New York Live Arts' James Baldwin, This Time! Launches

OPENING ALERT

Media Contacts: Elizabeth Cooke, New York Live Arts 212.691.6500x210 / [email protected]

Lillian Goldenthal, Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors 212.593.6355 / [email protected]

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS’ JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! BEGINS NEXT WEEK WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23 TO SUNDAY, APRIL 27

LAUNCHES THE YEAR OF JAMES BALDWIN IN NEW YORK CITY

Features an array of theater, visual art, dance, video and literature events with artists Carrie Mae Weems, Jamaica Kincaid, Stew, Carl Hancock Rux, Colman Domingo, Fran Lebowitz, Colm Tóibín, Charles O. Anderson and Patricia McGregor

James Baldwin, writer, January 9, 1963. Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation

WHAT: Taking place next week, April 23 – 27, New York Live Arts’ second annual Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time! , will inaugurate “The Year of James Baldwin,” a city-wide celebration in 2014 - 15 of the continuing artistic, intellectual and moral presence of James Baldwin on the occasion of what would have been his 90th year. James Baldwin, This Time! will present no fewer than 18 events in an array of theater, visual art, dance, video and literature.

Curated by celebrated non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler in conjunction with Bill T. Jones, highlights of the five-day festival include the world premiere of the theater work Nothing Personal, based on the 1964 collaborative book by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, directed by Patricia McGregor and starring Colman Domingo; a preview of Carl Hancock Rux’s play Stranger on Earth, featuring vocalist Marcelle Davies-Lashley; an intimate evening with award-winning composer Stew, who shares his creative process surrounding his new Baldwin inspired work, Notes of a Native Song; the New York premiere of choreographer Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives; and the world premiere of choreographer Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time. Also featured during the festival are an original video installation, driven by Baldwin’s voice, by contemporary visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; the speaking program “Jimmy at High Noon,” featuring poet Nikky Finney, actors Jesse L. Martin and André De Shields and others reading Baldwin’s work and discussing its impact; and an Opening Keynote Conversation featuring photographer Carrie Mae Weems, novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid and Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts. Complete programming information and a schedule for James Baldwin, This Time! can be found below.

The 2014 Live Ideas Festival, James Baldwin, This Time! is being presented by New York Live Arts as part of “The Year of James Baldwin” in partnership with Harlem Stage and Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Community Outreach and Education. Other collaborators include: The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics; the School of Writing; NYU; and others to be announced as the year progresses.

WHO: Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director Maya Wiley, Counsel to Mayor DeBlasio of New York Live Arts Joy-Ann Reid, The Grio’s Managing Editor Carrie Mae Weems, photographer Five Mualimm-ak, Civil Rights Activist Jamaica Kincaid, novelist and essayist Jumaane Williams, Brooklyn City Stew, composer Councilman Carl HancockRux, director and performer Kyle Abraham, Live Arts Resident Colman Domingo, director and performer Commissioned Artist Fran Lebowitz, essayist Matthew Brim, Assistant Professor of Colm Tóibín, novelist and poet Queer Studies, College of Staten Island Charles O. Anderson, choreographer Laura Flanders, host and founder, GRITtv Dianne McIntyre, choreographer Aisha Karefa-Smart, Author, educator Patricia McGregor, director and niece of James Baldwin Hank Willis Thomas, visual artist Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Nikky Finney, poet Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem Darryl Pinckney, writer Patricia Cruz Executive Director, Harlem Jesse L. Martin, actor Stage André De Shields, actor Steven G. Fullwood, author, editor and Vijay Iyer, musician curator Marcus Gardley, playwright Michele Wallace, author Rich Blint, Columbia faculty member and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, author Baldwin scholar Nikky Finney, poet John Guare, playwright Edward Hirsch, poet Lawrence Weschler, James Baldwin, This Yusef Komunyakaa, poet Time! Co-curator Ed Pavlić, poet Rachel Cohen, writer Meghan O’Rourke, poet Diedra Harris-Kelley, Co-Director of the Nathalie Handal, poet Romare Bearden Foundation Marcelle Davies-Lashley, vocalist David Leeming, Baldwin and Delaney Ursula Rucker, poet biographer

WHEN: Wednesday, April 23 through Sunday, April 27

WHERE: New York Live Arts New York Live Arts Theater 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

TICKETS: Tickets: FREE - $60 | Festival Passes $175 T: 212-924-0077 | newyorklivearts.org/liveideas Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

OVERVIEW OF EVENTS

VISUAL ART INSTALLATIONS

HANK WILLIS THOMAS (Video installation) This innovative video installation, A person is more important than anything else…, will be driven by the cadence and intonation of James Baldwin’s voice, for Baldwin was also an orator whose delivery was almost as forceful as his ideas. Artist Hank Willis Thomas will weave audio, images, and video together in a fluid- moving, digital stream of consciousness that connects Baldwin’s 20th century discourse with the concerns and urgencies of the 21st. In recent years Thomas’s career has been surging throughout the world; in New York City he is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery.

