Past Events

  • Under Construction Series

    Wally Cardona & Jennifer Lacey

    March 21, 2014 - March 23, 2014

    Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey’s work together has been described as “utterly original, deeply comic, and deviously beautiful.”  Their current collaboration, The Set Up, is a multi-year eight-part project that posits western contemporary practice as yet one cultural specificity among others. Made with an international assembly of artists viewed as masters in their respective disciplines, each master is invited to teach what they think is most important about the form to which they have devoted their lives. This is followed by periods of response and reflection that culminate with a final piece.

    This fourth installment of the series began in Central Java and continued while in residence at Park Avenue Armory. Against the backdrop of the Armory’s historic period rooms, the residency centered around an encounter with classical Javanese dancer Heni Winahyuningsih, dancer/teacher at the Sultan Palace in Yogyakarta for over 30 years. The result, presented as part of the Under Construction series, is a work made for three dancers, two singers and the historic Board of Officers room.

  • Under Construction Series

    Lauren Flanigan

    September 13, 2014 - September 28, 2014

    Following her residency in 2012, soprano Lauren Flanigan returns to the Armory with her amazing ensemble to expand upon her work on the unknown songs of Kurt Weill with filmmaker James Mathew Daniel, stage director Kevin Newbury, accordionist William Schimmel, violist Julie Goodale, and pianist Christopher Cooley.

    Lauren Flanigan has enjoyed a 30-year career that includes performances at the Metropolitan Opera, La Scala, Glyndebourne, Lyric Opera of Chicago, and New York City Opera. She has been featured in 10 world premieres, 11 CDs, five Live from Lincoln Center telecasts, one major motion picture, and has received 15 awards for her musical and humanitarian work. In 2002, Carnegie Hall commissioned composer Phillip Glass to write Symphony No. 6, Plutonian Ode for her. She started Comfort Ye …, now in its 20th year, an annual musical event to raise food and awareness for New York’s homeless. She is the founder and director of Music and Mentoring, a not-for-profit organization providing hands-on mentoring and full room and board to students studying in the arts in New York City.

  • Under Construction Series

    Jason Akira Somma

    October 14, 2014 - October 15, 2014

    Visual artist and choreographer Jason Akira Somma will preview a series of works-in-development as part of the Armory’s Under Construction Series. In addition to viewing a gallery of his visual art, Akira Somma will also be showcasing his work with dance, fracturing the movement of live dancers using analog technology to create an entirely new way to view the art form through interactive media and practices. The Under Construction Series offers audiences an inside look into the creative process of the Armory’s artists-in-residence, who set up studios and offer intimate public previews of works-in-progress.

    Jason Akira Somma is a New York-based visual artist and choreographer who merges practices and incorporates science, new technologies, and kinesthetics into transcendent performances and experiences. In addition to his creative work, Mr. Akira Somma has lectured internationally at universities, museums, and national theaters on “Arts and Science/Performance and New Technology” via the U.S. Embassy, and has had the unique opportunity to be a guest consultant for the University of Glasgow in the Neuroscience department for a research study focusing on how the perception of movement affects brain imaging and transcranial magnet stimulation. He is the first American to receive the Rolex Arts Initiative for Dance and has been working under the mentorship of Jiří Kylián.

  • Under Construction Series

    Sasha Frere-Jones

    November 12, 2014

    During his residency, Sasha Frere-Jones will continue writing for The New Yorker, conduct research for several book-length projects, and develop BATAN, a nomadic music and art collective.

    On November 12, he will present an intimate evening with the performance company Sister Sylvester. They will present The Fall: A Performative Screening, a work-in-progress based on, but not limited to, Peter Whitehead’s 1969 cult film, The Fall, which documents the social and political turmoil of Vietnam-era USA. The piece uses live performance and audio recordings of those involved in — and affected by — the film. This interpretation of The Fall explores the power of art to change society, the ways in which radical politics are transformed through memory, documentation, and the exigencies of history.

    Sasha Frere-Jones joined The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic in 2004. Prior to that, he was the music critic for Slate. Since 1995, he has written for the Village Voice, Spin, The New York Times, the New York Post, The Wire, and Pretty Decorating. His work has been anthologized in the Da Capo “Best Music Writing” series six times. In 1991, Mr. Frere-Jones formed the band Ui, which toured America and Europe and released five albums.

