Meet the Artists! BRIClab: Performing Arts

Congratulations to our 2020 BRIClab: Performing Arts Residents! Maria Bauman • Mia Rovegno, Tahir Karmali, and Elizabeth Thys • Darian Dauchan • Becky Baumwoll • Modesto “Flako” Jimenez and Brisa Areli Muñoz • Diane Exavier and Dominique Rider • Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón • Parijat Desai

BRIClab is a multi-disciplinary residency program created to advance opportunities for artists, performers, and media makers. The program's four tracks are Contemporary Art, Film + TV, Performing Arts, and Video Art.

The BRIClab: Performing Arts residency track is for New York City-based performing artists to explore and expand the possibilities of their work in music, dance, theater, and multidisciplinary performance. The residency offers artists rent-free studio space for ten days in the Artist Studio at BRIC House, a $2500 stipend, tech support, mentorship, and work-in-progress public performances. 

Maria Bauman, Desire: A Sankofa Dream

Maria Bauman-Morales is a “Bessie” award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer based in Brooklyn, NY. She is a 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. In 2009 she founded MBDance which recently premiered (re)Source to sold-out audiences, co-commissioned by the Chocolate Factory Theater and BAAD! She creates bold and intimate artworks for MBDance, via dream-mapping and nuanced, powerful physicality. Centering non-linear stories, bodies and musings of queer people of color, she draws on her studies of English literature, capoeira, improvisation, dancing in nightclubs and concert dance classes to emphasize ancestors, imagination, and Spirit while embodying inter- dependence.

A Doris Duke Performing Artist, Sharon Bridgforth is a writer that creates ritual/jazz theatre. She has received support from Creative Capital, MAP Fund, and the National Performance Network. She has been in-residence at: Thousand Currents; allgo, A Texas Statewide QPOC Organization; Brown University’s MFA Playwriting Program; University of Iowa’s MFA Playwrights Program; The Performing Blackness Series at the John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies at UT Austin; The Theatre School at DePaul University; and The Department of Performance Studies at Northwestern University. Widely published, Sharon is a New Dramatists alumnae, and has served as a dramaturg for the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center Initiative’s Choreographic Fellowship Program. Sharon is host of the "Who Yo People Is" podcast series, is a 2020-2023 Playwrights' Center Core Member, and is dramaturge for Maria Bauman-Morales's, Desire: A Sankofa Dream.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE
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Desire: A Sankofa Dream (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, SEP 24-25, 2020 | 7:30 PM 
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Choreographer/Facilitator: Maria Bauman; Dramaturg: Sharon Bridgforth

Desire: A Sankofa Dream (DESIRE) is a multi-disciplinary, non-proscenium and site-responsive artwork centered on imagination and consent as mechanisms of Black Queer survival which must be practiced rigorously.

Mia Rovegno, Tahir Karmali, and Elizabeth Thys, Elevator

Tahir Carl Karmali, Mia Rovegno, and Elizabeth Thys collaborate as ThoughtThought, a collective merging of contemporary art and social practices in performance, visual art and creative entrepreneurship. They ask questions that critically consider the crumbling paradigm. They are curious and serious about creative disruptions. ELEVATOR is their first collaboration.

Mia Rovegno is a Brooklyn-based playwright/director of experimental, investigative and immersive performance works. She has directed new work for Playwrights Horizons, The New Group, Soho Rep, St. Anne’s Warehouse, WP Theater, NYTW, INTAR, Ars Nova, Clubbed Thumb, NYSAF, Labyrinth, Bushwick Starr, JACK, EST, Partial Comfort, The Amoralists, and Prelude Festival. Rovegno has received two Drama League Directing Fellowships (Theater & Film/TV), the MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a NYSCA Grant, a New Georges Audrey Residency, a P73 Yale Residency, the Berkeley Rep Ground Floor, and MTC’s Alper Fellowship.

Tahir Carl Karmali, born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, is a Brooklyn-based conceptual and visual installation artist. Karmali’s practice concentrates on critiquing and expressing the ramifications of technology, economic structures, and neo-colonialism. He has exhibited at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn; United Photo Industries, Brooklyn; Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Kunsthal, Rotterdam; and Circle Art, Nairobi. He has participated in residencies at MacDowell Colony, Triangle Arts Association, BRIC, Pioneer Works and Trestle.

