Announcing the 2024 Theatre & New Forms Grantees

After Virginia Woolf 
Directed by Élise Vigneron
With Chloée Sanchez, Zoé Lizot, Loïc Carcassès, Thomas Cordeiro, and Azusa Takeuchi (or Yumi Osanai) 

Immutable and constantly renewed, at the same time, the wave is a metaphor for the passage of time and its eternal cycle. The starting point for this creation is Virginia Woolf’s eponymous work. Five characters, five friends in search of themselves, evolve within the atmospheric variations of a seascape, from dawn to dusk. Fascinated by the energy and intensity of Woolf’s poem, puppeteer Élise Vigneron chose to adapt it for the stage, representing her characters through human-sized ice figures. Operated on sight by the actors, these icy bodies create enchantment and mystery. The audience is invited into an intimate experience, as fragile as the ice that melts before our eyes, to feel the metamorphosis that is taking place on an individual, collective, and cosmic scale. A poetic ice chorus celebrates the beauty of the ephemeral and the permeability between worlds. 

 © Damien Bourletsis  

Written, Directed, and Music by David Lescot
With Ludmilla Dabot and David Lescot 

Following the success of their East Coast tour in 2023, Ludmilla and David return with Portrait de Ludmilla en Nina Simone, an intimate musical portrait of jazz singer Nina Simone, one of the formidable artistic figures of the civil rights movement referred to as the “High Priestess of Soul.” 

©Tristan Jeanne-Valès 

Written and Directed by Tiago Rodrigues
With Isabel Abreu, Romeu Costa, António Fonseca, Beatriz Maia, Marco Mendonça, António Parra, Carolina Passos Sousa, and João Vicente. 

Portuguese actor, director, and playwright, and the current director of the Festival d’Avignon (France) Tiago Rodrigues,will premiere his latest work, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists, for the first time in the US at PS21 in Chatham! 

Set in 2028, In Catarina, every year, a Portuguese family “commemorates” the 1954 murder of activist Catarina Eufémia at the hands of the Salazar dictatorship by kidnapping and killing a fascist. But this year, the young woman chosen to carry out the ritual refuses, challenging the family’s motto of “Doing harm in order to practice good,” with a question: Can an act of violence lead to justice? What if the killing isn’t a form of protest, but merely a crime?  

Tiago Rodrigues asks whether we can defend or preserve democracy by violating its fundamental principles. But rather than offering clear answers, he brings the consequences of these questions to life through dramatic paradoxes that are both lucid and unnervingly grotesque. In doing so, he creates a performance that challenges audiences and their own inner contradictions to the point where it hurts. 

“The world of fiction, in which I still believe as a theater artist, allows certain things that aren’t possible in politics. Like this completely absurd and truly awful question, “Should the fascist be killed or not?” Only the theater can create a context in which that question exists.” -Tiago Rodrigues 

© Filipe Ferreira, Tiago Rodrigues; © Christophe Raynaud de Lage 

Directed by Florient Jousse
With Florient Jousse, Big Chief Juan Pardo, Zelito, Frederic Madia, and Zélito Deliron 

Since childhood, actor, playwright, and director Florient Jousse has had close ties to Reunion Island. After settling there in 2017 to join author Lolita Mongas’ theater company, he fully immersed himself in conducting background work on the island, from delving into its the history to understanding its various cultures, spiritual practices, and languages.  In 2020, he created the Tilawcis Company, while writing his first play, Frénésies. 

Featuring a strong musical coloring, his upcoming play, Flamboyants!, aims to tell the story of Puerto Rico, Reunion Island, and New Orleans, depicted collectively as an island city or archipelago, through five interpreters.  

A story about historical and cultural resilience, a term that will be reexamined by the interpreters, it will also convey the resilience of these regions in light of climatic considerations, namely hurricanes and cyclones. Drawing inspiration from the founding myths of the three territories, the play will present an enlightening common mystical narrative.  

This piece brings together American singer, percussionist, and leader of the Mardi Gras Indians group Big Chief Juan Pardo;  Réunionese maloya musician Frédéric Madia; and self-taught musician and Reunion native Zélito Deliron. 

©Cie Tilawcis 

The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis will present TRACES, a site-specific immersive performance, video installation, and web project, inspired by the life-long opus of French artist Sophie Calle. TRACES will premiere in downtown Minneapolis, in conjunction with the Walker-organized exhibition, Sophie Calle: Overshare, as part of the Walker Art Center’s 2024 season in October.  

Establishing what appears to be a noir crime-like narrative, the audience member follows a performer from a distance and is instructed to document their actions via audio, video, and photo recordings. Many antics ensue, referencing a range of Calle’s most famous projects. TRACES invites audiences into a variety of unique experiences in public and virtual spaces, ultimately offering a prism of poetic lenses for viewing the complex world that we inhabit today. 

©Wax Factory 

With Cie Basinga and Cie SenCirk 

Hudson Valley CirqueFest and residency brings together the three art forms PS21 supports: dance, theater, and contemporary circus. This pilot project with several circus companies, including two from France, Cie Basinga and Cie SenCirk, respectively, will be integrated into our creative place-making programming, called PS21 PATHWAYS, which offers participatory and collaborative workshops, classes, installations, and immersive performances on our 100-acre grounds and in communities. 

This 2024 event is a pilot project of Hudson ValleyCirqueFest, the first US-based residency program with French and Francophone artists in Contemporary Circus Arts. 

©SenCirk 

Directed by Alice Kudlak and Bernard Kudlak
Music: Thierry Pécou
Bilingual libretto : Alice Kudlak
Musical direction : Olivier Opdebeeck
With San Francisco Girls Chorus and La Maîtrise de Caen 

O’Future is a collaboration between the San Francisco Girls Chorus (United States) and La Maîtrise de Caen (France) directed by Alice Kudlak and Bernard Kudlak (Cirque Plume) combining choral, musical, and circus elements (palm sticks, trapeze and aerial hoop, and aerial rope). 

Founded in 1978, the San Francisco Girls Chorus, provides high-level choral music training for treble voices, serving as both an anchor in the lives of our youth and a resource for the countless arts organizations that partner with them for quality vocal talent and multi-year collaborative projects.  

Director and stage designer Bernard Kudlak is the co-founder and director of Cirque Plume, an organization renowned for its innovative blend of circus, theater, poetry, and other art forms.  

Librettist and stage assistant Alice Kudlak spent her childhood traveling across Europe in the caravans of Cirque Plume. Her work includes writing and directing. The denial of the end of the world is a recurring subject in her work, a theme reflected in O Future. 

© Clementine Stab