  • Under Construction Series

    AGING MAGICIAN

    January 11, 2015 - January 13, 2015

    A new music-theater work, AGING MAGICIAN uses a composite of sonic and visual elements to follow a man entering his final stages of life to the fantastical world of Coney Island. Composed by Paola Prestini with libretto by Rinde Eckert, direction by Julian Crouch, scenic design by Julian Crouch and Amy Rubin, instrument designer Mark Stewart, and projection designer, S. Katy Tucker, AGING MAGICIAN’s creative team combines music, theater, puppetry, instrument-making, and scenic design to create an enduring work for the stage. This work features vocalist Rinde Eckert with the Brooklyn Youth Chorus and string quartet.

    Paola Prestini is a composer and director and co-founder of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary collective that has created over 70 multimedia productions worldwide. Her music has been performed by such ensembles as International Contemporary Ensemble, The BBC Symphony Orchestra, The Chicago Symphony, and the Kronos Quartet in venues including Carnegie Hall, The Barbican Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), and The Kennedy Center. Named by NPR as one of the Top 100 composers in the world under 40, Ms. Prestini has received commissions from Concert Artists Guild and Carnegie Hall, among other organizations. Current commissions include The New York Philharmonic, The Krannert Center, and upcoming works at BAM and MASS MoCA. She is currently working with Roomful of Teeth, Isabelle Leonard, Rinde Eckert, Julian Crouch, Maya Beiser, Cornelius Dufallo, The Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Young People’s Chorus, Michael Counts, Helga Davis for a Bric Residency, and artists Erika Harrsch, Carmen Kordas, and Ali Hossaini. She is the Creative Director for Original Music Workshop, a Brooklyn-based venue slated to open in 2015.

    Rinde Eckert is a writer, composer, director, performer, and singer known for the flexibility and inventiveness of his voice and his uniquely interdisciplinary productions. His works move beyond the boundaries of what a “play,” a “dance piece,” an “opera,” or “musical” might be, and include And God Created Great Whales (2000 OBIE award), Orpheus X (2007 Pulitzer Prize in Drama Finalist), Highway Ulysses, Four Songs Lost in a Wall, and Horizon (2008 Lucille Lortel Award). He is the recipient of a Mark Blitzstein Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2005), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), the Alpert Award in the Arts (2009), and a Grammy for Best Small Ensemble Performance (2012) for his vocals on Lonely Motel: Music from Slide with Steve Mackey and eighth blackbird. In April 2012 The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation named Mr. Eckert as one of 21 inaugural Doris Duke Artists.

    Puppet designer and theater-maker Julian Crouch was a founding member of Improbable Theatre and was co-director and co-designer of the international and West End phenomenon Shockhead Peter. Other shows for Improbable include Satyagraha in a co-production with the English National Opera and The Metropolitan Opera; Spirit, which Crouch directed, and which was a co-production with The Royal Court; Coma, which he co-devised and co-designed; Sticky, the Hanging Man; and 70 Hill Lane. He designed and was associate director on the multi award-winning Jerry Springer: The Opera at the National Theatre, West End, and UK tour. Other recent productions include Cinderella  for The Dutch National Ballet, Dr. Atomic for The Met/ENO, The Magic Flute for Welsh National Opera, The Addams Family for Broadway, and The Enchanted Island for The Met. Mr. Crouch was an Artist-in-Residence at Park Avenue Armory in 2011.

  • Under Construction Series

    Ulysses Owens Jr.

    April 8, 2015

    Ulysses Owens, Jr. blends the movement of the under-celebrated choreographer Ulysses Dove, selections from the James Joyce novel Ulysses, and his own compositions in a multi-disciplinary project that explores the melding of art forms inspired by the name “Ulysses.”

    Multi-Grammy Award Winning drummer Ulysses Owens Jr. has performed with world-class musicians, including Patti Austin, Terence Blanchard, Russell Malone, Wynton Marsalis, Mulgrew Miller, Maceo Parker, and Dianne Reeves. In 2010 Owens received his first Grammy Award for his performance on Kurt Elling’s Dedicated To You, and in 2012 his second Grammy Award for Christian McBride’s Big Band Album The Good Feeling. His 2009 debut recording It’s Time For U featured several original compositions and arrangements. His second album,Unanimous, released in 2012 on European jazz label Criss Cross, features Christian McBride, Nicholas Payton, Jaleel Shaw, Mike Dease and Christian Sands, and has been hailed by critics and audiences alike as “...the best jazz album of 2012.” This year, Owens will produce three albums, one of which with the Alicia Olatuja, who was the featured Vocalist at the Re-Inauguration of President Barack Obama. Owens is the Co- Founding Artistic Director of Don’t Miss A Beat, his family’s non-profit organization. Don’t Miss A Beat’s core mission is to blend music and art with focus on academic achievement, civic engagement and to inspire and empower inner city students to strive for their dreams.

