PROGRAM
>Down To Earth Festival
August 29 to September 7, 2025
New York City's First International Festival of Multidisciplinary Creation in Public Spaces
Down to Earth brings world-class international performance, theater, contemporary circus, an opera installation and participatory events —absolutely free—directly to New York City’s vibrant, diverse communities. A festival that democratizes cultural expression, our inaugural season runs from August 29 – September 7, 2025.
Partnering with NYC parks in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens and working collaboratively with more than 10 dynamic cultural and community organizations, we are staging performances and workshops across multiple urban spaces. Contemporary circus and in-situ street arts are ideal for reaching new audiences: they are more than performance and are a radical reimagining of public space.
Dedicated to innovative expression and audience participation, these art forms stand as powerful assertions of communal space, champion public assembly, and democratize access to our shared urban commons.
Citizen expression beats at the heart of the Festival's artistic vision. Down to Earth is a crucible of ideas in action, forging connections between community organizations and CUNY Stages, affirming art’s critical role in the economic, political, social, and mental well-being of all New Yorkers.
Down to Earth seeks to expand access to cultural expression, privilege public assembly, and combat the injustices inherent in socio-economic exclusion. Central to the festival's mission is our commitment to dismantling cultural barriers by offering free and subsidized programs for students, youth, immigrant communities, and families. By attracting a diverse public to free street arts and in-situ performances that are accessible and inviting, the festival will redress the shortcomings of an expensive system of cultural dissemination.
In opposition to NYC's current performing arts landscape, where high costs have reduced many venues to rental facilities or limited seasons, Down to Earth takes a novel approach. With the majority of work presented in public spaces, our strategy focuses on sharing resources and building coalitions with CUNY Stages, NYC parks, and The Coalition of Theaters of Color, among other organizations. We plan to unite these spaces through joint presentations in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, fostering visibility and cooperation, while focusing on access for students, families, and a variety of theater audiences.
This Festival would not be possible without the civic commitment and leadership gift of Marvin A. Carlson, the distinguished theatre historian and CUNY Graduate Center Professor Emeritus of Theatre and Performance.
Founder and Co-Director, fhentschker@gc.cuny.edu
Founder and Co-Director, esiyanko@gc.cuny.edu
Advisor to the Festival and Conference Co-Director, ruth@wiklerarts.com
>Festival Program
The 2025 Festival features seven international productions, workshops, interactive events, ten presentations of PRELUDE, a festival-within-a-festival, focusing on artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary and mediatized performance, and two symposia that explore themes of migration, diversity, social justice, theatre as a tool of resistance, intergenerational alliance, climate change, and our imperiled democracy. Performances will be held across various New York City parks and public spaces.
Soka Tira Osoa by Cie BASINGA, with French-Congolese high-wire artist Tatiana Mosio-Bongonga (France), a performance that turns tightrope walking into a collaboration between artist and audience.
Ancrage and SenCirk Duo, from Senegal‘s only circus troupe, SenCirk, founded by former street child Modou Touré, explores themes including migration and living in harmony with nature.
Traces (Lands) by Théâtre de l’Entrouvert’s Elise Vigneron (France), a plastic and choreographic project representing a human community, through the image of a choir made of feet molded out of ice.
Arch, UK-based production studio Kaleider’s operatic work of installation art, in which the performers struggle to build a freestanding arch out of blocks of concrete and ice.
HIT OUT by Parini Secondo (Italy), a choreographic and musical composition wherein a jump rope is repurposed as a rhythmic and choreographic percussive instrument.
SANTE! by Le Cirque Kikasse (Quebec), a dynamic circus show featuring extreme acrobatics and breathtaking balancing acts whose stage is an extraordinary food truck.
“Poetic Consultations,” a Τhéâtre de la Ville, Paris, and DOWN TO EARTH Festival initiative, in three boroughs, five languages.
PRELUDE, a Festival-within-a-Festival, ten site-specific performances across all five boroughs with artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance, interdisciplinary, and mediatized performance:
Endsieg: The Second Coming, a reading of a new play by Elfriede Jelinek. Translated by Gitta Honegger. With Nicole Ansari-Cox, directed by Milo Rau.
