Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE returns to the Joyce for fortieth anniversary celebration
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE, a Dance Company
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
February 25 – March 1 (Curtain Chat February 25), $32-$82
212-645-2904 www.joyce.org evidencedance.com
Ronald K. Brown/EVIDENCE celebrates its past while looking toward the future in its annual winter season at the Joyce, running February 25 through March 1. Because of the blizzard, opening night, February 24, has been canceled, but a 7:00 show has just been added, and great seats are available if you hurry.
The Brooklyn-based company will be presenting two exciting programs as part of its fortieth anniversary. The first honors longtime collaborator Wunmi Olaiya, a composer, costume designer, dancer, and visual artist who has been working with Brown since 1992, while the second pays tribute to TU Dance cofounding artistic director Toni Pierce-Sands, who danced with Alvin Ailey and EVIDENCE and would begin every TU Dance production with the Ulysses Dove mantra “Nothing to prove, only to share”; Pierce-Sands passed away in November at the age of sixty-three.
“Celebrating Wunmi” — born in London and raised in Lagos, she goes by one name — begins with Ebony Magazine: To a Village, a 1996 piece for Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Ensemble that EVIDENCE debuted in March 1998, featuring music and costumes by Wunmi centered around the repeated phrase “do you see what I see.” Clear as Tear Water is a 2006 solo originally choreographed for Pierce-Sands; at the Joyce, six different dancers will perform the work, which will be set to Wunmi’s “Woman Child” in Program A and Meshell Ndegeocello’s “Heaven” in Program B. Next is 1999’s Gatekeepers, a piece originally for Philadanco that delves into Native American mythology and African traditions, with music and costumes by Wunmi. Following intermission, the evening concludes with the rousing, nonstop Upside Down, an exhilarating excerpt from Brown’s 1998 Destiny, in which the company cuts loose to music by Wunmi, which she will play live with two drummers.
“With the trust Ron affords me, I dare to dream and visualize what the work he is creating is speaking on,” Wunmi explains in a Joyce interview. “Ron tells stories of human beings making their way . . . and, in there, I create costumes to make them visible. Thankful, trust is alive and well.”
Ronald K. Brown, Wunmi Olaiya, and Arcell Cabuag at the 2024 Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gala
Planned prior to Pierce-Sanders’s death from cancer, “A Celebration of the Life and Legacy of Toni Pierce-Sands” kicks off with 2012’s Torch, a touching tribute to former Brown student and dance enthusiast Beth Young, who passed away in January 2012, followed by Clear as Tear Water. The company premiere of 2017’s Where The Light Shines Through, originally commissioned for TU at the Ordway, is choreographed by Brown and his partner, Arcell Cabuag, and set to music by Ndegeocello, Susana Baca, Ballet Folklórico Cutumba de Santiago, and Black Motion. The finale is the spectacular 1999 favorite Grace, originally choreographed for Alvin Ailey, which features twelve dancers moving, in costumes by Wunmi, to a melding of modern dance and West African idioms as only Brown and Cabuag can do, with music by Duke Ellington, Roy Davis Jr., and Fela Aníkúlápó Kuti and live vocals by Gordon Chambers; the beats will stay with you long after the show is over.
“This celebration is long overdue and I am happy the time is now,” Brown says in a program note.
The time is always now to see this extraordinary company, still going strong after forty marvelous years.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The second Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival returns to New York City with sixteen performances and twenty-four workshops by some of the finest companies in the world, running February 19 through March 21.
The exciting series kicks off February 19-21 with the Lyon Opera Ballet presenting Merce Cunningham’s BIPED and Christos Papadopoulos’s Mycelium at City Center and the Ballet national de Marseille bringing (LA)HORDE’s Age of Content to BAM’s Howard Gilman Opera House from February 20 to 22. The lineup continues with such shows as Jan Martens’s The Dog Days Are Over 2.0 at NYU Skirball, Leïla Ka’s Maldonne at New York Live Arts, Noé Soulier’s The Waves at the Joyce, and Lucinda Childs’s Early Works for the Guggenheim’s Works & Process program.
Below is a look at five more of the highlights.
LA Dance Project’s On the Other Side is part of triptych at PAC NYC (photo by Jade Ellis)
BENJAMIN MILLEPIED AND THE L.A. DANCE PROJECT: REFLECTIONS: A TRIPTYCH
Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC)
251 Fulton St.
Saturday, February 21, 8:00, and Sunday, February 22, 3:00, $61-$157 www.dancereflections-vancleefarpels.com pacnyc.org
Benjamin Millepied merges dance, music, and visual art in the New York premiere of Reflections: A Triptych, three pieces inspired by precious stones. The thirty-minute Reflections (2013) boasts a score by David Lang and a bold scenic design by Barbara Kruger, with six dancers musing on longing and memory. The seventeen-minute Hearts and Arrows (2014) features a set by Liam Gillick, music by Philip Glass performed by Kronos Quartet, and fab costumes by Janie Taylor. Several Glass compositions and a set by Mark Bradford anchor the forty-five-minute On the Other Side (2016), which explores communal human experience. Audrey Sides will teach a “Hearts & Arrows Repertory” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on March 12.
Trisha Brown and the Merce Cunningham Trust celebrate their extensive collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg, and the artist’s recent centennial, with two classic works for which Rauschenberg created the visual design and the costumes. Commissioned by BAM in 1983, Set and Reset is a postmodern masterpiece, with music by Laurie Anderson, that was recently reconceived as an art installation at the Tate. The vaudevillian pièce de résistance Travelogue (1977) is set to John Cage’s “Telephones and Birds,” which has been adapted for mobile devices, and is performed within Rauschenberg’s Tantric Geography environment. “I feel like this is the one time I can let the cat out of the bag and let you know just how dear this man is to me,” Brown once said about Rauschenberg. “Bob understands how I construct movement.” Bob returned the compliment: “Particularly with Trisha, it’s always a challenge because she remains so unpredictably fresh.” Cecily Campbell and Jamie Scott will lead a “Trisha Brown Discovery” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on February 28.
Benjamin Millepied reconfigures his Romeo & Juliet Suite specifically for Park Ave. Armory
Benjamin Millepied follows up his PAC NYC Reflections tryptych with an eighty-minute multimedia adaptation of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1930s ballet Romeo and Juliet, combining dance, theater and film reconfigured specifically for the entire Park Ave. Armory building. The cast of eighteen dancers will rotate as Shakespeare’s doomed young couple, with the presentation spreading from the Wade Thompson Drill Hall to the historic period rooms and other spaces, so be sure to get there early. “Of all the places I’ve shown Romeo & Juliet Suite, the armory is by far the most fitting, as it provides the massive scale, flexibility, and grandeur needed to present this work at its fullest potential,” Millepied, who will participate in an artist talk with NYU professor André Lepecki on March 4, said in a statement. “I invite audiences to forget what you think you know about the story of these two star-crossed lovers — and how it should be told — and open your mind to experiencing a radically reimagined tale about love suited for modern day.”
Exciting Belgian choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker displays her principle of “My walking is my dancing” in Exit Above, in which thirteen dancers move to the sounds of Meskerem Meesre interpreting the blues of Robert Johnson in addition to music by TC Matic’s Jean-Marie Aerts and dancer-guitarist Carlos Garbin, with scenic design by Michel François, costumes by Aouatif Boulaich, and opening text taken from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History.” In a 2023 interview, De Keersmaeker explained, “Less is more, I increasingly think. For me that means going back to the source, to the real thing. Blues goes all the way back to that essence, also content wise: It is about sorrow and joy, my sorrow, my joy but also our sorrow, our joy. Both individual and collective: That tension is crucial to me. Blues the ultimate emotional alchemy: we sing about our sadness, but by singing about it with others we transform it into a strength, something joyful. Singing about sorrow immediately contains the consolation for that sorrow. Isn’t this ultimately why we make art? To mourn together and to celebrate joy together. Beauty and solace. I know that beauty is considered to be old-fashioned, but we need it more than ever: Our relationship with nature is disturbed, we are living on the edge of an ecological catastrophe. When you’re lost, it’s a good idea to retrace your footsteps.” Jacob Storer and Clinton Stringer will lead an Exit Above workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance for professionals on March 6 and everyone on March 7.