  • Under Construction Series

    Taylor Mac / Machine Dazzle

    August 6, 2015 - August 9, 2015

    Taylor Mac presents new material and musical arrangements from his on-going durational concert called A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which includes performances of songs from the last 24 decades of popular music. Each decade has a different costume designed by Machine Dazzle; those created during the residency will also be on display during the Under Construction showing. Ultimately all 24 decades will be stitched together, culminating in a 24-hour long extravaganza (in 2016), which will feature Taylor Mac, a 24-piece orchestra, dancing beauties, special guests, and the audience.

    Taylor Mac is a theater artist (who uses the gender pronoun “judy”)—a playwright, actor, singer-songwriter, cabaret performer, performance artist, director and producer. judy’s work has been performed at New York City’s Lincoln Center and The Public Theater, the Sydney Opera House, American Repertory Theater, Stockholm’s Sodra Theatern, the Spoleto Festival, Dublin’s Project Arts Centre, and London’s Soho Theatre, among other theatres, museums, music halls, cabarets and festivals around the globe. judy is the author of sixteen full-length plays and performance pieces including Hir (recently premiered at San Francisco’s Magic Theater), The Lily’s Revenge (Obie Award), The Walk Across America for Mother Earth (named One of the Best Plays of 2011 by The New York Times), The Young Ladies Of (Chicago’s Jeff Award nomination for Best Solo), Red Tide Blooming (Ethyl Eichelberger Award), The Be(a)st of Taylor Mac (Edinburgh Festival’s Herald Angel Award). In collaboration with Mandy Patinkin, Susan Stroman and Paul Ford, Mac created The Last Two People On Earth: An Apocalyptic Vaudeville, in which judy is currently performing/touring with Mr. Patinkin. judy is the recipient of a Helen Merrill Playwriting Award, two Sundance Theater Lab residencies, three Map Grants, The Creative Capital Grant, The James Hammerstein Award for playwriting, three GLAAD Media Award Nomination, two New York State Council on the Arts Grants, a Massachusetts Council of the Arts Grant, an Edward Albee Foundation Residency, The Franklin Furnace Grant, a Peter S. Reed Grant and The Ensemble Studio Theatre’s New Voices Fellowship in playwriting. Mac is a proud alum of the HERE Arts Center Resident Artists program and is currently a New Dramatists fellow and a New York Theater Workshop Usual Suspect.

    Machine Dazzle (né Matthew Flower) is a performance artist, who moved to New York City in 1994 after attending The University of Colorado Boulder. Mixing odd jobs by day with art and dance clubs by night erupted in a unique lifestyle grounded in costume and performance art. Dazzle’s DIY and transgressive nature comes face to face with his conceptualist-as-artist identity; the results can be seen on stages all over the world. Machine has worked with Taylor Mac, Justin Vivian Bond, Joey Arias, Julie Atlas Muz, Big Art Group, The Crystal Ark, The Dazzle Dancers, Stanley Love Performance Group and The Pixie Harlots, to name a few. 

  • Under Construction Series

    Andew Ondrejcak

    September 2, 2015

    Writer/director/designer Andrew Ondrejcak continues work on ELIJAH GREEN, his adaptation of August Strindberg’s A Dream Play, which follows the journey of a divine spirit as it wanders on earth, delving into the contemporary tedium of the everyday human. For Under Construction, Ondrejcak will open his studio to show his work in progress, including large-scale drawings and prototypes of the scenery and costume elements.

    Born and raised in Mississippi, Andrew studied architecture and painting at Savannah College of Art and Design then playwriting at Brooklyn College. While making experimental theater in New York, Andrew was asked to conceptualize a fashion show; he quickly became one of New York’s most sought-after production designers in the fashion industry, known for large-scale environmental installations. He works with Vogue, Bazaar, Italian Vogue, Wallpaper*, W, V, among others. He is currently the art director for Vivienne Westwood’s upcoming retrospective.

    Ondrejcak’s performances have been presented at Guggenheim Museum’s Works in Process curated by Robert Wilson, the Under The Radar Festival at The Public Theater (2014) and the upcoming BAM Next Wave Festival (2015). Outside of New York, his original performances have been produced at Holland Festival (Amsterdam), SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah), deSingel (Antwerp), and Kampnagel (Hamburg). He reperformed the work of Marina Abramovic at MoMA (2010). In 2013, Ondrejcak was Artist in Residence at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council on Governor’s Island.