Galileo, Galileo, Galileo, by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, with excerpts of her workshop project based on Brecht’s Life of Galileo.
In the Solitude of Cotton Fields, By Bernard-Marie Koltès, co-directed by translator Amin Efrain (Iran/US) and Isaach de Bankolé (Ivory Coast/US), with Ismail ibn Conner and Tony Torn.
FLEXN, PAINTN, SPEAKN, with Quamaine Daniels and Reggie Gray.
“Parliament”: A work by choreographer and artist Michael Kliën / Laboratory for Social Choreography (Duke University).
The Tales of Black Histories, By Édouard Glissant (1972) Martinique, Caribbean, Directed by Keith Josef Adkins/The New BlackFest.
A/Live in NYC and Ukraine: The Down to Earth and Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival collaboration with Kyiv Contemporary Music Days.
The Nannies of New York City, Katiana Gonçales Rangel (Brazil) + Katie Brook (NY).
Solidarność, a town hall encounter in a city park.
A Lenape Creation Story of Turtle Island, conceived by Eagle Project. Written & performed by Opalanietet, with music by Danielle Jagelski. Directed by Ash Marinaccio.
Day 1: Milo Rau's RESISTANCE NOW, a one-day conference/town Hall at the CUNY Graduate Center, Manhattan.
Day 2: In Via Publica: Performance and Public Assembly, a conference on theatre and performing arts in public spaces, at LaGuardia Community College, Long Island City.
September 2
NYC/Global
Milo Rau’s RESISTANCE NOW! tour will stop in New York City at the Segal Center, The Graduate Center CUNY on Tuesday, September 2, after several previous events across Europe. As an internationally recognized theatre director and artistic director of the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) | Free Republic of Vienna, Milo Rau along with Frank Hentschker will lead a day-long symposium that will connect developments in Central and Western Europe and Latin America with those unfolding in the United States. Milo Rau will focus particular attention on the question of how Donald Trump's second term in office will impact the US cultural sector. The symposium will introduce attendees to Rau's School of Resistance, a project that fosters international collaborative solidarity in the face of global threats to artistic freedom.
September 3
NYC/International
A one-day conference on theatre and performing arts in public spaces. Wednesday, September 3, 2025. LaGuardia Community College Performing Arts Center (LPAC)
8:30 pm
Join DOWN TO EARTH to rediscover the great Rockaway neighborhood and beach in Queens. Chashama's New York theatre artists community and others will perform in the streets, bars and clubs. Accordion players on the ferry will bring you to one of the iconic neighborhoods in New York City. Join a Caribbean drumming circle and a rave on the Rockaway beach
August 31
September 7
France
A participatory project/performance by Elise Vigneron with a group of up to 40 people -- and feet cast in ice. “Traces” represents a human community, featuring thirty participants of all ages, through the image of a choir made of ice feet. A plastic and choreographic project that connects us and makes us sensitive to the world we live in. Through an ephemeral and collective performance conceived for a public space, Élise Vigneron in collaboration with circus artist Eleonora Gimenez question the ecological stakes and the traces left by human beings as they pass through the world. The participants, their feet cast in ice by the artistic team, are the actors of this choreographed installation. The singularity of each member, their bodies and the individual stories, form a chorus and discover their collective identity. The ice mirrors the fragility of the world and its transformation into water, the ephemeral nature of human experience and narrative. TRACES: With a performance scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, August 31 at 3:00 PM, at The Bushwick Starr. Sunday, September 7 at 3 PM at Hudson River Park.
September 3 & 5
Senegal
ANCRAGE (anchoring) and Duo SenCirk by Compagnie SenCirk, Senegal's only circus troupe, founded by former street child Modou Touré, a circus-dance-acrobatic-balance-inspired performances about identity and returning to one’s roots.
