St. Ann's to Stage Immersive BIANCO Under Brooklyn Bridge

To top off the Inaugural Season in its new Brooklyn waterfront home, St. Ann's Warehouse has invited NoFit State Circus, the UK's leading large-scale contemporary circus, to construct its 42'-high, 10,000 square-foot big top under the Brooklyn Bridge. Inside, the Wales-based international company will immerse audiences of all ages in Bianco,a gorgeous spectacle directed by Firenza Guidi. As a live rock band plays and audiences are shepherded through the space, promenade-style, the company of 35 performers and technicians creates awe-inspiring images of prowess and daring. "This is circus as an event, aiming for grand physical/visual poetry, while at the same time exuding a huge, restless party vibe," wrote London's The Times in a review of Bianco at the Edinburgh Festival. Continuing its commitment to introducing New York to great international artists, St. Ann's presents the work's American premiere-NoFit State Circus's North American debut-May 3-29.

Performances will take place May 3-6, 10-13, 17-20 and 24-27 at 7pm; May 7, 14, 21 & 28 at 6:30pm; and May 8, 15, 22 & 29 at 2pm and 8:30pm. Running time is two hours, including an intermission. Tickets are $35-40 and can be purchased at www.stannswarehouse.org, 718.254.8779 and 866.811.4111. The Bianco tent will be across New Dock Street from the new St. Ann's Warehouse, located 45 Water Street in DUMBO, Brooklyn.

Bianco weaves together large-scale imagery, high-flying trapeze and ropes, live music, movement and exquisite design to create a spectacle above, amongst and around a standing, roaming audience. A scenography of moving towers and trusses transforms and regroups to create a continually shifting landscape of images, while shepherds lead the audience around the flying saucer-shaped tent to provide different views and perspectives. While the scale is grand and the acts risky, there are moments which are poignantly human and intimate, as the performers scale the heights, providing beautiful human counter weights for each other in graceful and robust vertical pas de deux. What distinguishes NoFit State Circus is how they invent worlds that blur the boundaries between the real and the imaginary, the possible and the impossible. The images create seamless immersions for the audiences and performers.

In addition to director Firenza Guidi, the Bianco creative team includes Creative Producer Tom Rack, Musical Director David Murray, Costume Designer Rhiannon Matthews and Production Designer Saz Moir.

Reviewing Bianco at the Roundhouse in London, The Evening Standard not only praised its "superhuman feats," but also wrote, "the seductive, exuberant mood is infectious." Londonist said, "NoFit State Circus has managed to marry motion and music into many bursts of brilliance." In her review of Bianco at the Edinburgh Festival, Lyn Gardner of The Guardian wrote, "If you don't want to run away and join the circus afterwards, you probably need to check you have a pulse."

Funding Credits

The North American Premiere of Bianco is made possible with sponsorship from the Welsh Government and funding from Wales Arts International and The City of Cardiff Council.

The Howard Gilman Foundation is the Lead Sponsor of The New St. Ann's Warehouse Inaugural Season.

About NoFit State Circus

Five friends founded NoFit State in 1986. During a politically charged time, in a recession, and as a creative reaction to the world around them, the circus was born.

Thirty years later NoFit State still believes that the total outweighs the sum of the parts. The company lives together, works together, eats together, laughs and cries together-travelling in trucks, trailers and caravans and living and breathing as one community. This is what creates the spirit that is NoFit State and gives the work its heart and soul.

NoFit State Circus's work combines live music, dance, stage design, text, and film with traditional circus skills. It is rooted in the travelling community that turns up, pitches a tent, drums up an audience, and then leaves with only flattened grass and a memory to show they were ever there.

Today, NoFit State is the UK's leading large-scale contemporary circus company, producing professional touring productions and a wide variety of community, training, and education projects for people of all ages. Over the last six years NoFit State's touring productions have visited 15 different countries and played to audiences of over 250,000. They have garnered critical acclaim and numerous prestigious international arts awards.

