Photos by Maria Baranova

HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) is pleased to announce that applications for the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP) are currently open. This multi-year, $125,000 residency is HERE’s signature development and producing program since 1999 and one of the nation’s top commissioning programs. HARP provides each hybrid artist with a commission, development support, career planning, and an opportunity for a full production, all within a collaborative environment of peers working across disparate art forms – including theatre, dance, music, puppetry, visual art, and new media. Each HARP artist receives significant long-term support of $125,000, which includes $50,000 in cash and more than $75,000 in equipment, space, and services over two to three years. Each residency is tailored to the needs of the artist.

Through HARP, HERE has developed such highly acclaimed works as Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique, Trey Lyford and Geoff Sobelle’s All Wear Bowlers, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, and most recently, Normandy Sherwood’s Psychic Self Defense (pictured above), to name a few. Since HARP’s founding, HERE has supported the work and career development of 165 lead artists and hundreds of their collaborators.

Each season, HERE premieres two to three of these Resident Artist productions as mainstage works. These innovative projects are grown in a diverse artistic community where artists receive career development resources and hands-on training. Through significant investment of time and resources, dynamic work within a strong community is created. 

HARP has been widely recognized as a unique model for artistic development for the field to emulate. In honoring HERE with the 2009 Ross Wetzsteon Award, the OBIE Committee noted, “It’s become increasingly hard for artists to find a place to take risks, a safe haven where they can develop daring new work. One theater has regularly bucked the trend, making its mission to ensure that artists have a home for their research and development, and that theatregoers can sample the exciting results.” 

The 2024 HARP application is due February 1, 2024, and can be found at here.org.

Through HARP, HERE commissions and develops new hybrid works over multiple years. Throughout the year, resident artists show works-in-progress, develop workshop productions, and mount full–scale premieres. Projects currently continuing development in HARP include: 

Based on the research of the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects from Janani Balasubramanian is an operatic, immersive experience for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a lesser-known class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars.

Shayok Misha Chowdhury’s RHEOLOGY is a performance memoir. A translation across boundaries of language, gender, discipline, and generation. An artist’s 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.

Choreographer Ximena Garnica and Video Artist Shige Moriya’s A Meal, a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together experienced as part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner.

With theaters reopened, Joshua William Gelb’s Theater in Quarantine is in a period of reinvention, exploring new, dynamic ways of using technology to reach hybrid audiences and this new project, [Untitled Miniature], will be the company’s most palpable expression of intimacy yet. 

Dream Feed is an electro-acoustic song cycle that drops family singing group The HawtPlates and the audience into a dream sequence – in the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of the active mind within a slumbering body. The HawtPlates utilize a vocabulary of gestures, lyrics, vocables, and exchanges to bring some of our most common shared dreams into collective view while playfully engaging the concept album as an interdisciplinary performance form.

Interdisciplinary performance Upstairs, In Our Bedroom places performance collective Same As Sister’s experiences as female identical twins of color next to the real-life story of outsider authors June & Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. The Silent Twins). Utilizing dance, text, mobile VR technology, and puppetry they will reveal the dual struggles to be recognized as individuals within a pairing and within a racist and patriarchal society.

Nia Witherspoon’s new work, Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure + Wisdom School – inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples – presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.

 The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.

HERE’s standout productions include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique and, this season Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram and Zoey Martinson’s The Black History Museum According to the United States of America.

Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.