2024 EstroGenius Festival: EXPAND

FRIGID New York and Manhattan Theatre Source will present the 2024 EstroGenius Festival: EXPAND, a theatre festival celebrating (stellar) womxn, trans and gender non-conforming artists, March 14-30. Performances will take place at UNDER St. Marks (94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009), La MaMa (74 East 4th Street New York, NY 10003), The Cell Theatre (338 W 23rd St, New York, NY 10011), and Brooklyn Art Haus (24 Marcy Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211). Tickets ($15-$30) are available for advance purchase at http://www.estrogenius.nyc and http://www.frigid.nyc.

EstroGenius presents its 23rd year of expanding the definition of a womxn’s festival. Estrogenius 2024: EXPAND is 16 days of experimental performance, dance, theater, music and poetry across New York City. The Festival is curated by maura nguyễn donohue, Melissa Riker, John C. Robinson, and short play producer Vincent Marano. 2024 brings back the EstroGenius Short Play Series, partners with the legendary LaMama and Great Jones Rep, and features independent New York City dance artists like Rachel DeForrest Repinz, Enya-Kalia Jordan, Kayla Farrish, Jasmine Hearn, Portia Wells, Duel Rivet plus Vancouver, BC based Vanessa Goodman and Seattle artists Maia Melene D’urfé and Carolina Marin.

EstroGenius 2024: EXPAND offers a wide variety of performances throughout the festival with up-and-coming and award winning New York City artists plus Seattle, Chile, Chicago, Peru and Vancouver artists, inviting ticket buyers to experience performances in theaters, stairwells and lobbies. An intimate theater with stellar short plays, a multi-sensory, accessible dance performance, a one-on-one experience in which an audience member leaves with a power scent for their future self, a gorgeous sculptural dance in a lobby, and a bi-coastal stairwell simulcast sonic dance performance. EstroGenius 2024 is not to be missed!

Oh Brother, It’s Every Spring With This Woman

Written & Performed by Molly Kirschner

Thursday March 14th, 7pm at UNDER St. Marks 45 minutes

Molly Kirschner strives to use poetry to point the way to the hinterland where uncertainty collapses like a star into desire. In these new, never-before-read-out-loud poems, silliness and spirituality hold hands like an awkward couple; as a subset of reverence, humor speaks for those fundamental aspects of the universe that impishly defy prediction. Please join poet Molly Kirschner as she offers you these new poems with the immediacy exclusive to live performance!

MEDEA, by Great Jones Rep

Saturday March 16th, 11am-1pm at La MaMa (47 Great Jones St.)

Curated by maura nguyễn donohue OPEN REHEARSAL

Medea is part of La MaMa’s Great Jones Repertory Company’s Humanismo Project: Ancient Futures Series. Medea, composed by Elizabeth Swados and directed by Zishan Ugurlu, is a hybrid re-imagining of La MaMa’s 1972 Medea, originally directed by Andrei Serban combining ancient tongues. This iteration of Medea seeks to create harmony between technology and the raw experience of the tragedy and delves into the current global refugee crisis.

EstroGenius Expansion at La Mama Shares - Sheree V Campbell, Rachel Repinz, Enya Kalia, Mar Talavera-Tejeda and Angela Lianzo/Luis Angel Grande Corona

Curated by maura nguyễn donohue

Monday March 18th, 7:30pm at La MaMa Shares (66 E. 4th St.) 80 minutes

A shared evening begins at 7:30 in the Downstairs lobby with refreshments and music from La MaMa Great Jones Rep Co member, Sheree V. Campbell. Followed by a shared program of dance works by Rachel Repinz, Angela Lianzo/Luis Angel Grande Corona, Enya Kalia, and Mar Talavera-Tejeda. Curator maura nguyễn donohue.

FluxFlowGrow

Sheree V Campbell @DontForgetTheV is founder, creator of @FluxFlowGrow, member of Magis Theatre Company, Great Jones Repertory Company of La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club. dontforgetthev.wordpress.com/welcome

If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It (an excerpt)

Created by Rachel DeForrest Repinz

If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It is an intimate multi-sensory performance exploring girlhood, grief, and how to make the perfect pot of coffee. Utilizing experimental approaches to audio description and accessibility as creative praxis, the cast invites audiences to be immersed in their world.

