DONATION CAMPAIGNS
HERE
Be Part of it All! Make a tax-deductible donation to HERE and gain access to the City’s most exciting performance experiences. Choose a level that fits your needs.
If you would like to become a member at HERE, please visit this page. In exchange for a gift, you'll gain extensive access to digital and in-person premieres of new work.
Please feel free to include any questions or comments in the notes section below or contact HERE’s Development Team at developmentdept@here.org.
HERE is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization, and contributions are tax-deductible to the fullest extent of the law.
HERE's Fund for Women Artists
The Fund for Women Artists is dedicated to providing resources to projects by HERE's Women Resident Artists. This campaign was generously established by Jennifer Suh Whitfield and Benjamin Whitfield. They are joined by Abigail Gampel, Helen Mills, Alan Ostroff, Amy Segal, Christie Snider, and Tommy Young.
PROTOTYPE (BMP/HERE Co-Production)
Contributions support PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now, the annual festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works by pioneering artists from New York City and around the world, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE.
Adventurer (Any gift up to $249): You will be listed in the PROTOTYPE program and website and receive our weekly e-blast with insider information and preview videos.
PROTOTYPE VIP Membership ($250+): You are eligible for all of the Membership Perks, including concierge ticket service, no ticket fees, ticket exchanges (subject to availability), a complimentary glass of wine at each show, and invitations to special events.
Discoverer ($500+): All of the above, plus, invitation to opening night party.
Commissioners Club ($1,000+): Your name included as part of the "Commissioner's Club" on all PROTOTYPE programs. Two tickets to a World Premiere, an invitation to a Memebers' Only season announcement event in the spring. An invitation to workshops in the Fall.
Explorer ($2,000+): Two tickets to any show at the festival and ability to attend open rehearsals for festival shows.
Trailblazer ($5,000+): All of the above, plus join the Directors and Festival artists for drinks and conversation.
Visionary ($10,000+): All of the above, plus, join a PROTOTYPE Artist and the Directors for an intimate, home-cooked dinner.
If you prefer to mail a gift, please make checks payable to "PROTOTYPE" and send to:
HERE
145 Sixth Avenue
New York, NY 10013
HERE
145 Sixth Avenue
New York, NY 10013
*If you would like more information or to discuss making a larger impact please contact *Brenna Thomas, at 212-647-0202, ext. 326 or email brenna@prototypefestival.org.
DREAM MUSIC
One of the only programs in the country to grow and commission contemporary, mature puppet works, Dream Music provides performance opportunities to puppet artists, and encourages multidisciplinary collaboration to develop new puppetry techniques. This program was inaugurated with the premiere of Basil Twist’s OBIE-award winning Symphonie Fantastique in 1998. Under the artistic direction of Twist, with producing direction from HERE co-founder Barbara Busackino, the Dream Music aesthetic is geared toward puppet works that feature live music as a collaborative element.
HERE Artist Relief Fund
Consider lending additional support at any level to our Artist Relief Fund. Your gift, be it $3 or $300, will be contributed to our independent artists.
HARP: A Meal
Multidisciplinary artists Shige Moriya and Ximena Garnica will create The Meal. Part performance, part installation, part concert, and part dinner, The Meal is a choreographic ritual of preparing, serving and eating together. The Meal juxtaposes the minimalism of a Japanese tea ceremony against the imagined excess of a Dionysian rite. It exposes the audiences to a barrage of sensorial stimuli while creating a space for silence and mindfulness. It is a poem for the senses, a quest to endow a meal with meaning. The Meal is directed, choreographed, and designed by Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya featuring the LEIMAY Ensemble with music composed by Thea Little.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: m??n??
Gelsey Bell's m??n?? (pronounced as “mourning” and “morning”) is a opera that inhabits a world, beginning today, in which all humans have disappeared from Earth. Distanced creatures witness the changes that take place on Earth as forests grow back, rivers overtake dams, and human-made buildings and objects gradually erode away. Inspired by Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, the piece is whimsical, fantastical, and playful while being rooted in scientific ideas and the dire political and ethical contradictions that structure current human relations with nature and other animals.
