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The Exponential Festival presents and promotes theatrical performances created by New York-based artists and exhibited across Brooklyn. A pleasure, a mess, a thrill and a dream, Exponential is a month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields.
Lineup includes:
Admin Reveal: An Evening with Miss Lady Salad
Shawn Escarciga (Miss Lady Salad) [Shawn Escarciga]
January 25-27 at Brick Aux
The veil between URL and IRL thins once more for Admin Reveal. Darling internet pest and real life gayguy Miss Lady Salad welcomes f-slurs far and wide to journey through their valley of memes, celebrating three years of a meme-a-day (or 3) with a little talking, a little sharing, a little durational performance, 15mg of generic Lexapro and a dream.
Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses that Don't Concern You OR When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do?
Marissa Joyce Stamps
January 5-13 at The Brick
“We runnin cross country.” Being Up in Here… follows best friends Aaliyah and Eli who get magical running sneakers and run On Their Way, as far as space as near as Brownsville's GnM bodega, to reach The Final Destination where they're to meet Mama She. But, what happens when they make the unfamiliar familiar and run off course?
Brittain Ashford & Alec Spiegelman play songs for you (together)
Brittain Ashford & Alec Spiegelman
January 18 at The Brick
Brittain Ashford is a musician/performer, as seen in Dave Malloy’s Great Comet and Ghost Quartet. Her latest album, Trotter, has been heralded by the indie press as “profoundly moving” and “beguilingly rich.” Alec Spiegelman is a musician and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of the band Cuddle Magic.
DIRT
Sour Milk
January 17 at Loading Dock (and virtually)
The East River is now land. The water is gone; we can work with that. DIRT is a hybrid game and performance, where participants transform a newly exposed slice of NYC.
Hubris Always Gets You In the End
Banana Bag & Bodice
January 6-20 at Target Margin's The Doxsee Theater
Banana Bag & Bodice was a New York-based, undulating collaborative collective of artists/technicians that made live-event-theater-film-play-show-things. Their elastic approach to creating performance mashed together original writing, music composition and collective design in order to expose and celebrate the inspiring awkwardness of being a human. They made unique shows that varied in style and scope–from large-scale spectacles to intimate portraits. Their design was inspired by the objects and materials thrown into the theatrical dumpsters of midtown Manhattan... This is what they used to say about themselves on their website or in programs or when they tried to write grants. They are now down to just 2, Jessica Jelliffe and Jason Craig. They have an eleven year old child and live in the Hudson Valley where they raise chickens and carpent. Hubris Always Gets You In The End is a reflection on their past work, through the questions and arrangements of Feff Zezza, a fellow Hudson Valley resident and self-made expert on their work. Jessica and Jason will be there reflecting too.
ixchel
Cristina Pitter
January 10-13 at JACK
this work investigates the process of being in relationship and balance with the natural world. this work gestures to the tangled paths of re-indigenizing and deracializing myself. Cristina Pitter - everything. this work is my medicine: medicine shared to me by ancestors known and unknown, seen and unseen; medicine gifted and expanded on native lands that are not mine; medicine igniting the way home. I am still here. remember my medicine.
Manifesting Monsters
Chris Ignacio
January 15 on The Exponential Festival YouTube Channel
A digital puppetry project which uses abstract speech visualization to create shapes that are made into puppets. Inspired by Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, these "speech monsters" serve as containers for meaning making and world building. The project explores how our voice shapes our identities and the realities we create.
Más que un Pétalo
Salomé Egas
January 23-27 at The Brick
Más que un Pétalo (More than a Petal) is a multidisciplinary theatrical experience deconstructing the Ecuadorian immigrant experience in the United States. Using dance, theater, textile arts, music and stop-motion video, the performance invites audiences to see the immigration journey of a taxo flower, “Tauzhu Sisa”, an Ecuadorian native plant.
Natural Studies (POSTPONED)
thingNY
thingNY return to the Brick with a double bill made up of Joseph White's You Against Nature and their latest collectively written opus, Mouthful. You Against Nature is the first opera from White and is based on the decadent French classic, Against Nature. It is a tale of modern day self-isolation, attempts at life-hacking and nihilistic indulgence taken to extraordinary lengths. Mouthful is situated in the orbit of a large communal table and explores ancestry, lineage and linguistic transmission through food and digestion, through blood and through community and family structures. Natural Studies has been postponed due to COVID and will be presented later in the year.
