The Assembly's Deceleration Lab to Support Five New Projects

The Assembly has announced that five projects will receive development support in this year's Deceleration Lab, an initiative to foster new theatrical works that experiment with multi-perspective and multi-disciplinary models of creation. The 2026-2027 Deceleration Lab recipients are Catalina Beltrán with the documentary theater piece Antipodal Tour, Brett Ashley Robinson with the drag cabaret Leiomyoma, and the ensemble CAN TUNA and their multimedia puppet play Onions and onions and onions and onions. The Assembly is also partnering with previous Deceleration Lab artists to support the development of two additional works: a new work by theater band Friend of Friend titled all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well and a workshop of GUT (굿) by Soomi Kim.

The Deceleration Lab artists will be developing these five pieces over the coming months, and in-process showings of their work will be open to the public and announced at a future date.

'This year marks a major expansion of the Deceleration Lab, growing our support for artists to experiment, collaborate, and nurture new projects,' writes Emily Caffery, The Assembly's Artistic Producer. 'We're delighted to welcome back Soomi Kim and Friend of Friend to the Lab, and to partner with Catalina Beltrán, Brett Ashley Robinson, and CAN TUNA, as they develop these exciting new works.'

Antipodal Tour, led by Catalina Beltrán, is a transnational documentary theatre piece about a Colombian company that traveled to post-Cultural Revolution China in 1983, hoping to find themselves reflected, and finding something far more complicated. A story about disillusionment, and the questions every theatre artist eventually has to face: what are we doing this for, and who does it serve?

Brett Ashley Robinson's Leiomyoma is a drag cabaret about black women's health, ambition, and the myth of black excellence. You feel the music pulsing beneath you, muffled, like womb sounds. Then the world explodes. Bursting into this intimate space is Leiomyoma, a dazzling, red, pop-princess fibroid. But this is her last show, the night before her host's myomectomy. Born of excess estrogen, Leio demands through her music to know why she was put here, insisting on her feminist right to exist. To her host she has given so much: strength through pain, raw ambition, and a confidence as her host steps further into self-actualization. All it costs is some blood, pain, and maybe her host's life. This cabaret asks audiences to share and cast off the weight of perfection to celebrate the simplicity and pleasure of their authentic self.

Onions and onions and onions and onions, devised by the multi-disciplinary collective CAN TUNA, is a multimedia puppet play about onions, trust, betting on the future, and what really happens when we put $100 in a Roth IRA. Jumping between a loose retelling of the events of 1958 Onion Futures Act, a real speculative investment placed at the beginning of the show, an economics lecture, and an ever-looming pile of onions, Onions is an attempt to feel our way through the nonsensical relationship between real value and speculative value.

Friend of Friend (Andy Boyd, syd island, and Philip Santos Schaffer) returns to the Deceleration Lab to create a new piece: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well, a durational sonic meditation on the nature of prayer in the face of devastation.

Soomi Kim's autobiographical theater work GUT (굿), the Korean word for ritual, explores grief, memory, and intergenerational inheritance through a Korean American lens. Weaving bilingual Korean and English narrative, movement, memoir, projected media, and Korean shamanic traditions, GUT (굿) moves between the deeply personal and the ritualistic, opening one family's story of loss into a larger, cathartic encounter with grief and release. At its center is the question: How can we let go when grief is a knot of longing and regret?

Among the record number of proposals that were submitted to the Deceleration Lab this year, The Assembly recognizes the following finalists: BLACK/face on Butter by Jordan Ealey, Community Policing by Zachariah Ezer and Dominique Rider, How to Make Tom-Yum Soup by Tidtaya Sinutoke and Keng S. Meateanuwat, Lionfish by Ida Cuttler and Nick Hart, and Old Friends by Ashil Lee. A call for proposals for the seventh cohort of the Deceleration Lab will be announced in the spring of 2027.