Dates: Ongoing throughout the festival Times: Ongoing throughout the festival Tickets: FREE

WALL MURAL OF NEW YORKER “LETTER FROM A REGION OF MY MIND” The November 1962 issue of The New Yorker magazine (in which the piece Letter From a Region of My Mind first appeared later to become the basis for Baldwin’s great book The Fire Next Time) will be reproduced as a mural by visual artist Samantha Holmes: the text, often a single streaming column, is flanked on all sides by advertisements incongruously hawking all manner of luxury goods.

Dates: Ongoing throughout the festival Tickets: FREE

READINGS, LECTURES, PANELS & CONVERSATIONS

“JIMMY AT HIGH NOON” (A Series of Five Daily Readings) Presented in partnership with Columbia University School of the Arts, this noon-time series features poets, actors, musicians, essayists and scholars reading from a range of James Baldwin’s classics, as well as discussing his impact on their lives and thinking. Speakers include poet Nikky Finney; writer Darryl Pinckney; actors Jesse L. Martin and André De Shields; musician Vijay Iyer; and playwright Marcus Gardley, among others to be announced at a later date. “Jimmy at High Noon” will be overseen by director Patricia McGregor, with dramaturgy by Columbia faculty member and Baldwin scholar Rich Blint.

Dates: Every day, Wednesday April 23 - Sunday, April 27 Time: 12:00pm Tickets: FREE Location: New York Live Arts Studios

BALDWIN’S CAPACIOUS IMAGINATION & INFLUENCE Roberta Uno, former artistic director of New WORLD Theater which staged a ground-breaking Baldwin production in conversation with playwright John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation and A Free Man of Color), moderated by Live Ideas curator Lawrence Weschler.

Date: Wednesday, April 23 Time: 2:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

OPENING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION Featuring Bill T. Jones, renowned choreographer and Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts in a conversation moderated by James Baldwin: This Time! co-curator Lawrence Weschler with visual artist and MacArthur Fellow, Carrie Mae Weems and celebrated novelist and essayist, Jamaica Kincaid (Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy, A Small Place). Approaching Baldwin from a range of disciplines, these highly accomplished cultural figures share Baldwin’s commitment to the necessary excavation of the dense, complex and contradictory history of the nation. From the stunning visual imagery of Weems, to the startlingly honest and demanding prose of Kincaid, this conversation reaches across genres to address issues of importance to Baldwin, but crucial for our own transformation--this time!

Date: Wednesday, April 23 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $60 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

BALDWIN & DELANEY Rachel Cohen, whose critically acclaimed A Chance Meeting braids a sequence of seminal encounters across American cultural history, including Baldwin’s with both Richard Avedon and Norman Mailer, will read from a third chapter, focusing on the young writer’s life-transforming encounter with the sublime painter Beauford Delaney, at the latter’s Greenwich Village apartment. Following her reading, Cohen will engage Diedra Harris-Kelley, Co-Director of the Romare Bearden Foundation and Baldwin and Delaney biographer David Leeming, in a conversation about Delaney’s enduring importance in Baldwin’s life. Two original Delaney paintings will be on view during the program courtesy of Jim Levis Fine Art.

Date: Thursday, April 24 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $10 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

JAMES BALDWIN THIS TIME Newly appointed Counsel to Mayor DeBlasio, Maya Wiley moderates a conversation on what Baldwin might have made of everything from the burgeoning prison-industrial complex and the recent gutting of the Voter Rights Bill through the Barack Obama presidency. Distinguished panelists include Lawrence Weschler, The Grio’s Managing Editor Joy-Ann Reid, Civil Rights Activist Five Mualimm-ak, and Brooklyn City Councilman Jumaane Williams.

Date: Thursday, April 24 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

AFTER GIOVANNI’S ROOM: BALDWIN and QUEER FUTURITY This multi-disciplinary conversation examines James Baldwin’s mid-twentieth century novel as an opportunity to consider the possibilities for a liberating “queer” future on the horizon, but not yet in sight. The importance of Giovanni’s Room does not simply stem from its status as Baldwin’s sole novel on homosexuality but, also its subterranean yet searing indictment of the dangers of an enduring American innocence. The program will feature a rare original recording of James Baldwin reading an excerpt from Giovanni’s Room (1956). Taking its cue from the late thinker and theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this panel seeks to envision “the then and there” of a not-yet-realized progressive future as one way to negotiate the often devastating realities of the “here and now.” Panelists include Kyle Abraham, Rich Blint, Matthew Brim, Laura Flanders and Bill T. Jones.

