A glowing platform. A cloud. A white box. A living room rug. These are the four settings of Caryl Churchill's series of one-act plays presented this past spring at the Public Theater und…
"Go!" is an affirmation of consent. Meaning emerges from this limited vocabulary as well. "Ready? Four!" becomes "ready for" a dangling question asking, "ready for what?"
Ariel Stess, a playwright from the desert of Santa Fe, loves water onstage: kiddie pools, hot tubs, atmospheric pits and mirages and mirrors. Her crafted worlds are not just eerie, isolated,…
For a story honoring the history within the water, I am struck by the wind. It's 12:30 pm on a breezy Saturday afternoon in the Bronx. The days leading up to between wave and water are a…
At the conclusion of the electrifying performance of Curriculum III: People, Places, and Things, members of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company took their bows to a standing ovation f…
At the opening of Memory Piece: Mr. Ailey, Alvin…the un-Ailey?, we catch glimpses of Bill T. Jones dancing in and out of darkness. His flowing white pants and matching shirt caress his bod…
"What do we carry? What do we inherit?"Â On one of the first hot, humid nights this spring, I entered the packed Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research's intimate loft space on Huron Street…
Kallan Dana is a playwright, producer, theatermaker, and aspiring novelist from Portland, Oregon. Her work has been developed or presented with Clubbed Thumb, New Georges, The Hearth, The Ta…
 How does one take a classic literary work shaped by poetry and weave it into movement? How can you craft a physical manifestation of a character's declarative words and let their psycho…
You can't knock You Can't Take it With You. The 1937 Pulitzer Prize winning play, which just enjoyed a production at the Brooklyn Centre for Theatre Research, remains popular among high scho…
In the basement of the Flea on Thomas Street, just inside The Siggy Theater, two millennials Puff and Jame, are debating how they'll celebrate Puff's birthday. They've just finished their sh…
 Sitting down to work this afternoon, I selected to play my "On Repeat" playlist on Spotify: a selection of songs, continuously played, curated both by and for me. As I started this …
"Celebrations are rare these days." That's what Jame says to her best friend, Puff, the recently promoted and highly anxious manager at Revolution Cuts, a chain hair salon nestled in the mid…
For the 20th incarnation of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival programming director Nicky Paraiso reminded us of the importance of experimental theater in times of political turmoil. Something te…
The other day, I watched a subway dancer fall. Backflipping between metal rails, his hand slipped and he crashed back-first to the floor. For a moment, the train was still. No one had a scri…
Shared programs can be tricky. As a dance festival curator, part of the battle is attempting to describe a work of art effectively to the public while predicting their reaction. Putting two …
"I wanted to see the John Jasperse piece at La Mama but didnt have money for a ticket, so I offered to write about it," I texted Jodi Melnick, performer-collaborator in the piece" who once g…
I was sixteen in 2016, when Trump was elected for the first time. I went to the March for Our Lives in Boston. I fastened witty political buttons to my denim jacket. I put "activist" in my i…
The vibe was very: here we are in the midst of a fascist coup, what is left to fear? Lots, obviously. But the old obsessions with boundaries and criticism are too much to carry now.
As artificial intelligence takes over the world, many artists seem primed to abandon their inhibitions and experiment with the latest innovations. Concordance between art and technology is h…
I could picture the eye rolls coming, the sheer exasperation. There could be no other reaction. "It's a play about this Brooklyn couple" they've been married for years, now they're opening t…
As a playwright, there's something very special about an early draft " unedited and raw, a jumble of ideas that tumble out in the most honest and immediate way. There's the potential for so …
 Do I want to go to Mars? Not really, no. I was never one of those kids who looked up at the night sky and pointed to the stars and said "woah." I haven't even seen, for instance, In…
When I moved to New York in 2022, I was twenty-two, and I wanted to make dances. I knew a lot of artists my age and was lucky to have lots of great friends who had other great friends. (Mayb…
With her uncanny ability to capture highly-specific instances and deeply darkly kept-secret feelings, along with her bravery to really go there with descriptions of the body and all of its i…