The Chocolate Factory Theater Reveals 2024/2025 Season Featuring 10 Commissioned Premieres

The Chocolate Factory Theater has revealed its 20th season of performances featuring 10 Commissioned Premieres, 8 Early Stage Creative Residencies (with several others TBA), new work by The Chocolate Factory’s Co-Founder / Artistic Director, and partnerships with L’Alliance New York / Crossing The Line Festival, Ping Chong and Company, Under The Radar, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. 

Unless otherwise noted, all events will take place at The (New) Chocolate Factory Theater, 38-33 24th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Details and tickets at chocolatefactorytheater.org.

Yanira Castro / a canary torsi
Exorcism = Liberation

September - November 2024

Exorcism = Liberation is a public art project that investigates our relationship to land, self-determination, migration, and climate disaster. Through collective citywide experiences in New York City, Chicago, and the Connecticut River Valley of Western Massachusetts, we invite the American public to imagine alternative futures through the lens of Puerto Rican culture and the U.S.' ongoing colonial history. Exorcism = Liberation utilizes familiar forms of political media campaigns to immerse the public in sonic experiences, distributing stickers, posters, handmade banners, lawn signs and pins through local community and art organizations. Exorcism = Liberation is an act of intervention, a rehearsal for collective action during a critical American election.

Concept, Script & Direction: Yanira Castro. Audio Design: Erica Ricketts. Graphic Design: Alejandro Torres Viera and Luis A. Vázquez O’Neill.

CATCH 76

September 14, 2024

CATCH is a party that centers short and/or in-progress live performances and other time-based media. CATCH 76 will feature Lisa Fagan + Lena Engelstein, leahlaia, Hiera Jihye, Kennie Zhou, Laura Ortman, Paris Alexander, River L. Ramirez, Shawn Escarciga, Sol Cabrini, +  a Collective Action by Yanira Castro. .

CATCH promotes community and the exchange of ideas across a broad constellation of progressive artists, scenes, and their friends and fans, by curating, producing, promoting and documenting parties that center short (and frequently in-progress) performances and videos.

Big Dance Theater

Book Launch: Dance History(s): Imagination as a Form of Study
October 1, 2024

In an effort to deepen our understanding of what dance is and how it has functioned throughout human history, this prismatic book project is dedicated to an artist-centric perception of dance history. This book interrogates the history of dance from the subjective, poetic perspective of a choreographer. Diverse dance artists from the American dance field contribute prismatic, disruptive perspectives on how dance has unfolded over time and what dance history is. They reimagine the question: What is dance history? Twelve illustrated booklets, each written by a working choreographer, address the subject of dance history from nonacademic, subjective, poetic perspectives. The books model a way of enlarging and complicating how we view dance history by giving the authorial microphone to artists, to learn how their embodied perceptions relate to or diverge from the dominant dance canon.

Authors: mayfield brooks, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Maura Nguyen Donohue, Keith Hennessy, Bebe Miller, Okwui Okpokwasili, Eiko Otake, Annie-B Parson, Javier Stell-Fresquez, Ogemdi Ude, Mariana Valencia, and Andros Zins-Browne. 

Published by Dancing Foxes Press and Wesleyan University Press. 

Produced by Big Dance Theater with the generous support of The Howard Gilman Foundation, The Starry Night Fund, Big Dance Theater's Board Designated Fund, Virginia and Timothy Millhiser, and King's Fountain.

Dance History(s) was published through a partnership between Dancing Foxes Press, Big Dance Theater, and Wesleyan University Press. 

Daniel Fish and Brian Rogers 
Anonymous Cathedral / Small Songs

October 11-12, 2024

Interdisciplinary artist Daniel Fish and Chocolate Factory Theater co-founder / Artistic Director Brian Rogers will share their new experimental films. Anonymous Cathedral, by Daniel Fish, is a visual meditation on the street life of a single day in Brooklyn, shot in the fall of 2020. Small Songs, by Brian Rogers, is an abstract autofictional travelogue - and a love letter to the artist Nancy Holt - made from footage captured during several cross-country road trips between 2021 and 2024.

DD Dorvillier / human future dance corps
Dance is the archeologist, or an idol in the bone.

Co-presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival.
October 17-19, 2024
Returning to the US after several years, DD Dorvillier engages with her rich history as part of the downtown New York dance and performance scene throughout the 90s and 2000s. A French transplant since 2010, Dorvillier’s latest solo—a collaboration with sound artist Sébastien Roux, lighting designer Carina Premer, and dance researcher Mathieu Bouvier — is structured by four consecutive dance scores, which emerged from a dream after dance practices and research on a handful of little-known archeological sites in France. Dorvillier dances, digging through the series of scores, and upon reaching the end, begins again. The sound recorded from her first round of dances returns to accompany the second – a sonic ghost conjugating the present with the immediate past, as she moves towards the future.

Concept and performance: DD Dorvillier. Sound: Sébastien Roux. Light: Madeline Best. Artistic Collaborator: Mathieu Bouvier.

