FALL 2022

Interdisciplinary artist Sarah Cameron Sunde created 36.5 / A Durational Performance with the Sea in response to Hurricane Sandy. Spanning nine years and six continents, this series of site-specific, participatory environmental artworks feature Sunde standing in ocean water for full 12–13 hour tidal cycles, as water slowly engulfs her body and then recedes. After a three-year, hyper-local community-engagement process, the project culminates in the cove in the East River where Astoria meets Long Island City, Queens, with international satellite performances and livestream hubs around the globe.

International Contemporary Ensemble joins with the Iranian Female Composers Association (IFCA) to present an evening of works related to the theme of Peyvand (پیوند), the Persian word for Connectivity, and features a world premiere by Niloufar Nourbakhsh for eight musicians, commissioned by Cheswatyr Commissions, a new joint initiative of the Cheswatyr Foundation and Composers Now.

SITI Company makes its NYU Skirball debut with Radio Macbeth, inspired by Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre on the Air. Late at night in the guts of an abandoned theater, actors circle restlessly around the common shared warmth of a rehearsal table, moving through Shakespeare’s briefest and perhaps most magnetic play. Around them, in the perimeter of the space, the ghosts of all previous productions hover and encroach. The spirits of ambition, violence, fortune, free will, and madness flicker and glow. The actors cling to the sanity of words while the chaos of history grows to be undeniably present with them in the room.

Troubled but tough, unloved but unbowed, Maggie the Cat is the captivating focus of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Now, acclaimed American choreographer Trajal Harrell places Maggie center stage in his magnetic new dance work, a dazzling and provocative fusion of high art and pop culture. Set to a soundtrack ranging from electro and pop to classical music, Maggie the Cat addresses power, gender, rejection, and inclusion through the prism of one of modern theatre’s most celebrated characters. Influenced by everything from ancient Greek theatre to the Harlem voguing underground, it’s challenging, tragic, entertaining – and ultimately joyous.

Wakatt, the new creation by Serge Aimé Coulibaly, examines daily reality and social changes through a dance language that starts from internal violence, human instinct, urgency and the need to express oneself. Wakatt, meaning “our times” in the Mossi language of Burkina Faso, is a reflection on the fear-filled contemporary era we live in. At a time when nationalism is on the rise in most parts of the world, the starting point of this new creation is “the fear of the other”. Music and choreography take center stage in a constant exchange, with non-stop music written and performed by the musician Malik Mezzadri (Magik Malik), an Ivory-Coast-born French flutist and jazz musician.