Compagnie Hervé KOUBI will worship the sun again in Sol Invictus at the Joyce (photo by Nathalie Sternalski)
French choreographer Hervé Koubi studied dance and biology at the University of Aix-en-Provence, and he combines the two elements gorgeously in Sol Invictus as his company of eighteen performers pushes the limits of what the human body can do. Previously staged at the Joyce in 2023, Koubi calls the seventy-five-minute piece “a manifesto for life,” and he fills it with sections that explore ritual, worship, faith in a higher power — in this case, the sun — and life, death, and rebirth. “I want to talk about light, solidarity, and those bonds that unite us,” Koubi explains about the work, which features music and soundscapes by Mikael Karlsson, Maxime Bodson, Beethoven (the funeral procession from the Seventh Symphony), and Steve Reich and costumes by musical arranger Guilaume Gabriel. Several of the dancers will lead a “Sol Invictus Discovery” workshop at the New York Center for Creativity & Dance on March 13, and there will be a Curtain Chat following the March 11 show.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer; you can follow him on Substack here.]
There are no actors on hand but the Mabou Mines production of All That Fall boasts a magnificent set (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
“Space is the place,” Sun Ra sang on the title track of his 1973 album, Space Is the Place. “There’s no limit to the things that you can do. . . . And your life is worthwhile.”
The jazz legend might have been referring to the cosmos, but one of the (many) things that makes my life worthwhile is entering a theater with no idea what to expect visually. I’m not talking about standard setups where the proscenium stage is in front of rows of affixed seats but rooms that can be reshaped and reconfigured in multiple ways. For example, I am filled with anticipation every time I walk into Park Ave. Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, TFANA’s Polonsky Shakespeare Center, the Shed’s McCourt, BAM Fisher, and the Signature’s Romulus Linney Courtyard Theatre, all of which can be transformed into fascinating rearrangements.
Below are four recent shows I’ve seen that offered unique spatial experiences.
The cast of All That Fall does not appear in person at the 122 Community Center (photos by Jeri Coppola)
UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–25, $20-$50 www.maboumines.org utrfest.org
Since 1970, the experimental avant-garde Mabou Mines troupe has been challenging the boundaries of theater, and they do it again with their adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s 1957 radio play, All That Fall. When audience members get off the elevator at the 122 Community Center, they encounter a series of objects in the hallway and a side room that prepare them for the show: a photo of the Orangedale train station next to a radio playing a Big Band–era instrumental; a poster of a railway man’s “hand, flag and lamp signals” with an actual rusty lamp; a photo of the train station interior, with empty benches, which hints at what we’ll soon see; horse-racing information; and a piece of paper with the opening quote from Beckett’s 1938 novel, Murphy, “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new,” along with a drawing of a tree by Harry Bliss with the caption “A tree greeting the morning sun, because it has no choice.”
Inside the theater, the seats are arranged in a traditional manner, but the set is like an art installation, a large model of a miniature town with tiny houses, bumpy hills, rocky streets, a river, two bridges, hens near the tracks, and an elevated train station, all surrounded by a map on the walls; in the back are regular-size remnants, an abandoned bicycle and parts of some kind of moving vehicle. In front of the model, a man is projecting slides on an old carousel of costumed men and women — the characters the actors will be portraying. Shortly after the projections stop and the man leaves, we realize that there will be no actors for us to watch; in true radio-play fashion, they will only be heard, prerecorded, but we now know what they look like.
The narrative is fairly straightforward: Mrs Maddy Rooney (Randy Danson) is worried when her blind husband, Dan (Tony Torn), is late getting home. She finds out that the ever-dependable train has not arrived yet, and she is concerned why. Along her journey, she meets up with Christy the carter (Jesse Lenat), Mr Barrell the station master (Lenat), Mr Tyler the retired bill collector (Steven Rattazzi), Mr Slocum the racecourse manager (Torn), Tommy the railway porter (Tẹmídayọ Amay), the pious Miss Fitt (Wendy vanden Heuvel), the little girl Dolly (Lila Blue), and the little boy Jerry (Sylvan Schneiderman). They have absurdist conversations about dung, the Matterhorn, damnation, sex, bicycles and vans, the Titanic and the Lusitania, and “the horrors of home life.”
Mrs Rooney’s dialogue is filled with lovely snippets about human existence: “What kind of a country is this where a woman can’t weep her heart out on the highways and byways without being tormented by retired bill-brokers!” she complains to Mr Tyler. “Christ what a planet,” she declares to Miss Fitt. “I do not exist,” she says to Tommy. “I am not half alive nor anything approaching it,” she explains to Mr Tyler. “Have you no respect for misery?”
The breathtaking set is by Thomas Dunn, lit by Jennifer Tipton, with a bevy of sound effects by Bruce Odland, from animal noises to a storm that shakes your seat almost like Sensurround. Mabout Mines cofounder JoAnne Akalaitis directs with a wry sense of humor.
Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber revive David Gordon’s Times Four for its fiftieth anniversary (photo by Maria Baranova)
LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85 newyorklivearts.org
In May 1977, husband-and-wife dancers David Gordon and Valda Setterfield performed their 1975 piece, Times Four in the SoHo loft where they lived and worked. Their son-in-law, Wally Cardona, has brought their little-seen pas d’deux back for a fiftieth-anniversary tribute, teaming up with Molly Lieber to re-create it from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, taking place in the same loft. It is like a 1960s happening: The limited seating is a single row of folding chairs around the periphery of the otherwise empty room; in addition, the night I attended, there were numerous familiar choreographers and dancers in the audience, all greeting one another. There is no score; the only sounds are Cardona’s (Interventions,The Set Up) and Lieber’s (Rude World,Gloria) breathing and their feet and other body parts touching the floor, sometimes landing softly, sometimes hard. They stare at the walls and windows, rarely making eye contact with the audience, as they glide primarily in unison to four beats, then deleting one move and replacing it with another.
Concentrating mostly on their legs and feet, they move forward, backward, sideways, lifting here, pounding there, almost always in unison. They fall to the ground, extend their bodies, come within inches of the audience. When slight differences occur, you can feel it in your bones. You never know which direction they are going to turn in, resulting in a thrilling suspense to it all.
They both exert remarkable strength as they perform difficult maneuvers, their muscles rippling, sweat forming. It’s a compelling feat of human endurance that last about sixty tense, exhilarating minutes. A poem associated with the dance explains, “well worn wood floor / smooth burnished brown / the kind of floor that begs to be danced on / that wants to seduce me out of my shoes and socks. . . . I face my back to the windows / I imagine 1975.”
Consider me seduced.
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Stephanie Berger)
PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18 www.bam.org www.prototypefestival.org
In September 2006, experimental avant-garde legend Richard Foreman and composer Michael Gordon debuted their surreal post-rock opera, What to wear, at the Redcat in LA. It took twenty years, but the show has finally made it to New York at the BAM Strong Harvey Theater as part of the Prototype festival, in its first-ever revival. To prepare everyone for what awaited inside the theater, in the lobby was Foreman’s detailed original concept design model for the complex, fabulously overstuffed stage, a kind of mind-blowing melding of Monty Python, Pablo Picasso, and Alice in Wonderland. It is thrilling to walk into the Harvey and see how that set has been painstakingly re-created at full size by Michael Darling, like magic; Darling also did the props, and the wild costumes are again by E. B. Brooks. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson direct, honoring the 2006 production, which you can watch online here.
The show begins with fancy lighting coming down from the ceiling as a giant cartoonish duck emerges from a doorway and the deep voice of Richard Foreman booms from the heavens: “As of this moment, this ugly duckling is now effectively banished from the realm of the oh so beautiful people.” The duck exits, and sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo sing, “This is Mad’line X” eight times, then adding, “In a terrible world / One unpleasant world / Such a bad, bad world.” Over the next sixty-plus minutes, those four are joined by St. Vincent, an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers, and the seven-piece Bang on a Can orchestra caged in one corner as the story goes through such chapters as “Mad’line X, who understands now,” “So sad but I reject you,” and “When a duck enters a fine restaurant.”
Marchers in kilts hold signs with a big X on them, a pointing finger drops down from above like the hand of G-d, skulls abound, headpieces feature little colored balls on top, a character walks around in a barrel, golf clubs become weapons, a head is locked in a box, and cool wizardry occurs just about everywhere. The unsatisfying ending does not diminish the triumph of this engaging revival. We are told that “Madeline X lives in this terrible world,” but any world that includes works by Foreman can’t be all bad.
