Abrons Arts Center's 2018-19 Season Celebrates 125th Anniversary Of Henry Street Settlement

In 1893, social work and public health pioneer Lillian Wald (1867-1940) founded Henry Street Settlement on Manhattan's Lower East Side to serve New York City's most vulnerable people through social service, healthcare, and arts programs. Since that day, Henry Street Settlement has been a crucial force for progressive reform and a leading advocate for social change, serving 60,000 New Yorkers each year.

The arts have always been an integral part of Henry Street's mission. Their vitality was cemented in 1915 with the opening of The Neighborhood Playhouse and again, in 1975, with the completion and dedication of Abrons Arts Center, one of the first arts facilities in the nation designed for a predominantly low-income population. Today, the OBIE award-winning $3.2M institution is an essential cultural resource, providing diverse audiences with artistically bold work while offering artists opportunities to dynamically grow.

Abrons Arts Center's 2018-19 season, curated by Artistic Director Craig Peterson and Director of Programming, Ali Rosa-Salas, along with guest artists and organizational partners, celebrates the 125th anniversary of Henry Street Settlements through 26 public events, primarily world premiere performances and exhibitions, that examine the critical role the arts have played in both reflecting and challenging the social and political norms of our times. The institution's Lower East Side location has long been a nexus of communities and cultures who have immigrated to the United States or who have historically been pushed to margins of our City.

Peterson remarks, "As Henry Street Settlement embarks on its 125th anniversary, Abrons Arts Center's season is taking a moment to examine the role that arts plays in the creative, political and cultural evolution of the Lower East Side and beyond. Our local issues are a microcosm of much broader conversations about an ever-changing America. Income disparity, displacement, gentrification, and immigration are all part of our neighborhood's story. But alongside these challenges, we also see a resilient community of artists and a vibrant collection of cultures with rich and dynamic traditions. With our facility and through our 2018-19 season, we aim to celebrate these collective histories while charging headlong into the future."

Henry Street Settlement's Executive Director, David Garza, adds,"Henry Street Settlement is proud of its longstanding commitment to the arts. As essential to human spirit and dignity as food, shelter, education, and employment, the arts serve as the oxygen in the ecosystem of a community. Now, as for the past 125 years, we stand behind our investment in the arts as an agent of change, a vehicle of expression, and a platform to understand each other, our community, and our world with the richness, color, and depth it deserves."

Rosa-Salas adds, "Abrons Arts Center is committed to meaningfully fortifying its relationship with the Lower East Side through partnerships with key local institutions like Loisaida, Wing on Wo, St. Augustine's Episcopal Church, and the American Indian Community House. These long-standing organizations share our values of political, social and cultural equity and their work is integral to the integrity of our city. With the DIY ethos of the LES as our anchor, we are excited for the many modes of experimentation that will manifest through our collaborative curatorial and programmatic initiatives this season and beyond.

Abrons Arts Center's 2018-19 season includes:

Eight Visceral Dance Events

As part of By Association, a new curatorial methodology that adopts associative thinking, Abrons has invited Elena Rose Light to begin the link in a chain of shared evening presentations. Light invited Pallavi Sen, who invited Bully Fae Collins who will all present new work. (September 20-22)

In Juliana F. May's FOLK INCEST, five women interrogate seemingly unrepresentable subject matters including the Holocaust, sexual trauma, and the fetishization of young girls. (October 9-20)

prettygirl264264 is a premature funeral for critically unclaimed artist Ashley R.T. Yergens and an extremely loose re-imagination of the 2011 documentary, Becoming Chaz. (November 1-3)

Created in collaboration with community members of the Henry Street Settlement Senior Center, Zapatografía / Shoegraphy is Larissa Velez-Jackson's most conceptual work to date that addresses the relationship between longtime working-class residents of New York City and its experimental arts community. (November 29 - December 8)

Lime Rickey International's Future Faith accumulates Arab migration narratives and transmits them through Lime's futurist noise, song, and fictional folk dance. (March 7-9)

Oba Qween Baba King Baba draws upon Ni'Ja Whitson's exploration of gender and African ritual practices, engaging spiritual multiplicity and the role of Queerness in the Divine. (March 28-30)

Jonathan González's performance work Lucifer Landing II, conceptualizes Blackness and post-Anthropocentricism, as well as the traditions of classicism, narratives of the 'epic', and conventions of classical opera. (May 2-4)

