Applications Now Open For HERE's Signature $100,000 Residency Program

HERE announces that applications for the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) are currently open. This multi-year, $100,000 residency program was created in 1999 and serves as a national model. HARP provides commission funds, development support, career planning, and a full production to recipients, all within a collaborative environment of peers working across artistic disciplines including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. HARP provides significant long-term support, as well as $50,000 in cash and $50,000 in space, equipment, and services over two to three years. Each residency is tailored to the needs of the artist.

Through HARP, HERE has developed such highly acclaimed works as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle's All Wear Bowlers, and James Scruggs' Disposable Men, to name a few. Since HARP's founding, HERE has supported the work and career development of 165 lead artists and hundreds of their collaborators.

HARP nurtures the development of nine to eleven artists, through a cross-disciplinary exchange, monthly meetings, peer-driven workshops, and panel discussions. Created nearly 20 years ago to address a compelling need in the field-the void of artistic, administrative, and financial support for artists with certain professional accomplishments, but without breakthrough recognition-HARP assists artists who are developing distinct voices and experimenting with new approaches that expand the parameters of performance. HARP is unique by offering a meeting ground where artists from varied disciplines can share diverse perspectives and by developing work with a hybrid performance aesthetic.

The 2019 HARP application is due February 1, 2019, and can be found at here.org.

ABOUT THE HERE ARTIST RESIDENCY PROGRAM (HARP)

Through HARP, HERE commissions and develops new hybrid works over multiple years. Throughout the year, HARP artists show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full-scale premieres. Current HARP projects in development include:

Set to premiere January 6-12, 2019, ThisTree, from cellist and singer Leah Coloff, glides between idyllic childhood memories, unanswered questions and Coloff's roller coaster ride of fertility treatments.

Writer/director Gisela Cardenas' Hybrid Suite No. 2: The Carmen Variations, a devised theater opera inspired by Bizet's Carmen. Mixing opera, text, and movement, this project seeks to cross time and geographical borders to understand the potentially different faces Carmen might possess.

Writer/director Zoey Martinson's The Black History Museum According to the United States of America, which delves into the fraught relationship between Black bodies and the value America has placed on those bodies. Starting from the founding of this country traveling through modern day this immersive production will explore 'Blackness' from its constitutional conception to its currency.

Choreographer Ximena Garnica and Video Artist Shige's A Meal, a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together experienced as part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner.

Puppetry artists Spencer Lott and Maiko Kikuchi's 9000 Paper Balloons, a new work of puppet theater about the mother and five children, who were killed by a bomb carried by a giant paper balloon launched from the Japanese coast in 1945, the only enemy inflicted casualty on the U.S. mainland during WWII.

Choreographer Raja Feather Kelly's The McCarthy Era (Working Title), a dance-theatre production that addresses the status of the artist in the McCarthy era, showing the ways in which, through a brutally effective mechanism, artists were directed to disengage from issues facing the real world.

Writer/director/hip-hop artist Baba Israel's Cannabis! (Working Title), a live multimedia performance telling the history of cannabis and tracing its impact on humanity by creating an "up on your feet" musical concert with spoken word, video, and immersive theatre.

Composer/singer Imani Uzuri's Songs of Sanctuary for the Black Madonna, a large choral and chamber orchestra work inspired by the iconic figure of the Black Madonna, a rare holy Marian figure visually depicted with Dark Skin and currently worshipped within the Catholic and Orthodox Marian pantheon but who can be traced back to pre-Christian pagan images.

Taylor Mac has been HERE's resident playwright since 2016 and is currently working on Socrate, which Mac envisions as an adaptation of The Apology of Socrates and Satie's Socrate. The piece is part of the playwright's continued quest in navigating the evil forces of the world with beauty and contemplation. Taylor Mac's upcoming Broadway debut, Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus with Nathan Lane and Andrea Martin, was commissioned by HERE and written by Mac as part of the HARP residency.

About HERE

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

Standout productions include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and Arias with a Twist, 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, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Kamala Sankaram's Miranda and Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, among many others. In 2008, following an extensive renovation, HERE re-opened the doors to its long-time downtown home for the arts, where it continues as a vibrant, welcoming haven for artists and audiences alike.

HERE is also recognized nationally and internationally for the annual PROTOTYPE festival of opera-theatre and music-theatre, co-founded in 2013 and co-produced with Beth Morrison Projects, through which HERE commissions, develops, produces, and presents new 21st century works in that genre; and the Dream Music Puppetry Program, founded in 1998 with the premiere of Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, and co-curated and co-produced with Twist and HERE co-founder, Barbara Busackino.

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, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.

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