AMERICAN REALNESS Festival Kicks Off Abrons Arts Center's Spring 2017 Season

Abrons Arts Center recently announced its Spring 2017 season, featuring a lineup of boundary-pushing theatre, dance and performance.

The lineup, comprised almost entirely of premieres, includes:

• The eighth annual American Realness festival, (January 5­-15)
• The 2017 OpenICE season with a diverse and extensive array of chamber, electro-acoustic, improvisatory, and multimedia work (Jan 23, March 3-5, )
• The US premiere of Dutch choreographer Jan Martens' Sweat Baby Sweatcovers the lifetime of one man and one woman in just one hour, (January 27 & 28)
• New York City Players present a return of Richard Maxwell's critically acclaimed Good Samaritans, (February 8 - March 4)
• This series of motivational speeches and TED-style talks by Tiny Little Band, entitled Your Hair Looked Great asks us what defines the good life, and how do we define success? (February 9 - 25)
• Real Talk / Kip Talk, a series of live talk shows about the state of contemporary performance in New York City, hosted by Kippy Winston (Feb 25 & Apr 15)
• The Terrifying is a world premiere from Minor Theater, which brings horror movies to live theater, experimenting with sound, darkness, silence and suspense, (March 12 - April 2)
• Aynsley Vandenbroucke uses experimental literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays, (March 30 - April 2)
• Mourning Becomes Electra continues Target Margin Theater's two-season exploration of Eugene O'Neill, (April 26 - May 20)
• Commissioned by Abrons Arts Center, The Joyce and The Chocolate Factory, Ivy Baldwin's latest work Keen (Part 2), is an exploration of that which we avoid, the contours of grief, (June 1 - 11)
• 2016 Guggenheim Fellow Christina Masciotti returns to Abrons Arts Center with world premiere Raw Bacon from Poland, (June 1 - 17)
• Dylan Crossman's dance piece Here We Areuses movement and an electronic soundscape by Jesse Stiles to explore the concept of humanity within formalism, (June 15-17)

Show descriptions are below. Abrons Arts Center is located at 466 Grand Street, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Tickets can be purchased by calling 212.352.3101 or visiting www.abronsartscenter.org.

---

ABRONS ARTS CENTER SPRING 2017 SEASON:

[DANCE/PERFORMANCE]
American Realness (US Premieres)
The Playhouse, Experimental & Underground Theaters
January 5-15; $20

Cited by The New Yorker as "New York's preeminent sampler of boundary-pushing performance bordering on dance," American Realness returns to Abrons Arts Center for its eighth consecutive season with partner presentations at Gibney Dance and MoMA PS1. The 2017 festival presents the US premieres of Meg Stuart's An Evening of Solo Works, Dana Michel's Mercurial George, and Ligia Lewis' minor matter along with encore engagements of Will Rawls' The Planet Eaters: Seconds, Jen Rosenblit's Clap Hand, and Juliana May's Adult Documentary among others.

The American Realness Festival is made possible by the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. www.americanrealness.com

[MUSIC]
International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE)
Winter OpenICE Weekend
Underground Theater
January 23 at 7:30PM | FREE

Abrons resident artists launch the 2017 OpenICE season with a diverse and extensive array of chamber, electro-acoustic, improvisatory, and multimedia work - sharing their process, commissions and collaborations in a series of FREE workshops and performances for Abrons audiences. This first installment features Wolfgang Rihm's Musik für drew Streicherfesturing, performed by ICE strings: Josh Modney, Kyle Armbrust and Michael Nicolas.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble's 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Emerging composers have anchored ICE's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.

OpenICE, a series of free public concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is made possible by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. www.iceorg.org

[DANCE]
Jan Martens: Sweat Baby Sweat (US Premiere)
January 27 & 28 at 8pm
The Playhouse; $25, 65 minutes

Flemish/Dutch choreographer Jan Martens' conceptually rigorous and dynamically engaging work has been captivating audiences across Europe since 2009. In SWEAT BABY SWEAT, he focuses on the all-consuming love affair between a man and a woman, a couple who can't or won't let each other go. Played out over an hour, in which a lifetime is passing, we are drawn into this modern mating ritual of two profoundly entwined lives; naïve, and at the same time comforting and confronting. Dance, music, song and video imagery are combined to produce this arresting, tender but painfully poignant study of desire, love and loss.