Angela Lianzo and Luis Angel Grande Corona

Ebonic Bodies in Motion (an excerpt)

Created by Enya-Kalia Jordan

If Black feminism is to womanism, as purple is to lavender, then the Ebonic body is my jam, acting as a joyful celebration of us ratchet Black girls as scholars and innovators. This choreographic work is a Black ‘fly gurl’ (i)teration of Ebonic Bodies in Motion: Discerning the Metaphysical Emergence of African American Vernacular Embodiment which centers Black women in Brooklyn, their knowledge systems, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This work celebrates and cultivates dance performance, prioritizing Black women’s embodiment as expressed across the body, movement, sound, and aesthetics. It imagines AAVE as soul communication expressed as both spoken and movement languages voiced from the Black "fly gurl's" prerogative. This developing choreography work plays with projection and light to discuss how the Ebonic body transcends and is viewed from moment to moment. It also utilizes colloquialisms, poetic verse, and documentary to compliment Black women's stories told through movement. This multi-module project (written research, oral stories, choreography, documentary, pedagogy) is apart of Enya-Kalia Jordan's practice-based dissertation research, which utilizes a decolonial activist methodology, asking the audience to consider which bodies are traditionally considered changemakers and culture creators.

Por Debajo de la Rodilla

Created by Mar Talavera-Tejeda

Por Debajo de la Rodilla is a dance piece that explores the human urge to be saved, seen, and forgiven by a higher power and entity. This work research is guided by the perspective that the body has its unique language that speaks for us, revealing hidden truths that transcend our consciousness and carry our ancestors' wisdom, memories, and knowledge.

Marie, GODDAMN MARIE!, a staged reading

Written by Yolanda K Wilkinson

Monday March 18th, 7pm at UNDER St. Marks 90 minutes

Marie, GODDAMN MARIE! is a Magical Realist, Absurdist, Dark Comedy, Horror story about creole and black women and girls (age range from 10-70) striving to claim power and agency over their lives through political and supernatural means in 1870s New Orleans. They were able to install TWO African-American men into the office of Governor of Louisiana in the late 19th Century. This play blends genres. This play and its telling should be impossible. It attempts to deconstruct the prominent “-isms” (racism, sexism, colorism) and phobias (transphobia, homophobia, xenophobia) that still plague our society to this day. This is the warning label: **This play includes derogatory language and content about racism, colorism, antisemitism, ethnicity, misogyny, transphobia, pedophilia, white slavery, sexual assault and rape. Some subject matter may be triggering for some. Black and Creole women and girls have never been depicted like this on the American stage.

EstroGenius Short Plays

Thursday March 21, 7pm, 9pm & Saturday March 23, 3pm at UNDER St. Marks 60 minutes

Five 10-12 minute plays written by 2024’s EstroGenius Short Plays Playwrights. We are proud to be bringing back the Short Play Series for the first time since 2020. These are playwrights who know how to celebrate the complex lives of womxn.

Short Play Genius in Development Reading Series

Sunday, March 23, 2pm at UNDER St. Marks 70 minutes

EstroGenius’s Genius in Development Series continues with six 10-12 minute short plays written by 2024’s EstroGenius Reading Series Playwrights.

Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical

Written by Eve Blackwater

Friday March 22, 10:30pm at UNDER St. Marks 90 minutes

Brokeneck Girls: The Murder Ballad Musical is a dark comedy based on the tradition of violence against women in folk music and the true crimes that inspired it. The social commentary delivers fast-paced laughter while addressing issues of class, race, gender, and power. Revenge, redemption, free will and the conflict between good and evil unfold unexpectedly in a story focused on three women who bond over music and discover increasingly outrageous secrets. Eventually the truth comes out- the desire to survive has driven all of them to become what they fear most. A lively score, performed by folk noir band Brokeneck Girls, features songs of murder and mayhem which unflinchingly tells a hidden history. Join us for the thrilling new festival edition!

EstroGenius 2024 Expansion at La Mama Shares, a Bi-Coastal Evening

March 26 & 27, 5pm and 7pm at La MaMa 60 minutes

This very special evening of performances offers a site responsive series in the non-traditional spaces of La MaMa, turning the buildings into a performer playground. From moving sculpture to a dance of sonic sharing across the country to full dancing in a lobby, EstroGenius and La MaMa invite you to enjoy a walk of performance possibility with Carolina Marin (Chile/Seattle) Vanessa Goodman (Vancouver BC) and tidbit collective (NYC). Curators Melissa Riker and John Robinson.

ARRURRÚ, surviving to change the skin

Created by Carolina Marín

Arrurrú, surviving to change skin, is a performative wearable device, designed to be and inhabit, whose main characteristic is to contain and provide security. The space generated by inhabiting the Arrurrú calls for a self-regeneration, a reprogramming, in a serene, warm and loving way. It evokes a disappearance in the midst of the chaos and speed of current life, while causing camouflage around the shapes of the natural spaces that embrace us, generating an extension and relationship of sympoiesis.

