Hi-ARTS Incubator Names New Cohort Of Artists-in-Residence

As the New Year begins to unfold, Hi-ARTS welcomes its newest cohort of residents for its signature CRITICAL BREAKS and SKY LAB residencies. Jay Délise, Germono Toussaint, and two collaborative duos - Zachariah Ezer & Dominique Rider and Brian Quijada & Nygel D. Robinson - join the CRITICAL BREAKS residency, which provides an intensive development process, rehearsal space, and a public offering (performance, experience or showing) of their choice to artists in a pivotal phase of creating new work. Friday Lynton joins as an Artist-in-Residence for SKY LAB, a program that supports socially engaged artists who center community in the development and research of their work, including practitioners who create outside of the traditional studio or theater.

Hi-ARTS is New York City's premier incubator for urban art, serving as a springboard for the next generation of cutting-Edge Theater, music, dance, visual art, and multi-disciplinary artists. Core to Hi-ARTS' mission - and reflective of this cohort - is to foster artists who engage Hip-Hop and urban aesthetics, especially Black artists and artists of the Global Majority, and to amplify their work within and beyond the organization's home in East Harlem. Among the award-winning artists that Hi-ARTS has supported are Radha Blank, Ebony Noelle Golden, Nona Hendryx, Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Dominique Morisseau, since its founding as the Hip-Hop Theater Festival (HHTF) in 2000.

"Our latest cohort brings such a vast array of talents and narratives that are the here and now of art in America," said Hi-ARTS Executive Director Aaron L. McKinney. "We are looking forward to supporting them on their journey of discovery as they develop their bold new works, and we warmly welcome each of them into the Hi-ARTS family."

Friday Lynton is a Brooklyn-based Guyanese-American Metal Artisan most acknowledged for conceptualizing elaborate metal objects (sculptures) for the body and home space. Her socially engaged process, Variables Pending, invites audiences and communities into the conversation as they join Lynton in the fabrication of a large-scale metal object.

Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson are developing MEXODUS, a two-man, live-looped, hip-hop show inspired by the estimated 4,000 to 10,000 enslaved people in the South who pursued freedom in Mexico instead of looking north. Quijada is an actor, playwright and composer whose work has been seen, developed and produced across the country. Robinson is an NYC-based singer, actor, writer, and multi-instrumentalist.

Zachariah Ezer and Dominique Rider are a duo in search of the narrative arc of the slave in the tryptic An Unclear World: Experiments in Afropessimism. Using their academic and theatrical training, they use the medium of performance to create an aesthetic language for Afropessimism.

Germono Toussaint is a multi-award-winning composer, arranger, playwright, and producer. Through his residency he will focus on The Last Gatekeeper, a three-act, Afro-Futurist musical theater experience inspired by the teachings of West African shaman Malidoma Patrice Somé (January 30, 1956 - December 9, 2021). Touissant is no stranger to the Hi-ARTS community having worked as a composer with CRITICAL BREAKS alum Derek Lee McPhatter in 2017 on the development of the sci-fi theater experience Bring Back the Beat.

Jay Délise will work on &&&Art, a multimedia bouffon, or comedic farce, piece of documentary theater that laughs at the commercialization of the theater in America. Délise will collaborate with "expert" performing arts stage persona Sapphire Crauwtch.