HOME FOR CONTEMPORARY THEATRE AND ART LTD
145 Sixth Avenue, New York, NY 10013 here.org

---

Organizations Filed Purposes: From our home in Lower Manhattan, HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art. By providing these genre-blending artists with an adaptive, flexible home for developing and producing their work, we share a range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of our city. HERE welcomes curious audiences to witness groundbreaking performances, responsive to the world in which we live, at free and affordable prices.HERE strives to create an equitable, diverse, and inclusive home in which all people have fair access to the resources they need to realize their visions. We acknowledge structural inequities that exclude individuals and communities from opportunities based on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, class, age, and geography, and seek to counter those inequities in our work. Through mindful actions on sustainabi

HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art.

HERE FY20 Programming AchievementsHEREs artistic programs are organized within two distinct areas: HERE Produces and HERE Presents. HERE Produces encompasses our signature initiative, the HERE Artist Residency Program (HARP), and HERE & Back. HARP supports the visions of our resident artists through commissions, development, and a final production, strengthening their careers for the long-term. HERE & Back supports the development and production of projects by established artists with deep connections to HERE. In addition to our producing endeavors, HERE continues to be a pillar in the arts field as a presenter, sustaining PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now; the Dream Music Puppetry Program; SubletSeries@HERE, our curated rental program; and HEREart, our visual art program. HEREs unique and ambitious 2019-20 season included 2 world premiere productions, PROTOTYPE 2020, Dream Music Puppetry presentations, and new virtual and socially-distanced offerings in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. HERE ProducesThe first world premiere production, Looking At You, kicked off the 2019-20 Season. Looking at You is an opera-theatre work, which uses music, an engaging narrative, and actual data-mined audience information to shine a light on the provocative subject of Internet privacy and surveillance capitalism, questioning how the loss of privacy could transform us as a global culture. We were thrilled by the positive critical response to Looking at You, which was called Visionary, Artful, and Sardonically Hilarious. Heidi Waleson, Opera Reviewer for the Wall Street Journal said: Director Kristin Marting...and music director Samuel McCoy wove the live performers and the video into an absorbing, frightening whole. The second work premiere was resident artist work, Black History Museum...According to The United States of America (BHM). BHM is an immersive, multi-genre theatre performance delving into the fraught relationship between Black bodies and the value America places on those bodies. The project engaged HEREs audience, made up of a broad cross-section of New York City, to explore Blackness from its constitutional conception to its currency. BHM was called remarkable, and essential viewing by critics. Front Row Center said the ensemble is astonishing, actors dancing, dancers acting, laying it out for you like the best meal of your life, each course of the evening topping the last. Maya Phillips from The New York Times said of the choreography, the Middle Passage begins with joyous African dance until the performers contort beneath the cracks of invisible whips. In another exhibit, a dancer inside a box festooned with black movie posters puts on whiteface in front of a mirror, preparing for a minstrel performance. These moments, rhapsodic and uncaptioned, are the most affecting, the productions dancers seamlessly incorporated into the action. In addition to these productions, audiences once again had a chance to sample live works in progress and participate in the creative processes of HEREs resident artists past and present by attending our 2020 HERE RAW (Resident Artist Works, previously CULTUREMART) Festival, where the projects ran the gamut of topics and aesthetics. HERE RAW featured a storytelling event told through the lens of Japanese-American identity exploring the importance of safeguarding our civil rights; a retort to Georg Bchners Woyzeck ; a musical witnessing of a world in which all humans have disappeared from Earth; an unabashed appropriation of current popular culture which celebrates, criticizes, and comprehends the years between 1949 and 1952 through text and movement; a time-traveling tale of jubilation, injustice, and transformation about marijuana grounded in hip-hop; a social sculpture and performance delicately framed by dancing bodies, crafted recipes, and mythological beings; and finally a work inspired by the bad bitches of hip-hop, presenting women of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.This year, HERE also continued to support the