The 21st annual PRELUDE Festival, curated by Jess Barbagallo and John Hoobyar in alignment with “Not a Luxury,” a collaboration between ASAP-15 and the Park Avenue Armory, will feature works-in-process, critical conversations, and new theater and performance scholarship.
As a featured program of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, PRELUDE presents a unique snapshot of the contemporary New York experimental theater. By merging the critical with the creative, PRELUDE provides a space for artists to share and discover emerging practices in form, craft, and technology.
Thursday 17 October
Building Cultural Power through Organizing
With Dancers 4 Palestine + Theater Workers for a Ceasefire
12 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 2 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 3 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Organizers from two Palestine solidarity formations in the arts dialogue about the obstacles and opportunities related to organizing within the arts, specifically as it relates to the current struggle for building solidarity for Palestine today. Topics of discussion will include strategies and tactics, building cultural power, an overview of actions, and provocations for others to develop or join organizing efforts from wherever they are.
Theater Workers for a Ceasefire exists to organize U.S.-based theater workers in solidarity with the people of Palestine. We aim to use our bodies and talents in pursuit of a comprehensive ceasefire, which we understand is merely the first step among many in realizing a Free Palestine.
Dancers for Palestine (D4P) is an autonomous group of dance workers who organize in solidarity with the global movement for Palestinian liberation. Formed during Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza beginning in 2023, D4P seeks to both cohere and create a dance community which is vocal and active in its support of the Palestinian people. D4P is a local and international endeavor with a core organizing group in NYC and an ever expanding network of dancers and organizers working toward a dance field free from complicity in genocide, imperialism, white supremacy, and all systems of oppression. D4P’s work has included protest and direct action, political education events, art-based fundraising, and campaigns in alignment with the Palestinian Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and against repressive anti-boycott policies. D4P works alongside with other arts and culture-based groups organizing for Palestine, including Artists Against Apartheid, Theatre Workers for a Ceasefire, and Writers Against the War on Gaza, and aligns strongly with labor organizing movements in the arts.
Friday 18 October
The School of New York: New Leaders and the Artists They Serve in Dialogue
Morgan Bassichis, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, Enver Chakartash, Will Davis, Caleb Hammons, Jill Rafson, Tina Satter, and Tyler Thomas
2 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 4 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 5 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
All over New York, long-lived performance venues are in transition, and we’re welcoming the biggest “class” of new artistic directors and associate artistic directors in memory. These leaders take their positions in a fraught moment for the field — they are also taking power with fresh ideas. Join us for a structured, two-part panel discussion, in which we’ll hear first from a group of four “freshman” New York artistic leaders, who will share their ideas and solutions for the quandaries currently facing our field; then we’ll hear from a respondent group of veteran artists, experts in New York performance, who will reflect on these innovations, explore their ramifications, and possibly offer their own. Can we talk about the theatrical “crisis” in a new, solution-oriented way? Can we marry idealism and pragmatism? Can institutions and the artists they serve arrive at solutions together? Helen Shaw from the New Yorker moderates a talk with Morgan Bassichis, Freedome Bradley-Ballentine, Enver Chakartash, Will Davis, Caleb Hammons, Jill Rafson, Tina Satter, and Tyler Thomas.
Will Davis is a director and choreographer. His work has been seen Off-Broadway at Signature Theater, City Center, Roundabout Theatre, MTC, MCC, Playwrights Horizons, Clubbed Thumb, and Soho Rep. Regionally, his work has been seen at La Jolla Playhouse, Baltimore Center Stage, Shakespeare Theater Company, Long Wharf Theatre, and ATC in Chicago where Davis previously served as artistic director. He received a Helen Hayes Award for Best Direction for his work on Colossal at the Olney Theatre Center. He was nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award for his direction of Men on Boats at Playwrights Horizons. Davis is the Artistic Director of Rattlestick Theater.
Caleb Hammons (they/he) is a Tony and Obie Award-winning creative producer and curator of live performance. They are entering their second year as one of the three directors of Soho Rep, NYC’s premiere experimental Off-Broadway theater. Prior to returning to Soho Rep, Caleb spent ten years as director of artistic planning and producing at the Fisher Center at Bard, was the producer at Soho Rep for two seasons, and was the producing director of Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company for four years. He is the co-organizer of the CATCH performance series, wore many hats for 13P, curated the Prelude Festival, and has generally floated around the downtown performance scene in various capacities.
Jill Rafson took on the role of producing artistic director at Classic Stage Company in June 2022. Previously, she worked with Roundabout Theatre Company since 2005, most recently serving as associate artistic director as well as artistic producer for Roundabout Underground, an acclaimed program supporting productions from early-career playwrights. She has developed dozens of new plays and musicals for Roundabout, with highlights including Stephen Karam’s Tony-winning The Humans; Steven Levenson’s If I Forget; Joshua Harmon’s hit Bad Jews; Adam Gwon’s musicals Ordinary Days and Scotland, PA; Ming Peiffer’s Drama Desk-nominated Usual Girls; and Sanaz Toossi’s Pulitzer Prize-winning English. Jill has been a dramaturg for several commercial musical projects and at institutions including the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference, The Flea, The Playwrights’ Center, Fault Line Theater, and more. Jill received her BA from Johns Hopkins University and a Graduate Certificate in Fundraising Management from Boston University.
Tina Satter is a writer and director for theater and film. Her debut feature REALITY was adapted from her play Is This A Room which opened at The Kitchen in 2019 and premiered on Broadway in fall 2021. With her theater company Half Straddle, Tina has written and directed 10 critically acclaimed plays including House of Dance, Ghost Rings, and SEAGULL (Thinking of you) and a number of shorter performances and video works. She has been a guest director at The Schaubühne and is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Doris Duke Artist Award among other honors.
Helen Shaw is the theatre critic for the New Yorker. Before joining the magazine in 2022, she was the theatre critic for New York magazine (and its online site, Vulture) and wrote at 4Columns, Time Out New York, the Village Voice, and others.
Tyler Thomas is a New York-based theater director and Susan Stroman Directing Award recipient. Most recently, she directed new work at the Vineyard Theatre, Pasadena Playhouse, Williamstown Theatre Festival, and Geva Theatre. Tyler is a former 2050 Fellow with New York Theater Workshop, member of the Lincoln Center Directors’ Lab, and has been a visiting artist at the Athens Conservatoire (Greece), UCLA, UC Santa Cruz, and NYU Tisch. She is currently the associate artistic director of the national arts and health initiative, Arts for EveryBody, inspired by the Federal Theatre Project. Tisch: BFA in Drama, MA in Arts Politics.
Saturday 19 October
Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism
Julia Jarcho
12 p.m. PDT (San Francisco, UTC -7) / 2 p.m. CDT (Chicago, UTC -5) / 3 p.m. EDT (New York, UTC -4)
Celebrated poet and critic Michael Robbins (Walkman, Alien vs. Predator) will join Jarcho to read and discuss her new book and how to be a pervert in writing.
Throw Yourself Away proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing—and that THEATER has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary.
Julia Jarcho is a writer, theater artist, and scholar. She puts on her plays with the NYC company Minor Theater. They include Marie It’s Time, Pathetic, The Terrifying, Dreamless Land, Every Angel Is Brutal, and Grimly Handsome. Other books: Minor Theater: Three Plays (53rd State Press) and Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press). She is the head of MFA playwriting at Brown.
