Perhaps A Fragment Is All We Have: On Stephanie Acosta’s “Good Day God Damn”

Some days, I find myself so lost in my own thoughts that I completely forget where I lock my bike. I walk around in circles, block after block, examining every bike rack and street post trying to find my own. Sometimes, I walk right past it, after a cursory glance has me convinced it’s just a look-a-like, and only a second look forces me to recognize it as my bike. In these moments, I am walking outside but I am clearly elsewhere. I am questioning my choices, my relationships, my values, and asking myself: why exactly are you alive? Some of the most compelling artwork encourages us to reflect on this interiority and the underlying thoughts we hold. Transgressive, unpopular, unwelcome, unmoored––we suppress until we have the emotional capacity to process these thoughts. Making sense of it all can be difficult, and sharing this confusion even more so, as we expose ourselves to the risks of the unknown. I am reminded of these thoughts as I walk through Stephanie Acosta’s immersive exhibition Good Day God Damn at the Chocolate Factory.

Aya Ogawa

Performances will take place at Japan Society, 333 East 47th Street. Japanese-American playwright/director Aya Ogawa presents this final version of their intimate autobiographical piece that explores their fractured relationship with their long-deceased, enigmatic father.

AUNTS

AUNTS, The Chocolate Factory Theater, and NYU Skirball Center for the Performing Arts announce a three-way collaborative performance adventure. Taking over all the nooks and crannies of the new Chocolate Factory Theater space in L.I.C. with a classic AUNTS-style performance event featuring multiple performers, overlapping performances, multi-disciplinary, body/non-body based, time oriented, finished / experimental / unfinished / process art, a dance party and more.

Flux Factory

Let’s think about the shared history of Black Folks in the same way poet Hanif Abdurraqib describes the Soul Train Line: A narrow writhing seemingly endless tunnel of Black Folks smiling and clapping. Where, in the center, partners are brought together – sometimes by intention, many times by fate. And together, using what knowledge they have of themselves and their bodies, they must make their way out – to the other side – urged on by the blooming claps around them.

Sibyl Kempson / 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co.

THE SECURELY CONFERRED, VOUCHSAFED KEEPSAKES OF MAERY S. is an experimental digital "theatrical miniseries" that reinvents as many versions of the Frankenstein author Mary Shelley as there are definitions of the word “Gothic.”

luciana achugar

PURO TEATRO: A Spell For Utopia furthers luciana achugar’s mission of making work as a practice of constructing a new theater - a utopian theater - as a practice of growing a collective utopian uncivilized body with the audience. It asks our bodies directly, intimately and collectively: what do we need now, and what can carry us through and give us hope?

ISSUE Project Room

Propositions from the deadWIP is a multidisciplinary performance series that balances considerations of knowledge and fallibility launching from the premise that creative knowing imbues the process of making as much as a work’s eventual presentation or future iterations. By never claiming to reach finality, the works in this series accept the condition of being always “in progress,” with the potential to reimagine the status of a work-in-progress (WIP) altogether.