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $10 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

BALDWIN’S NEW YORK Author, educator and niece of James Baldwin, Aisha Karefa-Smart discusses her Uncle Jimmy’s New York roots in conversation with Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Patricia Cruz Executive Director of Harlem Stage; author, editor and curator Steven G. Fullwood; and authors Michele Wallace (Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman) and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Harlem is Nowhere).

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

JIMMY’S BLUES: DISCUSSING THE POETRY OF JAMES BALDWIN Co-presented with The Poetry Society of America, this poetry event will feature conversations about and readings from Jimmy’s Blues by renowned American poets Nikky Finney, Edward Hirsch, Yusef Komunyakaa, Ed Pavlić, Meghan O’Rourke and Nathalie Handal.

Date: Saturday, April 26 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

A CONCLUDING CONVERSATION: LEBOWITZ & TÓIBÍN Writer, sardonic provocateur and New Jersey émigré Fran Lebowitz (Metropolitan Life, Social Studies, etc.) and award-winning Irish novelist and essayist, Columbia Professor Colm Tóibín (The Master; The Testament of Mary; New Ways to Kill Your Mother, among many others) discuss Baldwin’s legacy and his remarkable and enduring impact on their own lives and vantages, with a special introduction byBill T. Jones.

Date: Sunday, April 27 Time: 6:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

DANCE & THEATER EVENTS

“NOTHING PERSONAL” Not the least improbable aspect of Baldwin’s life was the fact that he and the photographer Richard Avedon attended high school together at Dewitt Clinton in the Bronx (class of 1942), and were members of the editorial board of the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie. A bit over twenty years later, the two joined forces once again in an exceptionally powerful melding of images and text, the 1964 volume Nothing Personal. Now, in a world premiere production, director Patricia McGregor, working with actor Colman Domingo (Passing Strange and Lee Daniel’s The Butler) and renowned American visual artist Sanford Biggers on scenic décor and design, brings the Baldwin/Avedon collaboration to life in a wrenchingly original stage adaptation.

Date: Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00pm, Thursday, April 24 at 8:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

CARL HANCOCK RUX: STRANGER ON EARTH A preview of a new work, Stranger on Earth imagines a chance meeting between writer James Baldwin and singer Dinah Washington at a Harlem jazz club in 1963. Drawing from Baldwin’s essays including Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time -- combined with Rux’s original dialogue and performed by Rux and Marcelle Davies-Lashley -- the work addresses issues regarding race, identity, music and the future of a world both artists are struggling to understand. This showing will include a talk back with the artists. (Stranger on Earth will premiere in February 2015 at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse.)

Date: Saturday, April 26 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

STEW ON ‘NATIVE SONG’ In a dynamic and intimate evening, Tony Award (Passing Strange) and Obie Award winning artist Stew will share his creative process and his lifelong journey into the world of Baldwin for his new work Notes of a Native Song. This insightful evening will engage audiences through fragments of work in progress: songs, poems, sermons and projections, using the work of James Baldwin and the locale of Harlem as filters through which to view the role of black artists in America, as well as springboards from which to leap into future questions of black art. Notes of a Native Song investigates, at times interrogates, the relationship between art and the black community, and asks what exactly a black American artist owes to this notion of community. (Notes of a Native Song will premiere in June 2015 at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse.)

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre New York Live Arts presents the New York City Premiere of Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives. Infused with a stunning sound score and original texts by poet Ursula Rucker, this work has been inspired by James Baldwin’s seminal work Another Country. Set in a fictional speakeasy called “Home,” the piece is a physical manifestation of a kinetic story about emotional and spiritual longing, saturated with rhythm and blues.

Dianne McIntyre’s new work, Time is Time, commissioned for the Live Ideas Festival, James Baldwin: This Time! explores the emotional soul of Baldwin’s poem “Song (for Skip).” With the foundation of Baldwin’s language, and “Time is Time,” a recurring theme in the poem, choreographer McIntyre weaves a tapestry of dance, song, instrumental sounds and contemplation. Ms. McIntyre will be performing in this celebratory offering joined by four fellow artists including a live score composed by legendary pianist Onaje Allan Gumbs. The movement, vocals and music will be propelled by Mr. Baldwin’s words - which are at times like a whip, at times like a lullaby - never holding back the “truth” of the times.

Apr 26 Stay Late Discussion: Translating James Baldwin into Dance, Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre in conversation with scholar Nadine George-Graves, President of the Congress on Research in Dance (CORD), and Professor of Theater and Dance at the University of California, San Diego.

