The TEAM is hosting a party to celebrate the launch of our newest project: Reconstruction (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside). Save the date and plan to join us for a giant celebration that will benefit the making of Reconstruction!
This spring, the TEAM will be leading three of our devising and self-producing workshops! Click here for more information!
In June, the TEAM will be bringing our Devising Within a Democracy workshop back to NYC! Modeled on the TEAM’s own unique creative process, this 4-hour workshop gives participants insight into a mini devising process, providing tools and strategies for solo and group creation, working through delicate issues of collaboration and authorship, and bridging into the editing and synthesizing process. Perfect for artists of all levels of experience! Learn more.
Monday, June 25th
10am – 2pm
Registration: $100
Our self-producing series, led by the TEAM’s Producing Director Alexandra Lalonde and industry guests, continues this spring with two more workshops about the business side of making and sustaining your work. Each two-hour session is a peer-to-peer discussion over drinks–your registration fee includes beer and wine provided by the TEAM. Both workshops will be held in Manhattan.
Wednesday, May 2nd
7-9pm
Registration: $30
Tuesday, May 8th
7-9pm
Registration: $30
Hello everyone!
I’m Alexandra Lalonde and I’m thrilled to have recently joined the TEAM as the new Producing Director.
In my first weeks with the TEAM, this company has returned home from a residency at the UK’s National Theatre Studio, we’ve planned a fundraising benefit, we’ve started development on a giant project called Reconstruction (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside), we’ve scheduled artist workshops and have started some of the most interesting conversations of my life. I have seen artists create beautiful work on their feet, and I have seen board members roll up their sleeves to support them. Through all of it, The TEAM members have thoughtfully and generously shared their vision for this company, and have aggressively fought to give voice to artists and communities who might not otherwise be heard. It is a remarkable and beautiful community that I have joined.
I come to the TEAM after several years with the amazing SITI Company, and have worked with organizations ranging from La MaMa to Opera Atelier in Toronto. I love theatre, and care very deeply about working with artists and giving them the tools with which to change our minds and change our lives. I also, though, am a student of politics, and have spent time working with human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and PEN. It is a huge privilege to be joining a company that touches both of those worlds, and which so lovingly and rigorously questions what America means.
Whoever you are out there in the TEAM community, I hope we meet soon! Whether it’s at a workshop, a show, or dancing our faces off at BREAKING GROUND in June (I will be the one dancing very badly).
Love,
Allie
Earlier this month, The TEAM convened for a week of development on our newest project, currently titled Reconstruction (Still Working but the Devil Might Be Inside).
It was a truly amazing week, with a roomful of insanely amazing artists and collaborators. The whole group included Brenda Abbandondolo, NJ Agwuna, Jessica Almasy, Denée Benton, Maddy Foster Bersin, Jhanaë Bonnick, Vinie Burrows, Rachel Chavkin, André De Shields, Jerome Ellis, Jill Frutkin, Amber Gray, Jeremy O. Harris, Kimille Howard, Modesto “Flako” Jimenez, Libby King, Artem Kreimer, Allie Lalonde, Ian Lassiter, Zhailon Levingston, Jake Margolin, James Monaco, Kristen Sieh, and Nick Vaughan.
We’ll be posting about the next phases of the project, and we’ll be keeping the Reconstruction page updated with new developments. But for now, feel free to visit our BREAKING GROUND page, which has details on our upcoming fundraising part for Reconstruction, which will take place on Thursday, June 14th!
“…the conviction in the voices could not have been louder or clearer.”
New York Times
“Behind the Scenes of Primer for a Failed Superpower”
The Interval
“For Teen Activists, What Good Is a Protest Song?”
New Yorker Radio Hour
“Protest Songs Take Center Stage In Primer”
The Leonard Lopate Show
Visit the Primer website.
Rehearsals for Primer begin in a month! We have a little more fundraising left to do and we need your help.
We’ve received extraordinary support from Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, the NEA, NYSCA, and other institutional supporters. And thanks to one exceedingly generous donor, EVERY DOLLAR YOU GIVE TO THIS CAMPAIGN WILL BE MATCHED.
Your donation will go toward:
Primer for a Failed Superpower is an all-ages community concert featuring a multi-generational ensemble of teens, the TEAM, and Baby Boomers performing new arrangements of iconic protest songs–songs that have celebrated and questioned what it means to be an American throughout our country’s past and present.