HARP: Priestess of Twerk
Nia Witherspoon’s new work, Priestess of Twerk – inspired equally by the “bad bitches” of hip-hop, the reproductive justice movement, and the sacred sex workers that graced Egyptian temples – presents women and trans folks of color with opportunities to re-encounter their sexualities through the lens of the sacred, in the hopes of increasing bodily autonomy and dispelling toxic masculinity.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HERE & Back: The Hang
Your contribution supports the development of a new work by Playwright in Residence, Taylor Mac.
SubletSeries Production
Coming to see one of our upcoming SubletSeries productions? Or hoping to support it as it comes to life? Make a donation to our SubletSeries and we'll apply your gift to underwrite direct costs for the show that you are attending.
stillHERE IRL: The Visitation
Your contribution goes directly to supporting the creators of The Visitation. A visceral sonic journey through our longing for the solace of the wild, The Visitation charts the histories and hauntings of a particular urban geography, embedded within the geology of time. Visit the show page here.
HERE & Back: Kristin Marting's Artistic Project
HARP: Psychic Self Defense
Psychic Self Defense is an object focused theater piece where we, audience and performers, train to defend ourselves against the force of the corporations that seek to leech our psychic energy. Psychic Self Defense will create an empty space where visions can happen by way of that most basic of theater machineries– curtains opening (endlessly).
Psychic Self Defense takes Dion Fortune’s 1930 occult self-help text of the same name as point of departure. Fortune’s book is about how we protect ourselves from paranormal psychic attacks from beings such as vampires and ghosts. This evening-length performance attempts to create new psychic self defense strategies for an era where capitalism incentivizes and normalizes the hijacking of our attention– via smartphones, apps, screens in all public spaces. How do we regain a sense of mental spaciousness? Psychic Self Defense aims to create this experience of empty space by way of the hypnotic effect of at least 45 minutes of curtains opening. The piece will explore visual and sonic abstraction, and will rely on theatrical machinery, puppetry techniques, lights, shadows, a sound score that features samples and generative electronics, movement based performance, talking, negative space and positive energy.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
thingNY - A Series of Landscapes
Presented as part of HERE Arts Center’s #stillHERE, A Series of Landscapes is a new online work of opera-theatre by thingNY set in the world of our dreams. Audiences are invited into a Zoom call where seven performers dive into the anxiety and serenity of this paradoxical moment, where yesterday’s action in the street, today’s paralyzing personal stasis, and tomorrow’s online wedding are all refracted through the bizarre filter of social and emotional distance. You’re outside of time and somehow you’re everyone. “Is that me? Is that you? What year is it?” We’re together with everyone we’ve ever known. Jeff’s dad shows up to get us out of there. We might be in Texas. There will be absurdity, severity, sweetness, and uncanniness amidst moments of interaction, deluge, and connection.
In April, thingNY was one of the early “adapters” of making work within and responding to quarantine culture, creating and performing a series of etudes which toyed with the shortcomings of virtual performance: SubtracTTTTTTTTT. Praised in the Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Wire, and Steve Smith’s Night After Night, the band returns with another chapter of socially distant live performance. A Series of Landscapes pushes our attention, our practice, and our technologies further.
Once you make a donation, you will receive a confirmation with a private Vimeo link in order to view the performance. Please reach out to tickets@here.org if you have any questions or do not receive the link after making your donation.
HARP: Dream Feed
What does it mean for us to dream at this moment in time? What can we learn from the absurdity, the wildness of the dream state that can be useful in replacing what we amend with something better? How do we allow the very personal language of our dreams to inflect our waking lives? With this work, The HawtPlates offer a moment to pause and make use of what we conceive when our bodies are at rest and our imaginations remain hyperactive.
Dream Feed is an electro-acoustic song cycle that drops The HawtPlates and the audience into a dream sequence - in the humor, terror, beauty, and allure of the active mind within a slumbering body. The HawtPlates utilize a vocabulary of gestures, lyrics, vocables, and exchanges to bring some of our most common shared dreams into collective view while playfully engaging the concept album as an interdisciplinary performance form.