All Martens' works explore the possibility of a perfect balance and symbiosis between storytelling and conceptualism. He is not trying to create a new movement language, but instead he molds and recycles existing idioms and places them in a different setting, so a new idea emerges. In his work the beauty of the incomplete human being is front and center.

Originally produced by Frascati Productions, ICKamsterdam, TAKT Dommelhof, JAN vzw in 2011. www.janmartens.com

[THEATER]
New York City Players: Good Samaritans
February 8 -March 4 at 8pm
The Playhouse; $25, 90 minutes

New York City Players presents a return of Richard Maxwell's critically acclaimed GOOD SAMARITANS. In a dining hall at a rehabilitation center, pleasure battles virtue in this urban story of an intake counselor and her patient. Starring RoseMary Allen and Kevin Hurley. Written and directed with songs by Richard Maxwell. www.nycplayers.org

[THEATER]
Tiny Little Band: Your Hair Looked Great (World Premiere)
February 9-25 at 7.30pm
Underground Theater; $25, 90 minutes

A motivational speech. An ad for cheese chips. An ancient Greek hero. A desire to do good, to live right, to not fail, to make the world better, to find happiness, to find comfort, to find meaning, to find, to find, to find, success, success, SUCCESS. Your Hair Looked Great is a kaleidoscopic head-trip through the social and cultural forces that shape our sense of what life is and what life should be from the company that brought you the 2015 Time Out NY Critics' Pick Ghost Stories.

Tiny Little Band is the New York based collaboration between Stefanie Abel Horowitz and Jerry Lieblich. Their last piece, Ghost Stories, premiered at Cloud City May 2015 to rave reviews (4 Stars, Critic's Pick, Time Out New York). It was previously developed at PRELUDE 14 (CUNY), Smith + Tinker (HERE Arts Center), Barn Arts Collective, Gershwin Live at Dixon Place, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. Past work includes 1927 (Ars Nova, ANT Fest), Rod Serling: Binghamton to Syracuse, and Walt Disney and the Invention of the Human (Fresh Ground Pepper).

First performed at THROW presented by Chocolate Factory curated by Sarah Maxfield and Mohawk Fest at Cloud City. Developed at Barn Arts Collective. We would like to thank Playwrights Horizons for the generous donation of rehearsal space for the development of this workshop (production). www.tinylittleband.com

[THEATER/PERFORMANCE]
Kippy Winston: Real Talk / Kip Talk (World Premiere)
February 25 (Studio 307) & April 15 (Underground Theater) at 8pm
$25, 75 minutes

REAL TALK / KIP TALK is a series of live talk shows about the state of contemporary performance in New York City, hosted by Kippy Winston, media mogul, internet sensation, and citizen of the world. Since Kippy's weblog took flight in 2008, Kippy's larger-than-life persona and cottage industry empire has grown to encompass Kippy Winston Media, a boutique PR firm servicing all things theatrical; The Radish, a semi-autumnal gossip rag; Just Ask Kippy, a brief yet potent advice column; and an active social media presence. Formatted like a talk show but with room for debate, REAL TALK / KIP TALK blurs the lines between art and life and challenges participants of all stripes and creeds to engage in real talk about our starry performance landscape.

Kippy Winston's web log began in 2008, but her peripatetic life started long, long ago. A citizen of the world, Kippy is not only a tastemaker, but also a mover and shaker and an ardent supporter of the performing arts, or quite simply "the field." Linguist and lover of culture, Kippy's musings on art, life, and la cultura take on unique forms all their own. She is an Andy Rooney of the PoMo age, a Gadfly of the Gilded era, a Muckraker with the Mostess. Journalism meets hedonism in Winston's word play(s). [wink!] "Hey world. Here I am. Kippy Winston and loving life."

