Chris Green's AMERICAN WEATHER Closes HERE's 25th Anniversary Season

HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director, and Kim Whitener, Executive Director) is proud to close their 25th anniversary season with the commissioned world premiere of American Weather, a new work by director and designer Chris Green, a member of the HERE Artist Residency Program since 2016. With a bittersweet verve, American Weather is a visceral work of material performance inspired by daily life in America. Layering movement, puppetry, live music, found text, and animation, Green and a multi-disciplinary ensemble create an absurdist meditation on losing your footing in the pursuit of happiness. Running June 19-30, American Weather, a presentation from HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program (Basil Twist, Artistic Director), builds on HERE's decades-long commitment to commissioning adult puppet works, especially those that feature live music and other artistic disciplines.

"As a visual storyteller, I believe in supporting narratives that are always true, but not always literal," says Green. "Building from a palette of familiar materials, experimental research, and the vast realm of our shared human experience, my work is about bringing the public to new worlds by utilizing innovative extensions of the world they already know. My projects over the past 25 years have been directly or indirectly rooted to the wildly diverse visual language of experimental puppetry, a form of theater that I want to keep pushing forward. This kinetic, jointed, handmade expression of myth-making has given me a universal vocabulary that I can carry across a variety of visual platforms including time-based installation and motion graphics."

The creative team for American Weather includes Erin Wilson (costume design), Ayumu "Poe" Saegusa (lighting design), Hyung Seok Jeon (projection/video programming), Sxip Shirey (Music Director), and Hugo Fowler (Sound Engineer).

Performances of American Weather will take place June 19-30 (see above schedule) at HERE, located at 145 Sixth Avenue, just below Spring Street. Press are welcome as of June 19, which is also the official opening. Tickets, priced at $25 general / $45 premium, can be purchased by visiting here.org or by calling 212-352-3101. 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.

About the Artists

Chris Green (creator) is a Brooklyn-based designer, director, and performer. His theatrical and installation works have been presented over the past 20 years both nationally and internationally in venues including Lincoln Center, New York City Center, St. Ann's Warehouse, Geothe Institute (Delhi), National Geographic Museum, La Jolla Playhouse, Teatro del Lago (Chile), and BAM Harvey among others. Honors include Creative Capital (2009), MacDowell Fellowship (2012), and LMCC Process Space Grant (2013). Since 2005, his design studio Chris Green Kinetics has received awards of excellence from the American Association of Museums, TEA, a PR News' Nonprofit Award for Advocacy, and a Regional Design Award from American Institute of Architects. Recent commissions include Stravinsky's 'Firebird' with ten puppeteers and full orchestra, 'Hagoromo' directed by David Michalek and featuring Wendy Whelan, Jock Soto and the International Contemporary Ensemble; and, 'This Is Hunger', a traveling multi-media installation about hunger in America housed in a triple-expanding tractor-trailer. Currently, Green is working with David Neumann as set designer for 'Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed.'

Erin K. Orr (ensemble) is a puppeteer, storyteller, and chef. She's performed in other works by Chris Green (Lyubo, Tin Lightning, Firebird), as well as Basil Twist (Petrushka, Master Peter's Puppet Show, La Bella Dormente, Hamlet, Long Christmas Ride Home), and Lake Simons (What's Inside the Egg?, How I fixed my Engine with Rosewater, White Elephant, Carnival of the Animals, Bremen Town Band). Her own puppetry works have been presented by HERE and Abrons Art Center, and range from a dark fairytale for adults (Savage Nursery) to a circus about the real life drama of honeybees (It's A Bee, Honey), and a musical inspired by the Spanish Punch (Don Cristóbal, Billy-Club Man). She recently collaborated with Cynthia Von Buhler on her immersive spectacles (Brothers Booth, Midnight Frolic, The Illuminati Ball) both as puppet designer and chef. Erin writes the food blog Big Sis Little Dish and is currently creating an Estonian Werewolf Dinner, an interactive performance of Estonian folklore and personal narrative exploring themes of cultural displacement, hunger, and thresholds between our domestic and wild natures.

Yasmin Reshamwala (ensemble) is a Brooklyn-based musician and artist. After moving to NYC in 2003, she juggled her love for music and visual arts by playing in bands such as Justice of the Unicorns, Tigers and Monkeys, and Lavalier while pursuing a career in Production Design. Her design work has ranged from costume supervision on a film by artist Matthew Barney to Art Direction for rapper Pusha T. She is currently recording a new album with the dream-pop band Wild Arrows and is working towards an MFA in Music Education at Hunter College.

Rima Fand (ensemble) is a Brooklyn-based composer, musician, and vocalist with a passion for multi-disciplinary and cross-cultural collaboration. Recent projects include NACL's Courage, a large-scale outdoor performance presented at Apple Pond Farm in Callicoon Center, NY in 2016 and Governors' Island in 2017; a workshop production of A Footnote in History, a rock band-infused exploration of the life of Sally Ride, presented in the 2017 ICE FACTORY Festival, and Don Cristóbal, Billy-Club Man, a Lorca-inspired musical puppet play created in the HERE Artist's Residency Program, and produced at the Abrons Arts Center (2013). Especially captivated by the music of the Balkans and Middle East, Rima has composed music inspired by these traditions in the acclaimed string band Luminescent Orchestrii, which toured internationally for a decade, and more recently with Sherita, an acoustic quartet, and with Hydra, a women's vocal trio. She also currently plays in Timbila, an innovative ensemble exploring the traditions of Zimbabwe and Mozambique. She was a recipient of the Exploring the Metropolis Composers' Residency for the year 2013-2014.

Katie Melby (ensemble) is a Lecoq-trained theatre maker and puppetry artist. She is co-founder and co-Artistic Director of 3 Sticks, a physical theatre company dedicated to making new work that she runs with composer/performer Andrew Lynch. Their work has been presented by Ars Nova, Columbia Stages, Dixon Place, One Arm Red, Governor's Island Art Fair, and the Bird Theatre in Tottori, Japan. Also, as core member of BREAD Arts collective, she has directed The Great American Casket Company for Green-Wood Cemetery, and co-directed and starred in Rise and Fall at People Lounge and NACL. Katie has directed Jahn Sood's folk opera In a Sea of Faces in a boathouse up in Maine with the Barn Arts Collective, where she often returns to collaborate. Puppetry work includes Basil Twist's Sister's Follies (Abrons Art Center), Rite of Spring (Lincoln Center), Mabou Mines' La Davina Caricatura (La Mama), The Cat Who Went to Heaven (BAM), Chris Green's Firebird (Chilean Tour), Lake Simons' Tree Pop (HERE), and Pip's Island. www.3Sticks.org

About HERE

HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. In addition, Dream Music brings to New York the most excellent of international puppetry, reflecting on Twist's roots at the E?cole Supe?rieure Nationale des Arts de la Marionnette in Charleville-Mezieres, France. Dream Music was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist's OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE's Dream Music is also proud to house the Griff Williams Puppetry Collection. The 6 antique marionettes of Harry James, Griff Williams, Cab Calloway, Arturo Toscannini, Ted Lewis and Paul Whiteman were all performed with The Griff Williams Orchestra in the 1930s & 40s throughout America's big band era. They have a permanent home outside the Dorothy B. Williams Theatre at HERE.

The OBIE-winningHERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director and Kim Whitener, Executive Director), which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this season, 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'sThe 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, and original works by Founding Artistic Director Kristin Marting, 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.

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