September 4 & 5
International
In partnership with The Clemente Center, Mount Sinai Hospital, Rivington Street branch; South Street Seaport Museum; McNally Jackson Bookstore South Street Seaport Plaza; Marcus Garvey Park, Harlem; and additional locations TBD. Presented in English, Spanish, French, Wolof, and two other languages. A poetic consultation is a 20-minute individual conversation with an artist. It begins with a simple question: "How are you?" Based on the answer a poem, a dance or a music is selected by the artist as a "poetic prescription" and read or performed, by phone, or in the streets and public gardens of the city, wherever possible. Initiated as a means to combat isolation and create activities for artists during the first lockdown, the project has evolved in different forms, always remaining free of charge for the public.
August 30 & 31
Italy
HIT OUT by PARINI SECONDO (Italy), a choreographic and musical composition built around the jump rope repurposed as a rhythmic and choreographic percussive instrument. In the dual athletic and rhythmic nature of the jump rope, with HIT OUT Parini Secondo elevates the intimate practice of training into a performative action: the hammering succession of rope strokes morphs into the drumbeat of rebellion against those forces that would have us lie motionless on the ground with our eyes closed. August 30, 31, 6:30 PM, in partnership with Culture Lab, LIC.
September 3, 4, & 5
Québec
A dynamic circus show with high-level acrobatics, contagious energy, and breathtaking balancing acts… all on their extraordinary food truck! The troupe transforms tables and chairs into a balancing tower 30 feet in the air, creating comic chaos as they clean their truck and trampoline, and flooding the area with popcorn. A light-hearted tour de force sure to tickle your inner child and thrill your kids. Contemporary circus is an infectious performance art hybrid, employing elements of acrobatics, theatre, music, comedy, and improvisation to fashion narrative and engage audiences of all ages and backgrounds. It expands access to cultural expression, encourages public assembly, and unifies communities. September 3, 5:00 pm: Abolitionist Place, Downtown Brooklyn. September 4, 6:30 pm: Culture Lab, LIC. September 5, 3:00 pm: LaGuardia Community Greenway, Long Island City.
September 4 & 6
France
Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga is one of the world’s few female artists walking the high-wire. Basinga's SOKA TIRA OSOA (literally "pulling the rope") takes its name from the traditional “tug of war,” a sport in which two teams pull on the opposite ends of a rope, each trying to drag the other team across a line drawn in the middle. But Basinga turns the experience into a collaboration between the artists and audience-participants. At the outset, the tightrope walker ‘s wire lies on the ground, and it is the audience members who life, stretch and stabilize the wire into a tightrope. Then Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga performs her poetic, breathless, spectacular balancing act, accompanied by a pop-up band of local musicians, professional and amateur. "It takes many to be many." Tatiana-Mosio Bongonga will carry out her breathtaking crossing in the South Street Seaport’s historic waterfront district, a feat of balance and imbalance, aided by her audience and the pop-up band’s auditory “ground track.”
September 7
United Kingdom
ARCH by Kaleider (UK), an installation opera. In partnership with NYC’s Master Voices and The Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, September 7, 2025. Kaleider’s ARCH is an attempt to build a freestanding arch, made two-thirds of concrete and one-third of ice, witnessed by a vigilant choir of human voices. Touching audiences with themes of death, renewal, and hope, ARCH points towards the extraordinary, yet flawed, systems humans create: language, economies, architectures, democracies – and, inevitably, to the impact of these systems on our ecosystem and ourselves. Kaleider's ARCH event unfolds under the open skies, a thought-provoking performance enchantingly accompanied by the watchful singers.
