New York Live Arts Hosts World Premiere of LAST AUDIENCE

New York Live Arts (Live Arts) presents the world premiere of Yanira Castro I a canary torsi's Last Audience October 16-20, 2019, commissioned as part of the Live Feed Residency Program. In the spirit of communal work built upon artist and audience collaboration, Last Audience is collectively navigated and embodied by every person in the theater. Each night, the performance is preceded by COMMUNE, a free public meal hosted by Castro and special guests to share dishes, poems, stories, and dance.

Enacted specifically and uniquely with and by each audience, Last Audience is a live laboratory for the communal work of what it means to conjure. Comprised of a set of unique scores written for each performance, the piece grapples with agency and manipulation, negotiating the individual and the collective inside a theatrical context. Drawing on language and themes from requiems and Greek classical tragedy on judgement and democratic formation, Last Audience moves inside the unstable space between the perfunctory and the transformative.

COMMUNE is a shared meal where an offering (a piece of writing, music, reading, or dance) by an invited guest artist takes place prior to each performance. The free, communal meals, open to ticket holders and non-ticket holders alike, embrace the forms of congregation and collectivity that come with sharing food and conversation -- activities that may not normally find themselves in our theater spaces. a canary torsi welcomes a wide-ranging public to attend, discuss, and collect over food and drink. COMMUNE is organized by Yanira Castro, Athena Kokoronis, and Tara Sheena, and will feature contributions from themselves and nightly guest artists Martita Abril, Stephanie Acosta, André Daughtry, Helen Betya Rubinstein, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Tina Wang, and Darrin Wright.

In conjunction with Last Audience and her Live Feed residency, Castro developed a platform to share support and resources with artists from NYFA's Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. The group performance showcase In I Between on October 19 will take place in the Live Arts theater prior to the evening's COMMUNE and performance, in partnership with NYFA Immigrant Artist mentoring program. Co-curated by Yanira Castro and Martita Abril, In I Between assembles artists including: Júlia Brandão, Floor Grootenhuis and Julian Louis Phillips, Robert Ó Shea, Lyto Triantafyllidou and Tina Wang.

Performances of Last Audience take place at New York Live Arts (219 West 19th St New York, NY 10011) October 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20, at 7:30 PM. Tickets are Free with RSVP and can be reserved here. The running time is approximately 90 minutes. An hour prior to the performance at 6:30 PM there will be COMMUNE in the lobby for a shared dinner. The group performance showcase In I Between will take place at the New York Live Arts Theater on October 19 at 5 PM. Tickets are Free with RSVP and can be reserved here.

Last Audience was made possible by the generous support of The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a NYSCA Individual Artists' Theatre Artist Commission made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and by a grant from New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Howard Gilman Foundation, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.

The development of Last Audience was made possible, in part, with artistic residencies at Yaddo and Marble House Project and a production residency at Amherst College.

Live Arts encourages a culture of respect around free programming. It's easy to forget that, in reality, none of the events are "free" to produce. An engaged and supportive community of artists, scholars, foundations, individual donors, government agencies, sponsors, and partners have generously joined efforts to make various events accessible to all audiences without charge. Live Arts asks audiences to respect this collective effort and simply let the box office know if they cannot attend. This is Respecting the Reservation.

Photo Credit: Simon Courchel

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