Apr 27 Stay Late Discussion: Reflections on the Baldwin Era of Jazz and Dance, Charles O. Anderson and Diane McIntyre in conversation with scholar Brenda Dixon-Gottschild, Professor Emeritus, Temple University.

Date: Saturday, April 26 at 8:00pm; Sunday, April 27 at 2:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

CHRONOLOGICAL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:30 pm BALDWIN’S CAPACIOUS IMAGINATION & INFLUENCE

5:00 pm WORLD PREMIERE OF PATRICIA MCGREGOR’S “NOTHING PERSONAL”

8:00 pm OPENING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION

THURSDAY, APRIL 24

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm BALDWIN & DELANEY

5:30 pm JAMES BALDWIN THIS TIME

8:00 pm WORLD PREMIERE OF PATRICIA MCGREGOR’S “NOTHING PERSONAL”

FRIDAY, APRIL 25

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm AFTER GIOVANNI’S ROOM: BALDWIN and QUEER FUTURITY

5:30 pm BALDWIN’S NEW YORK

8:00 pm STEW ON ‘NATIVE SONG’

SATURDAY, APRIL 26

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm CARL HANCOCK RUX: STRANGER ON EARTH

5:30 pm JIMMY’S BLUES: DISCUSSING THE POETRY OF JAMES BALDWIN

8:00 pm BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre

SUNDAY, APRIL 27

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre

6:00 pm A CONCLUDING CONVERSATION: LEBOWITZ & TÓIBÍN

About New York Live Arts New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184- seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Funding Support Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Bloomberg Philanthropies; The Brownstone Foundation; The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art; The Ford Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Florence Gould Foundation; Japan Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; The New York Community Trust; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. New York Live Arts is supported by public funds administered by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

Download a PDF of this alert. For Immediate Release

New York Live Arts Announces Program Details and Schedule

for 2014 Live Ideas Festival

James Baldwin, This Time!

April 23 – 27, 2014

James Baldwin, writer, January 9, 1963. Photograph by Richard Avedon © The Richard Avedon Foundation

Highlights include a Keynote Conversation with Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems and Jamaica Kincaid, the world premiere of Nothing Personal, starring Colman Domingo, a preview of Carl Hancock Rux’s newest work Stranger On Earth and a special evening with Stew exploring his new ‘Notes of a Native Song’

Also included are the New York premiere of Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives, the world premiere of Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time, an original video installation by Hank Willis Thomas, and a concluding conversation with Fran Lebowitz and Colm Tóibín

New York, NY, January 15, 2014 (updated April 16, 2014) – New York Live Arts today announced the schedule of its second annual Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time! taking place April 23 – 27, 2014. Inaugurating “The Year of James Baldwin,” a city-wide celebration in 2014 - 15 of the continuing artistic, intellectual and moral presence of James Baldwin, on the occasion of what would have been his 90th year, James Baldwin, This Time! will present no fewer than 18 events in an array of theater, visual art, dance, video and literature featuring such artists as Carrie Mae Weems, Jamaica Kincaid, Stew, Carl Hancock Rux, Colman Domingo, Fran Lebowitz, Colm Tóibín, Charles O. Anderson, and Patricia McGregor.

“New York Live Arts is proud to launch the monumental city-wide multidisciplinary festival The Year of James Baldwin with James Baldwin, This Time! and collaborate with such illustrious partners as Harlem Stage and the Columbia University School of the Arts,” stated Jean Davidson, Executive Director and CEO of New York Live Arts. “Bringing people, resources and big ideas together to examine the past and reimagine the future is important to New York Live Arts and we are incredibly thankful to the Ford Foundation and our colleagues at the Richard Avedon Foundation and the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics for their support of our second annual Live Ideas festival.”

“After the success of New York Live Arts’ inaugural Live Ideas festival, The Worlds of Oliver Sacks, we are thrilled to shift the focus to another multifaceted generator of and magnet for ideas, James Baldwin,” said Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts. “James Baldwin is a unique and indispensable voice in twentieth-century art and ideas. He continues to shed light on the painful truths of our society, engaging us as almost no other figure does in the intractable conversation at the intersection of class, race, sex and violence. There were other powerful artists and social justice thinkers in his era, but what set James Baldwin apart was his ability to address, in terms at once poetic and visceral, what we can only call ‘Americanism.’”

Among the highlights of the festival are the world premiere of the theater work Nothing Personal, based on the 1964 collaborative book by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, directed by Patricia McGregor and starring Colman Domingo; a preview of Carl Hancock Rux’s play Stranger on Earth, featuring vocalist Marcelle Davies Lashley; an intimate evening with award-winning composer Stew, who shares his creative process surrounding his new Baldwin inspired work, Notes of a Native Song; the New York premiere of choreographer Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives; and the world premiere of choreographer Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time. Also featured during the festival are an original video installation, inspired by the writings of Baldwin, by contemporary visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; and the speaking program “Jimmy at High Noon,” featuring poet Nikky Finney and others reading Baldwin’s work and discussing its impact.

