CATCH 79 and More Set for The Chocolate Factory Theater 2025/26 Season

The Chocolate Factory Theater has unveiled its 2025/2026 season of performances featuring 8 Commissioned Premieres, 9 Early Stage Creative Residencies, several additional interdisciplinary events, and partnerships with L’Alliance New York / Crossing The Line Festival, Under The Radar Festival, New York Live Arts, and the Walker Art Center. 

CATCH 79

Saturday September 13, 2025
Doors at 6pm. Performance at 7pm

With James Harrison Monaco + Avi Amon !  Maria Baranova ! Shiloh Blue ! lily gold ! Gabriella Gonzalez ! Ishmael Houston-Jones ! Noah Latty ! Edgar Oliver ! Garrett and Scout ! Alex Tatarsky ! Dominic Yarabe !

CATCH is organized by Andrew Dinwiddie, Caleb Hammons, Jeff Larson, and Matt Romein. CATCH is the Obie award-winning, itinerant, rough and ready series of performance events that whirls through Brooklyn and other cities. For years, Catch has given stage to emerging artists and downtown luminaries, pouring equal portions of community, love, and beer. Founded in 2003 by Jenny Seastone Stern as a home for the emerging avant-garde, CATCH has become an integral part of the downtown community.

Ruth Childs - Blast!

October 8-10, 2025
Wednesday through Friday at 7pm

Co-Presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival

In her solo performance Blast!, Ruth Childs crafts a choreographed dialogue with the percussive sound design of Stéphane Vecchione, weaving its rhythms and ruptures together with movement into a choreographic circle. Drawing from her observations of how humans express themselves, Childs confronts and interacts with representations of bodies that embody a terrible violence. What sounds, expressions, and words emerge from these bodies? Are they storytelling, ballad, poetry, or nonsense?

Netta Yerushalmy, Tuçe Yasak, Mieke Ulfig, Katherine Profeta, Paula Matthusen, Alla Kovgan - nothing personal, just everything

October 30 - November 1, 2025

Alla Kovgan (film), Paula Matthusen (sound/music), Katherine Profeta (text), Mieke Ulfig (graphic arts), Tuçe Yasak (light/installation), and Netta Yerushalmy (movement) come together to devise nothing personal, just everything – a multi-sensory tangle of pictures, bodies, and objects in motion. Interrogating ideas of femaleness, fleshiness, the passage of time, the evasive notion of belonging, and the survival practices of their artist-heroines through history, these six makers move in and out of step with one another, constructing and dismantling jagged landscapes. With no leader and no center, they propose something like a home – or at least a temporary shelter.

Autumn Knight - Nothing #4: Pattern

January 16-18, 2026
Co-Presented with Under The Radar Festival

This new work is a somatic inquiry into an ongoing research of nothingness - its form, theory and practice. 3 performers experiment continuously to access emergent material, images, and impulses. The moment is a meditation on acting with and on and as objects in ways that generates and privileges impermanence as a viable strategy for survival. 

Performers: Kaylah Farrish, Dominica Greene, Jasmine Hearn. Producer: nick von kleist. Lighting Design: Tuce Yasak. Object Design: Matt Shalzi.

Saturday Salons

March 7 + May 16, 2026

In the spirit of the unfinished, the unformed, and the untamed, the Saturday Salons bring together visual artists, writers, musicians, composers, performers, and others to present selections from works-in-process. The rougher the ideas—the more unexpected and outlandish the projects—the better. Participating artists TBA.

Curated by writer-critic Jennifer Krasinski and artist Amy O'Neill. 

Karinne Keithley Syers - Your Ghost Body & Companion Piece

March 2026

Your Ghost Body is a memory palace in the form of a playable junkyard. Its genesis was an inquiry into the way I carry the landscapes of childhood and adolescence with me as a psychic possession and the question of what to do in middle age with the vestigial homing instinct for a place I no longer inhabit. What emerged was the visitation of three avatars – two of my own childhood, one 9 and one 17, and one of the me who was writing and remembering, 45, laid out in three landscapes played as levels in the junkyard. Its form is a point and click video game interspersed with songs. The video game will be accompanied by Companion Piece, a spoken and sung performance text sourced from the same raw material as the game. 

Created by Karinne Keithley Syers with collaborators: Kate Benson (performer), John Gasper (performer), Aviva Jaye (performer), and Sara Walsh (designer).

Neal Medlyn - Made In Heaven

March 2026

Made in Heaven is a new performance and visual art piece by Neal Medlyn in collaboration with Ulrika Andersson featuring live music, dance, painting, and video. Inspired by the Jeff Koons/Cicciolina art disaster, and following large scale works by Medlyn on themes of death and God, Made in Heaven is about sex and the doomed and comic creation of something alluring, menacing, and holy. 

Created and Performed by Neal Medlyn in collaboration with Ulrika Andersson.

Ayano Elson - Control

May 2026

Control emerges from research into yōkai (shapeshifting entities) and henshin (transformational processes) from Okinawan folkloric traditions. Drawing on postwar Japanese cinema’s treatment of corporeal transformation and sexualized violence in films like Paradise View and Woman in the Dunes, invites six paired performers into a shared, occupied site where sensual memory, historical trauma, and embodied shame oscillate and intersect within the dark, heavily surveilled space of the theater.

Collaborators: Matt Evans, Amelia Heintzelman, evan ray suzuki.

Moriah Evans - BANKing: […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] 

June 2026

Co-Commissioned with the Walker Art Center

BANKing: […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] is an immersive performance that confronts the body as an ambivalent site of political and existential inscription. Through a sequence of evolving circumstances—internal and external, individual and collective—the piece stages the circulation of bodies and value, asking what it means to give, to take, to receive, to be taken. It is not merely a choreography of movement and sound, but of power, dependency, and worth.

Jasmine Hearn - Memory Fleet

Co-Presented with New York Live Arts (performances will take place at NYLA)
June 2026

Memory Fleet is a continually expanding, episodic, migrating performance that builds an alternative archive for the preservation of shared embodied memories and stories. Memory Fleet is rooted in lands now known in Houston, TX. Lead artist and researcher Jasmine Hearn has been tracing their movement lineages centering the work / rest and past / future of the Black people who have mothered and mentored their artistic trajectory as an organizer, storyteller, dancer, and performer. As the project moves across the country from Houston to Queens to Pittsburgh to Manhattan, Hearn expands their research and listening practices to include a variety of places and people who have shaped their understanding of color, direction, gesture, and rhythm.

Choreography, Performance, and Design: Jasmine Hearn. Sound: Jasmine Hearn and Ashley Teamer. With additional choreographic collaboration: Begee, Melanie George, Harrison Guy, Acquenette LeBlanc, Kendra Portier, jhon r. stronks, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Project Coordinator: Areli Navarro Magallón. Creative Producing Consultant: Nora Alami. 

Early Stage Creative Residencies

Fall 2025 - Spring 2026