The Conquest of Bread Digital Program
SUPPORT
This project was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
“FROM EACH ACCORDING TO HIS ABILITY, TO EACH ACCORDING TO HIS NEED” – KARL MARX
Taking these words to heart, NYU Skirball is proud to present The Conquest of Bread free of charge. If you have the means, we invite you to donate in support of a theater that makes radical, accessible work like this possible. Donate here.
CREDITS
Composer, director, performer: Ethan Philbrick
Performers (in order of appearance): Gelsey Bell, Hai-Ting Chinn, Catherine Brookman, leiken, mayfield brooks, Jennifer Miller, Anh Vo, Sing in Solidarity, Marlo Caulfield, Jonah Fox Chmielewski, Ben Clareman, Zoe Hayes-Culhane, Nina Driscoll, Naomi Edmonds, Madeline Heller, and Charlotte Stewart
Sing in Solidarity: Mia Avramescu, Robin Baumgarten, Sam Bojarski, Kimmie Braunthal, Jordan Engel, Tobi Erner, Amelia Fedo, Josh Feintuch, Debby Feuerman, Avonlea Fisher, Bernard Goyder, Christian Hansen, Camellia Hartman, Christopher Hickey, Alex Holmstrom-Smith, Pat Hornak, Annie Levin, Margot Levinson, Scott McMillen, Winona Packer, Sean Reilly, Arianna Schindle, Ann Schneider, Tom Speaker, and Liz Vogt
Audio fx: Nicholas Nauman
Bread performer: Young Gun Lee
Bread creative: quori theodor
Captions: Seamus Slattrey
Youth ensemble coordinator: Gabe Gordon
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Ethan Philbrick is a cellist, performance artist, and writer. He holds a PhD in performance studies from New York University and has taught performance theory and practice at Pratt Institute, Muhlenberg College, New York University, Wesleyan College, Yale University, and The New School. He is currently performance curator at The Poetry Project. In 2023, Philbrick published Group Works: Art, Politics, and Collective Ambivalence with Fordham University Press. He is part of the musical-theatrical project DAYS and has presented solo and collaborative performances in NYC and across the country. His musical performances have been called “overwhelmingly beautiful” and “extremely strange” in The Nation and his writing has been characterized as “rich and fascinating” in e-flux. ethanphilbrick.com
Whether marching to “The Internationale” on May Day, leading a picket line with “Roll the Union On,” or performing music from The Threepenny Opera in concert, Sing in Solidarity, the choir of NYC-DSA, uses their voices to strengthen the socialist community through song. Begun in 2017, the choir draws its repertoire from the rich tradition of international revolutionary song: its mission is to disseminate anti-capitalist music, build internationalism, and unite the struggles of working and oppressed peoples through culture and song. Past projects have celebrated the musical cultures of Nueva Canción Chilena, the communist cabarets of Weimar-Era Berlin, the folk labor militancy of 1930’s Harlan County, and the revolutionary songs of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union. The choir’s 2022 album, Starvation Army—created in collaboration with Brass Band of Columbus and Chris Westover, and featuring songs from the IWW Little Red Songbook—can be found on music streaming platforms. Sing in Solidarity is open to everyone, with no auditions: if you can speak, you can sing! Join today! Follow our work @nycdsachoir.