About the Artist:
The HawtPlates are a family singing group that was formed in a one-bedroom apartment in The Bronx. They create live vocal works by breaking down vernacular musical forms and reconstituting them into other modes of performance, producing sound tonics and “one pots’, harkening to the spirit of the family heirloom recipe. Their work honors their lineage and personal histories while outwardly reporting an ultimately human experience.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: Upstairs, In Our Bedroom
Upstairs, In Our Bedroom is an autobiographical performance that radically reimagines Same As Sister’s experiences as female identical twins of color next to those of outsider authors, June & Jennifer Gibbons (a.k.a. The Silent Twins). Utilizing dance, text, VR technology, and puppetry, they will reveal the powerful and painful intersections between twinship, blackness, madness, and art-making.
About the Artist:
Led by twin choreographers Hilary Brown-Istrefi and Briana Brown-Tipley, Same As Sister (S.A.S.) is a New York- and Toronto-based performance collective celebrating 10 years of collaborative and interdisciplinary storytelling. Their performance and film commissions have been presented and screened internationally at The Citadel: Ross Centre for Dance (Toronto); Base: Experimental Arts + Space (Seattle); Archaeological Museum of Messenia (Greece); Centre d'Art Marnay Art Centre (France); Danspace Project, BRIC, and New York Live Arts (NYC), among other venues. S.A.S. is currently a commissioned collective in the HERE Artist Residency Program and a Guest Curator at Dancemakers, supporting the creation and development of UPSTAIRS, IN OUR BEDROOM, premiering in 2026 at HERE in NYC. Dance/choreography awards include Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts’ 2022 Dora Mavor Moore Award Nominee for Outstanding Production (THIS IS NOT A REMOUNT), Jerome Foundation’s 2021-22 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow Alternate, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants (2022 and 2017), Queens Council on the Arts/Queens Arts Fund’s 2020 New Work Grantee, and New York State Council on the Arts/New York Foundation for the Arts 2019 Artist Fellow. sameassister.com
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: Theater in Quarantine: [Untitled Miniature]
There’s an apocryphal story about a tiger who, finally moved from a tiny zoo enclosure to an expansive habitat, was unable to conceive of life beyond the footprint of their original captivity, pacing the same small square footage every day — From the beginning of the pandemic Theater in Quarantine embraced such limitations, live-streaming dozens of productions from a closet measuring only 8 square feet to explore how digital encounters can feel tactile, immediate and intimate. With theaters reopened, Theater in Quarantine is in a period of reinvention, exploring new, dynamic ways of using technology to reach hybrid audiences and this new project, created in collaboration with composer Orion Johnstone, will be our most palpable expression of intimacy yet. Imposing our strictest limitations to date, this study of microscopic self-exposure will be performed from a version of the original closet scaled down to a mere 32 inches wide by 18 inches tall.
About the Artist:
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: Rogue Objects
Based on the research of the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History, Rogue Objects is an operatic, immersive experience for planetaria that explores the emerging science of brown dwarfs: a lesser-known class of in-between celestial bodies, neither planets nor stars. Brown dwarfs are primarily bright in the infrared--a segment of the electromagnetic spectrum just outside the wavelengths of human sight--and to observe them we, humanity, had to make the creative leap that darkness was worth looking at.
Through animation of original and archival image, data from the new JWST and Gaia space telescope, and an operatic score built from sonified light curves of nearby brown dwarfs, Rogue Objects invites audiences into the wonderful life of these objects that abound and sing in the dark.
About the Artist:
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HERE & Back: Terce
Created by Heather Christian, Terce: A Practical Breviary is a radical rethinking of a monastic 9:00 AM mass and an adaptation that reimagines the face of the “Holy Spirit” through the lens of the Divine Feminine. Sung by a community choir of 30-plus caregivers and makers, it is a wild meditation/celebration of the sacred mothers alive in all of us and how that manifests in regard to the Earth, each other, and ourselves.
Commissioned, developed, and produced through HERE&Back as part of PROTOTYPE: Opera/Theatre/Now. Co-presented with the Space at Irondale.
Photo by Maria Baranova
URHERE
HARP: Chimera (Angélica Negrón)
Chimera (working title) is a deeply personal chamber opera featuring drag queen performers that explores the complexity and boundlessness of identity. Chimera will feature film, a chamber ensemble, vocalists and electronics, as well as drag queen performers. The opera will be experienced as a film and live music installation, with audiences traveling through the performance space, encountering different films, each featuring a unique world built around a drag performer’s personal story and the intersections between their story and the artist's fragmented childhood memories.
