2021 RESIDENCIES

American Ballet Theater. For the second of their 2020–21 residencies, ABT’s dancers were led by Jose Sebastian, the director of ABT Incubator, in the company’s annual choreography workshop designed to stimulate the creation of new dances. The group created and filmed several new works during their residency that extended through the first week of February. Residency in January 2021

Camille A. Brown & Dancers: The Obie-winning choreographer, twelve dancers, two musicians, their manager and a chef, in a Covid-bubble residency, developing Queens, Brown’s new solo work, and reimagining Matchstick (2008), a work inspired by the Great Migration that interweaves poetry and earthbound movement and is newly relevant in our present moment. Brown’s artistic vision and commitment to community outreach through her Every Body Move program dovetail perfectly with PS21’s community service initiatives and conviction that the arts play an essential role in everyday life. Residency from February 14–March 22, 2021.

Heartbeat Opera developing The Extinctionist, a dark comedy about a couple agonizing over whether to have a child in a world threatened with environmental apocalypse, the ensemble’s first original work, during a two-week residency. Founding director Louisa Proske, composer Daniel Schlosberg, conductor Jacob Ashworth, and librettist Amanda Quaid (who adapted her one-act play) rehearsed with Kelly Griffin and Claire Leyden, sopranos, and baritones Benjamin Dickerson and Matthew Gamble. As musicians Schlosberg (violin) and Ashworth (piano) were joined by Caitlin Cawley (percussion) and Thomas Flippin (guitar). Watch the mini-documentary from Heartbeat Opera about the making of the work and the PS21 residency process, Residency from May 14–30, 2021.

Actor/Director Katiana Rangel, Jim Fletcher, and cellist and composer Lori Goldston refining and developing their two-person, three-character version of Sarah Kane’s 1988 Blasted. Set in a hotel room in the midst of a war zone, the play casts an unpitying gaze on human beings’ capacity for cruelty and their desperate search for connection to other people. Writing in the New York Times, Ben Brantley wrote that audiences are “compelled to follow an authentic and original voice into theatrical territory you have never visited before.” Residency from December 11-17 2021 ended with one work-in-progress showcase performance on December 16.

French playwright and director Pascal Rambert, actors Jim Fletcher and Ismaïlibn Conner, and writer/translator Nicholas Elliott adapting and rehearsing The Art of Theater, performed by Fletcher, and With My Own Hands, featuring Conner. A monologue, The Art of Theater (2007), is a manifesto about the nature of dramatic acting addressed, not to the audience, but to the speaker’s dog. With My Own Hands, dating from 1993, when it premiered on a Dijon rooftop, is a protean meditation on the human condition, a soliloquy spoken by a wounded psyche on the brink of suicide. In January 2022, Fletcher and Connor presented four public performances of the plays. A co-presentation of PS21 and the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival. Residency from December 6–11, 2021 and January 5-23, 2022