AN ARK
The Griffin Theater at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building at Hudson Yards
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
Tuesday – Sunday through March 1, $45 theshed.org
“Don’t panic. Don’t be scared. This must feel strange to you. It felt strange to me,” an unnamed character played by Sir Ian McKellen says at the beginning of British playwright Simon Stephens’s An Ark, continuing at the Shed through March 1.
Too late.
In the summer of 2021, Stephens’s Blindness was reimagined for the pandemic, presented at the Daryl Roth Theatre in Union Square, where a maximum of eighty-six masked and blindfolded people were seated in chairs in pods of two, either facing the same or opposite directions, each couple at least six feet away from other pairs. Everyone listened to the play, about a spreading virus that leads to chaos, through individual binaural headphones; the prerecorded narrative was performed by Juliet Stevenson.
In the summer of 2023, Tin Drum brought Kagami to the Shed’s Griffin Theater, which began with a historical multimedia installation that led to a mixed-reality concert in which everyone put on specially designed optically transparent devices that made it appear that the late pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto was playing live, enveloped in augmented reality art. In actuality, the room was completely empty except for a row of chairs along the perimeter where audience members could sit and watch, although it was much better to walk around and get up close and personal with Sakamoto — you could even go right through him.
The prep for the show is mind-bogglingly annoying. The audience is encouraged to arrive at least fifteen or twenty minutes before showtime in order to check their coats and bags, which is mandatory; however, the line was so long when we go there that we were advised to just bring our stuff in with us. At the Griffin, a sign announced, “wipe your feet / check your glasses / store your shoes / enter through the curtain / find a seat / put on your headset / sit back / enjoy the ride.” There was no curtain; the open doorway revealed a large room with plush red carpeting, a giant glowing orb hanging in the center from the ceiling, and three circular rows of chairs with a pathway through the middle. While my guest waited for corrective lenses — glasses won’t work with the headset — I took off my shoes and jacket, placed them on the floor, and tried to grab a specific seat, then come back and store my garb in one of the small cubby-hole benches, but I was told by a guide that I couldn’t do that; first I had to put the shoes and coat away, then someone would guide me to a chair. The shoes fit in the little cubby, but I had to really force the coat into another slot, only to be told that I had placed them in the wrong bench and had to move them. By then, my guest was already seated — with her jacket, which she was allowed to keep on her lap, and bag, which she could put under her chair.
Mixed reality An Ark at the shed is a confusing jumble (photo by Marc J. Franklin)
Next, you put on the headsets, and four white holographic chairs appear in front of you; mine had to be adjusted by a guide because the chairs were enormous and floating in the ether. I was disappointed that I could also see everyone else in the room, which detracted from the personal nature of the show, even though theater is usually meant to be a communal experience. Then, guides wheeled the cubby benches straight through the middle of the theater and out the curtain on the other side of the room, further disturbing the alternate reality that was being created. As the play proper began, with the four characters, all barefoot and wearing white, entering the space and sitting down, it was hard not to wonder why the floor had to be carpeted and why we had had to take off our shoes; perhaps it was some kind of ASMR thing.
For forty-seven minutes, the actors perform just for you, making intense direct eye contact, reaching out with their hands, and using the second person as they recount multiple versions of a life, from birth, childhood, and adolescence to adulthood, the senior years, and death. For example: “At school you work hard but you never really feel like you belong,” “You’ll want to tell people about the things that have happened to you in here,” and “You get on first name terms with your pharmacist.” The dialogue is filled with detailed descriptions of objects and scenarios that involve all five senses; while poetic, they don’t propel the plot, which remains mysterious through the end.
Recorded in one take and directed by Sarah Frankcom (Our Town,Punk Rock) with sound by Ben and Max Ringham, set and costumes by Rosanna Vize, and lighting by Seth Reiser, An Ark has numerous beautiful moments, and the interaction between the characters and you can be utterly chilling (Sir Ian McKellen is only a few feet away!); when Sheehy reached a hand out to me, I reached back, attempting to grasp it.
But too much of it was confusing and unnecessary; I’m eager to see where the technology goes. Hopefully the kinks will be smoothed out and creators will have more faith in the story itself, without all the bells, whistles, and rules.
As McKellen says early on, “When this is over . . . things will have changed forever.” Well, hopefully not too much.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
UNDER THE RADAR: KANJINCHO
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 8–11, $63 japansociety.org utrfest.org
Kinoshita Kabuki makes its North American debut at Japan Society with a rousing adaptation of the 1840 Kabuki classic Kanjincho (“The Subscription List”), reimagining it as a contemporary hip-hop and pop-culture-infused theatrical experience.
Based on the Noh play Ataka, the original Kanjincho was written by Namiki Gohei III, with nagauta songs by Kineya Rokusaburo IV and choreography by Nishikawa Senzo IV. Company founder Yuichi Kinoshita has modernized the text, with a new score by Taichi Kaneko and movement by Wataru Kitao, resulting in a tense and thrilling eighty-minute drama about loyalty, revenge, and the borders that separate people not only geographically but by race, gender, class, and power in the past and present.
Inspired by actual twelfth-century events, Kanjincho tells the story of half brothers Lord Minamoto-no Yoritomo and General Minamoto Yoshitsune around the time of the Genpei War. Yoritomo has become the first shogun of the Kamakura shogunate, but he distrusts the motives of the military hero Yoshitsune (Noemi Takayama) and has demanded his capture. Yoshitsune, disguised as a porter, heads out on the seldom used Hokurokudō road with the brave and loyal Benkei (Lee V) and four shitenno (armed retainers), Kamei Rokuro (Kazunori Kameshima), Kataoka Hachiro (Hiroshi Shigeoka), Suruga Jiro (Yuya Ogaki), and Hitachi (Yasuhiro Okano), who are pretending to be mountain priests collecting donations on their way to repair Todaiji Temple in Nara. In fact, they are seeking safety in Michinoku with the Fujiwara clan.
When they reach the Ataka Barrier checkpoint, one of many set up throughout Japan to stop Yoshitsune, they are met by Mr. Togashi (Ryotaro Sakaguchi) and his four guards (Kameshima, Shigeoka, Ogaki, and Okano), who are determined to bring Yoshitsune back and behead him in front of Yoritomo. Togashi has been told that Yoshitsune is traveling with a group of fake mountain priests, so he is suspicious of them. “I’m gonna make every last damn mountain priest grovel at Mr. Togashi’s feet!” one of the guards declares.
Togashi decides to test Benkei with a series of questions about their mission and Buddhism that turns into a sensational verbal duel in which Benkei shows off his considerable mental acuity, impressing Togashi, who is leaning toward letting them pass even as one of his guards believes that the lowly porter is Yoshitsune. The cat-and-mouse game continues through a picnic with a transistor radio and contemporary snacks, the four shitenno breaking out into a J-pop boy band, and Benkei enjoying a whole lot of sake.
Beautifully directed and designed by Sugio Kunihara (Tokaido Yotsuya Kaidan,Shin Suikoden), Kanjincho — the English title, “The Subscription List,” refers to the scroll of supposed temple donors Togashi asks Benkei to reveal — takes place on a raised horizontal hanamachi (“flower path”) platform behind which two rows of the audience sit. The characters are dressed by Haruki Okamura in modern-day black militaristic gear except for Yoshitsune, who wears a wide-brimmed hat and carries a large walking stick, and Togashi, who is in more regal attire. The sound, by Daisuke Hoshino and Chiharu Tokida, includes moments of silence amid forest noises and Kaneko’s loud electronic and rap score.
Lighting designers Masayoshi Takada, Arisa Nagasaka, and Naruya Sugimoto nearly steal the show with spectacular effects, from pinpoint laserlike beams, slow, shadowy atmospheres, and an occasional subtle white bar on the floor that represents the numerous barriers separating the characters. “No matter how much I care about you / I can’t hold on to you / because of the borderline / You’re right next to me / but still so far away,” the pseudo–boy band sings in Japanese, except for the word borderline, which they say in English, connecting East and West. The East-West relationship is further developed by Kitao’s choreography, which incorporates traditional kabuki (primarily by Takayama) and hip hop, as well as by the casting of Benkei, portrayed by the outstanding Lee V, a caucasian poetry slam champion who was born in the United States; he evokes David Harbour as Sheriff Hopper in Stranger Things.
At its heart, Kinoshita’s adaptation attempts to break down barriers without preaching, even as the shitenno proclaim, “Equality for all!” and “Everyone’s the same! No more discrimination!” Having the same four men play the shitenno and the guards, running from one side of the stage to the other to indicate who they are without changing costumes — one actor apologizes for coughing first as a shitenno, then as a guard, equating the two despite their being enemies — packs a powerful message, especially in America today, as ICE agents patrol the streets of major cities rounding up citizens and legal and illegal immigrants alike.