development of The Hang, a new project created by HARP alum and HERE resident playwright Taylor Mac. The Hang imagines the last moments of Socratess life as a transcendental centuries-long jazz-music-theatre hang. The audience, along with musicians and performers, join the party together in celebration, philosophical debate, and queer romps to envision a more joyous and just world. HERE PresentsHEREs presenting efforts for FY20 included the Dream Music Puppetry Program and the 2020 incarnation of PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now, annual festival of contemporary opera-theatre and music-theatre in New York City produced by HERE and Beth Morrison Projects (BMP). Directed by Basil Twist, Dream Music continued to support the presentation of contemporary, adult puppet works, particularly ones that feature music. In March 2020, we were thrilled to present two particularly special works. Created by Theatre de LEntrouvert, Anywhere evokes the long wandering of Oedipus, who abandons his throne and sets out on a journey, accompanied by his daughter Antigone. The fallen Oedipus appears as an ice puppet that gradually turns into water then into mist and disappears in the Erynian Forest -- the place of clairvoyance. Anywhere is an inner evolution represented through the metamorphosis of water. Kosmos Invers, created by Kalan Sherrard, presents the creation of two inverse planets filled with bizarre otherworldly puppets: one, an Edenic parallel of our green earth; and the other, its tentacled pink opposite. Strange fragments of stories coalesce through the contours of different biomes piecing together a patchwork of utopian armageddon and weird psychological metaphors with a green cosmic bent. Unfortunately, both of these productions were cut short when HERE closed our space in response to COVID-19 on March 12. The 2020 PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now Festival successfully presented 27 performances from January 9-19, 2020 at HERE and in a number of partner venues throughout Brooklyn and Manhattan. The six productions of the festival tackled complex and socially relevant topics while growing audiences for contemporary opera and music-theatre. PROTOTYPE 2020 once again garnered critical and audience acclaim, and remained a tremendous success.Finally, when HERE was not showcasing the work of our resident artists or mounting presentations, we continued to maintain SubletSeries@HERE, a curated rental program that provides independent dance and theatre companies with subsidized performance space, technical assistance, marketing support, and full box office services. We made sure that SubletSeries renters received a full three-week engagement at minimum in our theatre spaces, providing them a deeper and more dedicated relationship with the programs resources. The program supported nine productions this year before being put on pause when our doors closed in March. HEREs COVID-19 Response: Virtual and Socially-Distanced ProgrammingOn March 12th, 2020 HERE closed our doors to the public in an effort to help stop the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Within those first days of lockdown, we launched three extensive online programs to provide audiences and artists moments of connection and conversation at a time of isolation. The first was HERE@Home (weekly March-July 2020; monthly through October), a total of 18 live screenings of past HERE productions. Shared for free with our community, these screenings gave people the opportunity to relive a performance and connect socially as part of a digital screening party. Second, we offered #stillHERE, a weekly livestream performance or artist talk on Fridays at 1pm. Some are structured as digital premieres of new works created for these times, while others are more informal artist talks; both feature live Q&A between viewers and artists. Finally, we were proud to create COVIDEO (March-December 2020), a sequential, community-built video of art-making in the time of corona. Built over 10 days, by 10 artists and in response to a certain theme, a new Exquisite Corpse-like video was revealed every two weeks through the summer, and then monthly until December. All together, we crafted 16 COVIDEOs featuring over 170 artists. In mid-2020, we began commissioning and producing works that were created specifically for the virtual realm, and premiered four new digital works before the end of the fiscal year. In the summer, when it became clear that some work outdoors was possible, we worked with our resident artists to begin imagining how to safely offer them opportunities to bring their ideas to life. First, we worked with composer/performer Gelsey Bell to create Cairns, a downloadable soundwalk at The Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In five months, around 1,200 people have utilized this meditative and historical piece to find inspiration, and the walk has been called lovely and

---

---

Data for this page was sourced from XML published by IRS (public 990 form dataset) from: https://s3.amazonaws.com/irs-form-990/202100859349300805_public.xml