Deságua is a documentary theatre work by and about professional nannies in New York City. In 2024, theatre artists Katie Brook and Katiana Gonçales Rangel interviewed a group of immigrant childcare workers about the joys and challenges of their jobs, shaping these stories into monologues that the nannies themselves proudly performed themselves. In 2025, in response to the escalating threat to immigrants, Brook and Rangel re-cast Deságua with esteemed, white, American citizen actors to continue to share these stories. Created by Katie Brook, Katiana Goncales Rangel, and nannies and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean; featuring Jim Fletcher, David Gould, Richard Maxwell, Dick Toth, and Ben Williams. This project is made possible in part with funds from a regrant program(s) supported by the funding agencies The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) in partnership with the City Council and administered by LMCC.
a/Live in New York + In Ukraine: THREE NEW COMPOSITIONS Join us for live performance and live streaming of three newly commissioned 20-minute works by Ukrainian composers Anna Arkushyna, Ihor Zavhorodnii, and Albert Saprykin. New York based contrabass clarinet player Gleb Kanasevich will perform live on stage in New York together with double-bass Nazarii Stets, playing over 4.500 miles away simultaneously in Kyiv. Poems and testimonies are paired with the music. The DOWN TO EARTH Festival invited Leah Batstone and her Ukrainian Contemporary Music Festival to present her collaboration with Kyiv Contemporary Music Days.
Join us and former members of the Martha Graham Dance Company for PARLIAMENT, a durational participatory movement experience held in the open courtyard at AMANT, 315 Maujer Street, Bushwick, Brooklyn. In its everyday sense, a parliament is a forum for debate—a place where the affairs of state are negotiated through language. Between 50 and 100 individuals co-create this living, emergent social choreography through movement, stillness, gestures, and relational awareness. There is no choreography to follow, no leader to imitate, and no verbal communication—only the shared presence of bodies in space. Over the past decade, Parliament has drawn thousands of participants—including philosophers, dancers , office workers, scientists, students, and artists—from Athens and Tokyo to Amsterdam, Brussels, and Durham, North Carolina. Parliament transforms that idea by creating a participatory site for citizens to hold council beyond words, experimenting with democracy through the body. For three hours, participants share a space without speech or electronic devices, engaging in a subtle renegotiation of ethics, society, and coexistence. Through sensation, attention, movement, and presence, those gathered leave behind ephemeral traces—gestures, relationships, and patterns—that may be picked up, altered, and carried forward by others, potentially propagating beyond the confines of the courtyard. A pioneering work of situational choreography and ecological aesthetics, Parliament offers a vital withdrawal from habitual patterns of speech, structure, and social behavior. In its place, it opens an innovative site for embodied cooperation, civic reflection, and reimagined public life. Developed by choreographer Michael Kliën and the Laboratory for Social Choreography at Duke University, Parliament invites participants to collectively inhabit a new kind of assembly—one that listens deeply, moves differently, and explores how we might truly be together. By reservation only. No movement experience required. Informal clothes recommended (suitable for sitting on the floor). Participants must be 18 or older. Courtyard doors will close promptly. No latecomers admitted. Participants must commit to the full 3-hour session.
By Édouard Glissant (1972) Martinique, Caribebbean Directed by Keith Josef Adkins/The New BlackFest Join us for a night on the new stage at the legendary Apollo theatre. Featuring borrowed texts from postcolonial literature, primary historical documents, Creole songs, new ensemble-based scenes, and Glissant’s original writing, The Tales of Black Histories was created in 1970-1971 by a group of schoolteachers at the Institute and performed for thousands of working-class spectators throughout Martinique. The play tells a tale that crosses time and space to stage the histories of slavery, colonialism, and anti-black violence, and the people’s resistance against these forces. Directed by Keith Josef Adkins with actors and activists. In a new adaption by translator and dramaturge Emily Sahakian and Adkins.
A Lenape Creation Story of Turtle Island theatrical piece conceived by Eagle Project. Written & performed by Opalanietet. Music composed by Danielle Jagelski / directed by Ash Marinaccio. Join us at sunset and witness the Lenape Theatre Collective EAGLE PROJECT performing a musical and immersive retelling of a Lenape creation story of Turtle Island in Inwood Hill Park at the Hudson River--where the landscape has not changed for hundreds of years. EAGLE PROJECT will offer a blessing while acknowledging and celebrating the island of Mannahatta. Conceived by Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape theatre artist, Opalanietet, A LENAPE CREATION STORY features text that is centuries old along with new music by Oneida Nation and Ojibwe composer, Danielle Jagelski of Renegade Opera/Simmer Arts. Bring a blanket, food and beverage and be with community. Free and open to the public.
