These Theater Projects Explore Life, Death, and Everything In-Between

Theater

The future of performing arts looks bright! As part of our 2023 Creative Capital “Wild Futures” Awards, we are supporting fifteen artists this year working on Theater projects exploring death, insomnia, robots, and everything in-between.

Discover the projects below:

Athey walks through a videoscope of the “Road to Golgotha” with video intercut from the christ fantasy scene in Fassbinder’s Querelle and The Passion of the Christ, carrying on his back six 10-foot poles with phallus heads Ron Athey

The Asclepeion, thematically set within the Ancient Greek healing temples, explores the possibilities of healing, including the values of pseudoscience and shabby shamanism.


Liz and Bow are energetically singing and dancing on a stage with two dancers wearing metallic silver bikini tops and pants dancing behind them. LIZN’BOW: Liz Ferrer & Bow Ty

Novelas de Niñas is an interactive bilingual soap opera set within a quince where music and storytelling explore the intersections of fem, queer, Latinx identity.


Shows a man, with salt and pepper hair, on his hands and knees contemplating a collection of seemingly ordinary objects on the floor. Ain Gordon

Condolence asks who contemporary death and dying practices actually comfort—and how we can lovingly/responsibly release a body into the ecosystem.


On the right side of the image an “On Air” sign is lit up with red letters in a dark room. The wall next to the sign is slightly red from the glow of the letters. Samar Haddad King

Radio Act is a new musical by Samar Haddad King inspired by the role of independent radio in wartime.


The profile of a brown woman in a black bra with short brown hair tilts her head upward. She hold a beer can with her hand and pours the beer onto her neck. Xandra Ibarra

Unsettled Agreements (or Political Constipation) parodies the constipated national discourse of settlement while critically addressing the resulting political condition of irresolvable turmoil that remains between nations and bodies.


A Black woman in a double image, in an orange/brown dress, in a state of expressiveness. Aaron Landsman

Night Keeper is a performance about insomnia as a superpower, rendered in low light with actors, live music, phone-glow choreography, projections, drawings, and audience-made memory maps.


Ethan Lipton & his Orchestra Ethan Lipton

We Are Your Robots is a narrative song cycle in which a band of robots seeks to understand what human beings want from their machines.


A puppet made out of a colorful baby clothes and a white metal hanger surrounded by cardboard boxes and paper cut-outs of windows. Kimi Maeda

A Japanese akiya becomes the setting and main character for 一憶ハウス (Ichi Oku House), an interactive performance that explores loss, memory, and depopulation in rural communities.


A figure's shadow. ONEOFUS: Julie Atlas Muz & Mat Fraser

A multigenerational theatrical extravaganza, Sleeping Beauty: She Woke (Panto Project) is the herald of a new form of inclusive, radical American theater redefining how we celebrate the holiday season.


A car Joan Osato & Sunhui Chang

“the boiling” is a New Americana theater staged in an evocative world by melding film, CCTV, VR, and holographic effects with theatrical stage and live-camera acting.


A NASA generated visual showing water currents as they move across the globe. Heather Raffo

The Migration Play Cycle: A New Theatrical Platform is an epic map of a play linking the world’s migration patterns to the daily transactions of our lives, it invites us to imagine a new relationship to human value by first unpacking what we value.


A photo shown in negative of a bushy tree appearing as a bright white tree with full foliage against a black background. Several illustrated handshapes that look like sign language emerge as roots of varying shades of white and grey. The title “Not Another Deaf Story” appears as a painted font at the bottom of the image. Hilari Scarl

Not Another Deaf Story will be an innovative multimedia theater production, devised and performed in American Sign Language by an ensemble of Deaf actors.

 


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