River To River Festival Opens June 18

Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) presents the 18th annual River To River Festival, Downtown New York City's completely free summer arts festival, June 18-29. The River To River Festival celebrates artistic and creative diversity across disciplines, presenting live art and installation in public spaces and in partnership with leading institutions in Lower Manhattan. All events are free and all are welcome.

This year's Festival is the first to be curated by Lili Chopra, LMCC's Executive Director, Artistic Programs. The 2019 program focuses on the theme of slowing down, reflecting and imagining. "Our contemporary reality is rushed, and nowhere is this more apparent than in New York-the city that keeps moving," Chopra says. "There is always somewhere to go, something to see and more to achieve, creating a frenetic energy that makes this city fabulous and exhausting in equal parts. Increasingly, external stimulation seems to be stifling internal introspection as we anxiously charge forward blinkered to our surroundings and, in this digital age, hardened towards the very people that make up our physical community. In response to this, the River To River Festival addresses the experience of the individual within the urban setting by making space for balance. Working with a number of exceptional artists, each project seeks to provide the viewer with an invitation to engage in considered and deep focus. Collectively, the Festival offers respite and encourages deceleration and stillness-a vehicle through which to pause, open our minds, reflect, connect and imagine."

The projects presented in the Festival this year-including Ernesto Pujol's research into active listening, Jennifer Monson's movement-based foray into the city's spatial rhythms and constraints, Yoko Ono's visual invitations to think big, NIC Kay's durational meditation on emotional labor, Black Gotham Experience's readdressing of skewed histories or Carol Becker and Mark Epstein's study of transformational awareness-act as reminders for New Yorkers of the importance of deep and measured thought.

Creating dynamic networks of conversation between art, the public and the city, the River To River Festival activates non-traditional spaces, bringing art and culture out from behind closed doors, creating vibrant public spaces for the unexpected to blossom. The Festival will be presented across Lower Manhattan in locations as diverse as Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City, Pier 35, the Seaport District, Federal Hall, inside office buildings and on public plazas, over screens traditionally used for advertising and on rooftops overlooking the city.

Finally, artist residency programs serve as a pillar of LMCC's identity, alongside public programming and grant-making. This year, LMCC presents the work of four Extended Life Residency artists in the River To River Festival: Ernesto Pujol, Jennifer Monson, Pam Tanowitz and Sarah Michelson, plus NIC Kay, a current Workspace artist-in-residence.

River To River 2019 includes:

The Reflection Project with Yoko Ono features the artist's iconic text works installed across Lower Manhattan on the screens of Fulton Transit Center, posters on bus shelters and in vacant storefront windows. Add Color (Refugee Boat) (1960/2019) is presented by Yoko Ono in the Seaport District. The interactive installation contains a lifeboat in an empty space, inviting the public to paint their thoughts, ideas and hopes on the walls, floor and boat.

The world premiere of Pam Tanowitz's Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures takes place in Nelson A. Rockefeller Park in Battery Park City. Tanowitz partners with New York City Ballet principal Sara Mearns to conceptualize a new work with an ensemble of dancers.

Jennifer Monson's ditch is a choreographed piece developed by the rhythms, tones and spatial inflections of movement generated by flows of people, the traffic, weather and water along the river's edge. NIC Kay's pushit!! is a site-responsive durational performance that starts on the street and moves indoors with the audience. Part of the getting well soon series, pushit!! meditates on emotional labor and the impossibility of the "stage" as a place of freedom for the Black performer. Social Choreographer Ernesto Pujol's Listening School will seek performative engagement for three days across Lower Manhattan. Thirteen artists will pursue the public's roadside discourse on listening. Their open process will culminate in The Listeners, a performance as a formal listening vessel embodying stillness. Mark Epstein and Carol Becker's The Agitated Now is an invitation to explore our presence in these fast-paced contemporary realities by offering a reflection around the idea of slowing down to think and imagine.

Sarah's Fire by Black Gotham Experience is a guided walking tour delving into a tale set on the southern tip of Manhattan, illustrating the peculiar dark universe of slavery in a port city with deep ties to the sugar plantations of the West Indies. The walking tours will be followed by a talk with BGX founder Kamau Ware.

Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive and unabashedly queer role models. Kids are able to engage with people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.

Rooftop Films presents a special film screening on the rooftop of New Design High School, preceded by a live music performance by a to-be-announced artist.

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