Kippy's work has been seen / experienced at PRELUDE 2013 ad 2014 with her gossip rag THE RADISH. https://kippywinstonmedia.wordpress.com/

[MUSIC]
International Contemporary Ensemble (Ice)
Winter OpenICE Weekend
March 3-5 at 7.30pm
Underground Theater; FREE

The second installment in the 2017 OpenICE season of FREE workshops and performances featuring chamber configurations of ICE with music by Eric Wubbels, Sofia Gubaidulia, and a new commission workshop with Monte Weber. OpenICE, a series of free public concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is made possible by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble's 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Emerging composers have anchored ICE's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.

OpenICE, a series of free public concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is made possible by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. www.iceorg.org

[THEATER]
Minor Theater: The Terrifying (World Premiere)
March 12-April 2
The Playhouse; $25, 90 minutes

In a creepy Little Village on the cusp of modernity, a ravening monster stalks two teenagers and their families. Taking cues from horror movies, The Terrifying asks how you can live every day with forces that want to destroy you-including the urge to destroy yourself. Written by Obie Award-winning playwright, Julia Jarcho, with sound design by Ben Williams.

Minor Theater is a New York City company putting on plays written and directed by Julia Jarcho. The members are downtown veterans Jenny Seastone, Ben Williams, and Ásta Bennie Hostetter. Shows we have collaborated on include Grimly Handsome (2013 OBIE Award for Best New American Play), American Treasure (through 13P), Nomads (at Incubator Arts) and Dreamless Land (with New York City Players). minortheater.org

[DANCE]
Aynsley Vandenbroucke (World Premiere)
March 30- April 1 at 8pm, April 2 at 3pm
Underground Theater; $25, 60 minutes

In this new performance, Aynsley Vandenbroucke uses experimental literary devices to create a series of live, three-dimensional essays. She plays with the lines between fact and fiction, narrative and abstraction, legibility and complexity. She works with - and against - the role of formal structures in writing, moving, and making a life. Commissioning support made possible by the Jerome Foundation. Additional support provided by a Late Stage Stipend from the Mertz Gilmore Foundation.

Called "gifted" by The New Yorker and "an elegant sensitive thinker" by The New York Times, Aynsley Vandenbroucke has been making performance in NYC since 2000. Her work has been presented by The Chocolate Factory, Danspace Project, Dance New Amsterdam, the Cuny Graduate Center, and in San Francisco, Colorado, and Brazil, among others. She co-founded Mount Tremper Arts in the Catskills and served as co-curator there until 2014. She teaches at Princeton University and is obsessed with the relationships between reading, writing, learning to live, and making dance. www.movementgroup.org

[MUSIC]
International Contemporary Ensemble (Ice)
Winter OpenICE Weekend
April 24 - 28
Underground Theater; 7.30pm | FREE

The second installment in the 2017 OpenICE season of FREE workshops and performances featuring chamber configurations of ICE with music by Eric Wubbels, Sofia Gubaidulia, and a new commission workshop with Monte Weber. OpenICE, a series of free public concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is made possible by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is an artist collective committed to transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The ensemble's 35 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Emerging composers have anchored ICE's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.

OpenICE, a series of free public concerts by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), is made possible by support from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc. www.iceorg.org

[DANCE]
Abby Z and The New Utility
abandoned playground (World Premiere)
April 13 - 15 at 7:30pm
The Playhouse; $20, 50 minutes

Citing the embodied practice of Afro-Diasporic dance forms, including hip hop, as well as punk as influential on her sensibilities, Abby Zbikowski creates works that pay homage to the effort of living, tactics of survival, and the aesthetics produced as the result. Her newest work abandoned playground continuously and relentlessly asks: what is the necessity of physical rigor and how can masochism be harnessed for its transformative properties? In this evening length dance event, ten performers willfully engage in the brutal action of hyper-physical dance exposing the process of decomposition and reclamation of their physical and mental states.

Abby Z and the New Utility create works that pay homage to the effort of living, tactics of survival and the aesthetics produced as a result, citing punk and hip-hop subcultural movements and aesthetics as influential on their work. Artistic director/choreographer Abby Zbikowski founded the New Utility in 2012 with collaborator performers Jennifer Meckley and Fiona Lundie and as a group have been in residence at the American Dance Festival in Durham, NC, the Bates Dance Festival in Lewiston, Maine and the nEW Festival in Philadelphia, PA and presented by Movement Research at Danspace Project and Gibney Dance Center, among others. http://www.abbyznewutility.org/

[THEATER]
Target Margin: Mourning Becomes Electra
April 26 - May 20
The Playhouse

Mourning Becomes Electra is the most massive vivid complex drama in American literature-it's a Greek tragedy, it's an American history play, it's a family romance. Eugene O'Neill captured the essence of our country in this great trilogy: love, race, money, and war. Now the unique sensibility of Target Margin shocks it into the present tense. Target Margin Theater gets drunk on Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra. With passionate irreverence, this production explodes The American Project. Intimate and intense, entertaining and challenging, you will never have a ride like it.