About the Artist
Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist. She writes music for voices, orchestras, and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. Angélica is known for playing with the unexpected intersection of classical and electronic music, unusual instruments, and found sounds. Recent commissions include works for Opera Philadelphia, the LA Philharmonic, NY Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, the NY Botanical Garden, Kronos Quartet and Roomful of Teeth. As the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Greenfield Prize, Angélica composed a work synchronized to the setting sun for EnsembleNewSRQ. She regularly performs a solo show and is a founding member of the tropical electronic band Balún. As an educator, Angélica has been a teaching artist with NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program and with Lincoln Center Education. Angélica lives in Brooklyn, where she’s always looking for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: ONLY I
ONLY I project description
from 2nd grade through 8th grade, i was the only Black student in my wealthy, conservative Catholic-school classroom.
that's 1994-2001.
some of the students were Asian-American.
some were Latine.
nearly everyone was White.
ONLY I was Black.
folded into the pleats of my uniform skirt are all the spells i cast to make myself less Black:
"straighter hair, that'll do it ...", "tell Mom that we should just get a bigger house!", "shift the intonation of your speaking voice to mirror theirs ..."
ONLY I is a 30-year-old tantrum. it is a dance-driven maelstrom constructed to inspect the cultural isolation of my most formative years.
i invite my body to remember and purge and heal and rage.
have i grown out of the mindset(s) that delayed self-actualization?
ONLY I can know.
About the Artist
nicHi douglas is an AUDELCO and Princess Grace Award-winning experimental artist based in Brooklyn. you can refer to her/them/him/us using any pronouns said with Respect. nicHi is interested in leading community care centered creative processes born out of personal inquiry and cultural curiosity. they are an Assistant Arts Professor at NYU/Tisch undergrad in the Experimental Theater Wing where they teach dance & movement methodologies. Recent theater: (pray) (National Black Theater + Ars Nova, Playwright/Director/Choreographer; 6 Lortel Award Nominations in 2024), The Cotillion ... (The Movement Theatre Company + New Georges, Choreographer), WEIGHTLESS (WP Theater, Choreographer), SKiNFoLK: AN AMERICAN SHOW (Bushwick Starr + National Black Theater, Choreographer). Upcoming: Public Displays of (self) Affection, a dance film commissioned by Lincoln Center and RECONSTRUCTING (The Team/BAM, Choreographer). www.mynameisnichi.com
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
HARP: For You Alone
For You Alone is a theatrical experience for one, and for everyone. A group of Baroque-ish courtiers in search of stability find their King among the audience. They set to work creating a private luxury viewing experience for their Highness, pulling out all of the stops—puppetry, perspective, pampering, Pepper’s Ghost, etc. The rest of the audience will just have to adjust to life as non-kings, finding common cause in toiling to help entertain the King, stealing small moments of true joy and/or rebellion, or—for that rarest of special people—finding validation from a talking horse who decides YOU are the human they will talk to.
About the Artist
Piehole is a live arts collective that draws from a shared fascination with objects, media, and handmade universes, to pursue delight, humor, and beauty in unexpected places. Their work encourages audience agency, as well as an expanded sense of potential realities.
Since 2008, Piehole has made 16 major performance projects for live and virtual spaces. Recent works include Christmas Mountain, an interactive advent calendar media installation at WNYC’s The Greene Space, and Disclaimer at Under the Radar (Drama League Award Nominee). Piehole also collaborated with the LA-based Tender Claws on award-winning XR games The Under Presents and Tendar. Piehole has received support from The Public Theater, New Georges, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York Theatre Workshop, The Drama League and The New Ohio, as well as NYC Women’s Fund, Jerome Foundation, Puffin Foundation, NYSCA-A.R.T./New York, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Mental Insight Foundation and Puppeteers of America.
Home for Contemporary Theatre & Art D.B.A. HERE is a New York State not-for-profit organization (EIN: 13-3449416). Your contribution is deductible to the extent allowed by law.