James Baldwin, This Time! is curated by celebrated non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler in conjunction with Bill T. Jones. "For all his time in exile, and for all of the time he spent dwelling on the agonies of difference, Baldwin always spoke in a radical, cleansing and prophetic voice from the standpoint of an American – his own word, endlessly repeated – reclaiming and reconceiving that term in a way that seemed especially relevant to the poisoned discourses of our own era,” stated Weschler. “That’s part of what we were trying to get at in titling our festival James Baldwin, This Time! We can't wait to see the sorts of discourses it will spark.”

The 2014 Live Ideas Festival, James Baldwin, This Time! is being presented by New York Live Arts as part of The Year of James Baldwin in partnership with Harlem Stage and Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Community Outreach and Education. Other collaborators include: The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics; the School of Writing; NYU; and others to be announced as the year progresses.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

Please see the descriptions and schedule below for complete program details. *Schedule in formation and subject to change.*

Listing Information: Live Ideas James Baldwin, This Time! April 23 – 27, 2014

Single tickets and festival passes ($175) will go on sale to New York Live Arts members on January 27, 2014 and the general public on February 3, 2014.

New York Live Arts Tickets: FREE - $60 T: 212-924-0077 | www.newyorklivearts.org 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011 Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

OVERVIEW OF EVENTS

VISUAL ART INSTALLATIONS

Dates: Ongoing throughout the festival Times: Ongoing throughout the festival Tickets: FREE

Dates: Ongoing throughout the festival Tickets: FREE

READINGS, LECTURES, PANELS & CONVERSATIONS

Dates: Every day, Wednesday April 23 - Sunday, April 27 Time: 12:00pm Tickets: FREE Location: New York Live Arts Studios

Date: Wednesday, April 23 Time: 2:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

Date: Wednesday, April 23 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $60 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Date: Thursday, April 24 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $10 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Date: Thursday, April 24 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $10 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

BALDWIN’S NEW YORK Author, educator and niece of James Baldwin, Aisha Karefa-Smart discusses her Uncle Jimmy’s New York roots in conversation with Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of The Studio Museum in Harlem; Patricia Cruz ,Executive Director of Harlem Stage; author, editor and curator Steven G. Fullwood; and authors Michele Wallace (Black Macho and The Myth of The Superwoman) and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts (Harlem is Nowhere).

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

Date: Saturday, April 26 Time: 5:30pm Tickets: $15 Location: New York Live Arts Studios

Date: Sunday, April 27 Time: 6:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

DANCE & THEATER EVENTS

Date: Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00pm, Thursday, April 24 at 8:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Date: Saturday, April 26 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Date: Saturday, April 26 at 8:00pm; Sunday, April 27 at 2:00pm Tickets: $15, $40 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

CHRONOLOGICAL SCHEDULE OF EVENTS

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:30 pm BALDWIN’S CAPACIOUS IMAGINATION & INFLUENCE

5:00 pm WORLD PREMIERE OF PATRICIA MCGREGOR’S “NOTHING PERSONAL”

8:00 pm OPENING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION

THURSDAY, APRIL 24

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm BALDWIN & DELANEY

5:30 pm JAMES BALDWIN THIS TIME

8:00 pm WORLD PREMIERE OF PATRICIA MCGREGOR’S “NOTHING PERSONAL”

FRIDAY, APRIL 25

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm AFTER GIOVANNI’S ROOM: BALDWIN and QUEER FUTURITY

5:30 pm BALDWIN’S NEW YORK

8:00 pm STEW ON ‘NATIVE SONG’

SATURDAY, APRIL 26

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm CARL HANCOCK RUX: STRANGER ON EARTH

5:30 pm JIMMY’S BLUES: DISCUSSING THE POETRY OF JAMES BALDWIN

8:00 pm BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre

SUNDAY, APRIL 27

12:00 pm JIMMY AT HIGH NOON

2:00 pm BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre

6:00 pm A CONCLUDING CONVERSATION: LEBOWITZ & TÓIBÍN

About James Baldwin: James Baldwin was born in Harlem in 1924. The oldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty. In his early years he preached the Gospel and worked for the New Jersey railroad before moving to Greenwich Village, where he wrote book reviews. He caught the attention of novelist Richard Wright, who helped him secure a grant with which he could support himself as a writer. In 1948, at age 24, Baldwin left for Paris, where he hoped to find enough distance from American society so he could write about it.