Kunihara and Kinoshita may be delivering a warning, but they do so with a masterful sense of fun that transcends all our differences.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Elevator Repair Service’s Ulysses is a highlight of the January performance festival season (photo by Maria Baranova)
Every January, many of us begin the new year with resolutions to make positive changes in our lives; I find the best way to start that is by checking out the latest in cutting-edge and experimental theater, music, dance, opera, film, and other forms of entertainment. Performance festivals abound this month, at tiny venues you’ve never heard of, places you’ve always wanted to go to but haven’t yet, and well-known spaces you haven’t been to in years.
You now have the chance to fill those voids at such festivals as Under the Radar, Prototype, Exponential, Out-Front!, Live Artery, Winter Jazzfest, New Ear, the Fire This Time, and PhysFestNYC, none of them costing nearly as much as a Broadway show. As sound designer Mark Anthony Thompson says in the below video, “Get out of your house and be with people.”
Here are only some of the highlights of this exhilarating time to try something that might be outside your comfort zone — or right up your alley.
UNDER THE RADAR: IN HONOR OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT
New York Theatre Workshop
79 East Fourth St. between Second & Third Aves.
Tuesday – Sunday, January 7–18, $35 www.nytw.org utrfest.org
Obie-winning actor, playwright, rapper, and director Roger Guenveur Smith has staged such solo shows as A Huey P. Newton Story, about the founder of the Black Panthers, Frederick Douglass Now, in which he embodies the nineteenth-century abolitionist and orator, and Juan and John, which explored the real-life 1965 fight between Major League pitcher Juan Marichal and catcher John Roseboro. For the 2026 Under the Radar festival, he will perform In Honor of Jean-Michel Basquiat, about his friendship and collaboration with the highly influential Brooklyn-born artist and musician who died of a heroin overdose in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven. Smith and Basquiat met during their LA club years in the 1980s; Smith created the character of Smiley, inspired by Basquiat, for the 1989 Spike Lee film Do the Right Thing. The sixty-minute piece features live sound design by Mark Anthony Thompson; the January 8 and 15 performances will be followed by a Q&A.
UNDER THE RADAR: KANJINCHO
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
January 8–11, $63 japansociety.org utrfest.org
Yuichi Kinoshita reimagines the 1840 Kabuki classic Kanjincho (“The Subscription List”) as a contemporary hip-hop and pop-culture-infused theatrical experience, making its North American premiere at Japan Society January 8–11 as part of Under the Radar. The eighty-minute show is set in the twelfth century, around the Genpei War, a civil clash between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The work is performed by the Kyoto-based Kinoshita Kabuki, all dressed in black, and directed by Sugio Kunihara on a runway-like hanamachi (“flower path”) platform that juts into the audience, with the first two rows on the stage itself. The story concerns war, betrayal, race, and class as refugees attempt to cross borders, giving it a modern-day relevance. The company’s previous works include Musume Dojoji,Shinju Ten no Amijima, and Sannin Kichisa. The 7:30 show on January 8 will be followed by a reception; the 7:30 performance on January 9 will conclude with an artist Q&A. Ticket holders are invited to visit the immersive exhibition “Chiharu Shiota: Two Home Countries” with complementary same-day admission.
UNDER THE RADAR: ALL THAT FALL
Mabou Mines@122CC
150 1st Ave. at Ninth St.
January 8–26 www.maboumines.org utrfest.org
“It is our desire to create, as Beckett says, ‘a text written to come out of the dark,’” director JoAnne Akalaitis says about Mabou Mines’s tenth production of a work by Samuel Beckett, the absurdist black comedy All That Fall, following such presentations as Cascando,Happy Days,Play, and Worstward Ho over the course of the company’s fifty-six-year history. The seventy-five-minute one-act radio play will be performed by Randy Danson, Jesse Lenat, Steven Rattazzi, Tony Torn, Tẹmídayọ Amay, Wendy vanden Heuvel, Lila Blue, and Sylvan Schneiderman as part of Under the Radar. “What have I done to deserve all this, what, what?” the frail Mrs Maddy Rooney moans to bill broker Mr Tyler, later adding, “Have you no respect for misery?” I saw Trevor Nunn’s splendid version in 2013 starring Michael Gambon and Eileen Atkins and can’t wait to see what Akalaitis (Beckett’s First Love,BAD NEWS! I was there . . .) has in store for us this time around, with a set by Thomas Dunn, lighting by Jennifer Tipton, sound by Bruce Odland, costumes by Andreea Mincic, and projections by Jeri Coppola. Expect the unexpected.
Founded in 2005, “Winter Jazzfest celebrates the music as a living entity, wherein history collides with the future in every note. Creative improvisation in the digital age continues to stimulate thought and emotion of its listeners, embracing innovation, defying instrumental boundaries and the old cliches of ‘What is Jazz?’” The festival runs January 8–13 and is highlighted by the Manhattan Marathon on January 9, boasting forty-five shows at Le Poisson Rouge, Nublu, DROM, City Winery, Close Up, Zinc, and the Bitter End, featuring Nels Cline’s “Songs from Lovers,” the Getdown, James Carter, David Murray, Lady Blackbird, and many more.
Drita Kabashi stars in Sara Farrington’s Euripides adaptation at the Tank (photo by Carol Ostrow)
APAP: A TROJAN WOMAN
Theater 98 at the Tank
312 West Thirty-Sixth St. between Eighth & Ninth Aves.
January 10-11, $23-$42 apap365.org/conference thetanknyc.org
“A Trojan Woman exists inside an act of modern warfare, inspired by an early moment in the Russian war against Ukraine that affected me deeply,” playwright Sara Farrington explains in a note about her adaptation of Euripides’s 415 BCE Greek tragedy The Trojan Women. Originally performed at the outdoor Theatro Attikou Aldous/Katina Paxinou Attica Grove Theater in Athens, Greece, in July 2023, A Trojan Woman will be at the Tank January 10-11 as part of the APAP (Association of Performing Arts Professionals) festival, directed by Meghan Finn and starring Drita Kabashi as Irina; the costumes are by Suzanne Bocanegra, with video by Ana Veselic. Farrington has previously collaborated with her husband, Reid Farrington, on such productions as BrandoCapote,CasablancaBox, and Dora Maar, always providing a unique take on the world and theater itself; Sara is currently working on Dr. Uncanny Presents: Moreau ’96, a musical based on the 2014 documentary Lost Soul: The Doomed Journey of Richard Stanley’s Island of Dr. Moreau. She is also the author of the popular Theater Is Hard. on Substack.
Ian Andrew Askew and Johnnie Cruise Mercer will present world premieres at Out-FRONT! Fest (photos by Maria Baranova and Johnnie Cruise Mercer)
OUT-FRONT! FESTIVAL: IAN ANDREW AND JOHNNIE CRUISE MERCER
Judson Memorial Church
243 Thompson St. at 55 Washington Square South
Saturday, January 10, and Sunday, January 11, free with advance RSVP (suggested donation $28.52) pioneersgoeast.org www.judson.org
Pioneers Go East Collective’s multidisciplinary Out-FRONT! Fest “champions the voices of LGBTQ and Feminist artists for a lively exchange of art and culture.” Curated by Gian Marco Riccardo Lo Forte, Remi Harris, Philip Treviño, and Joyce Isabelle, the 2026 edition runs January 5–11, with works by such performers as Dominica Greene, Suzzanne Ponomarenko, Alexa Grae, Sugar Vendil, Jo Warren, Owen Prum, and Corentin JPM Leven at Judson Memorial Church. On January 10 and 11, Ian Andrew Askew will present the world premiere of SLAMDANCE punk lessons, which explores sociopolitical aspects of moshing and violence, followed by the world premiere of Johnnie Cruise Mercer’s Mercies of a Butterfly, “a movement allegory about resilience.” All tickets are free with suggested donation and are going fast.
Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber restage David Gordon’s 1975 duet in original SoHo loft (b&w photo by Babette Mangolte; color photo by Daqi Fang)
LIVE ARTERY: TIMES FOUR / DAVID GORDON: 1975/2025
New York Live Arts / Pick Up Performance Co. Studio
541 Broadway between Spring & Prince Sts.
January 11–13, $33.85 newyorklivearts.org
Two of my favorite dancer-choreographers, Wally Cardona and Molly Lieber, have teamed up for Times Four / David Gordon: 1975/2025, an adaptation of David Gordon’s 1975 duet with his wife and muse, Valda Setterfield, that will run January 11–13 as part of New York Live Arts’ Live Artery festival. The work will be presented in the same SoHo loft where Obie and Bessie winners Gordon and Setterfield debuted it fifty years ago; Times Four has not been seen in its entirety since then. In 2021, Gordon asked Cardona, who is married to playwright Ain Gordon, David and Valda’s son, if he wanted to perform something from his archives. Cardona was instantly interested in Times Four, an unusual, relatively unknown piece, but Gordon rejected that. However, after both Gordon and Setterfield died, the former in 2022 at the age of eighty-five, the latter in 2023 at eighty-eight, Cardona decided to resurrect Times Four in their honor. “I think that they, especially Valda, would be very happy that we are doing this piece and that we are performing something,” Cardona told choreographer, dancer, director, and NYLA head Bill T. Jones in an online interview. Cardona (Interventions,The Set Up) and Lieber (Rude World,Gloria) reconstructed the piece from a video rehearsal, Setterfield’s handwritten notes, photographs, and other ephemera, as no footage of the full original duet, which is done in silence, exists. The audience will sit in folding chairs on all four sides of the loft.
Eric Berryman shares African American toasts in Wooster Group’s Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me (photo by Marika Kent)
UNDER THE RADAR: GET YOUR ASS IN THE WATER AND SWIM LIKE ME
Joe’s Pub, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
Monday, January 12, and Tuesday, January 13, $36 utrfest.org publictheater.org
In 2019, the Wooster Group production of The B-Side: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons,” a Record Album Interpretation earned a Drama Desk nomination for Unique Theatrical Experience for Eric Berryman’s multimedia adaptation of a 1965 LP compiled by Bruce Jackson, consisting of performances by inmates of color on segregated agricultural prison farms. Writer and actor Berryman and director Kate Valk followed that up with Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me, which is having an encore presentation at Joe’s Pub as part of Under the Radar. This time Berryman dives deep into Jackson’s 1974 book and 1976 disc, Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry from Black Oral Tradition, a collection of folktales known as toasts, made for heroes and antiheroes in the Black storytelling canon. The tales are filled with tawdry sex and extreme violence — bullets are flying everywhere — but as funny as they are, there’s also an underlying sense of discomfort, particularly with a primarily white audience, as the stories contain stereotypes reminiscent of minstrelsy. Berryman compares over-the-top characters to Greek myths, where such figures as Hercules and Jason “would do stupid shit because they knew it would help them uh, uh, more quickly achieve kleos, and get kleos . . . A community creates the heroes that they need.” Berryman (Primary Trust,Toni Stone) is not just sharing old fables but exploring Black identity then and now. At one point he digresses into a discussion of his own name, how disappointed he is to be anchored with the plain “Eric” when he has relatives called Qasim, Idris, Indira, Akeem, Alenka, and Adia. (He does note that there is a Gary but does not share that it’s his uncle, Grammy-winning jazz saxophonist Gary Bartz.) The show concludes with the all-time favorite “Stackolee,” a tale of murder and mayhem that has been recorded in different versions by Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, Wilbert Harrison, Long Cleve Reed, Lloyd Price, and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, among others, its familiarity spotlighting the centrality rather than the marginalization of the Black experience in American popular culture.
PhysFestNYC: BILL BOWERS: IT GOES WITHOUT SAYING
Stella Adler Center for the Arts
65 Broadway
Tuesday, January 13, $20, 7:30 & 9:00 www.physfestnyc.org
PhysFestNYC was started in 2024 as “a community-focused festival that celebrates, enriches, and envisions our field of physical theater . . . [which] tends to be experimental, innovative, and genre-breaking.” The third annual event, taking place January 8–18 at the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, consists of workshops, panel discussions, masterclasses, and live performances. On January 13, Bill Bowers will present the one-man show It Goes without Saying, which delves into his life and career from his childhood in Montana to studying with Marcel Marceau and appearing in several Broadway productions.
Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Vin Knight, and Scott Shepherd rehearse for NYC premiere of ERS’s Ulysses (photo by Joan Marcus)
UNDER THE RADAR: ULYSSES
Martinson Theater, the Public Theater
425 Lafayette St. at Astor Pl.
January 13 – February 15, $109 publictheater.org utrfest.org
Elevator Repair Service follows up its farewell performance of the eight-hour Gatz at the Public with its adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, clocking in at a mere two hours and forty minutes. Directed by John Collins, who has previously tackled such literary biggies for ERS as The Sound and the Fury and The Sun Also Rises in addition to Gatz, the show stars Dee Beasnael, Kate Benson, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, Stephanie Weeks, and codirector and dramaturg Scott Shepherd, with sets by dots, costumes by Enver Chakartash, and projections by Matthew Deinhart. Joyce is having a bit of a renaissance onstage recently, with a rare revival of Joyce’s only play, Exiles, last winter and Colin Murphy’s The United States vs. Ulysses at the Irish Arts Center last spring; ERS’s Ulysses, part of Under the Radar, promises to be the best of the bunch.
Writer Jay Stull (The Capables,Rantoul and Die) and director Jillian Jetton have put together a fantastic cast for my utopias, running at the Loading Dock Theatre as part of the Exponential Festival: Brittany Bradford, Ugo Chukwu, Fernando Gonzalez, Melissa Hurst, Jon Norman Schneider, Colleen Werthmann, and Julyana Soelistyo. The show is about a kind of postapocalyptic nightmare in New York City as a group of survivors wonder what the future holds.
Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson stage first revival of Richard Foreman’s What to wear at BAM (photo by Scott Groller)
PROTOTYPE: WHAT TO WEAR
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Strong Harvey Theater
651 Fulton St. at Ashland Pl.
January 15-18 www.bam.org www.prototypefestival.org
“Don’t finish what you start,” reads one of ninety-four notecards collected in experimental theater maestro Richard Foreman’s posthumously published book No Title. Fortunately, Foreman, the founder of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater who died last January at the age of eighty-seven, finished much of what he started, including more than eighty plays, operas, films, and books. The seven-time Obie winner and Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow turned the theater and opera community inside out and upside down with such influential avant-garde works as Sophia = (Wisdom) Part 3: The Cliffs,Pandering to the Masses, and Elephant Steps. In the past year and a half, Object Collection presented the world premiere of Foreman’s Suppose Beautiful Madeline Harvey, the Wooster Collective staged 1987’s Symphony of Rats, and the Segal Center Film Festival on Theater and Performance held a retrospective of Foreman’s movies and videos. Big Dance Theater’s Paul Lazar and Annie-B Parson are now reviving, for the first time since its premiere, Foreman and Michael Gordon’s 2006 surreal post-rock opera What to wear, running January 15–18 at the Harvey as part of the Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave festivals. Foreman wrote the libretto and directed the original; Gordon composed the music, which will be performed by Bang on a Can All-Stars. The cast is highlighted by St. Vincent, sopranos Sarah Frei and Sophie Delphis, mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn, and tenor Morgan Mastrangelo, along with an ensemble of more than a dozen vocalists and dancers.
NEW EAR FESTIVAL: NIGHT 02
Fridman Gallery
169 Bowery between Delancey & Broome Sts.
Saturday, January 17, $22.46–$43.57, 8:00 withfriends.events
The Fridman Gallery’s annual New Ear multimedia festival showcasing “time-based art in all its forms” is highlighted by an impressive roster of performers on January 17, consisting of dancer and choreographer Jade Manns, artist and biohacker Dr. Heather Dewey-Hagborg, and the live debut of the trio of sound artist Stephen Vitellio, Fugazy drummer Brendan Canty, and multi-instrumentalist and producer-engineer Hahn Rowe, supporting their sophomore LP, Second. Talullah Calderwood, Sue Huang, and Konjur Collective open the three-day fest on January 16, while La Frae Sci, Ben Shirken x Dorothy Carlos, and Lucky Dragons close things out on January 18.