Elizabeth Thys is a Business Design Lead at IDEO, a global design and innovation consultancy. She was a founder of limeSHIFT, a creative agency that aligns people, place and purpose, that emerged from MIT through a collaboration between Sloan School of Management and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Thys, an art and technology entrepreneur, researches the intersection of the two fields, and was a 2015 Winner of Made in NY Media Center’s Entrepreneur Innovation Grant. Her work is published with The Americans for the Arts and in the Journal of Public Space.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

ELEVATOR (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, OCT 8-9, 2020 | 7PM
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Playwright/Director: Mia Rovegno; Conceptual Artist: Tahir Carl Karmali; Pitchwriting Dramaturg: Elizabeth Thys

ELEVATOR is an immersive multimedia performance exploring a deconstructive critique of the Elevator Pitch, a capitalist ritual where a concise business proposal is delivered within a 2-minute elevator ride to a captive listener. 

Darian Dauchan, The Brobot Adventure: Wrath of the Wackness

Darian Dauchan is an award winning actor, writer, and musician who has appeared on both Broadway and Off Broadway theatre. He is the 2016 Loop Station Vice Champion of the American Beatbox Championships, a finalist for the 2019 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and more recently completed The Brobot Johnson Project, an Afrofuturism, Sci Fi Hip Hop transmedia piece. The web series The New Adventures of Brobot Johnson won for Outstanding Comedy Series at the 2017 LA Web Festival, BEST soundtrack at the 2017 Escape Velocity Festival sponsored by the Museum of Science Fiction, and BEST editing at the 2018 Independent Television Festival. The album Brobot Johnson: Bionic Boom Bap is now available on iTunes, and the show The Brobot Johnson Experience is a Howard Gilman Foundation Grantee and critically acclaimed Ben Brantley New York Times Critics' Pick.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

The Brobot Adventure: Wrath of the Wackness (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, NOV 12-13, 2020 | 7PM
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Written, Composed, and Performed by Darian Dauchan; Directed by Andrew Scoville; Projection Design by Sadah Espii Proctor and Lisa Renkel; Co-Produced by Poetic Theater Productions

The Brobot Adventure is the follow up show to The Brobot Johnson Experience, where an alien Hip Hop android named Flobot Owens, travels through space and time to help humans be better humans.

Becky Baumwoll, Body/Language

Becky Baumwoll has performed with words regionally, off-Broadway, and in projects with Amios, Paper Canoe, and Ozet. She has directed with Opera On Tap, the Parsnip Ship, and Red Lab Productions. Baumwoll teaches with Broken Box and is part-time adjunct faculty at The New School’s College of Performing Arts, teaching Physical Storytelling and Body Languages to undergraduates. She is also a teaching artist with ASTEP and the IRC. 

Broken Box Mime Theater (BKBX) is a collaborative theater company that performs original, contemporary short plays entirely through movement. Based in NYC and founded in 2011, they reimagine French pantomime through the lens of contemporary US American theater. The manifoldly diverse group of artists who call BKBX their artistic home believe in making innovative, provocative theater that erases the language barrier and champions the power of simplicity in performance. Their short plays range from realistic to metaphorical, heart-wrenching to hilarious, and cinematic to intimate.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

Body/Language (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, DEC 10-11, 2020 | 7PM
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Artistic Director, Broken Box Mime: Becky Baumwoll; Company Members, Broken Box Mime: Nick Abeel, Blake Habermann, Regan Sims, Duane Cooper, David Jenkins, Tasha Milkman, Joél Pérez, Marissa Molnar, Matt Zambrano, Géraldine Dulex, Dinah Berkeley, Esti Bernstein, Jamie Roderick, Ismael Castillo, Joshua Wynter, Leah Wagner Leonard

BODY/LANGUAGE will explore the communicative capacity of the body through playing and plays, developed and performed by an ensemble of BKBX mimes, live musicians, and ASL-speaking artists.

Modesto “Flako” Jimenez and Brisa Areli Muñoz, MMDementia Project

Modesto Flako Jimenez is a Bushwick-raised artist and educator. 2015 HOLA Best Ensemble Award Winner. ATI Best Actor Award Winner 2016. HOLA Outstanding Solo Performer 2017, 2016 Princess Grace Honorarium in Theater, and NY Times profiled. He has taught theater/poetry in NYC Public Schools for ten years. He has toured internationally and appeared on TEDxBushwick, EARLY SHAKER SPIRITUALS (Wooster Group), Richard Maxwell’s SAMARA (Soho Rep.), Kaneza Schaal’s JACK &. (BAM) and Victor Morales ESPERENTO (Sundance).In 2018 he became the first Dominican-American Lead Artist in The Public Theater’s UTR Festival for ¡OYE! FOR MY DEAR BROOKLYN.