His first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain―an autobiographical work about growing up in Harlem―was published in 1953 and has long been considered an American classic. Baldwin’s essays explored racial tension with eloquence and addressed taboo themes, including homosexuality and interracial relationships. Both Nobody Knows My Name and Another Country became immediate bestsellers. In the early 1960s, Baldwin returned to America to take part in the civil rights movement and began work on an explosive work about black identity and the state of racial struggle, the bestseller The Fire Next Time (1963). Baldwin’s clarion call for human equality in the essays of Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time became essential texts in the civil rights movement. After the assassinations of his friends Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Baldwin returned to France, where he worked on the book If Beale Street Could Talk (1974). During the last ten years of his life, he produced a number of important works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. He also turned to teaching as a new way of connecting with the young.

About New York Live Arts: New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

Funding Support for New York Live Arts

Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Bloomberg Philanthropies; The Brownstone Foundation; The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art; The Ford Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Florence Gould Foundation; Japan Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; The New York Community Trust; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. New York Live Arts is supported by public funds administered by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

Download a PDF of this release.

Press Contacts

New York Live Arts Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors Elizabeth Cooke Lillian Goldenthal 212) 691-6500 x210 (212) 593-6355 [email protected] [email protected]

MEDIA ALERT

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS’ JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! OPENING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION TO FEATURE THE CELEBRATED PHOTOGRAPHER CARRIE MAE WEEMS AND EMINENT NOVELIST AND ESSAYIST JAMAICA KINCAID IN DIALOGUE WITH BILL T. JONES Wednesday, April 23 at 8:00pm

Weems by Todd Gray; Kincaid by Russell MacMasters; Jones by Stephanie Berger

WHAT: On April 23 at 8:00pm, the first day of New York Live Arts’ 2014 Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time! will culminate with an Opening Keynote Conversation featuring celebrated photographer Carrie Mae Weems, whose retrospective Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video is currently on view at the Guggenheim Museum; the vivid and always thought-provoking novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid; and Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts. Approaching Baldwin from a range of disciplines, these highly accomplished cultural figures share Baldwin’s commitment to the necessary excavation of the dense, complex and contradictory history of the nation. From the stunning visual language of Weems, which continually probes the experiences of black life with grace and evocative witness, to the startlingly honest and demanding prose of Kincaid as she chronicles the tangled drama of life in the New World, the work of both artists responds to Baldwin’s famous call that artists enlist all mediums in the effort to arrive at, in his own words, “something a little closer to the truth” concerning our common American experience of injustice, survival, anguish and beauty. Reaching across the genres, this dynamic, multidisciplinary conversation will address issues of enduring importance to Baldwin, but crucial for our own transformation--this time!

Through April 27, James Baldwin, This Time! will present close to twenty events across an array of theater, visual art, dance, video, literature and scholarship featuring such artists as Hilton Als, Charles O. Anderson, Colman Domingo, Fran Lebowitz, Patricia McGregor, Suzan- Lori Parks, Carl Hancock Rux, Stew and Colm Tóibín. The Live Ideas festival will be inaugurating “The Year of James Baldwin,” a city-wide celebration in 2014 – 15 of the continuing artistic, intellectual and moral presence of James Baldwin, on the occasion of what would have been the writer’s 90th year. Complete programming information and a schedule for James Baldwin, This Time! can be found in the Festival Highlights press release.

WHO: Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts Jamaica Kincaid, novelist and essayist Carrie Mae Weems, photographer Bios below

WHEN: Wednesday, April 23 at 8:00pm

WHERE: New York Live Arts New York Live Arts Theater 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

TICKETS: Tickets: $60 T: 212-924-0077 | newyorklivearts.org/liveideas Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

MEDIA CONTACTS: New York Live Arts Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors Elizabeth Cooke Lillian Goldenthal (212) 691-6500 x210 (212) 593-6355 [email protected] [email protected]

About Bill T. Jones Bill T. Jones is the Executive Artistic Director of New York Lives Arts, which is the home of his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Jones’ vision provides direction across all of New York Live Arts’ programming and ensures that the organization is contributing to a vibrant cultural landscape and dialogue.

Jones formed the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in 1982 out of an 11-year collaboration between himself and his late partner Arnie Zane (1948–1988). During this time, they redefined the duet form and foreshadowed issues of identity, form and social commentary that would change the face of American dance. The Company has performed in more than 200 cities in 40 countries on every major continent and is recognized as one of the most innovative and powerful forces in the dance-theater world.

