NYU Skirball Commissions

A new work by Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener that explores the thinking body and collective uncertainty. Technological and human paths converge into a dynamic choreography for the stage that imagines an Artificial Intelligence lovingly programmed by experimental dance. Blurring the lines between brain, body, and machine, the work builds an ever-evolving experience, amplified by a sweeping, mechanical sound score by electronic musician Mas Ysa, media design by Jesse Stiles, and lighting design by Davison Scandrett.

Theater In Quarantine (TiQ) returns with Phantom of the Opera, a fully remote world premiere inspired by the 1925 silent horror classic, created by Joshua William Gelb and Normandy Sherwood. Phantom continues TiQ’s gothic experiments in digital performance—broadcast live from a labyrinth of miniature stages inside an East Village apartment. Unlike its more lavish musical cousins, this Phantom strips the story to its bones: a portrait of the artist as saboteur, trapped in a system that preserves tradition by suffocating change. Performed by TiQ’s largest cast to date and featuring a brand new dual-streaming system, audiences can toggle between the show and its behind-the-scenes construction, offering unprecedented access to the mechanics behind the illusions — unmasked and unmistakably live.

My Town is a bold and darkly humorous dance-theater piece from acclaimed artist Jack Ferver, with multimedia by Jeremy Jacob. A queer reimagining of Thorton Wilder’s Our Town, Ferver’s wry, razor-sharp storytelling transforms the nostalgia of small-town life into something far stranger — and far more unsettling. Also inspired by the haunting Wisconsin Death Trip and the eerie undercurrents of Ferver’s own rural past, My Town unearths the ghosts that linger in America’s heartland, revealing how the places we leave never really let us go.

“… these shows — in their weirdness, humor, gravitas, intellectual curiosity, graphic boldness and electric vitality — offered the best argument by far for the artistic promise of streaming theater.” — The New York Times, Critics Pick’

Distance is Malleable, is a mutable and evolving series of experiments in collaboration. Negotiating differences of race, age, culture, and religion, she partners with a diverse range of artists, living and dead, to maximize the potential of their encounters.

Fellow Traveler is a dystopian romantic comedy based on the life and work of a Real Magnanimous Artist and the various support staff, associate artistic administrators, romantic partners, and unpaid interns who shepherd him throughout his career.

Since 2009, 600 HIGHWAYMEN (Abigail Browde & Michael Silverstone) have been making live art that, through a variety of radical approaches, illuminates the inherent poignancy of people coming together. The work exists at the intersection of theater, dance, contemporary performance, and civic encounter.

“Many operas in the standard repertoire are based on fairy tales and fantasy. But few of those describe a global queer-feminist revolution, and fewer still have main characters whose names begin with “Warren” and end with an unusual moniker for a genital appendage.” – The New York Times

“One of the great experimental theater artists of his generation.” – Ben Brantley, The New York Times

In Field of Mars, a chain restaurant in Chapel Hill is used as a way to measure the progress of primates, from hunter/gatherer to fast casual dining experience. Topics covered: Music, Food, Nature, and Spirituality.

Featuring a cast of 11 actors: Lakpa Bhutia, Nicholas Elliott, Jim Fletcher, Eleanor Hutchins, Paige Martin, Brian Mendes, James Moore, Phil Moore, Steven Thompson, Tory Vazquez and Gillian Walsh.

“He always has a quality of celebration in his work and, structurally, his choreography can be a bit wild, a bit untamed.” — The New York Times

Employing “out of body” experiences as a metaphor for our body politic, David Dorfman propels his dancers through space and time in a search of personal truths. With breath-taking lighting and visual design by theater-maker Andrew Schneider (YOUARENOWHERE) and the company’s four-person house band, led by singer/songwriter Elizabeth DeLise, Dorfman’s newest work, (A)Way Out of My Body, beckons us into the otherworldly-ness of dreams, desires, and routines, as well as potential new worlds awaiting us.

Created and performed by John Kelly, Underneath the Skin, is a new solo work of dance-theater drawn from the life of the societal and sexual maverick, Samuel Steward (1909-1993). A novelist, poet, and scholar, Steward abandoned his post as a staid university professor to reinvent himself as a writer of gay erotic fiction (aka Phil Andros), and as one of the 20th century’s most accomplished and influential tattoo artists (aka Philip Sparrow). He had trysts with Valentino, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Roy Fitzgerald (aka Rock Hudson); attracted the friendships of Gertrude Stein, Thornton Wilder, and Andre Gide; and having meticulously recorded every sexual encounter he ever had in his “Stud File,” became an unofficial collaborator at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research in the 1950s.