Gelsey Bell is a multidisciplinary performance creator, composer, and vocalist. She is the Co-Artistic Director for thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. Her recent works include the opera mɔɹnɪŋ [morning//mourning] (2023), the soundwalk Cairns (2020), shuffleyamamba: Yamamba as a Bear (2021), and thingNY’s Mouthful (2024). She has released multiple albums on Gold Bolus Recordings and the duo album Skylighght with saxophonist Erin Rogers on Chaikin Records. Performance highlights also include Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre, & the Great Comet of 1812 (Broadway) and Ghost Quartet (Off-Broadway), Robert Ashley’s Crash, Foreign Experiences and Improvement, Darius Jones’s Samesoul Maker, Alaina Ferris’s The Lydian Gale Parr, Aaron Siegel’s Rainbird, and other works by John King, Brent Michael Davids, Paul Pinto, Kate Soper, Tomomi Adachi, Jay Afrisando, Dan Trueman, and others. www.gelseybell.com
Mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn’s eclectic career spans music from medieval to new, and a range of theatrical styles from performance-practice to wildly experimental. She was featured in The Wooster Group’s La Didone, Einstein on the Beach (Philip Glass/Robert Wilson) and in several monodramas written for her, as well as standard operatic, oratorio, and concert repertoire. Hai-Ting is the creator of Science Fair: An Opera With Experiments, and of Astronautica: Voices of Women in Space, based on the words of women astronauts (with Trio Triumphatrix), and Meltdown, in which a glaciologist loses her cool; a collaboration with librettist David Cote and composer Stefan Weisman. www.hai-ting.com
Catherine Brookman is a Brooklyn-based performer and composer. She will release her debut album “If A Song Fades Out, It’s Playing Forever Somewhere” this year. By mixing vocals with electronics, synthesizers, and poetry, her music seeks to uncover the majestic inside of the mundane. Brookman is also an active performer in contemporary opera and theater at some of the top venues worldwide. She is a regular guest vocalist at the LA Philharmonic, performing works by Meredith Monk and Julius Eastman. She has sung alongside famed pop and jazz singers such as Lorde, Esperanza Spalding, Louis Cole and in the 2020 Vanguard Gala honoring Laurie Anderson. She has performed as a soloist with acclaimed ensembles such as Alarm Will Sound, the Orchestra of St Luke’s and Wild Up, contributing vocals to their GRAMMY-nominated records: Eastman, Vol 2 & 3. Brookman performed on Broadway in Hair, and off-Broadway in Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. Her debut album was presented live with a chamber ensemble at the Carnegie Hill Concert Series in NY. She has been featured at Lincoln Center, Pioneer Works, DiMenna, The Public, The Broad, MOCA Geffen, Ars Nova, and more. She recently completed work on Pauline Oliveros/Moira Roth’s The Library of Maps with Long Beach Opera, which she co-composed & performed with Paul Pinto & M.A. Tiesenga. Upcoming, she is developing a new opera adaptation of Ursula K Leguin’s “The Dispossessed” by Ted Hearne / Chana Porter with Wild Up. She is a 2022 MacDowell Fellow.
leiken is a singer and performance-maker based in Brooklyn, NY. Both a medieval and new music specialist, their practice fuses these disparate worlds exclusively through collaboration and frequently explores queer spirituality, identity, and ephemera. A sought-after vocalist for concert, opera, and theatre, leiken has performed all over the world at legendary venues alongside iconic artists. they also love fermentation, textiles, and swimming.
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
Jennifer Miller is the director and founder of Circus Amok – a one ring, no animal, queer as fuck, free circus extravaganza that has been touring the parks of New York annually since 1994. She is the writer and director of Cracked Ice and The Golden Racket. Besides touring solo shows internationally she works with a myriad of choreographers and performance artists including Jennifer Monson and Vaginal Crème Davis. She is the recipient of an OBIE, a “Bessie”, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. She had a 10-year stint at Coney Island Sideshow by the Seashore and is a Professor of Performance at Pratt Institute.
Anh Vo is a Vietnamese choreographer and writer working primarily in New York City, with a second base in Hanoi. Their practice fleshes out the body as a vessel for apparitional forces. Their work is situated in the unlikely lineage convergences between Downtown New York experimental performance, Hanoi performance art, and Vietnamese folk ritual practices
Marlo Caulfield is an actress and sixth grader at Brooklyn Friends School.
Jonah Fox Chmielewski’s parents regret not giving them the secret middle name of “T Rex.” What a reveal that would have been at high school graduation.
Ben Clareman is an 11-year-old 5th grader at Brooklyn Friends School who loves his friends, his family, his phone, and Starbucks.
Nina Driscoll is a ninth grader who loves to sing and play ultimate frisbee.
Naomi Edmonds is a sixth grader at Brooklyn Friends School who loves musical theater and traveling.
Zoe Hayes-Culhane is a triple threat: writer, performer, eighth grader.
Madeleine Heller is in Brooklyn Friends School chorus and wants to continue her music career as she grows up.
Charlotte Stewart is an 11-year-old dancer, figure skater, and dog lover from Brooklyn.
Nicholas Nauman (audio fx) works as a musician, writer, and cook.
Young Gun Lee (bread performer) holds a BFA in printmaking from Rhode Island School of Design and currently works as a pastry chef at ACQ Bread Co. and a food stylist for New York Times Cooking.
quori theodor / adore (bread creative) is an invitation to self, unlearning as insubordination. their work addresses questions of capital disobedience and the politics of vulnerability through the media of food. they are a founding member of Spiral Theory Test Kitchen and Circle Time School. they are based in NYC on unceded Lenape territory.
Seamus Slattery (captions) is an artist and writer using performance and text as a means to understand invisibility, perception, and porosity. He is interested in the confluence of emotion and thought, and hopes to play in public more.