About St. Ann's Warehouse

St. Ann's Warehouse plays a vital role on the global cultural landscape as an American artistic home for international companies of distinction, American avant-garde masters and talented emerging artists ready to work on a grand scale. St. Ann's signature flexible, open space allows artists to stretch, both literally and imaginatively, enabling them to approach work with unfettered creativity, knowing that the theater can be adapted in multiple configurations to suit their needs.

In the heart of Brooklyn Bridge Park, under the vision of St. Ann's Board of Directors and founding Artistic Director Susan Feldman, Marvel Architects PLLC and development manager DBI Projects-with British theater consultants Charcoalblue and a team of expert engineers and preservation consultants-have designed a spectacular waterfront theater that offers St. Ann's signature versatility and grandeur on an amplified scale while respecting the walls of an original 1860's Tobacco Warehouse. The new building complex includes a second space, a Studio, for St. Ann's Puppet Lab, smaller-scale events and community uses, as well as a walled public garden, designed by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which will be open to Brooklyn Bridge Park visitors during Park hours. The garden will open in May 2016.

Susan Feldman founded Arts at St. Ann's (now St. Ann's Warehouse) in 1980, at the National Historic Landmark Church of St. Ann and the Holy Trinity on Montague Street in B­rooklyn Heights. For twenty-one years, St. Ann's presented a decidedly eclectic array of concert and theater performances in the church sanctuary.

From Fall 2001 through the 2014-15 season, the organization has been activating found spaces in DUMBO with the world's most imaginative theater- and music-makers, helping to make the burgeoning neighborhood a destination for New Yorkers and tourists alike. After twelve years (2001-2012) in a warehouse that was located at 38 Water Street, St. Ann's transformed another raw space at 29 Jay Street, turning it into an interim home for three years (2012-2015) while the organization adapted the then-roofless Tobacco Warehouse at 45 Water Street in Brooklyn Bridge Park into the new St. Ann's Warehouse, which opened to the public last month.

The Inaugural Season features St. Ann's signature international presentations that will continually demonstrate the flexibility of the new St. Ann's Warehouse. The season began with the Donmar Warehouse all-female Henry IV, directed by Phyllida Lloyd and starring Harriet Walter, and continued with The Last Hotel, a new opera from Donnacha Dennehy and Enda Walsh. Currently, Oscar winner Mark Rylance is performing in Nice Fish, written by Rylance and prose poet Louis Jenkins after Jenkins' poems.

Three decades of consistently acclaimed landmark productions that found their American home at St. Ann's include Lou Reed's and John Cale's Songs for 'Drella; Marianne Faithfull's Seven Deadly Sins; Artistic Director Susan Feldman's Band in Berlin; Charlie Kaufman and the Coen Brothers' Theater of the New Ear; The Royal Court and TR Warszawa productions of Sarah Kane's 4:48 Psychosis; The Globe Theatre of London's Measure for Measure; Druid Company's The Walworth Farce, The New Electric Ballroom and Penelope by Enda Walsh and Walsh's Misterman, featuring Cillian Murphy; Lou Reed's Berlin; the National Theater of Scotland's Black Watch; Kneehigh Theatre's Brief Encounter and Tristan & Yseult; Yael Farber's Mies Julie; Dmitry Krymov Lab's Opus No. 7; the Donmar Warehouse all-female Julius Caesar; Kate Tempest's Brand New Ancients; Tricycle Theatre's Red Velvet and, most recently, the National Theatre of Scotland's Let the Right One In. St. Ann's has championed such artists as The Wooster Group, Mabou Mines, Jeff Buckley, Cynthia Hopkins, Emma Rice and Daniel Kitson, and presented a historic David Bowie concert in 2002.

The new St. Ann's Warehouse retains the best of its past homes: the sense of sacred space of the organization's original home in the Church, and the vastness and endless capacity for reconfiguration artists have harnessed in St. Ann's temporary warehouses in DUMBO.

For more information, please visit www.stannswarehouse.org.