KRISTINA WONG: #FOODBANKINFLUENCER, World Premiere of HELEN., & More Set for En Garde Arts 2023-24 Season

En Garde Arts will present their 2023-24 season, which features the young international company SuperGeographics with their World Premiere production of Helen. by Caitlin George, a modern adaptation of the Helen of Troy story told through a feminist lens, co-presented with La MaMa. En Garde’s upcoming season will also feature their expanded Uncommon Voices developmental residency program along with the continuation of their backyard series for early career artists, playdate.

BRICKS 

A New Musical by Charlene Jean, Co-Composed with Franklin Rankin 

UNCOMMON VOICES: Work in Process Co-Presented with Hi-ARTS

Saturday, September 16 at Hi-ARTS (215 E 99th St, New York, NY 10029) 

BRICKS is a story about family legacy, a mom, her daughter, and the ancestors that preceded them. Told in the spirit of Afrofuturism, this moving and poetic story is of a mother who seeks to protect her daughter from the intense spirits who emerge from “up yonder”  by giving her a spirit blinder, Baker-Miller pink glasses. We consider the repercussions of spiritual blindness and the need to recognize the truth of our histories through the lens of land memory, family, and ancestry. Playwright Charlene Jean was a 2023/2024 Creative Capital finalist and a MAP Fund grantee. BRICKS is developed in part with support by Hi-ARTS' CRITICAL BREAKS, a residency program for artists who are in a pivotal phase of developing new work.

Helen.

La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts present The SuperGeographics

World Premiere by Caitlin George

October 13-29, Opening October 16th at La MaMa (66 E 4th St, New York, NY 10003) 

With top-speed language, irreverent humor and dynamic physicality, Helen. is a story you know told in a way that you don’t. A wild adventure of paths crossing – of mothers and myths and memories and monsters – Caitlin George’s new play takes you on a journey whose experience is greater than the sum of its parts. Produced by The SuperGeographics and presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts, Helen. invites you to leap into the unknown, and revel in the unexpected.

Kristina Wong:  #FoodBankInfluencer

Created & Performed by Kristina Wong

An UNCOMMON VOICES: Work in progress presentations

Monday, November 13 

En Garde’s 2022 inaugural winner of the Joan D. Firestone Award is artist, writer, and performer Kristina Wong. In her project, #FoodBankInfluencer Kristina is working with existing strategists in food desserts to reimagine the grocery store/food bank line/community fridge as a new immersive theater/environment that will attempt to cue healthier instincts of consumption and self-determination. Specifically, these funds will be used for ribbon skirt sewing workshops for the community that has relied on the recently closed Rocky Ridge Gas & Market in Dinnebito, AZ– a rural area of the Navajo Nation. This week of sewing workshops will be a place for community gathering, a grieving process for their Covid loss, and a chance to make skirts that are worn traditionally. It will also be a moment to dream of the possibilities for their new market as the native Trading Posts that once was– creating a guide towards community building, ancient wisdom and a reclamation of food ways.

Spacebridge 

Created by Irina Kruzhilina

January 2024

SpaceBridge is a new project created by Irina Kruzhilina, the auteur, director, and designer who created A Dozen Dreams with En Garde Arts in 2020. The piece is an intergenerational performance and spatial installation bridging multimedia, visual theater, and cultural diplomacy. It explores the impact of cross-cultural polarization on young people, with a specific focus on the political and social relationships between the United States and Russia.

Spanglish Sh!t 

Book and Lyrics by Samora la Perdida

Music by Josiah Handelman, Mobéy Lola Irizarry and Matthew Zwiebel 

Two Week Workshop - Spring 2024

Spanglish Sh!t is a bilingual musical about Brujita, a Puerto Rican witch who runs the most poppin’ restaurant in East Harlem, enchanting customers with her magical meals. But when an old family recipe calls for a tablespoon of her Spanish, she must make a shocking confession… and wrestle with the demons of her whitewashed past.

En Garde Arts was founded in 1985 by Anne Hamburger leading the site-specific theatre movement in New York City throughout the 90s. Its significant legacy of producing site-specific work featuring ground breaking productions by Anne Bogart, Tina Landau, Reza Abdoh, Mac Wellman and others has given the company the unique ability to bring people together to experience theatre in unlikely spaces. When theatres across the city were shut down due to Covid-19, En Garde Arts produced A Dozen Dreams, a multimedia immersive installation that brought to life the pandemic dreams of 12 playwrights spanning multiple generations, including Ren Dara-Santigo, Liza Jesse Peterson and  Emily Mann, among others. Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes), a music-theatre production produced in 2020 and created by an all Latinx team was written by playwright Andrea Thome with music by Sinuhé Padilla and direction by José Zayas. It premiered at La Mama and was followed by a five borough tour before it was shut down by the pandemic. En Garde remounted the piece in Brooklyn, toured to Penn State and the University of Maryland and was presented by the La Jolla Playhouse which incorporated a week-long tour to communities throughout San Diego. Fandango ended each performance with an outdoor celebration engaging the audience to join the cast in a “fandango,” a celebration of music and dance. In 2021 they launched a partnership with the Downtown Alliance business improvement district, for the creation of Downtown Live, a festival of 36 outdoor performances of music and theatre, followed by Downtown Stories, a series of three theatrical offerings which invited New Yorkers to rediscover Lower Manhattan and its rich and complicated history. https://engardearts.org/  

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