HERE Announces 2024 Recipients Of $125K HARP Residencies

HERE will welcome three new members of the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), one of the most robust residency programs in the country. The new artists in residence are Brooklyn-based experimental artist nicHi douglas, Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón, and live arts collective Piehole.

HARP provides each artist with a commission, development support, career planning, and an opportunity for a full production, all within a collaborative environment of peers working across disparate art forms – including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. Each HARP artist receives significant long-term support of $125,000, which includes $50,000 in cash and more than $75,000 in equipment, space and services over 2-3 years to tailor each residency to each artist's individual needs. Through significant investment of time and resources, dynamic work within a strong community is created.

Co-Director Amanda Szeglowski says: “We are thrilled to welcome nicHi douglas, Angélica Negrón, and the collective Piehole into HERE's community of innovators. The HARP residency has been a transformative experience for over 165 artists, myself included, since its founding in 1999. I can't imagine embarking on my first year as Co-Director of HERE with a more inspiring group of resident artists.”

ONLY I is an autobiographical dance-driven maelstrom by experimental artist nicHi douglas. The work inspects the cultural isolation douglas experienced as the only Black student in their wealthy, conservative, predominantly white, Catholic elementary school. ONLY I is a 30-year-old tantrum.

The chamber opera Chimera (Working Title) is a deeply personal work by composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón that features drag queen performers and explores the complexity and boundlessness of identity. The opera will be experienced as a film and live music installation, with audiences traveling through the performance space, encountering different films, each featuring a unique world built around a drag performer's personal story and the intersections between their story and Negrón's own fragmented childhood memories.

For You Alone by the live arts collective Piehole is a theatrical experience for one, and for everyone. An interactive spectacle, For You Alone draws from physical theater, puppetry and multimedia hijinks to explore loneliness, labor, luxury, illusion, power, prestige, solidarity, and community. It centers on a group of Baroque-ish courtiers in search of stability who find their King among the audience. For You Alone is a Dream Music Puppetry Program commissioned project.

Through HARP, HERE has developed such highly acclaimed works as Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, and James Scruggs' Disposable Men, among others. Since HARP's founding, HERE has supported the work and career development of 165 lead artists and hundreds of their collaborators.

HARP nurtures the development of seven to nine artists, through a cross-disciplinary exchange, monthly meetings, peer-driven workshops, and panel discussions. Created in 1999 to address a compelling need in the field—the void of artistic, administrative, and financial support for artists with certain professional accomplishments, but without breakthrough recognition—HARP assists artists who are developing distinct voices and experimenting with new approaches that expand the parameters of performance. HARP is unique by offering a meeting ground where artists from varied disciplines can share diverse perspectives and by developing work with a hybrid performance aesthetic. 

Please visit www.here.org/programs/harp for more information.

About the 2024 HARP Resident Artists

nicHi douglas is an AUDELCO, Princess Grace, and Lortel award-winning experimental artist based in Brooklyn. you can refer to her/them/him/us using any pronouns said with Respect. nicHi is interested in leading community care centered creative processes born out of personal inquiry and cultural curiosity. they are an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU/Tisch undergrad in the Experimental Theater Wing where they teach dance & movement methodologies. nicHi's most recent work (pray), a co-production of Ars Nova and National Black Theater, received three 2024 Lortel awards for “Outstanding Musical,” “Outstanding Director,” and “Outstanding Ensemble. Additional theater: The Cotillion... (The Movement Theatre Company + New Georges, Choreographer), WEIGHTLESS (WP Theater, Choreographer), SKiNFoLK: AN AMERICAN SHOW (Bushwick Starr + National Black Theater, Choreographer). Upcoming: Public Displays of (self) Affection, a dance film commissioned by Lincoln Center and RECONSTRUCTING (The Team/BAM, Choreographer). www.mynameisnichi.com

Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds. Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the NY Botanical Garden, Kronos Quartet and Roomful of Teeth. As the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Angélica composed a work synchronized to the setting sun for EnsembleNewSRQ.  She regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, Angélica has been a teaching artist with NY Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program and with Lincoln Center Education. Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she's always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.