Brisa Areli Muñoz is a chicanx theatre director, educator, and cultural worker based out of Brooklyn, New York. She serves as the Artistic Director of Applied Theatre Collective, where she has facilitated work both nationally and internationally, including work with peacebuilding educators in Iraq, and international mediators in Romania. Brisa has directed and facilitated work for the NYC Department of Education, Actionplay, The Public Theater, New York City Center, The Civilians, Carnegie Hall, BRIC, Sojourn Theatre, CUNY Creative Arts Team, Hi-ARTS, Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, New York City Children’s Theater, Vital Theatre, and Atlantic Pacific Theatre. Most recently, Brisa served as Manager of Community Partnerships for the Public Works program at The Public Theater.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

MMDementia Project (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, FEB 4-5, 2021 | 7PM
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Writer/Performer: Modesto Flako Jimenez; Director: Brisa Areli Muñoz

MMDementia Project is a new multidisciplinary theatrical work in which we explore our relationship to the matriarchy and our ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how our own identity can impact our mental health.

Diane Exavier and Dominique Rider, Bernarda’s Daughters

Diane Exavier is a Brooklyn-based writer, theatermaker, and educator who creates performances, public programs, and games that invite audiences to participate in a theater that rejects passive reception. With a point of departure located in Caribbean Diaspora, Diane explores what she calls the 4L’s: love, loss, legacy, and land. Intersecting performance and poetry, her work has been presented at Haiti Cultural Exchange, Sibiu's International Theater Festival in Romania, Bowery Poetry Club, Dixon Place, and more. Her writing appears in The Atlas Review and The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, amongst other publications. Her play Good Blood received a 2017 Kilroys List Honorable Mention.

Dominique Rider is a director and dramaturg based in Brooklyn, New York. They believe in l[i/o]ving like it is the end of the world. Dominique’s work is concerned with answering the question: “What is a world unmade by slavery?” They have worked as a director, assistant, and collaborator at Ensemble Studio Theatre, The Haiti Cultural Exchange, MCC, The Old Globe, The Lark, Soho Rep, The Atlantic, The Bushwick Starr, Clubbed Thumb, Long Wharf, Flux Theatre Ensemble, WP, The Movement Theatre Company, and The Black Lady Theatre. They are the director in residence for the National Black Theatre through 2021, a NAMT 2019 observer, an inaugural member of Roundabout Theatre Company’s Directing Group, as well as an inaugural member of Mabou Mines’ Maker program.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

Bernarda’s Daughters (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, MAR 4-5, 2021 | 7PM
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Playwright: Diane Exavier; Director: Dominique Rider

It’s summer in Flatbush and the Abellard sisters are in the heat of mourning their father, their neighborhood, and what they thought they knew about their lives. An exploration of private and public grief, Bernarda’s Daughters asks when, where, what, and whom do we mourn.

Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón, [  ]

Adrienne Westwood is a Brooklyn-based dance artist whose multi-layered work incorporates objects into embodied explorations of memory, bringing traces of other times and places into the present moment. Her work has been presented widely in NYC and at Jacob's Pillow, CCN-Ballet de Lorraine (France), WUK (Vienna), The Firkin Crane (Ireland), and The Philly Fringe Festival. She was a 2018-19 CUNY Dance Initiative Space Grant recipient, in partnership with Snug Harbor on Staten Island. She has had extensive residencies at One Arm Red in DUMBO, and the pilot Parent-Artist Space Grant from Brooklyn Arts Exchange. From 2011-2018, she served on the selection committee for “The Bessie” NY Dance and Performance Awards on the Current Practices subcommittee.

Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist who writes music for accordions, robotic instruments, toys, and electronics as well as for chamber ensembles, orchestras, and choir. Negrón has been commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, loadbang, MATA Festival, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Sō Percussion, the American Composers Orchestra and the New York Botanical Garden, among others. Upcoming premieres include works for the LA Philharmonic, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the NY Philharmonic Project 19 initiative. She continues to perform and compose for film as well with her tropical indie band Balún.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

[  ] (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, APR 1-2, 2021 | 7PM
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Choreographer: Adrienne Westwood; Composer: Angélica Negrón

[  ] is a corporeal and sonic exploration into histories of womxn ancestors created by choreographer Adrienne Westwood and composer Angélica Negrón. Together with five performers, they create an embodied exploration of untold and imagined histories. Weaving throughout a musical sculpture, the group uses performance’s hyper-attentive care to call in and hold experiences of private and personal memories of family lore, real and imagined histories, and womxn’s visible/invisible labor, ultimately asking “what is long ago, but still right now?”

Parijat Desai, How Do I Become

India-born, U.S.-raised Parijat Desai creates hybrids of contemporary, Indian classical and Gujarati folk dance; theater; and other forms to challenge ideas of cultural purity and fear that underlie nationalism and xenophobia. Parijat’s work has been presented internationally at venues including PioneerWorks, Brooklyn; La MaMa, 92Y, and Queens Museum, all NY; Skirball Cultural Center, California Plaza, and J. Paul Getty Center, all Los Angeles; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco; Denver Art Museum; The Dance Centre, Vancouver; and National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai. Parijat received commissions from Danspace Project and Harlem Stage, and was an artist-in-residence with the Gibney Moving Toward Justice Cohort, CUNY Dance Initiative, and Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts. Parijat won a Lester Horton Dance Award for Performance and Chhaya Arts and Activism Award.

Kaoru Watanabe is a composer/percussionist. He trained as a jazz flautist and saxophonist, and spent a decade in Japan performing with and eventually directing internationally acclaimed taiko ensemble Kodo. A specialist on Japanese transverse bamboo flutes and percussion, Watanabe has performed at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Kennedy Center, and around the world. He has collaborated with Yo-Yo Ma, jazz musician Jason Moran, flamenco dancer Eva Yerbabuena, visual artists Simone Leigh and Alyson Shotz, vocalist Imani Uzuri, and others.

Kiran Ahluwalia is a modern exponent of vocal traditions of India and Pakistan, specializing in ghazal, Punjabi folk, and Indian classical. Her compositions also embrace influences as diverse as West African Blues and contemporary Jazz. She has developed award-winning collaborations, including with legendary Tuareg group, Tinariwen. Kiran has produced seven albums which have brought her to stages internationally. She won two JUNOs, a Songlines Award, and two Canadian Folk Awards, among others.

Arun Ramamurthy is a violinist/composer and disciple of celebrated Carnatic violinists Mysore Nagaraj, Mysore Manjunath, and Ananthakrishnan. He has performed internationally in Carnatic and Hindustani settings, and bridged genres with his own projects. He has performed with Dr. M. Balamuralikrishna, Sudha Ragunathan, Reggie Workman, Amir ElSaffar, Marc Cary, and others at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Kennedy Center, and BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival. Arun is co-founder of Brooklyn Raga Massive, a globally recognized collective of rooted, forward-thinking musicians.

Rez Abbasi is a guitarist and composer based in Harlem, NY. Abbasi’s music as an instrumentalist and composer is a vivid synthesis of classical, jazz, and Indian percussion. He has performed with Ruth Brown, Peter Erskine, Billy Hart, Tim Hagans, Tim Berne, Michael Formanek, Dave Douglas, Rudresh Mahanthappa, Mike Clark, Tony Malaby, George Brooks, Ronu Majumdar, Kadri Gopalnath, and Greg Osby, among others. With fifteen albums of mostly original compositions, Abbasi continues to forge new ground. A recent project is a commission by the New York Guitar Festival to create and perform a live score for the 1929 silent film A Throw of Dice.

WORK-IN-PROGRESS PERFORMANCE

How Do I Become (work-in-progress)
THU-FRI, APR 29-30, 2021 | 7PM
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Creator/Choreographer/Co-Composer: Parijat Desai; Vocal/Co-Composer: Kiran Ahluwalia; Guitar/Co-Composer: Rez Abbasi; Violin/Co-Composer: Arun Ramamurthy; Percussion and Flute/Co-Composer: Kaoru Watanabe

How Do I Become is a multidisciplinary performance exploring the relationship between inner struggle and outward action in two parts—“How Do I Become I” and “How Do I Become We,” each a distinct choreography interwoven with spoken text and projection, to live music.