NERO - Rough-Cut
Kyoung's Pacific Beat
February 1 at Brick Aux
NERO is a hybrid event that includes both a work-in-progress screening of this theatrical production followed by a panel discussion on arts journalism regarding pandemic art. The panel discussion will be a conversation between NERO artists and critics to be announced. NERO is a Shakespearean, five-act “streamplay” theatricalizing the history from George W. Bush’s War on Terror to our present day as the rise and fall of Nero’s Roman Empire. Set in 64AD in Rome’s Palace of the Frogs, this “state of the nation” tragicomedy invites Black, Indigenous and People of Color to examine how white male supremacy is the root of American Imperialism.
Puppymoon
Kennie Zhou
January 22 on The Exponential Festival YouTube Channel
Puppymoon is a mockumentary spotlighting a newly out-of-the-closet widow, Fang, and her lover, a white dog who answers to the name Karl, initially inspired by an old East Asian folktale. In a world where underrepresented groups are often sensationalized in media, can the subjects ever truly be seen as human?
ROAR!
Lindsey Hope Pearlman / BREAD Arts Collective
January 11-13 at Cloud City
ROAR! is a rock musical based on a true story about the making of the most dangerous, most expensive home movie in Hollywood history—the 1981 movie Roar, starring Tippi Hedren and 100 lions, tigers and other untrained big cats. This workshop production will have you inches away from some of the biggest, most dangerous predators on the planet (as played by human actors). Brace yourself: it’s going to be wild.
ten dreams of metamorphoses or me talk dirty someday
Yuki Kawahisa
January 31-February 3 at The Brick
You are invited to Yuki’s world! Follow her on a wild solo ride across dreams, memories and *stories*. As you find that precious connection, deep intimacy we all seek from theatre, you might suddenly wonder “Can I actually trust this silly narrator?”, well, can you?
THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES
The Million Underscores
January 11-14 at We Are Here Bushwick
THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES: a slow dance, a workout sequence, a slapstick routine, superstitious rituals and daily processions. Two characters stumble, follow, soar over and crash into a physical word filled with secrets, old narratives and patterns for encountering one another.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods
Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams
January 5-13 at Loading Dock
In every woods, there is a box. The box is full of lesbian erotica. We are going to read some for you.
Lineup includes:
Admin Reveal: An Evening with Miss Lady Salad
Shawn Escarciga (Miss Lady Salad) [Shawn Escarciga]
January 25-27 at Brick Aux
The veil between URL and IRL thins once more for Admin Reveal. Darling internet pest and real life gayguy Miss Lady Salad welcomes f-slurs far and wide to journey through their valley of memes, celebrating three years of a meme-a-day (or 3) with a little talking, a little sharing, a little durational performance, 15mg of generic Lexapro and a dream.
Being Up in Here and All the Other Businesses that Don't Concern You OR When You See a Buncha Black People Running, What Do You Do?
Marissa Joyce Stamps
January 5-13 at The Brick
“We runnin cross country.” Being Up in Here… follows best friends Aaliyah and Eli who get magical running sneakers and run On Their Way, as far as space as near as Brownsville's GnM bodega, to reach The Final Destination where they're to meet Mama She. But, what happens when they make the unfamiliar familiar and run off course?
Brittain Ashford & Alec Spiegelman play songs for you (together)
Brittain Ashford & Alec Spiegelman
January 18 at The Brick
Brittain Ashford is a musician/performer, as seen in Dave Malloy’s Great Comet and Ghost Quartet. Her latest album, Trotter, has been heralded by the indie press as “profoundly moving” and “beguilingly rich.” Alec Spiegelman is a musician and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. He is a member of the band Cuddle Magic.
DIRT
Sour Milk
January 17 at Loading Dock (and virtually)
The East River is now land. The water is gone; we can work with that. DIRT is a hybrid game and performance, where participants transform a newly exposed slice of NYC.
Hubris Always Gets You In the End
Banana Bag & Bodice
January 6-20 at Target Margin's The Doxsee Theater
Banana Bag & Bodice was a New York-based, undulating collaborative collective of artists/technicians that made live-event-theater-film-play-show-things. Their elastic approach to creating performance mashed together original writing, music composition and collective design in order to expose and celebrate the inspiring awkwardness of being a human. They made unique shows that varied in style and scope–from large-scale spectacles to intimate portraits. Their design was inspired by the objects and materials thrown into the theatrical dumpsters of midtown Manhattan... This is what they used to say about themselves on their website or in programs or when they tried to write grants. They are now down to just 2, Jessica Jelliffe and Jason Craig. They have an eleven year old child and live in the Hudson Valley where they raise chickens and carpent. Hubris Always Gets You In The End is a reflection on their past work, through the questions and arrangements of Feff Zezza, a fellow Hudson Valley resident and self-made expert on their work. Jessica and Jason will be there reflecting too.