We’ve commissioned an amazing and diverse group of composers to create the set list–including Heather Christian (Mission Drift), Justin Ellington (Fetch Clay Make Man), Stephanie Ryan Johnstone (I’ll Never Love Again), Amy León (Something Melancholy), Martha Redbone and Aaron Whitby (Bone Hill), Stew and Heidi Rodewald (Passing Strange), and Yva Las Vegass (I Was Born In A Place Of Sunshine And The Smell Of Ripe Mangoes).
Please save the date to join us for performances in August! Tickets will go on sale in July.
Photo: Manual Harlan
Back by popular demand, Rachel will lead a director-focused workshop on April 9 on ensemble creation, covering tools and strategies for generating content, the editing process, and navigating the murky waters of collaboration and authorship.
Sunday, April 9
5pm-9pm
Registration: $100
ART/NY South Oxford Space
138 South Oxford Street, Fort Greene (map)
And our self-producing series, led by the TEAM’s Producing Director Manda Martin and industry guests, continues this spring with two more workshops about the business side of making and sustaining your work. Each two-hour session is a peer-to-peer discussion over drinks–your registration fee includes your first beer or beverage of choice. Both workshops will be held in Manhattan–location to be confirmed.
Touring Your Work
Tuesday, April 18
7-9pm
Registration: $30
Manda and Touring Producer Lucy Jackson will share from the TEAM’s 13 years of road-tested experience touring around the country and around the world. We’ll discuss approaching presenters and venues, how to put together a tour rider, what to anticipate in a tour budget, touring fees and box office splits, and the exhilarating gamble of taking a show to the Edinburgh Fringe.
Collaboration Agreements & Contract Basics
Monday, May 1
7-9pm
Registration: $30
Making new work collaboratively—whether you’re a 15 member devised ensemble like the TEAM, or a small group of artists working together on one project—can get tricky when it comes to articulating everyone’s ownership of the final work. With theatre agent Di Glazer from ICM Partners, we’ll look at a template agreement and unpack the how and why of drafting your own. We’ll also take your questions on other kinds of contracts for making and presenting your work, and working with an agent as an individual artist or ensemble.
Last night during the curtain speech for RoosevElvis (Re-MX’D) at New York Live Arts, we shared the following information with our audience:
NEA funds came to us at a critical moment of producing the premiere of this show, which directly led to the robust national and international touring we’ve enjoyed for the past year and a half. Though it isn’t the biggest part of our budget, government support is a vital part of how we make our work.
Funding for the entire stream of culture and critical thinking in our country is under attack, from National Public Radio to the National Endowment for the Humanities to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to the National Endowment for the Arts.
This country is not a faceless corporation. The agencies and programs that are on the chopping block are essential to the rights of individuals, rights to expression, information, fair trial, education, and so much more. American fundamentals exist to protect the people of the United States, not the United States, Inc.
We were blown away by the audience’s response to hearing these figures, and so we are inviting our colleagues to #ShareTheNumbers–in curtain speeches, eblasts, and across social media—to tell your community what government grants have paid for and made possible. Let’s use our platforms to illustrate the exponential power of every grant dollar in action. We are taxpayers, we are job creators, we are community developers. We must ask our audiences, our boards, and our donors to call their representatives and #FightForCulture.
Photo: Helen Murray
After sold-out performances in London, Boston, Minneapolis, and Michigan, we are thrilled to be bringing RoosevElvis back to New York! Created specially for Live Ideas, RoosevElvis (Re-MX’D) is a concert-style re-imagining of the production, showcasing “two performances of enormous conviction” (The Telegraph) in this special one-night-only performance.
Thursday, March 16 at 8pm
Tickets $15 – $30
Live Ideas is an annual humanities festival of arts and ideas, exploring the ideas, controversies and thinking informing a different bodily-oriented theme each time out. Curated by trans-genre artist Mx Justin Vivian Bond, the 2017 series examines the idea of a world without binaries–across gender, politics, theology, sensory perception and race–featuring a lunch time reading series, an afternoon film program curated by Dirty Looks, Happy Hour panel discussions on trans-theology, afrofuturism, activism and social justice, caregiving and choral workshops, genre bending performances, and ends with a queer punk rock dance party.
For the full schedule: newyorklivearts.org