A festival-within-a festival, dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance: 10 works in progress by 10 NYC-based artists and ensembles.

A one-day conference on theatre and performing arts in public spaces.
Wednesday, September 3, 2025. LaGuardia Community College Performing Arts Center (LPAC)

Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga is one of the world’s few female artists walking the high-wire. Basinga's SOKA TIRA OSOA (literally "pulling the rope") takes its name from the traditional “tug of war,” a sport in which two teams pull on the opposite ends of a rope, each trying to drag the other team across a line drawn in the middle. But Basinga turns the experience into a collaboration between the artists and audience-participants. At the outset, the tightrope walker ‘s wire lies on the ground, and it is the audience members who life, stretch and stabilize the wire into a tightrope. Then Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga performs her poetic, breathless, spectacular balancing act, accompanied by a pop-up band of local musicians, professional and amateur. "It takes many to be many." Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga will carry out her breathtaking crossing in the South Street Seaport’s historic waterfront district, a feat of balance and imbalance, aided by her audience and the pop-up band’s auditory “ground track.”

A participatory project/performance by Elise Vigneron with a group of up to 40 people -- and feet cast in ice.
“Traces” represents a human community, featuring thirty participants of all ages, through the image of a choir made of ice feet. A plastic and choreographic project that connects us and makes us sensitive to the world we live in. Through an ephemeral and collective performance conceived for a public space, Élise Vigneron in collaboration with circus artist Eleonora Gimenez question the ecological stakes and the traces left by human beings as they pass through the world. The participants, their feet cast in ice by the artistic team, are the actors of this choreographed installation. The singularity of each member, their bodies and the individual stories, form a chorus and discover their collective identity. The ice mirrors the fragility of the world and its transformation into water, the ephemeral nature of human experience and narrative.

ARCH by Kaleider (UK), an installation opera. In partnership with NYC’s Master Voices and The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, September 7, 2025.
Kaleider’s ARCH is an attempt to build a freestanding arch, made two-thirds of concrete and one-third of ice, witnessed by a vigilant choir of human voices. Touching audiences with themes of death, renewal, and hope, ARCH points towards the extraordinary, yet flawed, systems humans create: language, economies, architectures, democracies – and, inevitably, to the impact of these systems on our ecosystem and ourselves. Kaleider's ARCH event unfolds under the open skies, a thought-provoking performance enchantingly accompanied by the watchful singers.

Milo Rau’s RESISTANCE NOW! tour will stop in New York City at the Segal Center, The Graduate Center CUNY on Tuesday, September 2, after several previous events across Europe. As an internationally recognized theatre director and artistic director of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna, Milo Rau along with Frank Hentschker will lead a day-long symposium that will connect developments in Central and Western Europe and Latin America with those unfolding in the United States. Milo Rau will focus particular attention on the question of how Donald Trump's second term in office will impact the US cultural sector. The symposium will introduce attendees to Rau's School of Resistance, a project that fosters international collaborative solidarity in the face of global threats to artistic freedom.

ANCRAGE (anchoring) and Duo SenCirk by Compagnie SenCirk, Senegal's only circus troupe, founded by former street child Modou Touré, a circus-dance-acrobatic-balance-inspired performances about identity and returning to one’s roots.

SANTÉ! by Cirque Kikasse. September 5, in partnership with the LaGuardia Community Greenway, a collaborative effort to create a new open space for Long Island City.
SANTÉ! by Cirque Kikasse is a dynamic circus show with high-level acrobatics, contagious energy, and breathtaking balancing acts… all on their extraordinary food truck! The troupe transforms tables and chairs into a balancing tower 30 feet in the air, creating comic chaos as they clean their truck and trampoline, and flooding the area with popcorn. A light-hearted tour de force sure to tickle your inner child and thrill your kids. Contemporary circus is an infectious performance art hybrid, employing elements of acrobatics, theatre, music, comedy, and improvisation to fashion narrative and engage audiences of all ages and backgrounds. It expands access to cultural expression, encourages public assembly, and unifies communities.

In partnership with The Clemente, a Puerto Rican and Latinx cultural space rooted in the Lower East Side; Mount Sinai Hospital, Rivington Street branch; South Street Seaport Museum; Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem; and additional locations TBD. Open Call to NYC-based immigrant artists, dancers, and musicians. Presented in English, Spanish, French, Wolof, and two other languages.
A poetic consultation is a 20-minute individual conversation with an artist. It begins with a simple question: "How are you?" Based on the answer a poem, a dance or a music is selected by the artist as a "poetic prescription" and read or performed, by phone, or in the streets and public gardens of the city, wherever possible. Initiated as a means to combat isolation and create activities for artists during the first lockdown, the project has evolved in different forms, always remaining free of charge for the public.

HIT OUT by PARINI SECONDO (Italy), a choreographic and musical composition built around the jump rope repurposed as a rhythmic and choreographic percussive instrument. July 30 - 31, in partnership with Culture LAB, Long Island City; September 6 and 7, in partnership with Washington Square Park and The University Heights Campus of Bronx Community College, the Gould Memorial Library, the iconic building, designed by Stanford White.

In the dual athletic and rhythmic nature of the jump rope, with HIT OUT Parini Secondo elevates the intimate practice of training into a performative action: the hammering succession of rope strokes morphs into the drumbeat of rebellion against those forces that would have us lie motionless on the ground with our eyes closed.