PrBetween the Landings

Created by Vanessa Goodman

Between the landings is a sonic and physical study of liminal spaces. It questions what happens when we spend time between pitch lines, thread depths, and rise heights. It is a work performed in two stairwells, in two countries, by two artists simultaneously.

The Gap

Created by Sabrina Canas

Three daydreamers dramatize their experiences as queer women and consumers of pop culture as a means to relive and indulge in the reality of loss; they grieve everything from their subway crush getting off the train to the loss of the storybook family life they were conditioned to want as kids. the gap is a collage of dance, sound, and other mediums that investigates the experience of loss (but in a cool, fun way).

EstroGenius Expansion at Brooklyn Art Haus: Rachel DeForrest Repinz, Enya-Kalia Jordan

Tuesday, March 26, 7pm at Brooklyn Art Haus 75 Minutes

Brooklyn Art Haus partners with EstroGenius through their Dance Haus series curated by Portia Wells, bringing fierce and gorgeous artists Rachel DeForrest Repinz and Enya-Kalia Jordan to share a show of their full performance works in Brooklyn for one night.

If I Could Just Reach Out and Touch It

Created by Rachel DeForrest Repinz

An intimate multi-sensory performance exploring girlhood, grief, and how to make the perfect pot of coffee. Utilizing experimental approaches to audio description and accessibility as creative praxis, the cast invites audiences to be immersed in their world.

Ebonic Bodies in Motion

Created by Enya-Kalia Jordan

"If Black feminism is to womanism, as purple is to la)vender, then the Ebonic body is my jam, acting as a joyful celebration of us ratchet Black girls as scholars and innovators" -This choreographic work is a Black ‘fly gurl’ (i)teration of "Ebonic Bodies in Motion: Discerning the Metaphysical Emergence of African American Vernacular Embodiment” which centers Black women in Brooklyn, their knowledge systems, and African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This work celebrates and cultivates dance performance, prioritizing Black women’s embodiment as expressed across the body, movement, sound, and aesthetics. It imagines AAVE as soul communication express)ed as both spoken and movement languages voiced from the Black "fly gurl's" prerogative. This developing choreography work plays with projection, and light to discuss how the Ebonic body transcends and is viewed from moment to moment. It also utilizes colloquialisms, poetic verse, and documentary to compliment Black women's stories told through movement.This multi-module project (written research, oral stories, choreography, documentary, pedagogy) is apart of Enya-Kalia Jordan's practice-based dissertation research, which utilizes a decolonial activist methodology, asking the audience to consider which bodies are traditionally considered changemakers and culture creators.

EstroGenius Expansion | the cell: Carolina Marin/Kescena, Jasmine Hearn, Kayla Farrish, Maia Melene D’Urfé

March 28th-29th, 7pm at The Cell Theatre 70 minutes

In this stunning evening of dance as refracting storytelling and experience, artists Carolina Marin, Jasmine Hearn and Kayla Farrish conjure, reach back and throw the future forward. On Friday evening they are joined by Maia Melene D’urfé and collaborators to continue the inspiring swirl of invention and movement. Curators Melissa Riker and John C. Robinson.

ARRURRÚ, surviving to change the skin

Created by Carolina Marín

Arrurrú, surviving to change skin, is a performative wearable device, designed to be and inhabit, whose main characteristic is to contain and provide security. The space generated by inhabiting the Arrurrú calls for a self-regeneration, a reprogramming, in a serene, warm and loving way. It evokes a disappearance in the midst of the chaos and speed of current life, while causing camouflage around the shapes of the natural spaces that embrace us, generating an extension and relationship of sympoiesis.

esPilot: lift off, a greeting

Created by Jasmine Hearn

This is an after -- a moment in the present that holds an assemblage of the concave and convex. Conceived by Jasmine Hearn and choreographed in collaboration with collaborators.

To Dream a Lifetime

Created by Kayla Farrish

Journeying through the wilderness of being lost, fragmented with history, the character Ruby makes her way back on the soil and tall grasses on the sharecropping lands of those before her. The work initially imagined a live film, feels the deep connections and alignments to her ancestors, and the fire that drives us. Ruby realizes like a super ability, that she can simply tap into the power within her, ignited in the lineage of those before her and spreading forward through time. She finds landings in places of personal history, her great great great grandmother's home, the quilt, and her books. She jumps through her memories and fills the lost histories with her intuition. She opens the door to question societal expectations and positioning. She becomes the entertainer, the monster and the shadows, and returns to the ghosts of grief.. This work imagines all the held dreams within us, the Black American people and women listening into this vision and power. This is to finally release.