Gabe Gordon (youth ensemble coordinator) is an artist and middle school history teacher. He hopes to be more like his students when he grows up.
Conquest of Bread ‘Zine Fair
Come early for a pre- and post-show ‘zine fair reception in the Skirball lobby featuring tables from Wendy’s Subway, Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Bilna’es, Pinko, and more.
Wendy’s Subway
Wendy’s Subway is a reading room, writing space, and independent publisher in Bushwick, Brooklyn. We support emerging artists and writers in making experimental, urgent work and create alternative modes for learning and thinking in community. Wendy’s Subway is dedicated to encouraging creative, critical, and discursive engagement with arts and literature. We prioritize collaboration and horizontal decision-making in our work towards being a responsive and sustainable organization.
Our interdisciplinary program includes free readings, talks, performances, and reading groups, as well as sliding-scale writing workshops and intensives. We offer residencies designed to uplift artistic and scholarly research, archival and library projects, and independent publishing practices. Our multi-series publishing initiative includes artists’ books, poetic texts, and hybrid-genre works by time-based artists. Our non-circulating library holds a collection of over 3,000 titles, ranging from poetry and fiction, to criticism and art books.
The collections that form the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives document the history of Labor and the Left and Labor. While the collections include records from the 18th century to the present, its core collections are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the contemporary day. Though its focus is primarily within the United States, and New York City more specifically, it is international in scope.
Tamiment’s archival collections, manuscripts, oral histories, photographs, AV, books, serials, and pamphlets document the history of labor, socialism, communism, anarchism, utopian experiments, the New Left, and the post-New Left, and present-day activist and social movements as well as the social and cultural contexts in which these movements exist. In addition to collecting publications documenting the history of the organized left and labor movements, the Library acquires research materials describing the history of work and working people in all its varied dimensions with an emphasis on class, race, gender, ethnicity, immigration and migration history, the workplace, working people–in particular working class people, and labor market participation.
Bilna’es
Bilna’es is an adisciplinary platform that seeks to find new models for artists to redistribute resources and support one another in the production and circulation of work. It functions as a publishing space with releases ranging from music to video games, web projects, publications, performances, installations, and other yet-to-be-developed forms.
Pinko
Pinko is a collective for thinking gay communism together. We publish print issues, books, zines, and host essays, translations, and archival material on our website.
NYU SKIRBALL
NYU Skirball holds close James Baldwin’s dictum that “artists are here to disturb the peace.” Our mission is to present adventurous, cross-disciplinary work that inspires yet provokes, confirms yet confounds, and entertains yet upends. We proudly embrace renegade artists who surprise, productions that blur aesthetic boundaries, and thought-leaders who are courageous, outrageous, and mind-blowing. We are NYU’s largest classroom. We want to feed your head.
NYU SKIRBALL FUNDING
NYU Skirball’s programs are made possible in part with support from the National Endowment for the Arts; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature; and the Howard Gilman Foundation; Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels; The Laura Pels International Foundation for Theater; Collins Building Services; Harkness Foundation for Dance; Villa Albertine; Polish Cultural Institute; General Delegation of the Government of Flanders to the USA; Québec Government Office in New York; Goethe Institut-New York; Austrian Cultural Forum New York; and Marta Heflin Foundation; as well as our valued donors through memberships, commissioning, and Allies for Arts Access Fund support.
BECOME A MEMBER
NYU Skirball Members are friends … with benefits. Members receive discounted tickets to productions, events, pre-sale opportunities, exclusive invitations, and special access to innovative artists, academics, and thought-leaders. More importantly, members support a broad range of cutting-edge performances to New York City. Memberships start at $75.
GO BEYOND THE STAGE
NYU SKIRBALL STAFF
Director Jay Wegman
Supervisor, Lighting And Sound Emily Anderson
Ticket Operation Specialist Cliff Billings
Engagement Director J De Leon, PhD
Theater Technician Brian Emens
Company Manager Tayler Elizabeth Everts
Theater Technician George Faya
Theater Technician Angie Golightly
Operations Manager Jenny Liao
Marketing Manager Clare Lockhart
Box Office Manager Craig Melzer
Development Director Kimberly Olstad Piegaro
Front of House Supervisor Jordan Peters
Production Manager Alberto Ruiz
Senior Supervisor, Lighting And Sound Don Short
Finance and Administrative Manager Caroline Grace Steudle
Operations Director Ian Tabatchnick
Press Representative Helene Davis