Mr. Jones is the recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors; a 2010 Tony Award for Best Choreography of the critically acclaimed FELA!; a 2007 Tony Award; 2007 Obie Award; 2006 Stage Directors and Choreographers Foundation CALLAWAY Award for his choreography for Spring Awakening; the 2010 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award; the 2007 USA Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship; the 2006 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Choreography for The Seven; the 2005 Wexner Prize; the 2005 Samuel H. Scripps American Dance Festival Award for Lifetime Achievement; the 2005 Harlem Renaissance Award; the 2003 Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize; and a 1994 MacArthur Foundation “genius award.” In 2010, Mr. Jones was recognized as an Officier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, and in 2000, The Dance Heritage Coalition named Mr. Jones “An Irreplaceable Dance Treasure.”

In addition to his Company and Broadway work, Mr. Jones also choreographed Sir Michael Tippet's New Year (1990) for Houston Grand Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. His Mother of Three Sons was performed at the Munich Biennale, New York City Opera and the Houston Grand Opera. Mr. Jones also directed Lost in the Stars for the Boston Lyric Opera. Additional theater projects include co-directing Perfect Courage with Rhodessa Jones for Festival 2000 in 1990. In 1994, he directed Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain for The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN. Mr. Jones is also an Artistic Advisor to the National YoungArts Foundation. In 2010, he was featured in HBO’s documentary special “YOUNGARTS MASTERCLASS,” which follows notable artists as they mentor aspiring young artists who are alumni of the YoungArts program.

About Jamaica Kincaid Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on the island of Antigua in 1949 and during her early years excelled through a traditionally British colonial education, though following the birth of three brothers (and the illness of her stepfather), she was taken out of school and presently sent to New York to work as an au pair to support the family back home. Her vividly idiosyncratic response to all things New York endeared her to New Yorker writer George Trow, who began featuring her in the “Talk of the Town” pieces through which she in turn came to the attention of the magazine’s editor, who soon began featuring her own writing. Changing her name to fend off criticism back home, she went on to become one of the premier voices in the great American conversation (wry, angry, hilarious, never less than fiercely penetrating) through a wide variety of writerly approaches: stories, novels, reportage, essays, polemic (At the Bottom of the River, Lucy, The Autobiography of my Mother, A Small Place, My Brother, and many more). Along the way, typically improbable, she became a consummate gardener and garden writer (My Garden Book). She is currently a professor in the African American studies program at Harvard University.

About Carrie Mae Weems Carrie Mae Weems was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953. Weems earned a B.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1981), and a M.F.A. from the University of California, San Diego (1984), continuing her studies in the Graduate Program in Folklore at the University of California, Berkeley (1984– 87). With the pitch and timbre of an accomplished storyteller, Weems uses colloquial forms—jokes, songs, rebukes—in photographic series that scrutinize subjectivity and expose pernicious stereotypes. Weems’ vibrant explorations of photography, video and verse breathe new life into traditional narrative forms: social documentary, tableaux, self-portrait and oral history. Eliciting epic contexts from individually framed moments, Weems debunks racist and sexist labels, examines the relationship between power and aesthetics and uses personal biography to articulate broader truths. Whether adapting or appropriating archival images, restaging famous news photographs, or creating altogether new scenes, she traces an indirect history of the depiction of African Americans of more than a century. She has received honorary degrees from Colgate University (2007) and California College of the Arts (2001). Awards include the MacArthur Fellowship (2013); Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2007); Skowhegan Medal for Photography (2007); Rome Prize Fellowship (2006); and the Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography (2002); among others.

Additional Information About James Baldwin, This Time! James Baldwin, This Time! is curated by celebrated non-fiction writer Lawrence Weschler in conjunction with Bill T. Jones. Among the highlights of the festival will be the world premiere of a new theater work Nothing Personal, based on the 1964 collaborative book by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, directed by Patricia McGregor and starring Colman Domingo; a preview of Carl Hancock Rux’s play Stranger on Earth, featuring Hancock Rux and vocalist Marcelle Davies Lashley; an intimate evening with award-winning composer Stew, who shares his creative process surrounding his new Baldwin inspired work, Notes of a Native Song; the New York premiere of choreographer Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives; and the world premiere of choreographer Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time. Also featured during the festival are an original video installation, inspired by the writings of Baldwin, by contemporary visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; and a daily program of readings, “Jimmy at High Noon,” featuring poet Yusef Komunyakaa, critic, essayist and memoirist Hilton Als, playwright and actor Tarell McCraney and others, all reading Baldwin’s work and discussing its impact

The 2014 Live Ideas Festival, James Baldwin, This Time! is being presented by New York Live Arts as the first installment in The Year of James Baldwin, in partnership with Harlem Stage and Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Community Outreach and Education. Other collaborators include: The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics; the School of Writing; NYU; and others to be announced as the year progresses.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

Funding Support for New York Live Arts Major support for New York Live Arts is provided by: Bloomberg Philanthropies; The Brownstone Foundation; The Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; Con Edison; The Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art; The Ford Foundation; The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation; Florence Gould Foundation; Japan Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Lambent Foundation; MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital; The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Mertz Gilmore Foundation; Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation; New England Foundation for the Arts; The New York Community Trust; Robert Rauschenberg Foundation; The Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation Fund; The Jerome Robbins Foundation; The Scherman Foundation; The Shubert Foundation; and the Trust for Mutual Understanding. New York Live Arts is supported by public funds administered by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

Download a PDF of this release.

