Park Ave Armory Unveils 2024 Season Featuring ILLINOISE NYC Premiere & More

Park Avenue Armory has revealed its 2024 season, which will include exuberant performances created by groundbreaking choreographers, enveloping musical experiences, and highly anticipated world, North American, and New York premieres of boundary-pushing commissions. The 2024 season continues the Armory’s commitment to collaborate with leading artistic voices to craft innovative works that engage with the iconic architecture and soaring space of the Wade Thompson Drill Hall while pushing beyond traditional proscenium staging. The Armory’s historic period rooms will serve as intimate performance spaces for visionary artists across genres to showcase their range in the Recital Series and Artists Studio programs. These programs will be complemented by the Armory’s public programming series Making Space at the Armory, curated by Armory Curator of Public Programming, Tavia Nyong’o. 

“This season’s Drill Hall programs will span genres and artistic practices while transporting audiences to imaginative worlds and dreamscapes,” said Pierre Audi, the Marina Kellen French Artistic Director at Park Avenue Armory. “From Justin Peck staging Sufjan Stevens’ music at a campsite in the American heartland, to a pulsating underground nightclub envisioned by dance innovators Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar, to a choral staging by the legendary Meredith Monk nestled between the celestial and earthly realms, these works of spatial music and movement powerfully reflect on the complexity of human connection.” 

“True to the Armory’s mission, the 2024 season will introduce New York audiences to bold and unexpected experiences from legendary artistic voices and the new vanguard,” said Rebecca Robertson, Adam R. Flatto Founding President and Executive Producer of Park Avenue Armory. “Liberated from convention and the limitations of traditional performance and exhibition venues, the Armory’s Drill Hall offers this season’s artists an opportunity to pursue their boundary-breaking visions within a historic space.” 

The Armory’s 2024 Wade Thompson Drill Hall programming will begin in March with Illinoise, an adaptation of the Grammy- and Oscar-nominated Sufjan Stevens concept album Illinois, brought to life by Tony Award-winning director-choreographer Justin Peck in a genre-bursting theatrical experience rooted in dance, folk storytelling, and live music. Illinois is widely beloved for its delicate narratives, lush orchestrations, and wildly inventive portrayals of the state and its people. In its New York City premiere, Peck reimagines the album as an enchanting and jubilant music-theater production with a cast of dancers, singers, and musicians, featuring expansive new arrangements by composer and pianist Timo Andres ranging in style from folk and indie rock to ambient electronics to joyous marching bands. Peck, alongside Pulitzer Prize-winner Jackie Sibblies Drury, crafts a touching coming-of-age story that will lead Drill Hall audiences on a journey from the American countryside to the urban streets of New York City, the edges of the cosmos, and beyond. 

Celebrated director Peter Sellars returns to the Armory with Shall We Gather at the River, a one-night-only musical engagement and call to action for the climate crisis. The performance will speak to the power of water and its spiritual dimensions, reflected both in the over-400-year tradition of Black American spirituals, with songs of resistance and renewal such as “Wade in the Water” and “Deep River,” and Bach’s cantatas, whose sacred texts evoke images of water in drought and full flood. The Oxford Bach Soloists and The Choir of Trinity Wall Street, under the music direction of Tom Hammond-Davies, are joined by countertenor Reginald Mobley and tenor Nick Pritchard to perform a program merging these two musical sources, staged by Sellars in an act of mobilization and restorative beauty in the face of climate change. Shall We Gather at the River is co-presented with the Asia Society as part of their forthcoming series COAL + ICE: Inspiring Climate Action Through Art and Ideas, which calls on the U.S. and China to collaborate more actively on the climate change challenge. 

Electronic music from Karlheinz Stockhausen’s magnum opus, the opera cycle Licht, is performed in an octophonic setting as it was originally intended by one of his original collaborators, sound projectionist and Director of the Stockhausen Foundation for Music, Kathinka Pasveer, in the North American premiere of Inside Light. Rarely performed due to its length and complex configurations, Stockhausen’s original seven-opera, 29-hour epic pioneered the use of electronics in art music and went on to inspire Björk, Aphex Twin, Miles Davis, and Animal Collective. Pasveer will perform five electronic compositions from the cycle across two separate nights, with two rare marathon stagings of all five parts over nearly seven hours. Conceived specifically for the Armory by Marina Kellen French Artistic Director Pierre Audi, the all-encompassing environment designed by Urs Schönebaum will feature transformative lighting and lasers as well as high-definition video projection by Robi Voigt. Inside Light will fully realize these works in a relaxed, imaginative setting which includes seating set up around the Drill Hall floor, where audiences are encouraged to move around freely, true to Stockhausen’s original vision for these octophonic works. 

