve and improve.

The 2022/23 season of URHERE will include the following:

URHERE will launch with the world premiere of a provocative new work, Section 230, by Jared Mezzocchi (HERE Artist Residency Program Alum from the VR project, You Are Dead. You Are Here.). In 1996, before social media was a thought, 26 words were penned into law that shaped the internet. Almost entirely unrevised today, Section 230 has impacted culture in a way that cannot be undone. This live, online performance questions, fetishizes, and deconstructs these 26 words that gave birth to a culture of memes, doom scrolls, insurrections, and cats. Section 230 takes a deep and often dark look at the online trails forged by a law that gives a sword and shield to online companies while everyone else is left to melt inside a social volcano programmed to perpetually erupt. This digitally-native work will be performed live, in-person for a mixed in-person and virtual audience. Additional support from Andy's Summer Playhouse.

Also in November, Adham Hafez/Wizara.io will present a hybrid virtual/in-person premiere of MetaDreams. This mixed-reality performance features a virtual world built through Web3 tools and choreographic investigation of how dreams under states of emergency are a document of our times. A culmination of ten years of research by renowned Syrian German choreographer Mey Seifan, MetaDreams is co-directed by New York-based choreographer and theorist Adham Hafez, together with Mey Seifan, and developed in partnership with Berlin artists Mert Akbal, Harshini Karunaratne, and generative artist Ahmed El Shaer, working between AI, performance, digital design and world-building to take the audience through a journey of dreams, traumas, and political strifes. The work features online and augmented reality elements, holographic in-person installation, and live performance in a mixed-reality setting that will take place in HERE's Dorothy B. Williams Theatre on November 19 at 7pm and November 20 at 2pm. Production of Tanween Company and HaRaKa Platform, "MetaDreams" receives the support of the German Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media through the program NEUSTART KULTUR, within the context of tanz:digital Program, under the umbrella of Dachverband Tanz Deutschland. Co-production: HERE Arts Center, Goethe Institut New York, Wizara.

In Summer 2023, in a new collaboration with ALL ARTS, HERE will share two pre-recorded digital native works, developed through the ALL ARTS Artists in Residence program and airing on the free ALL ARTS app, AllArts.org/ArtistInResidence and URHERE.

Untitled is a new film by multidisciplinary artist, director, and choreographer duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya (current HERE Resident Artists). Untitled embarks on a poetic journey through an enigmatic landscape of mythical characters, ambiguous bodies, textures, and materials, with food at its center. A companion of Garnica and Moriya's upcoming immersive live performance A Meal (which is being developed with and will premiere with HERE), Untitled is a visually stunning art film using dance, theater, and poetry. It is at once allegorical food rituals, reflections on our post-industrial relationship with food, and meditations on becomings - among other interpretations. Untitled takes the viewer on a sensorial journey of relationalities and multiplicities.

Additionally, artists Paul Pinto (HERE Artist Residency Program alum) and Kameron Neal (HERE Princess Grace fellow) will build on their series of immersive music video cantatas interrogating "whiteness," first presented digitally in HERE's Prototype Festival in January 2021 and in-person by La MaMa and CultureHub in February 2022. Whiteness: Part Two is the next chapter in a series of video cantatas reflecting the silliness, the severity, and the anxieties of skin color. It begins by pulling the viewer into a white void while a chorus of floating heads muse (in 4-40-part harmony) on privilege, appropriation, and the history (or plague) of "whiteness" in the U.S.A. Told through chants, rants, and micro-pop songs, Whiteness: Part Two is a humorous self-interrogation of Paul Pinto's maddening inner thoughts as a mixed-race American, visibly brown and invisibly trying to not be so white, set to a whirling video directed by Kameron Neal. While Whiteness: Part One figured heavily on the US census as source material, Part Two looks at the Brazilian and Japanese census as a total outsider to see what floats to the surface when you reach beyond the national conversation about race in America.

In addition to these premieres, URHERE will host a rotating library of notable works. The fan favorites will include everything from soundwalks to archival stage performances with the following initial roster of highlighted works: Cairns (Gelsey Bell & Joseph White), Only You Will Recognize the Signal (Rob Handel, Kristin Marting, Kamala Sankaram), Symphonie Fantastique (Basil Twist), Cannabis! A Viper Vaudeville (Grace Galu & Baba Israel), The Hang (Taylor Mac), Stairway to Stardom (Amanda Szeglowski/cakeface), and 9000 Paper Balloons (Maiko Kikuchi & Spencer Lott).

Subscriptions for URHERE are $10 per month without an annual commitment, or $100 upfront for the year. Individual performance tickets will be available on a sliding scale of $10-$50. Subscriptions and individual tickets will be available to purchase in the coming weeks.

ABOUT HERE

The Obie Award-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines-theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

HERE's standout productions include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs' Disposable Men, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, and Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.

About ALL ARTS

ALL ARTS is breaking new ground as the premier destination for inspiration, creativity and art of all forms. This New York Emmy-winning arts and culture hub is created by The WNET Group, the community-supported home of New York's PBS stations. With the aim of being accessible to viewers everywhere, ALL ARTS' Webby-nominated programming - from digital shorts to feature films - is available online nationwide through AllArts.org, the free ALL ARTS app on all major streaming platforms and @AllArtsTV on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. New York area TV viewers can also watch the 24/7 broadcast channel. For all the ways to watch, visit AllArts.org/Everywhere.

FOR MORE INFORMATION:

WWW.HERE.ORG

 

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