"Get-low, gliding, bone-breaking, connecting, pauzin, waving: Even the language of flexing, a street-dance style born in Jamaica and raised in the Brooklyn neighborhood of East New York, pops with energy." Join Quamaine Daniels and Reggie Gray's iconic FLEXX dance at Brooklyn Bridge Park where the collective will mesh movement, music, words while painting a canvas using dance shoes as urban street brushes. All while the sun sets. Followed by a battle and music by FLEXN DJ. Bring your dance shoes, food, drinks and a blanket.
Join us for a live English reading of Elfriede Jelinek’s new play Endsieg: The Second Coming—a response to the re-election of Donald Trump. Translated by Gitta Honegger. Featuring Nicole Ansari-Cox and directed by Milo Rau, with introductory remarks by Elfriede Jelinek. The reading will be followed by a Q&A with Milo Rau and Gitta Honegger, moderated by Frank Hentschker, Executive Director of the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center. Presented in collaboration with the Vienna Festival (Wiener Festwochen) and the Free Republic of Vienna. Democracy is in crisis, and the public is confused. Elfriede Jelinek responds to Donald Trump’s second election victory with a powerful new text: Endsieg: The Second Coming—a grim sequel to Am Königsweg / The Burgher King, her play about the U.S. election eight years ago. Jelinek depicts how Trump’s followers view the “new old king” as a divinely chosen redeemer. But the king is not alone. Lurking behind him are political and economic cliques, each vying for his favor—and with one another. Meanwhile, resistance is crumbling: “I say there is nothing more, there is nothing else, the other no longer exists, there is nothing to see, there is only the one left,” declares the blind seer. So what remains, beyond Jelinek’s relentless dissection of our times?
New York theatre artists will ask random park visitors and DOWN TO EARTH audiences to sit in a circle to discuss what needs to be changed—and write down the demands of the people of New York on a large white notepad. The results will be forwarded to newspapers, as well as to zlocal and national politicians. In the 1980s, Solidarność (Solidarity) was a broad anti-authoritarian social movement in Poland, using methods of civil resistance to advance the causes of worker’s rights and social change. The Polish Government attempted in the early 1980s to destroy the union through the imposition of martial law in Poland and the use of political repression. On the first day of the strike dock workers in Gdansk sat in a circle at the shipyard and wrote the most urgent demands of the workers on a 4 x 8 plywood sheet. The sheet is now a centerpiece of the Solidarność museum Gdansk.
Brilliant Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera will share early excerpts of her new Galileo Brecht workshop project. The stage is the stunning setting of the Agger Fish Corp. building, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, once the site of shipbuilding—like the Arsenale in Venice where Galileo worked in 1593 as consultant, advising military engineers and instrument makers, and helping with shipbuilding and related problems like ballistics. Science, politics and religion were part of the culture wars of the 16th century. When do we need to stand up for the truth and for what we believe in? And when are we forced to lie to save our lives so we can eat a piece of chicken? 20th century German dramatist Bertolt Brecht’s iconic play, Life of Galileo, reflects about the life and times of Italian astronomer and mathematician Galileo di Galilei (1564–1642), who is brought to the Vatican in Rome for interrogation by the inquisition. Upon being threatened with torture, Galileo recants his teachings that the earth is round and revolves around the sun. His students are shocked by his surrender in the face of pressure from the church authorities. Brecht, after immigrating in 1941 to the Untied States from Hitler’s Germany, translated and reworked the first version of his play in collaboration with the actor Charles Laughton. The result of their efforts was the second, less optimistic "American version" of the play, entitled simply Galileo. In 1947, shortly after the opening of Galileo in Los Angeles, Brecht himself was subpoenaed in the US by the House Un-American-Activities Committee. He testified before HUAC on 30 October 1947 that he never was a Communist party member, and the next day took a flight to Paris and lived in Switzerland before returning to Germany in late 1948.