HERE ARTIST
RESIDENCY PROGRAM

Photo by Paula Court

A multi-sensorial live performance: part-ritual, part-celebration, part-installation, and part-dinner by critically acclaimed multidisciplinary artist duo Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya. Commissioned by HERE and co-produced with LEIMAY, A Meal explores our deep connection with food—where it comes from, what we eat, and who we share it with.

This two and a half hour immersive experience takes you through a series of vignettes across HERE’s building, where you’ll partake in the act of eating together, witness performances by mythological creatures, and encounter offering songs and evocative sound/video movement installations. The layered work features handmade organic tableware, crafted artifacts, and evocative images and dances, all resonating with our post-industrial relationship with food and the Japanese and Colombian roots of the co-creators.

RHEOLOGY is the autobiography of an avalanche. A physics symposium. A concert. My mother studies the rheology of granular materials: how the natural landscape flows in fits and bursts. She also sings the songs of Bengali poet-composer Tagore. Most singers approach his songs delicately. But my mother’s voice is strident. Confrontational. She says, “gawla khule ga”: sing with your throat open. When she’s teaching me a song, I ask her to translate lyric by lyric. Scattered throughout the house are yellow pads scrawled with equations. Sigmas and deltas. I’ve always been mystified by these other, intricate languages my mother speaks. RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist son studies his physicist mother. She studies the strange behavior of sand. Together, they try to understand the science—the story—of how things flow.

The HawtPlates are a family singing group that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The Bronx. They create live vocal works by breaking down vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance, producing sound tonics and “one pots’, harkening to the spirit of the family heirloom recipe. Their work honors their lineage and personal histories while outwardly reporting an ultimately human experience.  

The HawtPlates music breaks down vernacular music styles into multiple modes of vocalizing, producing their sound and songs in the spirit of the family heirloom. Their work honors lineage while reporting a universally human experience.  Experimental and unique to them as a trio and family, The HawtPlates create soul music that feels rooted and lived in yet indifferent to genre. 

Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriters The HawtPlates have collaborated with Meshell Ndegeocello, Abigail DeVille, Kaneza Schaal, Hilton Als, Helga Davis, Steffani Jemison, Reggie “Regg Roc” Gray and The D.R.E.A.M. Ring, National Black Theater, The Public Theater, Performance Space New York, Symphony Space and The Park Avenue Armory among many others.  The HawtPlates is comprised of drama desk-nominated singer-songwriter/artist Justin Hicks, his sister, singer-songwriter Jade Hicks, and his wife Tony-nominated actor/singer Kenita Miller-Hicks.

Upstairs, In Our Bedroom is an autobiographical performance that radically reimagines Same As Sister’s experiences as female identical twins of color next to those of outsider authors, June & Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. The Silent Twins). Utilizing dance, text, VR technology, and puppetry, they will reveal the powerful and painful intersections between twinship, blackness, madness, and art-making.

Janani Balasubramanian is an artist and researcher creating accessible, inviting, and beautiful portals to natural and computational worlds. They work in emerging media, installation, immersive performance, poetry, prose, conceptual art, and public art.

Janani has received residency and commissioning support for their work from the Tow Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, Sundance Institute, Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, NYFA, New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, CAST at MIT, MAP Fund, Public Theater, Pioneer Works, Mount Tremper Arts, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Stanford Institute for Diversity in the Arts, UCross Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and more. Their work has been presented at dozens of venues internationally, including the New York High Line, SF Exploratorium, Red Bull Arts, Academy of Natural Sciences, and Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Janani is a member of the Guild of Future Architects, and has been the artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History since 2017.

In 2023, they will be in residence at Colorado College, University of Colorado, Camargo Foundation, and Djerassi Arts Center. In 2023-2024, they will be the Denning Visiting Artist at Stanford University, jointly hosted by the Physics and Electrical Engineering Departments.

Theater in Quarantine imposes its strictest limitations to date in this  hybrid, digital confrontation performed entirely from a box measuring only 34″ wide by 19″ tall. Pushing the boundaries of, and proximity to, a concept of self-exposure that’s becoming the default extension of our ever more codependent relationship with technology and life online, [Untitled Miniature] asks how we find ourselves embedded within all this technology. How is our body exploited when the content we share is ourselves? [Untitled Miniature] is being developed as a durational, solo-performance for a Spring 2025 premiere intended for both an in-person audience at HERE’s DOT theater in New York City, and a live-streamed audience on HERE’s digital platform URHERE.

from 2nd grade through 8th grade, i was the only Black student in my wealthy, conservative Catholic-school classroom. 

that’s 1994-2001.

some of the students were Asian-American. 

some were Latine. 

nearly everyone was White. 

ONLY I was Black.  

folded into the pleats of my uniform skirt are all the spells i cast to make myself less Black:

“straighter hair, that’ll do it …”, “tell Mom that we should just get a bigger house!”, “shift the intonation of your speaking voice to mirror theirs …”

ONLY I is a 30-year-old tantrum. it is a dance-driven maelstrom constructed to inspect the cultural isolation of my most formative years. 

i invite my body to remember and purge and heal and rage.

have i grown out of the mindset(s) that delayed self-actualization?

ONLY I can know.

Chimera (working title) is a deeply personal chamber opera featuring drag queen performers that explores the complexity and boundlessness of identity. Chimera will feature film, a chamber ensemble, vocalists and electronics, as well as drag queen performers. The opera will be experienced as a film and live music installation, with audiences traveling through the performance space, encountering different films, each featuring a unique world built around a drag performer’s personal story and the intersections between their story and my own fragmented childhood memories. Chimera is intended to be non-narrative in form, favoring an abstract and surreal montage style that blurs the line between deeply personal memories and newly imagined ones. Chimera is preoccupied with evoking a very direct connection towards emotions through a vivid collage of memories from a collective past. With performers personifying different facets of one individual, Chimera is an homage to the women who have shaped me.

For You Alone is a theatrical experience for one, and for everyone. A group of Baroque-ish courtiers in search of stability find their King among the audience. They set to work creating a private luxury viewing experience for their Highness, pulling out all of the stops—puppetry, perspective, pampering, Pepper’s Ghost, etc. The rest of the audience will just have to adjust to life as non-kings, finding common cause in toiling to help entertain the King, stealing small moments of true joy and/or rebellion, or—for that rarest of special people—finding validation from a talking horse who decides YOU are the human they will talk to.

For You Alone is an interactive spectacle that draws from physical theater, puppetry and multimedia hijinks to explore loneliness, labor, luxury, illusion, power, prestige, solidarity, and community.