In [GET WELL SOON] You Black + Bluised, NIC Kay presents a triptych of one hour long performative duets centering absence and loss, to be presented over the course of three evenings. (May 23-25)

Eight Groundbreaking Theatrical Works

Play is a serious yet sometimes dangerous business in Trusty Sidekick Theater Company's Gumshoe, a performance for children and families inspired by the legacy of Henry Street Settlement founder Lillian Wald. (September 28-October 7)

At Anne Carson's request, Big Dance Theater has pared down her version of Antigone to an intense, cut-to-the-bone one-act play called ANTIGONICK. (November 14-17)

The New York Times critic's pick Jack & the Beanstalk, which introduced many New York audiences to the widely popular British art form known as the Panto, returns this holiday season with some new songs and even more radical joy. (December 14-30)

Another New York Times critic's pick, POLLOCK, returns with its original cast (Jim Fletcher as Jackson Pollock, Birgit Huppuch as Lee Krasner) for a strictly, limited engagement. (January 4-6)

Korde Arrington Tuttle's the journey between is a theatrical investigation of the relationship between Space Exploration and the Middle Passage of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. (February 14-23)

Okwui Okpokwasili premieres Adaku's Revolt, her first work for families, which follows one young black girl's revolt against normative standards of beauty. (March 14-24)

Composer, comedian and performance artist Morgan Bassichis premieres a new performance work that draws on Henry Street Settlement's archives, Jewish folktales, and music to explore Zionism and its discontents. (April 11-13)

Last seen at Abrons with Julia Jarcho's The Terrifying, Minor Theater premieres PATHETIC, an irreverent new adaptation of Racine's tragedy Phèdre, done as a teen drama in the style of Heathers. (June 5-June 23)

Three Genre-Blurring Music Events

As part of By Association, a new curatorial methodology that adopts associative thinking, Abrons has invited Onyx Collective, who bring a dynamic assemblage of artists to share new work that is directly or adjacently informed by the practices of other artists on the bill. (September 27-29)

In Revision Suite, a group of artists including Geng, Salome Asega, Rena Anakwe, Destiny Be, DeForrest Brown Jr, L'Rain, and Stacy Lynn Smith convene at St Augustine's Episcopal Church to meditate on the architectural history of "slave galleries" and explore their own connections to worship and spiritual labor. (November 8-9)

Sènsa, a collaborative performance work by French artist Paul Maheke and DJ and electronic music producer Nkisi, explores the realm of the invisible. (March 27-30)

Four Discursive Events and Celebrations

Co-hosted with Emily Johnson and her company Catalyst, Abrons Arts Center will host Kinstillatory Mappings in Light and Dark Matter, free community outdoor bonfires that center Indigenous protocol and knowledge. (October 13, November 9, December 14)

The Lenape Center Symposium is a day-long platform of discussions and performances that address the complex histories of colonization and the potential for art institutions to influence more equitable futures for Indigenous communities. (October 13)

A live recording of the Top Rank Podcast featuring New York City-born, drag performer, and youth LGBTQ advocate known as Desmond is Amazing with co-hosts Marcel Rosa-Salas and Isabel Flower. (October 25)

Performance artist George Emilio Sanchez's BANG, BANG, GUN AMOK is a 24-hour "performance filibuster" attempting to incorporate all necessary means to expose the reality of gun violence embedded in American culture. (December 14-15)

Three Expansive and Diverse Gallery Exhibitions

In How to see in the dark, 2017-18 AIRspace Curator in Residence Christian Camacho-Light looks to artists who share an interest in the politics of visibility. Toward these concerns, these artists make use of aesthetic and conceptual strategies that privilege the opaque, encrypted, or clandestine. (October 19 - December 2)

In how the Other 1/2 lived, artist denzel russell utilizes light as a language to interrogate the history of St. Augustine's Episcopal Church and its "slave galleries." The installation reflects on marginalization in order to understand the lives of the 19th century Black New Yorkers who were relegated to the galleries, and calls for the public to approach these spaces with reverence and appreciation for the spirits who occupy it. (November 8-December 14)

Extremely absorbent and increasingly hollow attends to the body's permeability, addressing ideas of consumption, contamination, abundance, void and how value is perceived and assigned. Curated by 2017-18 AIRspace Curator in Residence Alexis Wilkinson. (December 7 - January 20).

Additional details on the 2018-19 season can be found below. Abrons Arts Center is located at 466 Grand Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets are now on sale can be purchased by calling 866-811-4111 or visiting abronsartscenter.org.

 

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