Piehole is a live arts collective that draws from a shared fascination with objects, media, and handmade universes, to pursue delight, humor, and beauty in unexpected places. Their work encourages audience agency, as well as an expanded sense of potential realities. Since 2008, Piehole has made 16 major performance projects for live and virtual spaces. Recent works include Christmas Mountain, an interactive advent calendar media installation at WNYC's The Greene Space, and Disclaimer at Under the Radar (Drama League Award Nominee). Piehole also collaborated with the LA-based Tender Claws on award-winning XR games The Under Presents and Tendar. Piehole has received support from The Public Theater, New Georges, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Theatre Workshop, The Drama League and The New Ohio, as well as NYC Women's Fund, Jerome Foundation, Puffin Foundation, NYSCA-A.R.T./New York, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Mental Insight Foundation and Puppeteers of America.

ABOUT THE HERE ARTIST RESIDENCY PROGRAM (HARP)

Through HARP, HERE commissions and develops new hybrid works over multiple years. Throughout the year, resident artists show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full–scale premieres. Projects currently continuing development in HARP include:

Based on the research of the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects from Janani Balasubramanian is an operatic, immersive experience for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a lesser-known class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars.Through animation of original and archival images, data from the new JWST and Gaia space telescope, and an operatic score built from sonified light curves of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects invites audiences into the wonderful life of these objects that abound and sing in the dark.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury's RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist son studies his physicist mother. She studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science—the story—of how things flow.

Choreographer Ximena Garnica and Video Artist Shige Moriya's A Meal, a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together experienced as part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner.

From the beginning of the pandemic Joshua William Gelb embraced limitations, live-streaming dozens of Theater in Quarantine productions from a closet measuring only 8 square feet to explore how digital encounters can feel tactile, immediate, and intimate. With theaters reopened, Theater in Quarantine is in a period of reinvention, exploring new, dynamic ways of using technology to reach hybrid audiences and this new project, created in collaboration with composer Orion Johnstone, will be the company's most palpable expression of intimacy yet. Imposing our strictest limitations to date, this study of microscopic self-exposure will be performed from a version of the original closet scaled down to a mere 32 inches wide by 18 inches tall.

Dream Feed is an electro-acoustic song cycle that drops family singing group The HawtPlates and the audience into a dream sequence - in the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of the active mind within a slumbering body. The HawtPlates utilize a vocabulary of gestures, lyrics, vocables, and exchanges to bring some of our most common shared dreams into collective view while playfully engaging the concept album as an interdisciplinary performance form.

Interdisciplinary performance Upstairs, In Our Bedroom places performance collective Same As Sister's experiences as female identical twins of color next to the real-life story of outsider authors June & Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. The Silent Twins). Utilizing dance, text, mobile VR technology, and puppetry they will reveal the dual struggles to be recognized as individuals within a pairing and within a racist and patriarchal society. The project is a collaboration with performer Peggy Piacenza, dramaturge Susan Mar Landau, VR specialist Lora Appel, and VR advisor Rachel da Silveira Gorman.

Nia O. Witherspoon's Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Star Temple + Wisdom School is a ritual-opera and a temple that merges African traditional religious approaches to healing and Black feminist theologies to both envision and enact a more evolved world through embodied experiences. By centering all radical forms of Black femme agency across time, including dreamwork, coming to voice, creative expression, sacred sexuality, and gender affirmation, Priestess of Twerk takes participants on a journey populated with glorious music, spell-casting choreography, and their own personally tailored guidance throughout the piece, teaching the inter-relationship between Black Femme health and the health of our planet.

About HERE

The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

HERE's standout productions include Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac's The Lily's Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle's all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee's Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs' Disposable Men, Corey Dargel's Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt's The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist's Symphonie Fantastique and, this season Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram and Zoey Martinson's The Black History Museum According to the United States of America.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.

About HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program

HERE's Dream Music Puppetry Program, under the artistic direction of Basil Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, is one of few programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary adult puppet works, particularly works that feature live music as a collaborative element. Dream Music seeks to secure the future of puppetry by providing increased development and performance opportunities to puppet artists, and by collaborating with artists from other disciplines to develop new puppetry techniques. This program was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist's OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998 and the opening of the Dorothy B. Williams Theater, an intimate space created specifically for intimate puppetry. HERE's Dream Music is also proud to house the Griff Williams Puppetry Collection. The 6 antique marionettes of Harry James, Griff Williams, Cab Calloway, Arturo Toscannini, Ted Lewis and Paul Whiteman were all performed with The Griff Williams Orchestra in the 1930s & 40s throughout America's big band era. They have a permanent home outside the Dorothy B. Williams Theater at HERE.

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