Dancer Haley Williams. Photo edited and taken by Ashley McQueen, featuring artwork by Benny Cruz.
Tickets: $30
Purchase Tickets
Friday, November 18 at 7:30 P.M.
Saturday, November 19 at 5:00 P.M. & 7:30 P.M.
View the program.
CITY STORIES is a multimedia performance inspired by the verve, challenges, and elation of living in New York City. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings together choreography and immersive video projections by Ashley McQueen, and paintings on Metropolitan Transit Authority subway maps by Benny Cruz. An episodic pastiche of emotional peaks and valleys, CITY STORIES teeters between sublimity and deluge, showing the utterly unheroic heroism of surviving in New York City’s ecosystem.
Drawing together choreography, video installation, painting, and audience participation, CITY STORIES is a malleable and deeply personal expression of quotidian life in an unpredictable subterfuge. Choreography has been sourced from the dancers’ reflections, found narratives, and automatic writing submitted by the audience throughout the performance. Upon entry, attendees are given miniature subway maps and an opportunity to write, share, and witness their words be integrated into the living organism of the performance. CITY STORIES honors a multiplicity of experiences, no one more privileged than the other. This hydra of narratives overlaps and diverges, a joyride no matter whose strand you follow. Coupled with wall-to-wall-to-wall video installation, CITY STORIES is surreal, gritty, sarcastic, self-aware, and poetic.
Important note about visiting CPR:
CPR requires all visitors, artists, and staff to provide documentation of full vaccination against Covid-19 as well as a vaccine booster (if eligible), along with a photo ID, to enter CPR. For more information about booster eligibility, please visit the CDC's website. Masks must also be worn at all times inside CPR.