ixchel
Cristina Pitter
January 10-13 at JACK
this work investigates the process of being in relationship and balance with the natural world. this work gestures to the tangled paths of re-indigenizing and deracializing myself. Cristina Pitter - everything. this work is my medicine: medicine shared to me by ancestors known and unknown, seen and unseen; medicine gifted and expanded on native lands that are not mine; medicine igniting the way home. I am still here. remember my medicine.
Manifesting Monsters
Chris Ignacio
January 15 on The Exponential Festival YouTube Channel
A digital puppetry project which uses abstract speech visualization to create shapes that are made into puppets. Inspired by Borges' Book of Imaginary Beings, these "speech monsters" serve as containers for meaning making and world building. The project explores how our voice shapes our identities and the realities we create.
Más que un Pétalo
Salomé Egas
January 23-27 at The Brick
Más que un Pétalo (More than a Petal) is a multidisciplinary theatrical experience deconstructing the Ecuadorian immigrant experience in the United States. Using dance, theater, textile arts, music and stop-motion video, the performance invites audiences to see the immigration journey of a taxo flower, “Tauzhu Sisa”, an Ecuadorian native plant.
Natural Studies (POSTPONED)
thingNY
thingNY return to the Brick with a double bill made up of Joseph White's You Against Nature and their latest collectively written opus, Mouthful. You Against Nature is the first opera from White and is based on the decadent French classic, Against Nature. It is a tale of modern day self-isolation, attempts at life-hacking and nihilistic indulgence taken to extraordinary lengths. Mouthful is situated in the orbit of a large communal table and explores ancestry, lineage and linguistic transmission through food and digestion, through blood and through community and family structures. Natural Studies has been postponed due to COVID and will be presented later in the year.
NERO - Rough-Cut
Kyoung's Pacific Beat
February 1 at Brick Aux
NERO is a hybrid event that includes both a work-in-progress screening of this theatrical production followed by a panel discussion on arts journalism regarding pandemic art. The panel discussion will be a conversation between NERO artists and critics to be announced. NERO is a Shakespearean, five-act “streamplay” theatricalizing the history from George W. Bush’s War on Terror to our present day as the rise and fall of Nero’s Roman Empire. Set in 64AD in Rome’s Palace of the Frogs, this “state of the nation” tragicomedy invites Black, Indigenous and People of Color to examine how white male supremacy is the root of American Imperialism.
Puppymoon
Kennie Zhou
January 22 on The Exponential Festival YouTube Channel
Puppymoon is a mockumentary spotlighting a newly out-of-the-closet widow, Fang, and her lover, a white dog who answers to the name Karl, initially inspired by an old East Asian folktale. In a world where underrepresented groups are often sensationalized in media, can the subjects ever truly be seen as human?
ROAR!
Lindsey Hope Pearlman / BREAD Arts Collective
January 11-13 at Cloud City
ROAR! is a rock musical based on a true story about the making of the most dangerous, most expensive home movie in Hollywood history—the 1981 movie Roar, starring Tippi Hedren and 100 lions, tigers and other untrained big cats. This workshop production will have you inches away from some of the biggest, most dangerous predators on the planet (as played by human actors). Brace yourself: it’s going to be wild.
ten dreams of metamorphoses or me talk dirty someday
Yuki Kawahisa
January 31-February 3 at The Brick
You are invited to Yuki’s world! Follow her on a wild solo ride across dreams, memories and *stories*. As you find that precious connection, deep intimacy we all seek from theatre, you might suddenly wonder “Can I actually trust this silly narrator?”, well, can you?
THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES
The Million Underscores
January 11-14 at We Are Here Bushwick
THOSE MOVEABLE PIECES: a slow dance, a workout sequence, a slapstick routine, superstitious rituals and daily processions. Two characters stumble, follow, soar over and crash into a physical word filled with secrets, old narratives and patterns for encountering one another.
Two Sisters Find a Box of Lesbian Erotica in the Woods
Emma Horwitz and Bailey Williams
January 5-13 at Loading Dock
In every woods, there is a box. The box is full of lesbian erotica. We are going to read some for you.
Performance Schedule:
Visit theexponentialfestival.org for full festival schedule.
