Round The Block!
As the Garment District continues to grow as a busy and vibrant home to new arts venues and businesses, Theaterlab seeks out creative ways to connect with our neighbors. Round the Block is an event designed to build connections and create community through experience art together on our block.
Round the Block! is a promenade-style performance event where audiences travel around the Garment District to see short pieces of music, theater, and visual art. The event is a chance to gather together, to get to know each other as neighbors, and to make a place for ourselves in our growing neighborhood.
Hotel New Work
Hotel New Work is a curated series providing artists and audiences with time and space to take a detailed look at the theater-making process in an open studio setting. The program provides short-term residencies, including 40 hours of rehearsal time and performance space, to collaboratively-driven companies in the midst of creating ambitious new work. HNW serves as an artistic respite, where new works are given space to breathe, grow, and engage with outside eyes at an early stage. It is a place where artists of various disciplines can unpack their bags, display their ideas, and share the room keys with engaged spectators.Â
Pick up your key. Unpack your ideas. Stay awhile.
Mothers Myths Monsters
In this series, Theaterlab invites one artist to bring together a selection of trusted colleagues to craft short miniatures in overlapping, complementing, and sometimes contradicting genres. With the Curating Artist as a guide, each individual crafts a 10- to 15-minute new work on the theme(s) of the comforting and sometimes terrifying figure of the Mother, with bodies at once fecund and ferocious; the complex Myths that shape our personal and collective identities; and/or the repulsive yet riveting Monster. MMM began with the women of Theaterlab treating themselves as short-term artists-in-residence and has since grown into an extended series in which short works are given the time and space to become refined jewels.
MMM is designed to provide artists with short rehearsals spread out over several weeks or months, meeting both individually and in groups. After spending time refining their work, audiences are invited to two presentations in our intimate Gallery space.
Participation in MMM is by invitation only.
The Gallery Series
The Gallery Series is designed to champion the unique potential of the individual performer and challenge artists to craft ambitious explorations of the specific and intimate relationship between solo performers and spectators.
This series presents early, never-before-seen experimental work to audiences for the first time, with the aim of testing the boundaries of solo performance and exploring new artistic territory. Pieces selected for the Gallery Series are typically highly experimental, combustible, pliable performance art works that will utilize a limited showing to outside eyes as a catalyst for future development. Selected artists receive up to 20 hours of rehearsal and two nights of performances in our intimate white box Gallery space, for audiences of up to 20 people.
To Apply: Artists with untested, unperformed one-person experimental shows should email Program Director Jolene Noelle at theaterlab36@gmail.com with a short proposal. Currently, the Gallery Series is produced once each spring. Proposals received outside of that time may be considered for future series. Unfortunately, we are not able to accept all proposals received.
[im]permanence
Since 2016, Theaterlab and our Artistic Director Orietta Crispino have transformed our home on the third floor of 357 W. 36th Street into a vibrant hub of artistic activity, where meaningful encounters are woven between artists and audiences, and where international artists form connections with New York collaborators. While the stark beauty of our Loft creates fertile ground for experimental new work, the uncluttered elegance of our white box spaces can also belie the mess and struggle that it takes to construct a lasting artistic home.
In the [im]permanence series, Theaterlab celebrates the untidy and unpredictable process of becoming a more permanent fixture in space. We invite an action painter to perform a live painting on the gates on the street level of our 357 36th Street home, adding a new layer to our history.
Interested action painters should email Program Director Jolene Noelle at theaterlab36@gmail.com to inquire.
Celebrate The Artist
Celebrate the Artist is one of Theaterlab’s oldest and most valued programs, in which we celebrate an international theater company and introduce them to New York audiences by presenting workshops, performances, and, most importantly, a Theaterlab-style wine and snacks reception. The program aims to connect visiting international artists in transit with the New York artistic community to promote cultural exchange.
Celebrate the Artist has featured such acclaimed companies as Motus and Teatro Del Disìo, with many more to come!
Voices Inside
Voices Inside is an inspirational writing and theater program at Northpoint Training Center, a medium security prison near Danville, KY that uses theater arts and creative thinking to increase communication skills, build self-esteem and humanize and enrich the lives of those closed off behind bars.
“I believe this class is art. With art in our lives it allows us to be creative, which opens doors to see what is going on inside of us.” —Nicklaus
Since 2011, Theaterlab has been a partner with Voices Inside to present short plays and poems written by incarcerated writers on our stage. Actors who have participated in the program include Michael Shannon, Ron Canada, Ashlie Atkinson, Michael Chernus and many more. Theaterlab recently collaborated on PEN America’s 2020 Prison Writing Awards Celebration, curating the awards show.