Ice Factory Festival Returns To New Ohio Theatre

New Ohio Theatre has announced that the 28th annual Obie Award-winning Ice Factory Festival will return to live in-person performances, featuring seven new works over seven weeks, June 30 - August 14, 2021, at New Ohio Theatre, located at 154 Christopher Street between Greenwich and Washington Streets in New York City.

Performances are Wednesdays - Saturdays at 7pm ET (Liminal Archive performances at 7pm & 8pm). Tickets are $20 and $17 for students and seniors. Purchase at https://newohiotheatre.org. Special closing night benefit performance of My Onliness on August 14.

Artistic Director Robert Lyons says, "It was a long walk through a global pandemic but we are still standing and open for business! NYC artists are hungry to make and show their work. This year's line-up is an eclectic mix of artists; all fully engaged in the contemporary conversations of the moment. As always, we look to our artists to help us navigate, imagine, and build a better post-pandemic world."

Check New Ohio's website for the most current information on Covid restrictions. Currently, to attend a performance you must show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test (72 hours) for admittance into the theatre. Masks are required for all audience members. However, performers will not be masked.

Time Out New York calls Ice Factory "The coolest of the summer theatre festivals," and The New York Times says the festival's "an annual celebration of the weird, the wild and the unexpectedly wonderful." New York Magazine praises the Ice Factory as "New York's #1 Summer Theatre Festival," and The New Yorker says, "The Ice Factory Festival has a fine record for presenting intellectually challenging and artistically daring fare." "One of downtown theater's most beloved and reliable incubators of new voices," cheers the Observer.

New Ohio Theatre strengthens, nurtures, and promotes a community of independent theatre artists and companies by developing and presenting bold new work in New York City. Their Ice Factory summer festival offers emerging and established companies a prime platform to develop their work. Ice Factory prides itself on maintaining extraordinary aesthetic diversity along with an unequaled standard for intelligent, imaginative theater.

ICE FACTORY 2021 SCHEDULE

June 30 - August 14

Endless Loop of Gratitude

Ongoing Sound Installation

Created for New Neighborhood by Broken Chord, Jackson Gay, Steven Padla, Riw Rakkulchon and Ashley Thomas

Endless Loop of Gratitude is a solo, interactive sound installation that opens one hour prior to the start of each Ice Factory performance. Participants are invited to record their own reflections on gratitude or read the words of another person who is not present. In a culture that can reduce the most profound feelings to blithe hashtags, this interactive installation invites participants up to the microphone to reflect on the people, places, and events that have impacted their own lives: what are you really grateful for?

June 30 - July 3

The Extremely Grey Line

A 23.5° Tilt Production

Co-written by Kate Pressman and Elizagrace Madrone

Directed by Estefania Fadul

Come take a ride on the Extremely Grey Line - a site-specific show led by psychopomps, designed around the streets of New York which are also the graveyards of New York which is also the life of New York. Audience members can choose which experience they're signing up for when they purchase a ticket to The Extremely Grey Line - on bicycle, on foot, or sitting inside the Underneath (although, of course, the Underneath is only available to those with the PROPER Covid documentation).

July 7 - 10

Kim Loo Gets a Redo

Written by and featuring Lisa Helmi Johanson and Kimberly Immanuel

An Original Piece Inspired by Real Women

Combining reimagined 1930 & 1940 show tunes, original music, percussive tap dance, spoken word, and personal reflections, this genre-bending work celebrates the lesser-known history of the Kim Loo Sisters, the first Asian American act on Broadway. A deeply personal response to the rise of hate crimes against the Asian community, Kim Loo Gets a Redo shifts the historical paradigm to the AAPI perspective, explores the erasure of AAPI women both past and present, and reclaims agency lost.

July 14 - 17

Liminal Archive

Al Límite Collective

Producing Directors: Leah Bachar, Monica Hunken and Dennis Yueh-Yeh Li

Featuring Leah Bachar, Shan Y. Chuang, Spicy Delight, Sanam Erfani, Monica Hunken and Philip Santos Schaffer

This immersive theatrical experience guides audiences through the intimate moments of isolation experienced by artists as they traverse the unknown during the early days of the pandemic. Liminal Archive began as an open-source platform, providing a cultural exchange for International Artists to collaborate together during a lockdown and mass uprisings, and it has collected more than 40 artworks, including music, digital art and theater. Al Límite has curated these offerings into a 40-minute odyssey of live performances, projections and audio journeys where we venture through the past, the present, and find our way together into the future.

July 21 - 24

As the Sun Sets

By Dow Dance

Choreography by Caleb Dowden

Featuring Imani Gaudin-County, Andy Guzmán, Jai Perez and Caleb Dowden

What does radical Black love look like in a racist world? How do we find love when we have to fight to simply exist? This dance/media work explores how Black people continue to find happiness and joy even in the predominantly white spaces of Sundown Towns, where their very presence makes them unsafe. A kinetic, visual representation of Black stories celebrating how radical Black love has and always will flourish, even in the midst of violence.

July 28 - 31

A Grave is Given Supper

Poems by Mike Soto

Directed by Claudia Acosta

Featuring Elena Hurst

in partnership with Teatro Dallas

In this Narco-Acid Western two lovers converge in a US/Mexico border town during a raging drug war. Anchored by a series of surreal and interlinked poems, infused with rituals of love and loss, this multimedia work incorporates video projections, dance and a Nortec soundscape to explore the complicated desires of people living in the borderland.

August 4 - 7

HERSTORY

In Tandem Lab

Created and directed by Gisela Cardenas

Created by and featuring Laura Butler-Levitt and Heather Hollingsworth

Written by Javier Antonio González

A female artist leaves an inheritance to two young women with no apparent relationship to her

or each other. But on one condition: they must create something together. Excavating the artist's drawings and short stories, captivated by revelations about their previously unknown past, these two women emerge from isolation in the act of giving life to another woman's story. This new work asks: how can we start telling the stories written in our genes and passed from one generation to another? Inspired by Shakespeare's female characters.

August 11 - 14

My Onliness

One-Eighth Theatre

Text by Robert Lyons

Directed by Daniel Irizarry

Composer Kamala Sankaram

Director of ASL Alexandria Wailes

in partnership with IRT Theatre

Featuring Daniel Irizarry, Cynthia La Cruz, Kamala Sankaram, Gabriel Silva, Rhys Tivey and Alexandria Wailes

A Mad King performs his royal power as an act of martyrdom in a desperate attempt to impress a mysterious petitioner while the Master of Ceremony orchestrates songs of torture, truth, and tenderness. (The poor Writer is simply collateral damage!) Is this a glimpse of our dystopian future? Or just the structure of human consciousness? An homage to Stanislaw Witkacy and his theories of "pure forms in theatre." Performed with fully integrated ASL interpreters.

A new collaboration between Daniel Irizarry and Robert Lyons, following the international success of Yovo (NYC/Poland/Cuba).

Special Benefit Performance August 14 at 7pm celebrating our return to live theatre! Includes post-show sunset song and toast on Pier 45. Tickets are $30/$50/$100.