Fire This Time fest features ten-minute works by six playwrights
THE FIRE THIS TIME FESTIVAL: TEN-MINUTE PLAY PROGRAM
The Apollo Stages at the Victoria
233 West 125th St. between Frederick Douglass & Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvds.
January 23–31, $51.25 www.firethistimefestival.com
Founded in 2009 by Kelley Nicole Girod, the Fire This Time Festival, now in its seventeenth year, “provides a platform for early career playwrights of African and African American descent.” The 2026 iteration comprises six ten-minute shows at the Apollo Stages at the Victoria: Teniia Micazia Brown’s Everything But–, Preston Crowder’s Black to Save the Day, Mo Holmes’s Clumsy, Naomi Lorrain’s DNR, DeLane McDuffie’s Goose, and Donathan Walters’s White Diamond.
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
The Holy Blues is part of all-new evenings of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater season at City Center (photo by Steven Pisano)
ALVIN AILEY AMERICAN DANCE THEATER
New York City Center
131 West 55th St. between Sixth & Seventh Aves.
December 3 – January 4, $45-$195 www.alvinailey.org www.nycitycenter.org
It’s been a time of change for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. This has been the first year without the shining light of Judith Jamison, the beloved Ailey dancer and artistic director who passed away last November at the age of eighty-one. That month, her successor, Robert Battle, became a resident choreographer with the Paul Taylor Dance Company. And this past spring, longtime Ailey dancer and Juilliard Dance Division dean Alicia Graf Mack was named the fourth artistic director in the history of AAADT.
“This monumental season draws deeply on Alvin Ailey’s legacy rooted in celebrating the resilience of the human spirit while extending its truth and bold virtuosity to reflect this moment in time and our hopes for the future,” Graf Mack said in a statement about the company’s upcoming annual City Center residency. “Each new creation shares the utterly distinctive voice of its choreographer, testifying to the vitality of the tradition Mr. Ailey gave us and the gifts of spirit that Judith Jamison so lovingly nurtured. I am grateful and honored to be a caretaker of this ever-changing continuum of inspiration, along with Matthew Rushing and the company of brilliant dancers whose artistry will move us all as we take our next steps forward.”
Running December 3 through January 4, the 2025 City Center season features the company premiere of Medhi Walerski’s Blink of an Eye, set to J. S. Bach’s violin sonatas and partita, and a new production of Jamison’s duet A Case of You, originally a birthday tribute to Chairman Emerita Joan Weill, danced to Diana Krall’s version of the Joni Mitchell song.
There are five world premieres from a wide range of choreographers. Inspired by Geoffrey Holder’s book Black Gods, Green Islands, about Trinidad and Tobago, Cuban American theater director and arts educator and activist Maija García’s Jazz Island celebrates the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, with original music by jazz trumpeter Etienne Charles. Matthew Neenan’s Ailey debut, Difference Between, is set to music by MacArthur fellow and two-time Obie winner Heather Christian, who sings in “Tomorrow”: “Difference between. Deference, reverence, sever its shoots on the bean / Sanity, brevity, bravery, levity — these are the virtues / are any restored or recorded or / pored over once the romance of it leaves?”
Superstar Jamar Roberts, the company’s first resident choreographer, follows up such gems as Ode,A Jam Session for Troubling Times, and Holding Space with Song of the Anchorite, a reimagining of Alvin Ailey’s 1961 solo Hermit Songs, set to jazz trumpeter Avishai Cohen’s interpretation of a Ravel adagio. In Embrace, Fredrick Earl Mosley incorporates tunes by Stevie Wonder, Kate Bush, Etta James, Maxwell, Ed Sheeran, Des’ree, and P!nk in exploring the intimacy of human connection.
And Urban Bush Women founder and Ailey Artist in Residence Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, collaborating with current Ailey dancer Samantha Figgins and former company member Chalvar Monteiro, looks to the concepts of the Ring Shout and the Door of No Return in The Holy Blues, named after the title of Alvin Ailey’s journal. The twenty-five-minute piece debuted at BAM in June; in a company interview, Figgins explained, “Through life, we have these hills and valleys, our human suffering and our pleasure, our delight, our bliss, our joy, and The Holy Blues is a chance to watch that journey of a group of people — a community, of course, but all individuals — how they tackle the challenges of bringing themselves up out of whatever pain they may be in, out of whatever life throws at them, and how they are able to create something beautiful out of it.”
The thirty-two dancers will also perform the Ailey classics Memoria,Night Creature,Pas de Duke,Masekela Langage,A Song for You,Opus McShann,For Bird — with Love,Love Songs,Reflections in D,Hidden Rites, and Cry; Ronald K. Brown’s Grace; Lar Lubovitch’s Many Angels; Rushing’s Sacred Songs; Elisa Monte’s Treading; and Alonzo King’s Following the Subtle Current Upstream. Many of the programs will conclude with the one and only Revelations, six with live music. In addition, the Saturday family matinees will be followed by a Q&A.
“I join with the entire company in welcoming Alicia Graf Mack in her new role as our artistic director,” Rushing said in a statement. “Her great respect for and commitment to the Ailey mission, along with the perspective and integrity that informs her vision, will help elevate everything we do. We are excited to welcome audiences to New York City Center this holiday season to be uplifted by cherished classics and remarkable new works as the curtain goes up on the next chapter in Ailey’s extraordinary story.”
[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
Jack Ferver reimagines Our Town through a deeply personal queer lens in My Town (photo by Jeremy Jacob)
MY TOWN
NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts
566 La Guardia Pl.
November 21-22, $42-$57, 7:30 nyuskirball.org jackferver.com
“Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you,” Emily Webb says in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?”
Dancer, actor, choreographer, and professor Jack Ferver has been sharing their unique and impassioned realizations about life in deeply personal and intensely funny and frightening shows since 2007; their works are complex, intoxicating fusions of pop culture, Hollywood glitz and glamour, childhood trauma, and loneliness, filtered through a distinctively queer sensibility. Their latest piece, My Town, running November 21 and 22 at the NYU Skirball Center, incorporates Emily, a romantic idealist who serves as the heart and soul of Wilder’s 1938 Pulitzer Prize–winning drama about the fictional early-twentieth-century American community of Grover’s Corners.
In a 2010 review of Rumble Ghost, an intimate story about the search for a missing child inspired by the 1982 film Poltergeist, I noted that Ferver “once again makes viewers squirm for a whole range of reasons.” For more than fifteen years, they have both challenged and delighted audiences with such obsessive yet relatable pieces as All of a Sudden, a reimagination of Tennessee Williams’s 1959 melodrama Suddenly, Last Summer; Night Light Bright Light, an examination of the 1964 suicide of dancer, actor, and choreographer Fred Herko; and Everything Is Imaginable, in which Ferver is like a devilish cherub paying tribute to Judy Garland and Martha Graham while asking us all to take stock of our lives.
“Artists are the stomachs of society. We digest the indigestible,” they told me in a 2012 interview focusing on Two Alike. “That means we explore all terrains. Gender and sexuality roles are assigned or taken in hopes of a sense of self, as a branch of the ego. And the ego begins with ‘Me, not me.’ As an artist I make my work so that people donʼt feel as lonely as I have felt. Therefore my work expands into something more akin to ‘I am you.’”
It’s been six years since Ferver presented a major work, yet they’ve been extraordinarily busy, teaching, choreographing for other creators, curating an upcoming Graham exhibition at Bard, making the film Nowhere Apparent with their partner, Jeremy Jacob, and revisiting the Little Lad, the bizarrely affecting character they played in a 2007 Starburst commercial for its new berries and cream flavor that went viral during the pandemic.
I recently met with Ferver over Zoom, discussing the creative process, Wilder and Williams, the Little Lad, growing up in Wisconsin, pets, and more.
Jack Ferver introduces Nomi to Tuki over Zoom (screenshot by twi-ny/mdr)
twi-ny: Oh, who’s that?
jack ferver: Here’s Nomi. She is a Parson Terrier and we got her in February of ’21 from a really great rescue org, Korean K9. Who’s that baby?
twi-ny: This is Tuki. She’s Maine Coon and Siberian, with a little Ragdoll. And she’s just adorable and cute and fluffy. This is all fur. She’s not very heavy. It’s just fur, and look at that tail!
jf: She’s so sweet. I know that we’re very blessed with our animal angels.
jf: Nomi was four. We had been looking for a dog for a while and she looked so sad. She had come from breeding and also a meat market. My partner said, “This looks like the saddest dog I’ve ever seen.” And I said, “Let’s go get her.” And then we got her and she’s just completely changed my life. We have both changed. They said, I don’t think she’ll ever play. Our trainer wasn’t sure if she ever would. And she plays every morning. I mean, I’ve really moved upstate, for two reasons. One was because of Bard, where I’m a professor. The other was that she was just so happy up here. But in just a moment, she will need to go back to the city.
twi-ny: Since I last saw you, you became a TikTok sensation with the Little Lad, garnering two million followers. How did that come to be?
jf: Well, someone had posted the commercial during the lockdown and told people to do things with it. I wasn’t on TikTok. Friends of mine were and started messaging me, saying there’s all these people impersonating that character and using the advertisement.
