FRIGID Nightcap to Present ODD NUMBERS at Under St. Marks

FRIGID Nightcap, the East Village late-night variety show, will return to Under St. Marks on Friday, August 28 at 10:30 p.m. with ODD NUMBERS, a new edition exploring counting, collective power, political participation and the people who refuse to divide evenly.

As the country approaches another consequential election amid continuing debates over who gets counted, documented, represented, recognized and heard, ODD NUMBERS begins with a deceptively simple question: Who counts?

The show will expand that question beyond the ballot box, exploring the many ways individuals participate in and contribute to their communities.

“A vote counts — but voting is not the only thing that counts,” said producer and host Edward Gibbons-Brown. “Organizing counts. Labor counts. Care counts. Art counts. Refusal counts. Protecting one another counts. Showing up counts. I'm much more interested in political participation as something we practice together every day than in treating democracy as something that happens once every couple of years when somebody hands us a ballot.”

ODD NUMBERS will celebrate people who resist easy classification, bringing together queer people, immigrants, workers, artists, disabled and neurodivergent people, outsiders, organizers and others who cannot easily be reduced to a demographic profile, political constituency, corporate metric or algorithmic prediction.

“Our power doesn't come from becoming identical,” Gibbons-Brown added. “It comes from becoming many. There are more of us than they want us to know, and there are more ways of being us than their systems know how to count.”

ODD NUMBERS Lineup

The featured lineup will approach the evening's theme through beatboxing, stand-up comedy, devised theatre and experimental performance.

MATCH/Michael Wingate, a USA and North American Beatbox Champion, will demonstrate how a single performer can create an entire musical composition using only the human voice before inviting the audience into the process. Combining beatboxing, comedy and audience participation, MATCH will transform individual performance into collective music.

Rebecca Kaplan will perform an excerpt from her forthcoming stand-up special, HOW TO ACT NORMAL, exploring her lifelong efforts to conform to neurotypical expectations. After learning relatively recently that she is autistic, Kaplan began reconsidering a lifetime spent viewing herself as somehow “off” and instead embracing differences she had previously been taught to correct.

Kaplan will film HOW TO ACT NORMAL in Brooklyn on December 10.

Performance artist Adri Tavares (@stealthtrap) will join Morgan Mincer and Centeno for Nice Lady Kashi: a corporate de(con)struction by stealthTrap, an experimental devised work examining tech, labor, trans identity and corporate conformity.

Drawing in part from Tavares' own experience of being laid off and treated as an expendable corporate resource, the piece uses movement, choral voice and audio archive to examine the personal cost of sacrificing one's life, soul and sanity in service of “the company.”

The night will also feature new work from recurring Nightcap artists The Strange Girlzz, along with performers selected for OpenStage, Nightcap's recurring platform for emerging artists and new work.

Together, the acts will make the structure of ODD NUMBERS part of its theme, bringing disparate forms and performers together without requiring them to match in order to create a whole.

About FRIGID Nightcap

FRIGID Nightcap is a monthly themed late-night variety show bringing comedy, drag, burlesque, music, theatre, dance, performance art, audience participation and downtown nightlife together at Under St. Marks.

Each edition uses a different theme as a provocation, inviting artists from different disciplines to approach a shared idea from different directions. With ODD NUMBERS, the show's variety itself becomes part of the evening's exploration.

“We spend so much of modern life being counted,” Gibbons-Brown said. “Follower counts. Polls. Demographics. Productivity metrics. Districts. Databases. Engagement. Profit. We're constantly being turned into information that somebody else can use. But human beings are messy. Art is messy. Coalitions are messy. That mess is not a defect.”

FRIGID Nightcap: ODD NUMBERS will take place Friday, August 28 at 10:30 p.m. at Under St. Marks, located at 94 St. Marks Place in New York City.

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