New York Live Arts' 2014 Live Ideas Festival Set for 4/23-27

New York Live Arts today announced that its second annual Live Ideas festival, entitled James Baldwin, This Time!, will take place April 23 - 27, 2014, and will center on the enduring pertinence of the work of the American essayist, novelist, playwright and social critic. Spanning the course of five days, James Baldwin, This Time! will include lectures, panels, performances and a full range of artistic responses. The festival will launch "The Year of Baldwin," a year-long celebration featuring Baldwin-inspired programming presented by a number of cultural institutions around the city on the occasion of what would have been the writer's 90th year.

"After the success of New York Live Arts' inaugural Live Ideas festival The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, we are thrilled to shift the focus to another essential generator of and magnet for ideas: James Baldwin," said Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts. "James Baldwin is a quintessential and unique voice in the landscape of Twentieth Century thought. His work sheds light on the painful truth of our society as represented by the intractable conversation at the intersection of class, race, sex and violence. What sets James Baldwin apart from other powerful artists and social justice thinkers of his era is his ability to address, in terms at once poetic and visceral, what we can only call 'Americanism.'"

Launched in April 2013 by New York Live Arts, the internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry, Live Ideas is an annual arts and ideas festival that offers artists of all disciplines and audiences an opportunity to come together for lively discussion and exploration under a new theme each year. Following the success of the first edition The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, which paid tribute to the acclaimed neurologist-and attracted more than 3,000 attendees throughout the five day period and more than 4,000 online viewers through the live streaming of events-the 2014 festival will once again be curated by celebrated non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler in conjunction with Bill T. Jones. The festival will explore the continuing impact of Baldwin, a prophetic author whose seminal works include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni's Room (1956) and The Fire Next Time (1963).

"For all his time in exile, and for all of the time he spent dwelling on the agonies of difference, Baldwin always spoke in a radical, cleansing and prophetic voice, from the standpoint of an American - his own word, endlessly repeated - reclaiming and reconceiving that term in a way that seemed especially relevant to the poisoned discourses of our own era," echoed Weschler. "That's part of what we were trying to get at in titling our own festival James Baldwin, This Time! We can't wait to see the sorts of discourses it will spark."

The 2014 Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time! is being presented by New York Live Arts as part of "The Year of Baldwin" in partnership with Harlem Stage; other collaborators include Columbia University and its Office of Community Outreach and Education, The School of the Arts; The Richard Avedon Foundation; The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the School of Writing; and others to be announced as the year goes on.

Programming information and complete details for James Baldwin, This Time! will be released in January 2014. Further details regarding additional "The Year of Baldwin" programming will be released in the coming months.