The Assembly, a collaborative theater collective whose eleven original plays include New York Times Critic's Pick HOME/SICK, Seagullmachine, and In Corpo, launched the Deceleration Lab in 2020 to support artists in The Assembly's broader community to develop work that takes artistic risks, challenges traditional hierarchical structures, and creates new professional opportunities for the participating artists. Previous Deceleration Lab artists include Erin Amlicke, Nehassaiu deGannes, Dante Green, Tianding He, Minna Lee, Xuanqi Liu, Alle Mims, Matthew Paul Olmos, Dezi Tibbs, Melisa Tien, and Lillian White.

Catalina Beltrán (Antipodal Tour) is a theater director originally from Bogotá, Colombia, now based in New York. She started making theater in Colombia, where movement-based, devised, and director-led work is predominant, and that foundation shapes everything she makes. She works with ensembles of actors and non actors, building pieces from the ground up through structural exploration, nonlinear forms, and a deep curiosity about what music and movement can teach a story that text alone cannot. Her work explores moral complexity, memory, and resilience, and she is actively developing her practice as a feminist artist and movement director. Recent work includes The Space We Share (The People's Theatre, Working Theater) and Nancy: An Elegy in Three Parts (ID Studio), a piece in development based on a true Colombian crime story. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and is a 2025 Drama League Directors Project fellow and New Perspectives Women's Work Lab participant.

Soomi Kim (GUT (굿)) is a New York City-based actor, theatre maker, and choreographer whose hybrid works merge text, movement, biography, and multimedia, centering Asian and Korean American narratives. Kim spearheaded a trilogy inspired by Asian American cultural figures whose lives were cut short: Lee/gendary, based on Bruce Lee; dictee: bells fall a peal to sky, inspired by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha; and Chang(e), based on performance artist Kathy Change. Her first autobiographical solo, MLCG (My Little China Girl), commissioned by Dixon Place, marked a turning point as Kim stepped more fully into writing and creating from her own family history. Subsequent works include Body Through Which the Dream Flows, created with an ensemble of competitive gymnasts and presented at New Ohio Theatre's Ice Factory and The Tank, and Testing² at The Tank. Her honors and residencies include MacDowell, BAM Artist in Residence, Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor, Mercury Store, the NYC Women's Fund, HERE Artist Residency Program, Mabou Mines, The Assembly Theater's Deceleration Lab, and Orchard Project's Greenhouse Lab. www.soomikim.com

Brett Ashley Robinson (Leiomyoma) is a 2021 Pew Fellow as well as a Barrymore Award-winning actor, director, theatremaker, and educator based in Philadelphia. She directed the world premiere of Abandon by James Ijames, which won the 2023 Barrymore for Outstanding Original Production. And her 2024 production of Once Upon a Bridge won the Philadelphia Award for Social Insight. She is the 2021 winner of the PEN America/ Jean Stein Oral History Grant for her original work Re-Enactment. She was also a semi-finalist for the Otto F. Haas Award for Emerging Artist and a two-time nominee for the Golden Tassel Jawn, Philadelphia's Drag and Burlesque Awards, for best comedy act as Patricia! She was a collaborator and performer in Lightning Rod Specials The Appointment at New York Theatre Workshop, a New York Times Critics Pick and voted best play of 2019 in The New York Times, Vulture Magazine, Time Out New York, and New York Magazine.

Lana Tleimat (Onions...) is a writer, fabricator, and puppeteer based in Brooklyn. She works as a sculptor in prop and scenic studios, working for clients such as Disney, Macy's, and Saks Fifth Avenue. In her work, Lana is interested in exploring systems of inclusion and exclusion, inspired by her mixed racial and cultural heritage. Puppetry design credits include masks for Froggy by Jennifer Haley (Center REP, World Premiere), General Peaches for Puppets of War (NY Theater Festival, dir. Zach Marullo), and puppets for Medicine Men, debuting 2027 at Puppetopia (HERE). She was a puppeteer in Midnight Radio Show's Dreamcats! (Gene Frankel Theater, dir. Charlotte Lily Gaspard). Her puppets have performed in the Edinburgh Fringe and San Francisco International Arts Festival.

