Keenan Hurley & Kedian Keohan

BLUSH

At the center of the Black Hole is the Event Horizon. Crawl inside and save me a dance. Internal transformations become external. Let’s reckon with one another or become unrecognizable. It’s ok if you’re a little smelly.

Talia Paulette Oliveras & Nia Farrell

A Map to Nowhere (things are)

A Map to Nowhere (things are) is a reminder that this is Real Life—and that means there is real hope for tomorrow. It is a chakra-based ritual and abolitionist practice in closing the gap between dreams and reality.

Kate Moore Heaney & Divya Mangwani

Speak American

Speak American is an insider/outsider’s perspective on the disorienting construct that is the American language—hyperlinking to the future (insert emoticon here).

Jeesun Choi & Bryn Herdrich

Bust

Sein fights for the leadership of her Model United Nations team. An economist gives one last lecture. Fish Grandma goes to the bank. Meanwhile, the global market teeters on the brink of collapse. BUST explores the money in our wallets, the illusions it buys, and the future it promises.

Jen Goma & Haruna Lee

plural (love)

“With the performance installation plural (love), Jen Goma & Kristine Haruna Lee flirt with the boundaries of desire, power, and responsibility, building an environment that feels akin to stepping into a soft BDSM roleplay. Always written and performed anew based on its audience and physical surroundings (from the NY Hall of Science planetarium, to theatre festivals, to a hotel), plural (love) is an opportunity for Goma and Lee to report their latest findings on love, desire, intimacy, sex and sexuality, and its relationship to transparency, ethics, and equity.

Originally inspired by auto-theorists such as Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, and Roland Barthes, Goma and Lee layer political, cultural, and social theory with their own autobiographical stories as Asian American femme women, and their experiences of desire and being desired. They perform their musings through a pastiche of intricate styles that include pop songs with lyrics by Sartre, femme rituals, live podcasts, intimate humor, radical truth-telling, and community engagement.”

Ann Marie Dorr & Paul Ketchum

Good and Noble Beings

“Good and Noble Beings is a stupid adaptation of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The performance is the result of a compilation of bits of language that Ketchum found funny in the post-structuralist text—and that ultimately started to sound like pieces of dialogue between as many people as possible.

Dorr and Ketchum have no idea what they are doing because A Thousand Plateaus is impossible to read—but it seems, to them, that the book is about nonhierarchical structures of being. They are hoping to deconstruct late capitalist notions of hierarchy and structural meaning while simultaneously blowing everyone’s mind. God is a Lobster. Welcome to the Rhizome.”

Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja Feather Kelly

The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente

“Collaborators Daaimah Mubashshir & Raja Feather Kelly were drawn together out of a desire to locate truths, the sublime, and to expand the vocabulary of blackness on stage. Kelly’s artistic practice combines dance, sketch comedy, minstrelsy, and devised theatre; Mubashshir conceived Everyday Afroplay, a daily theatrical writing practice on blackness and the black body that serves as a well-spring of material for her company of collaborators.

Together, they have developed one Everyday Afroplay into the first episode of a larger work—The Chronicles of Cardigan and Khente—which centers the experience of two black corporate executives as they navigate climbing the ladder toward financial liberation. In the style of a Post – Black Minstrelsy, Cardigan and Khente’s first question is: Why does success and freedom always come down to “what do they think of us?””

Virginia Grise & Shayok Misha Chowdhury

rasgos asiaticos

“On October 24^th, 1871, 20 Chinese men were tortured and hanged in downtown LA. This mass lynching—the largest in U.S. history—took place on Calle de los Negros, named for its original inhabitants: dark-skinned Californios of indigenous, African, and Spanish blood. This coincidence of space insists: the American story, of migration and displacement, is a palimpsest—a parchment written on, erased, then written on again, the traces of the old words ghosting underneath the new. Virginia Grise’s rasgos asiaticos looks to a history that’s been (imperfectly) erased: Chinese settlement in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. It’s about moving bodies and porous borders—How do you make a home in inhospitable country?

rasgos asiaticos is part hybrid-book—comprising drafts of scenes, splinters of text and poetry, as well as non-textual source material—and part multimedia performance—creating a mosaic of layered voices (speaking English, Spanish, and Cantonese), music, and movement. Director Shayok Misha Chowdhury has selected pieces of the book to excavate in this performance about moving bodies and porous borders, which aims to re-imagine how we think about immigration in the US-Mexico borderlands.”

Peter Mills Weiss & Julia Mounsey

while you were partying

“Peter Mills Weiss and Julia Mounsey take a fantastical approach to analyzing their own histories of aggression, impotence, and mental health with while you were partying. This piece takes the form of a staged reading of a screenplay—a bizarre, self-sacrificing hero fantasy of an aging man-child, whose relationship with his highly supportive mother manifests as a dream ballet with a chilling conclusion.

Weiss and Mounsey began working together after noticing their shared interest in speaking directly to audiences as “themselves” in a way that complicates identity and authenticity. Their work, like [50/50] Old School Animation (which will be performed at Under the Radar at The Public Theater this January 2019) places audiences in uncomfortable spaces as it gets at the heart of challenging moral questions.”