    As an arts educator, Ondrejcak taught workshops on performance and design at Domaine de Boisbuchet in Lessac, France (2013-2014) and, since 2002, has been a lecturer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

    Currently, Ondrejcak is Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City where he is working on a new performance, Elijah Green, which will premiere at The Kitchen in March 2016, for which he received a MAP Grant and a National Theater Project grant through the New England Foundation for the Arts, generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

    In 2016, Ondrejcak will begin creating a new performance while in residence at The Watermill Center.

  • Under Construction Series

    600 Highwaymen

    September 26, 2015

    600 Highwaymen begin with the infamous Rite of Spring as inspiration for their new theater piece, The Fever.  Involving a large group of people, the work explores human beings inside systems of organization – who we are together and who we are alone.

    Obie Award-winning company 600 Highwaymen construct theater pieces that illuminate the inherent poignancy and theatricality of people together.  Formed in 2009 by directors Abigail Browde and Michael Silverstone and based in Brooklyn, NY, 600 HIGHWAYMEN’s performances have been awarded distinctions by The New Yorker, New York Times, Village Voice, Flavorpill, and Time Out New York. Productions include The Record (Invisible Dog Arts Center, Under The Radar/The Public Theater; Noorderzon Festival, The Netherlands; Parc de la Villette and Centre Pompidou, Paris; Theaterformen, Germany),  Employee of the Year (Mt. Tremper Arts; Crossing the Line; upcoming: Wexner Center for the Arts, International Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven; Theaterformen, Germany; Noorderzon Festival, The Netherlands), This Time Tomorrow (“Best Of”; L Magazine), This Great Country (Fusebox Festival and River to River), Empire City (Editors Pick: Village Voice, Time Out New York), Everyone Was Chanting Your Name (Abrons Arts Center). Browde and Silverstone have received fellowships and residencies from the Drama League, Soho Rep Writer/Director Lab,  Theater Masters, New York State maximum-security prisons, A.R.T./NY, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and numerous colleges and universities.

  • Under Construction Series

    Brent Green

    October 17, 2015

    Brent Green presents his animated films accompanied by a live performance featuring his sound sculptures, live Foley sound effects, and a thirteen-piece band. The performance will be followed by a studio visit to further examine his creative process. During his residency Green will continue to work on his film, EE, about his grandfather and the ways in which people influence others around them. Simultaneously, Green is creating a series of new sound sculptures, including a 16’ tall accordion filled with pipe-organ reeds – which he will add to his portfolio of similar works.

    Working in the Appalachian hills of rural Pennsylvania, Brent Green is a self-taught visual artist and filmmaker. Green’s films have screened, often with live musical accompaniment, in film and art settings alike at venues such as MoMA, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Walker Art Center, The Hammer Museum, The Boston MFA, The Wexner Center for the Arts, The Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Rotterdam Film Festival, the Sundance Film Festival and even extending to rooftops, warehouses and galleries throughout the globe. Often, his sculptural work and large-scale installation are displayed alongside his animated films, most recently with solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Site Santa Fe, 21c/Art Without Walls, Diverseworks Houston and the Berkeley Art Museum. Green has received grants from Creative Capital and the MAPfund. His work is in some fine permanent collections including the Progressive Collection, the Hammer Museum and MoMA. He serves on the Board of Directors for Rooftop Films and the Susan J. Weiler Foundation.

  • Under Construction Series

    Imani Uzuri

    October 25, 2015

    Imani Uzuri presents a new exploratory work-in-progress inspired by Sister Gertrude Morgan’s “all white” prayer room. A visual, performative, and sonic installation entitled Prayer Request, the piece explores the intersection of spirituality, ritual, spectacle and sound and their impact on our perceptions of what is our “salvation” and what makes us “feel”.

    Vocalist, composer and cultural worker Imani Uzuri creates music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family in their small rural church. Her compositions for bands, choral ensembles, chamber orchestra, musical theater and solo voice also include influences from her travels around the world to places like Hungary, Morocco, Ethiopia, Russia, Kazakhstan and Japan where she shared these foundational American musical sounds with international audiences and communities while also learning about their musical traditions. Uzuri’s new album, The Gypsy Diaries, draws on her roots as well as influences ranging from Sufi devotionals to Romany laments. Uzuri creates and performs concerts, experimental theater, performance art, theater compositions and sound installations in international venues/festivals including Lincoln Center Out of Doors Festival, New York’s Central Park SummerStage, Joe’s Pub, Performa Biennial, France’s Festival Sons d’hiver, London’s ICA, and MoMA. Uzuri has also collaborated with a wide range of noted artists across various artistic disciplines including musicians Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Vijay Iyer; visual artists Wangechi Mutu, Carrie Mae Weems, Sanford Biggers; choreographer Trajal Harrell and composer Robert Ashley.