Jisoo Hope Yoon (Onions...) is a writer, translator, and researcher from Seoul working across fiction, theater, and video games. Her preoccupations include distance and departure, fragmented narratives, lay understandings of physics, technocriticism, and Korean culture as refracted through the Western gaze. Her short fiction has won prizes at Columbia Journal and Driftwood Press, her poetry translations have been published in And So On (Workroom Press, 2025). Her first book-length translation is forthcoming with New Directions in 2027. She is an alum of Soho Rep's Writer/Director Lab and the BIPOC Critics Lab at The Public Theater. She is a facilitator and creative researcher at the Strother School of Radical Attention. Hope also works as a video game writer at LINE Games. MFA candidate: Creative Writing, Rutgers-Camden.

Anna Zheng (Onions...) is a Chinese-American director, deviser, and writer. She is interested in acts of adaptation-of stories, of bodies, to other people, to inhospitable environments-and the ways we change ourselves and our narratives to survive in new spaces. They use playful interdisciplinary collaboration, adapted texts, and physical theatre to visceralize everyday realities and create unexpected, intimate, joyful messes. Recent directing: Dodoland (The Tank, CAN TUNA). Bane by London Carlisle (The PIT); Run all the way home (ODC Pilot 2025, SF); a dance theatre interpretation of Constellations by Nick Payne (Joe Goode Annex, IDA Stanford); Three States of Matter, a devised, adaptation of Three Sisters about climate migration. Anna is a member of the New York Neo Futurists.

Friend of Friend (Andy Boyd, syd island, and Philip Santos Schaffer) (all shall be well...) is a theater band making shows at the intersection of queerness and spirituality. Their show Room, Room, Room, in the many Mansions of eternal glory for Thee and for everyone was developed with The Assembly's Deceleration Lab and performed at University Settlement, the Brick, Joe's Pub, and HERE Arts Center. IG | @fri3ndoffri3nd

THE ASSEMBLY is a collective of multi-disciplinary performance artists committed to realizing a visceral and intelligent theater for a new generation. Assembly members unite varied perspectives in service of wide-reaching, unabashedly theatrical and rigorously researched ensemble performances, crafted to spark conversation with their audiences. Their work embraces the complexities of our present moment; it is a call for empathy and engagement. Embracing collaboration as the core of the creative process, the company chooses projects through consensus and develops text, action and design side-by-side within the rehearsal environment. From workshops to productions to post-performance discussions, The Assembly is dedicated to rooting its artists, audiences, and peers in a profound sense of community.

The New York Times called The Assembly 'a cutting-edge young theater collective...intense and thoughtful.' The Wall Street Journal described them as 'passionate, formally inventive theater makers who make much of delving into historical texts.' Huffington Post called the group 'makers of amazingly provocative theater.'

The company has performed at venues across New York such as La MaMa ETC, Jack, New Ohio Theatre (Archive Residency Award), The Incubator, The Prelude Festival, HERE Arts Center, Horse Trade, and The Collapsable Hole, and has toured to the Odyssey Theatre in Los Angeles, Wesleyan University, the Edinburgh Fringe (Fringe First nomination) and the Philly Fringe. In 2016, The Assembly's process was documented by Professor Cindy Rosenthal in the cover essay of the industry's leading academic journal, The Drama Review: 'Circling Up with The Assembly: A Theatre Collective Comes of Age.' The Assembly's educational workshops are designed to foster empowered and empowering collaborators, training young artists in the ethics and techniques of their unique method of ground-up creation. The company has worked with students at top-tier colleges and universities like Columbia, NYU, Dartmouth, Williams, and Wesleyan, as well as workshops in NYC, LA, and online. The Assembly is currently developing The Marx Sisters, led by Assembly co-Artistic DIrector Jess Chayes, which will premiere in 2028. For more information visit assemblytheater.org or follow The Assembly on Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and TikTok at @assemblytheater.