[DANCE]
Ivy Baldwin (World Premiere)
Keen (Part 2)
June 1-June 11, Thursday - Saturday at 8pm, Sunday at 2pm
The Playhouse; $25

Choreographer Ivy Baldwin's latest work, Keen (Part 2), is commissioned by Abrons Arts Center, The Joyce and The Chocolate Factory. This new dance for the Abrons Playhouse builds upon Baldwin's recent Keen (Part 1) for the Philip Johnson Glass House in New Canaan, CT. Keen (Part 2) is performed by Baldwin, Anna Carapetyan, Eleanor Smith, and Katie Workum, with a score by Justin Jones, lighting by Chloe Z. Brown, and costumes by Mindy Nelson. Keen (Part 2) grows out of an open-eyed exploration of that which we uncomfortably avoid: the contours of grief - the rites and rituals, spoken and unspoken, public and hidden, age-old and brand-new.

[THEATER]
Christina Masciotti: Raw Bacon from Poland (World Premiere)
June 1-17 at 8pm
The Playhouse; $25, 85 minutes

2016 Guggenheim Fellow Christina Masciotti's newest work, Raw Bacon from Poland, tells the story of shoe salesman and aspiring personal trainer, Dennis Toledo, as a lifetime of trouble assumes a new intensity after a bad tour in Iraq. Though he's managed to anesthetize the enduring wounds of his service with prescription drug abuse, when he's arrested on a domestic violence charge and sentenced to Brooklyn Treatment Court, he's forced to find new ways to handle his volatile tangle of mixed emotions. Further upheaval with his wife leaves him perched on the edge of recovery with an all-consuming drive to win full custody of his six-year-old daughter. www.christinamasciotti.com

[MUSIC/SOUND ARTS]
New York Electro-Acoustic Music Festival
June 19 - 25
The Playhouse, Experimental & Underground Theaters

Now in its seventh year, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival is a celebrated series of concerts in New York City (up to three per day) featuring numerous original compositions. Electroacoustic music is created, modified or performed by computers and other electronic equipment, as well as video music and sound installations. The festival features works by local, national and international composers. Tickets will be on sale in the Spring.

[DANCE]
Dylan Crossman: Here We Are (World Premiere)
June 15-17 at 8pm
Underground Theater; $25, 50 minutes

Take Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being. Use as background noise. Add three performers who love, lust and fear in front of you. For you. While Jesse Stiles' haunting score and the feel of old Prague filter into the old Playhouse, ponder whether these individuals are in love with each other or in love with you, their witness. Or maybe it is the sound of you falling in love again. Commissioning support provided by the Jerome Foundation.

Dylan Crossman Dans(c)e looks at human behavior within formalism. Its work has been called compellingly poetic by The New York Times and has been seen at Abrons Arts Center (as a part of Laurie Uprichard's Travelogue series), DanceRoulette, the 92nd Street Y, the Museum of Arts and Design and The Yard. Dylan Crossman also works with children and adults, using dance as a means for social integration and conflict resolution. dylancrossman.org

---

The Abrons Arts Center is the OBIE Award-winning performing and visual arts program of Henry Street Settlement. The Abrons supports the creation and presentation of innovative, multi-disciplinary work; cultivates artists in all stages of their practice with educational programs, mentorships, residencies and commissions; and serves as an intersection of engagement for local, national and international audiences and arts-workers.

Each year the Abrons offers over 250 performances, 12 gallery exhibitions and 30 residencies for performing and studio artists, and 100 different classes in dance, music, theater, and visual art. The Abrons also provides New York City public schools with teaching artists, introducing more than 3,000 students to the arts.

To post a comment, you must register and login.