It was the fall of 2021, so we’re still kind of in the lockdown. Like, how are we returning? There’s just this day where I said, I’m not going to do anything. I don’t have the capacity or the bandwidth. And then there was this day where I said, Just go to Fourteenth Street and get a wig and do it. And I did; I did one post and overnight it had hundreds of thousands of followers.
And then within a few months it was a million and then it went up to two million. And my partner, Jeremy Jacob, who’s a visual artist and a filmmaker and made the video and music for My Town, we made one film together where the Little Lad is trying to track down their mom, who is supposedly Anna Wintour. We did that. I did some other long-format YouTubes and a bunch of TikToks and people really loved it. I haven’t opened TikTok in so long. The Little Lad hasn’t shown themselves since, wow, July 2023, which was pretty much when I started working on this show. I loved doing it.
I think a benefit that I hadn’t foreseen with it was I was really curious how my work would get to places in America where it’s simply not going to tour. There are curators in cities in America who wouldn’t feel comfortable with my work, with its queerness and its femmeness and its examination of trauma, and also use the use of humor.
I started to receive all of these emails from young people who had found the Little Lad and then found my website; there were some incredibly touching emails. Years ago, when I started making my work, I saw how broke I was going to be. I said, Well, you better have a good sentence, like one that you can remember, because this is going to be so hard. It certainly has been.
What I always loved from art was that it made me feel less alone. So that was my sentence, that I’d make work for people to feel less alone. And so to receive emails from people who were able to then get this material that I saw no way of ever getting to them. . . . Also, in the lockdown, I opened up almost all of the works of mine that I have documentation for, which aren’t all of them, but for all the ones I do, I opened them for free on my website so that people would have access to that. And I’ve kept it open because it’s my way of dealing with what we have culturally and what we don’t — or rather don’t have in terms of support culturally.
twi-ny: That also relates to the audience, which wants to know Jack Ferver. So much of your work is about queer isolation; it really all comes together with Little Lad and the two million followers —
jf: Little Lad was such a place of just complete play. In a lot of my pieces, there has been playfulness. There’s also been, and I think probably always will be, a lot of darkness, a lot of dealing with really difficult material. So to have this other [creation] that’s not close to me, I think that was also the thing that was so fun, that it was so far from me.
Someone who was so important to me when I was growing up was Paul Reubens. I was eight when Pee-Wee was coming out. And so to be a lonely, queer, bullied kid who saw this queer-in-every-which-way character taking up space, having a lot of fun. . . . I don’t think the Little Lad would have ever existed if it hadn’t been for Paul Reubens. Pee-wee was so informative for the Little Lad. I certainly didn’t think about it when I did the commercial.
I was paid very little for it, because this was before YouTube was monetized. And it was like the Twin Peaks of commercials. It was so strange, so desired that it instantly went to YouTube and was being watched there. It stopped running on the networks, so that stopped the paychecks.
twi-ny: I was looking back at the last time I saw one of your live shows, and it’s been a while.
jf: It’s been a long time.
twi-ny: Over the last six years, you played Arkadina in The Seagull: The Rehearsal, you did It’s Veronique at Hesse-Flatow, you worked with Parker Posey on Abracadabra. Oh, you were talking before about having fun; I had a blast at The Last Bimbo of the Apocalypse, which you choreographed. So much fun, and very serious elements too. You also did Is Global Warming Camp? at MASS MoCA. And now you’re curating a Martha Graham exhibition, one of your heroes, at the New York Public Library. I kind of know why you haven’t been around for six years.
Jack Ferver and Parker Posey collaborated on Abracadabra (Instagram photo courtesy Jack Ferver)
jf: The last show in New York was Everything Is Imaginable; we did it in 2018 and it came back in 2019. And then that year, I was also the AIDS Oral History fellow with Jeremy at the New York Public Library of the Performing Arts, the Jerome Robbins Dance Division. So that year of 2019 through 2020 was spent with that archive.
We did a lecture performance in January of 2020. Working with that archive answered so many questions for me, or I would say really reified answers I had about where people were who would be mentors for me and what had happened with funding. It was an incredible and devastating event. It was an audience that was filled with a lot of women who afterwards said, “Thank you for saying my friend’s name, which I haven’t heard in years.” And then in rolled this pandemic and the lockdown and I left and went and lived at Parker’s and taught and wrote and really had time to reassess and have space and to think about what it was that I wanted to do artistically, in many aspects of life, and then because art is the big forerunner of what I do in my life, what I wanted to do. So much of the lockdown was spent writing and then the MASS MoCA show came up, which I started working on in 2021 and it went up in 2022. Then Jeremy and I made [Nowhere Apparent] through All Arts. It’s still streaming on the All Arts platform.
With MASS MoCA, it was this question, I’ve created this show, am I gonna try and get these presenters from NYC or from wherever to come to North Adams in the early fall? I really had met full burnout with trying to do that with presenters.
So at that time, Garen Scribner, who was in Everything Is Unimaginable, was changing paths to being a manager and said, I would love to be your manager. And I said, Great. So then Jay Wegman, who used to be the artistic director of Abrons, had given me free space for ten years when he was there. That’s how I made most of my work. And so Garen said, Let’s have a conversation with Jay, who was now at Skirball.
twi-ny: That’s the connection.
jf: I’ve been working on [My Town] since the summer of 2023. I’ve never worked harder on a piece. A lot of the things that are, I would say, more familiar if I look back at some of the formal things in my work, such as the use of film, that isn’t there. It begins sheerly by fiction of a story that’s not me, that’s about a schoolteacher and her student in 1911 in this town that I live in now, and then through trauma time starts to collapse.
A lot of characters emerge through this show, which is also something very different. And there’s a different approach to the solo format, which I might be doing for quite a while, I think, inside of my work. Through this work, I’m literally having more time alone. That Joan Didion quote: “Do not complain. Work harder. Spend more time alone.” And so my writing practice and my movement practice have just had so much more space.
I love teaching at Bard. I feel so grateful that I love to teach so much, and I feel so grateful I’m at Bard, which makes total sense for the way I work. It’s so interdisciplinary, and I work with professors from different parts of the college.
twi-ny: Are you hopeful for our next generation of writers and performance artists?
jf: That really solidified for me too during the AIDS Oral History Project, that I’m one of the bridge makers. We’ll never fix that gap, and we’ll never heal that canyon. But some of us will work to help build the bridge and those students, our students, will continue to be that bridge.
This piece has just been — oh, Mark, if I performed it a thousand times, I would never perform it for as many hours as I’ve rehearsed it.
twi-ny: It’s a solo piece.
jf: It is.
twi-ny: You’re very influenced by previous media: plays, movies, television, like Black Swan,Poltergeist,Suddenly, Last Summer,The Maids. So you’ve chosen in this case to take on Our Town, which is maybe the most famous play for its numerous characters.
jf: Yes.
twi-ny: And you’ve turned it into this one-person show. Why Our Town?
jf: A lot of the work had already been made. And then there was this moment where the character of Emily Webb emerged for me. And it emerged at a point in the process when, in the way I was talking and describing things, I was reminded of the stage manager. Then Emily Webb arrived and also Simon Stimson, the “queer-coded” chorus leader who hangs himself. I talked about both of them in Is Global Warming Camp? I talked about their deaths in that piece. And I was curious about why this woman meets her death in childbirth and then the queer-coded one hangs himself.
So I became really interested in tapping into, perhaps, could Emily get revenge with the stage manager before going back to the cemetery? It’s a very brief moment in the show. I was contacted by the Wilder estate; I felt very happy to be contacted by them. There’s nothing really of Our Town in there. There’s a part where it’s my fantasy if Emily got to confront the stage manager. But I think where I see the haunting of Our Town in it is that there’s someone describing things that aren’t there, that aren’t onstage. So many of my works don’t have a set. They generally have taken place in an “empty space,” to quote Peter Brook. It’s this thing of me using the power of my imagination to evoke the audience’s power of imagination. So much of that for me came from dance, but I also really see where that also comes from this experiment that Wilder did for America.