Levi Gonzalez
Hoary

November 13-16, 2024

“We started with the idea of fairy tales as portals into queerness, transformation and the indulging of forbidden desires; a resistance to the numbing effects of normativity.  Hoary is a practice of being in our bodies, of not knowing something but making something anyways.”

“Addressing site is an integral aspect of this practice; we create semi-fictional histories and sonic resonances in each location the work is researched, employing language, sound and vocal utterance as vibratory tools that give animacy and agency to place. This activates the audience’s potential for a sensory and imaginative attunement to their environment, creating new possibilities for our shared perception and behavior. Decentering empirical human concepts of knowledge, we disrupt our encultured nervous system responses and move beyond the shortcomings of late capitalist embodied experience by embracing ambiguity, fluidity, and the not yet known.”

Performers: Levi Gonzalez, Kayvon Pourazar, Rebecca Serrell Cyr. Performer/Composer: Senem Pirler. Costume Design/Consultant: jmy James Kidd. Lighting Designer: Madeline Best.

Anna Martine Whitehead
FORCE! an opera in three acts

Co-presented with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics
November 21-23, 2024
FORCE! is an opera, but what is an opera? If opera means “big work,” what could be blacker? In this big work, characters become fractals for the abundant relationships blooming in the shadows of the state and carceral power. In this big work, a constellation imagines a strange sisterhood with the power to disintegrate walls.

Since late 2019, FORCE! has developed as an iterative re-imagining of performance practice, constantly re-centering care, consent, queer divergence, and rest. The FORCE! constellation re-imagines rehearsal protocols and lets loose discipline to build an abolition feminist theatre practice. This project gathers lessons from lichens, direct actions, mutual aid societies, and other emergent strategies to leverage sound and movement as vectors for processing state violence and racial capitalism. As audiences travel with performers through space, sound, and silence, the boundaries between them become increasingly less important. Using the prison as a particular prism through which we can bear witness to the ways carceral systems replicate themselves, FORCE! is also an attempt to abolish the Prison Industrial Complex in our heads, hearts, and houses.

Co-composers: Angel Bat Dawid, Ayanna Woods, Anna Martine Whitehead. Music Direction: Ayanna Woods, Teiana Davis. Dancers: Jenn Po’Chop Freeman, Zachary Nicol, Rahila Coats. Musicians: Eva Supreme, Daniella Pruitt, Nexus J, Kai Black, Wyatt Waddell, Teiana Davis. Costume Designer: Sky Cubacub.

Tess Dworman
Everything Must Go

December 18-21, 2024

Everything Must Go is a dance theater work that emerges from satirical questioning into the consumption of experimental performance. It examines the ways in which capitalism provokes a savior complex in artists, urging us to demonstrate goodness amidst crisis. My investigation into persona and the solo improvisational form continues with this stark inhabitation of character and an inventory of feeling inside the power play between performer and audience. A teacher becomes a life coach becomes The Artist becomes your mom. The work lays bare the tangential renewal of live performance.

Choreographed and Performed by Tess Dworman. Co-performed by Sonya Gadet Molansky. Sound by Big Hard Excellent Fish and Mel Elberg.

Untitled Nile Harris Project
Co-presented with Ping Chong and Company and Under The Radar
January 2025
Nile Harris will premiere a new work in his ongoing series minor [  ], which responds to the biography of early Jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden. Set to music by Kwami Winfield and featuring actor Jim Fletcher, this ensemble performance confronts the nature of desire, and “the theater” as a site of (im)possibility.

Anna Sperber
Currently Untitled

May 2025

This dance invites the audience to attune to the room, their own bodies and the resonant bodies of the performers. Offering an unordinary feeling of time, the work heightens attention to our collective rhythms and the environment we share. Strength in the work is derived from duration and endurance. With fierce grace, the performers reach for moments of collective solidarity, not often available or accessible in our daily lives. Together we offer an expansive, encompassing atmosphere that holds the collective body.

Collaborating performers: Mykel Nairne, Owen Prum, Tim Bendernagle, Zo Williams, Anna Sperber. Lighting: Madeline Best.

Chloe Alexandra Thompson & DB Amorin
S H I N E: tending the glow

May 2025

S H I N E is a performance and installation using sound, video, voice, movement and audience participation to explore space as a living entity, and the delicate machinery of intentional, communal action. The work addresses the unseen mechanisms of care, the thin boundaries between call and response, and the importance of the immaterial within living systems.

Martita Abril
Tacos de Lengua 

June 2025

Martita Abril continues her introspective work of reflecting on border life. A sense of the familiar yet distorted, always shifting and yet recognisable, the work takes on the dualities of being raised in a land divided.

Early Stage Creative Residencies

This year, The Chocolate Factory Theater’s Programming Committee (led by artist Board Member Neil Greenberg), working closely with Co-Founder / Artistic Director Brian Rogers, invited current Season Artists to nominate fellow artists to receive early stage creative residencies. 

In Spring 2025, Maria Baranova, Dahlak Brathwaite, Maxi Hawkeye Canion, Sharleen Chidiac, Jessica Cook, Ethan Philbrick, Anh Vo, and additional artists TBA will each receive access to space and financial support for early stage research into their new projects. 
 

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