HERE Announces Call For Applications To Signature Multi-Year $100,000 Residency Program

HERE has announced 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, fiscal sponsorship, 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 up to $50,000 in cash and more than $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 3, 2020 at 12:00pm and can be found at here.org.

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.

Premiering November 1-24, 2019, director Zoey Martinson's The Black History Museum... According to the United States of America is a darkly comedic, immersive performance that transforms HERE's entire building into a theatrical museum. Marking the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery, the show examines Blackness from its constitutional origin to its modern currency through powerful and satirical visual art, theatrical performance, sound installation, and dance.

In the 2020-2021 Season, Spencer Lott and Maiko Kikuchi's 9000 Paper Balloons will premiere - 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.

Current HARP projects in development include:

Composer/singer Gelsey Bell' s m?"ːnɪŋ (pronounced as "mourning" and "morning") is an opera that inhabits a world, beginning today, in which all humans have disappeared from Earth. Inspired by Alan Weisman's The World Without Us, the piece is whimsical, fantastical, and playful while being rooted in scientific ideas and the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature and other animals.

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.

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

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! A Theatrical Concert, a live multimedia performance that tells the history of cannabis and traces its impact on humanity by creating an "up on your feet" musical concert with spoken word, video, and immersive theatre.

In Minor Theater's Marie It's Time, the company wants to plunge headfirst into the misogyny at the heart of modern drama. Using a wild retranslation of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck as a point of entry, Minor Theater's Julia Jarcho and Ben Williams will collaborate on original music and sound composition to underscore this classic story of lust and murder-and to interrupt it.

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.

Nia Witherspoon's Priestess of Twerk - inspired equally by the "bad bitches" of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples - presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity through this immersive production.

Taylor Mac has been HERE's resident playwright since 2016 and is currently working on The Apology, an adaptation of The Apology of Socrates and Satie's Socrate. This new play is part of Mac's continued quest in navigating the evil forces of the world with beauty and contemplation.

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