Traveling Hermit’s Future Self Scentology

Created by Zhen

Friday March 29, 5:30-7:45pm (audience members must be able to walk up stairs) & Saturday March 30, 1-3 pm (on the first floor, wheelchair accessible)

at The Cell Theatre 20 minutes

Create a supportive scent to power up your future self. This is a one on one, co-created experience with the artist. The audience member leaves with their new scent in hand.

*Accommodation can be made for scent sensitive people..

if you really must know, there's more to it than that!!

Created by Portia Wells

Saturday March 30, 5pm at The Cell Theatre 45 minutes

if you really must know, there's more to it than that!! is a trans performance project directed by Portia Wells. We are investigating dreams of boyhood, collective queer intimacies, and playful trans kinship.

EstroGenius Expansion | the cell: Carolina Marin, Maia Melene D'Urfé, Jasmine Hearn, Kayla Farrish, Dual Rivet

Saturday 30, 8pm at The Cell Theatre 80 minutes

Carolina Marin, Jasmine Hearn, Kayla Farrish and Maia Melene D’urfé and collaborators are joined by the fearless dance company, Dual Rivet. These dance artists are stunning and dynamically different, creating an unforgettable evening of performance of expansiveness.

Curators Melissa Riker and John C. Robinson.

ARRURRÚ, surviving to change the skin

Created by Carolina Marín

Arrurrú, surviving to change skin, is a performative wearable device, designed to be and inhabit, whose main characteristic is to contain and provide security. The space generated by inhabiting the Arrurrú calls for a self-regeneration, a reprogramming, in a serene, warm and loving way. It evokes a disappearance in the midst of the chaos and speed of current life, while causing camouflage around the shapes of the natural spaces that embrace us, generating an extension and relationship of sympoiesis.

enI'm sitting facing the wind

by Maia Melene D’Urfé and collaborators is an exploration of pressing forward, finding reasons to keep going, and the flow of movement across bodies, rhythm, and melody.

Pilot: lift off, a greeting

Created by Jasmine Hearn

This is an after -- a moment in the present that holds an assemblage of the concave and convex. Conceived by Jasmine Hearn and choreographed in collaboration with collaborators.

To Dream a Lifetime

Created by Kayla Farrish

Journeying through the wilderness of being lost, fragmented with history, the character Ruby makes her way back on the soil and tall grasses on the sharecropping lands of those before her. The work initially imagined a live film, feels the deep connections and alignments to her ancestors, and the fire that drives us. Ruby realizes like a super ability, that she can simply tap into the power within her, ignited in the lineage of those before her and spreading forward through time. She finds landings in places of personal history, her great great great grandmother's home, the quilt, and her books. She jumps through her memories and fills the lost histories with her intuition. She opens the door to question societal expectations and positioning. She becomes the entertainer, the monster and the shadows, and returns to the ghosts of grief.. This work imagines all the held dreams within us, the Black American people and women listening into this vision and power. This is to finally release.

EstroGenius Festival is an annual celebration of the artistry of femme, non-binary, non-conforming and trans womxn artists produced by Melissa Riker and maura nguyễn donohue. Founded as a short play festival in 2000 at Manhattan Theatre Source by Fiona Jones, EstroGenius exists to present the voices of dance-makers, playwrights, experimental performers, teens, musicians, burlesque performers, noise artists, filmmakers, dj’s and anyone else looking to break molds and crack gender codes to the stage, street and forefront of public attention. EstroGenius 2024 is possible in part to generous funding via 2024 NYSCA Support for Organizations through New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, along with the generosity of John C. Robinson, Vincent Marano, maura nguyen donohue and our individual donors.http://www.estrogenius.nyc

FRIGID New York’s mission is to provide both emerging and established artists the opportunity to create and produce original work of varied content, form, and style, and to amplify their diverse voices. We do this by presenting an array of monthly programming, mainstage productions, an artist residency, and eight annual theater festivals that create an environment of collaboration, resourcefulness, and innovation. Founded in 1998, the aim was and is to form a structure, allowing multiple artists to focus on creating and staging new work and providing affordable rental space to scores of independent artists. Now in our third decade we have produced a massive quantity of stimulating downtown theater. http://www.frigid.nyc