Kyoung's Pacific Beat to Launch Inaugural Season 'Community Safety, Community Cares'

Kyoung's Pacific Beat, a peacemaking, devising theater company based in Flatbush, Brooklyn, announces its inaugural season highlighting "Community Safety, Community Cares." A hybrid season, featuring both virtual and live events, will take place from September 2023 through April 2024 in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, centering radical hospitality and a "pay-what-you-can" ticketing scale to ensure access to our public programming. Free tickets for KPB's season are available on our website www.kyoungspacificbeat.org.

"Kyoung's Pacific Beat was founded in 2011 with the belief that peace matters. Now, more than ever, we need artists and our community to imagine a culture of peace together," stated Artistic Director Kyoung H. Park. "For twelve years, our mission has been to work with artists, non-artists, and local community members to transform personal and communal experiences of oppression into peace messages made public through performance. This season, with capacity-building support from the New York Community Trust, we are excited to invite our community to reinforce the community care and community-safety strategies we've been practicing since the onset of the pandemic."

"Whiteness on Fire: Where Are We Now?" will take place September 21, 2023 in celebration of the UN International Day of Peace and will resume the virtual community-gatherings KPB hosted since September 2020 to address white supremacy. "For the past two years, our community has uplifted abolitionist and community-care strategies to address racialized, gendered, and homophobic violence. I'm excited to take leadership of KPB's Community Co-Lab program and invite our community partners and community members to re-engage with this work," stated Producing Director Ishmael Thaahir.

"Community Cares: All Together Now" is KPB's bi-annual virtual gala and will take place October 24, 2023. "Facilitated as a stakeholder meeting between KPB artists, community partners, staff, Board, and funders, "Community Cares" is not simply a fundraising event, but an opportunity to name the pressing needs we wish to tackle through the work of Kyoung's Pacific Beat," stated Claudia Acosta, Kyoung's Pacific Beat's Board President. "Our inaugural season is in response to the conversations held by our community at our first 'Community Cares: All Together Now' in 2021. We hope our community will rally once more to radically imagine our future together."

OTHER NO MORE, KPB's new work-in-progress, will receive a public reading this December with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Brooklyn Arts Council. OTHER NO MORE is a docudrama based on NYC-based queer elders of color who lobbied the US Surgeon General to disaggregate Asian-Americans and Native Americans from the "Other" box in the US Census to address the healthcare needs of BIPOC LGBQT+ communities during the HIV/AIDS crisis. OTHER NO MORE will be a verbatim play featuring interviews from prominent organizers including Suki Terada Ports, Johnny Monzon-Santos, Gil Gerald, Curtis Harris-Davia, Joo-Hyun Kang, Cara Page, John Chin and more.

In February 2024, following OTHER NO MORE, KPB will host "Weaving Histories," a virtual gathering centering the lessons learned by our BIPOC, LGBQT+ queer elders working for our safety outside the system since the 1980's, resulting in the founding of APICHA (a community health center for queer APIAs and Native Americans, and more broadly, queer people of color), the Audre Lorde Project (a QTPOC, community-safety building organization), and GAPIMNY - Empowering Queer & Trans APIs. "GAPMINY is excited to partner with KPB and continue our ongoing collaboration with the company. We've enthusiastically been working with KPB for 10 years and we're looking forward to the company's inaugural season uplifting community-based solutions," stated Ryan Shen, Co-Chair of GAPIMNY.

The centerpiece of KPB's 2023-2024 season is the World Premiere of NERO, a Shakespearean, five-act "streamplay" theatricalizing George W. Bush's Presidency and the War on Terror as the rise and fall of Nero's Roman Empire. Set in 64AD in Rome's Palace of the Frogs, this "state of the nation" tragicomedy invites Black, Indigenous and People of Color to examine how white male supremacy is the root of American Imperialism.

A rough-cut screening of NERO's Act 2 will be part of The Exponential Festival next January 2024 in Brooklyn, prior to its World Premiere at Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in the Bronx next April. The World Premiere of NERO will be an interdisciplinary event - like a "movie on the lawn" gathering - that is a five-hour long, filmed theatrical production, screened jointly with community-driven, cultural invocations of a post white-supremacist world.

"The multi-year development arc of KPB's NERO included a 5-week artist residency at Pregones Theater in the South Bronx in the summer of 2022. During this time, the artists transformed our theater stage into a green screen studio where NERO was filmed. We are excited to extend our relationship with KPB as presenting partner for the premiere of NERO, a daylong live theater event spilling out from our 130-seat theater house into the lobby and outdoors. This will be a much-anticipated immersive experience for our patrons," stated Arnaldo López, Managing Director of Pregones/PRTT.

NERO is written/directed by Kyoung H. Park, with original music by Helen Yee, set and prop design by Yoon Choi, lighting design by Marie Yokoyama, sound design by Carsen Joenk, costume design by Andrew Jordan, and features an ensemble of Black, Asian, Chicanx, Arab American and Muslim performers including Claudia Acosta, Ariel Estrada, David Gelles, Yadira de La Riva, Zach Lusk, Ash Mayers, Sade Namei, Kaila Saunders, Imran Sheikh, and Ishmael Thaahir.

Kyoung's Pacific Beat's 2023-2024 season is supported by the New York Community Trust, Wallace Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, ART/NY Small Theaters Fund, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council for the Arts, Brooklyn Arts Council, and NYC Councilmember Farah Louis.

Tickets for KPB's inaugural season are available via our website: www.kyoungspacificbeat.org.

ABOUT KYOUNG'S PACIFIC BEAT

Kyoung's Pacific Beat (KPB) is a peacemaking theater company whose mission is to work with artists, non-artists, and local communities to transform experiences of oppression into peace messages through public performance. KPB collaborates with an interdisciplinary and multicultural ensemble of artists to uplift communities of color to create a culture of peace through non-violent practices that provide social cohesion, spiritual healing, and radical knowledge. Since its founding in 2011, KPB has devised three full-length plays-disOriented (2011), TALA (2015), PILLOWTALK (2018)-and created over 40 community-based, experimental projects. KPB's work centers stories of (im)migration, queerness, trauma and the ways these intersect in communities of color; it's described as "intensely personal" by American Theater Magazine and "very much of this moment" by the New York Times.

ABOUT OUR COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Asians Fighting Injustice is a grassroots, non-profit organization dedicated to uniting the AAPI community in fighting against systemic injustice and hate. Our goal is to reduce Asian hate crimes in our local communities. AFI is 100% volunteer run.

Founded in 2015 by Mohamed Q. Amin in response to anti-LGBTQ+ hate in Richmond Hill, Queens, NY, the Caribbean Equality Project (CEP) is a community-based organization that empowers, advocates for, and represents Black and Brown, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, gender non-conforming, and queer Caribbean immigrants in New York City. Through public education, community organizing, civic engagement, storytelling, and cultural and social programming, the organization's work focuses on advocacy for LGBTQ+ and immigrant rights, gender equity, racial justice, immigration and mental health services, and ending hate violence in the Caribbean diaspora. To date, CEP is the only educational-based agency serving the Caribbean-American LGBTQ+ community in New York City, with a dedicated aim to cultivating supportive and progressive Caribbean neighborhoods free of violence, oppression, and discrimination. CEP's organizing fosters solidarity, community partnerships, and greater family acceptance.

Founded in 1990, GAPIMNY is an all-volunteer, membership-based community organization with the mission to empower queer and trans Asian Pacific Islanders to create positive change. We provide a range of political, social, educational, and cultural programming and work in coalition with other community organizations to educate and promote dialogue on issues of race, sexuality, gender, and health.

The Exponential Festival is a month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields.

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