Award-winning choreographer Sharon Eyal partners with imaginative innovator in the club scene Gai Behar and Caius Pawson of multi-arts organization Young in the North American premiere of a subversive new Armory co-commission, R.O.S.E. Dissolving the boundaries between dancer, musician, and audience member, R.O.S.E celebrates the freedom and energy of club culture that Eyal continues to draw inspiration from in her work. Originally premiering at Manchester International Festival, R.O.S.E reconfigures conventional notions of dance performance and will transform the Drill Hall into a fully operating club, in which performers and audiences will intermingle and together create an exhilarating and surprising synthesis of contemporary dance performance, electronic music, and the club culture experience. 

In the North American premiere of Indra’s Net, renowned composer and performer Meredith Monk weaves together new modes of perception to expand the boundaries of music, performance, and installation. Returning to the Armory after more than a decade, Monk creates an immersive work inspired by an ancient Buddhist and Hindu legend in which an enlightened king, Indra, stretches a large net across the universe, with an infinitely faceted jewel placed at each intersection. Each jewel is unique yet reflects all the others, illuminating the interdependence of all living things. Interweaving sound, movement, architecture, and video, Monk and her renowned Vocal Ensemble are joined by a 16-piece chamber orchestra and an eight-member chorus in a work that embodies celestial, earthly, and human realms, affirming life and a sense of connection to each other and all living things in our contemporary world. 

The 2024 season will conclude with the world premiere of Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful, a Park Avenue Armory commission from MacArthur Fellow and star choreographer Kyle Abrahamwho will create a layered new work that explores the growing sensitivities of life and transition, and the delicate interplay of nature and humanity amidst contemporary chaos. The company will include a large ensemble of dancers from across the country, many of whom are previous collaborators of Abraham’s, alongside Abraham himself. In partnership with digital projection artist Cao Yuxi (JAMES) and an Armory-commissioned score composed and performed live by the critically acclaimed new music ensemble yMusic, Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful will explore the possibilities of empathy from the perspective of one of our generation’s most influential voices in dance. 

Throughout the year, the Armory will present intimate performances, lectures, artist talks, and educational programs in its inspiring period rooms. The Board of Officers Room provides a home for classical and contemporary concerts through the Armory’s Recital Series with performances by award-winning soprano Jeanine De Bique with pianist Warren Jones, tenor and Met Opera mainstay Matthew Polenzani with pianist Ken Noda, soprano Leah Hawkins (who returns to the Armory after dazzling audiences in the Lindemann Young Artists Series) with pianist Kevin miller, Grammy Award-winning tenor Karim Sulayman with Sean Shibe on guitar, and soprano Barbara Hannigan (returning to the Armory after multiple lauded Recital Series appearances) with pianist Bertrand Chamayou.  

The resplendent Veterans Room will continue to host the Artists Studio, curated by MacArthur Genius, Grammy-nominated jazz pianist Jason Moran. The 2024 Season of Artists Studio offers a multidisciplinary slate of programs that include free form jazz, acoustic music performances, and an intimate dramaturgical reading. Programs will feature multi-hyphenate performing and visual artist EJ Hill, poet and musician Moor Mother, innovative musical and visual artist Jasper Marsalis, and Sundance Film Festival Award-winning director and playwright Radha Blank. 

The Armory will also present Making Space at the Armory, its public programming series of talks, salons, symposia, performances, and other programming that sparks conversation on contemporary issues with today’s leading artists, activists, cultural leaders, scholars, and audiences. For its third season, Armory Curator of Public Programming Tavia Nyong’o will plan the series, bringing together thought leaders at the Armory for programs including a new musical work from interdisciplinary artist Robert Kennedy that will culminate a Radical Practice of Black Curation symposium in partnership with Princeton University; a symposium led by playwright and essayist Claudia Rankine on the poetics of disagreement with cultural historian Saidiya Hartman and postcolonial theorist Homi K. Bhabha; a salon considering nightlife as an art form presented in conjunction with R.O.S.E.; a 12-hour composition and installation by singer and performance artist Dorian Wood that emphasizes the urgency of folk music as a vessel for social change; and additional events curated in dialogue with the Armory’s Drill Hall programs, including Illinoise, Inside Light, Indra’s Net, and Dear Lord, Make Me Beautiful.   

Single tickets and subscriptions for the 2024 season are on sale at armoryonpark.org /

(212) 933-5812.  

Photo credit: Johan Persson

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