As Wilder’s essay that he put out to the American theatergoers says, you were just here for the soporific and for the baubles and for being entertained and you are asleep at the wheel. And so I’m gonna strip everything down. I connected very much in that way with Wilder. I will use language to evoke where we are. So that is where Our Town happens from. And I’d also say, yes, that I’m so many characters through this work. I’m very rarely me. And if I am, it’s some aspect of self. What I see from my work is that the stage is the psyche. It’s the psychic space.
I think this has been true of all of my work. And now it’s very clear to me that I am playing all of the aspects of self that get shattered in trauma and then jockey for attention. So when I’ve worked with a cast, they have also been aspects of self or aspects of whether they’re coming to it from a more narcissistic position or from a more victimized position.
They are all the shattered aspects that happen from trauma, and they will look to jockey and fight and spar to get the audience’s attention, to get the attention of the witnessers.
twi-ny: I wonder if that’s why you often don’t have a lot of set design. You were talking about this black space inside yourself or inside your mind, and right now you’ve chosen to be on Zoom in a dark corner.
jf: [laughs] Yes, this is where I do take my calls.
twi-ny: Last night I saw The Seat of Our Pants at the Public Theater, a musical adaptation of Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. So clearly his estate is having fun with people taking Thornton to other levels.
jf: Well, I think of Wilder and I think of Williams; I would love to, if I ever have it in me, to write a more narrative play — I’ve always been so curious of what it would be like for the two of them at a bar. They were obviously so creative, so utterly American, and very angry, incredibly angry artists, and a lot of their work comes from revenge. It’s clear on the page. Our Town is a deeply vengeful play. It is so much of an agony of how people are not waking up and are not being awake to the present moment.
I wish that we had more of that content of trying to wake us up. I mean, we’re so polarized; I’m the billionth person to say that. That’s not new news of how polarized we are, so inside of our own vectors, and so unwilling to see the other person.
twi-ny: It’s very scary. So Emily Webb took what you were already working on in this other direction, gave another part to it. What was the initial genesis before Our Town was even on the page?
jf: First it was Wisconsin Death Trip, the book by Michael Lesy, which has those photos and police records from the late 1800s into the early 1900s.
twi-ny: That’s where you grew up, in Wisconsin.
jf: I did. I grew up relatively close to where a lot of that material for that book takes place. So first there was that, and then, as I went on, that began to fall away. And because I was researching where I grew up, what was it like as the town was forming, and what was it like where I am now? Because they look very similar. Where I have landed looks very similar to where I grew up, which is a big shock because I was very, “I’m getting out of this town.” That real queer kid adventure of “I’m going to move to New York City and . . .”
twi-ny: Be a star!
jf: Yeah. Where I grew up was on the Wisconsin River, on the train tracks facing the Wisconsin Ferry Bluffs. And now I live on Amtrak. Just down the street are the train tracks, the Hudson River, and the Catskills. So I thought, Okay, let me do research between these two towns. Then that began to fall away. I don’t know where this story came from of this schoolteacher and her student in 1911 in a town that is maybe this town that I live in now. And I wrote this really long, incredibly detailed, graphic, honestly . . . novella. I started to read it to a friend of mine and I said, This is going to be my next piece. And he said, Well, it can’t be because you’ve written a novella and no one will sit through this. You could do this as a book on tape. I think I was at page twenty and still reading what was going on for them. And he said, You can’t. What’s the show? It’s a show. We’re not going to sit through . . .
twi-ny: Five hours of . . .
jf: Yeah, five hours of reading a story. That was what began. I think part of where that came from was really this interest in what happens to this schoolteacher, who’s marked as a woman in my script but she might possibly be a trans man, though she doesn’t have language for that at that time.
I won’t say more than that of what happens to her and the student. But I decided to have there be a traumatic event that rips through time. And that will tie this town back to Wisconsin, and I thought about portals and trauma and how we have memories of places that perhaps we’ve been or haven’t been. I thought about amnesis, this recollection of something that we haven’t experienced but feels very familiar, a knowledge of something that we haven’t directly experienced. What is that? There’s so much that opened, I believe, inside of the collective consciousness during the lockdown, and I’m so curious about what it will be to keep those psychic doors open, art’s ability to keep those psychic doors open. I started going through those doors: I’ll take a long walk to the cemetery, I’ll take a run through the woods. I don’t think if I was spending so much time alone and in nature . . . I don’t know if these doors would have opened that way.
twi-ny: That’s fascinating. Speaking of opening doors, My Town is going to be at Skirball. I’m thinking of the shows that I’ve seen of yours, they take place mostly in great spaces but small ones; this one is huge. How did Skirball and its size figure into the work?
jf: Immediately I knew that Jeremy was gonna have to make a video. It’s too big of a space. At one point it was a duet and then I cut that part. [laughs] There was another section that happened in this show that is another show. It’s just another show, and maybe I will make that other show.
But that duet needed to just go away. There were actual scenic pieces that were going to be constructed. And as it went on, I just thought the way that my experience of going to Skirball has been . . . they do screenings of films there. I’ve never seen a film screened there, but there’s times where it reminds me that I could be coming here to see the first screening of The Phantom of the Opera. It has this very grand theater feeling to it. So I wanted Jeremy to make a video that wouldn’t be illustrative to what I was saying but that would provide another element of projection, which I mean both literally and metaphorically, so that there would also be this projective element that’s happening while I am working through all of these projections and the audience is projecting onto me, onto the roles I’m playing, and then also dealing with their projections of this projection. So that was where the screen came from. There’s a large screen that’s behind me that I wouldn’t say I interact with as much as it is functioning as another part of the mind. And in the ways that, as Freud said, we’re always doing at least two things. And formally, I thought there needs to be something more here for the audience.
Jack Ferver plays multiple aspects of their self in My Town (photo by Jeremy Jacob)
And then Jeremy went further and said, I also think the whole piece has to be underscored, and so wrote an entire score — pending on how I do it. Every show is slightly different every time. This show has very specific reasons why it’s different every time that I won’t say; I’ll just leave that a secret. So it rides somewhere between sixty and sixty-five minutes, and the score has cues in it that’s from my text. I foresee our collaboration continuing on in that way. I always knew it was going to be me; at one point I thought it might be two people. Then I was like, Nope, it’s just me. Me and this video. I was also really interested in the size of it, and one person out there trying to work through something really difficult, because that is also what I experience people to be like right now. They have community and they have friends, but a lot of the people I see or what I see reflected back are a lot of people feeling very isolated in a very huge space.
twi-ny: Well, I’ve seen several solo shows at Skirball; it is a huge space. I’m not trying to scare you —
jf: Fortunately, I first got to do this piece at EMPAC in Troy, New York. We had a technical residency there, and I had it set up so it would feel the same as Skirball. So I’ve already tested it out.
For me, it’s the hardest performance I’ve ever done. It’s a gauntlet. I pretty much don’t stop moving through the majority of it. The text is so incredibly dense, and because I’m dealing with temporal disorder it has tricky syntax shifts that are . . .
twi-ny: But that’s your own fault. You gave it to you.
jf: I run best on a muddy track. I really wanted to let go of a lot of things and go through these doors that were opening and really listen to this writing that was coming through. In the lockdown, I wrote at least sixty pages of poetry that maybe no one will ever see. There are two poems that made it into this piece, modified. And there are reasons that they’re in the work, which I won’t say. I think it gets explained as the piece goes on. My desire for pushing my writing and pushing the psychological iconographies of my choreography has always continued to grow. So I wanted to push myself to do the hardest thing I had done so far.
twi-ny: Judging by what I’ve seen of your work previously, I know how hard you push yourself and how much you open up and reveal of yourself. I can’t wait to see this one.
jf: Yes. I’m terrified. It’s a piece that is so terrifying and so freeing all at once. But I don’t think the piece works as well if that’s not the state that I’m in. I’ve made it so that there’s no way to do it not terrified. Formally it’s just so hard, and again it has a psychological reason in it, which is when we hunt for memories and when we try to understand and make sense of extreme trauma and the way that the massive crush of heterogeneous voices falling upon us while we ask for something good to be done creates such a hardship of not becoming bitter, not shutting down, not coldly and decisively picking a lane and sticking to it.
Allowing oneself to remain open is something that I also wanted this work to encourage people to do and really to do through also what I don’t see much of right now, which is mystery and humor, and not easy humor — I mean, I’m great at that, but the humor that comes from recognition.
[There will be a talkback with Ferver following each performance. Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]