MEDIA ALERT Media Contacts: Elizabeth Cooke, New York Live Arts 212.691.6500x210 / [email protected]

Lillian Goldenthal, Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors 212.593.6355 / [email protected]

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS’ FESTIVAL JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF THEATER WORK NOTHING PERSONAL WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23 AT 5:00PM, THURSDAY, APRIL 24 AT 8:00PM

Colman Domingo Stars in Work Directed by Patricia McGregor and Based on the 1964 Collaborative Book by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon

WHAT: As part of New York Live Arts’ second annual Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time!, director Patricia McGregor (Katori Hall’s Hurt Village, Marcus Gardley’s The House That Will Not Stand) and actor Colman Domingo, of Lee Daniel’s The Butler and Stew’s Passing Strange, present the world premiere of Nothing Personal. This production, which shares the name of the exceptionally powerful 1964 volume by James Baldwin and renowned photographer Richard Avedon, brings the collaboration to life in a wrenchingly original stage adaptation.

Twenty years after attending high school together at Dewitt Clinton in the Bronx (class of 1942) and co-editing the school’s literary magazine, Baldwin and Avedon co-created Nothing Personal, exploring how an individual facing the mundane and grotesque realities of modern urban life finds the courage to walk out of the front door and face the world every day. This is the central question of McGregor’s Nothing Personal, which uses Baldwin’s essay and Avedon’s photos as inspiration.

In this staged work, the audience follows the journey of "Jimmy" (Colman Domingo), a Manhattanite trapped by anxiety and disenchantment who has locked himself in his bleak apartment. To pass the time and numb the pain, he flips through the stations of his static black and white television, becoming depressed by the American myth he sees portrayed on the screen. The text and corresponding Avedon images pour out as he shifts from the television to his cluttered desk, to the small window where he looks out on the grim Manhattan night. Out of the cacophony below emerges a street musician whose blues mirror Jimmy's own. Just as his examination of epidemic racism, police brutality, the excesses of privilege and the dangers of institutionalized power are spiraling into a choke hold of paralysis, he thinks of his family. He thinks of loves come and gone. He is reminded that despite the seeming bleakness blanketing the city like a February blizzard, there are moments of connection and kindness that can neutralize the cold. Will these thoughts be enough to counteract the insomnia and feelings of desperate isolation that creep in at four in the morning? Nothing Personal is a searing analysis of the state of our union written in 1964 and devastatingly relevant today.

Complete programming information and a schedule for James Baldwin, This Time! can be found here.

WHO: Patricia McGregor, director Colman Domingo, actor Sanford Biggers, set designer Sara Lasley, projection designer Raul Aktanov, costume designer Erik Carter, associate director

WHEN: Wednesday, April 23 at 5:00pm and Thursday, April 24 at 8:00pm

WHERE: New York Live Arts New York Live Arts Theater 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

TICKETS: $15, $40 | Festival Passes $175 T: 212-924-0077 | newyorklivearts.org/liveideas Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

OTHER THEATRICAL EVENTS BEING STAGED AS PART OF JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! INCLUDE:

Carl Hancock Rux: Stranger on Earth A preview of a new work, Stranger on Earth imagines a chance meeting between writer James Baldwin and singer Dinah Washington at a Harlem jazz club in 1963. Drawing from Baldwin’s essays including Notes of a Native Son, Nobody Knows My Name and The Fire Next Time--combined with Rux’s original dialogue and performed by Rux and Marcelle Davies-Lashley--the work addresses issues regarding race, identity, music and the future of a world both artists are struggling to understand. This showing will include a talk back with the artists.

Date: Saturday, April 26 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Stranger on Earth is commissioned by Harlem Stage and will premiere in February 2015 at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Please note that press attendance to this event is strictly for background information, and not for reviews.

Stew on ‘Native Song’ In a dynamic and intimate evening, Tony Award (Passing Strange) and Obie Award winning artist Stew will share his creative process and his lifelong journey into the world of Baldwin for his new work Notes of a Native Song. This insightful evening will engage audiences through fragments of work in progress: songs, poems, sermons and projections, using the work of James Baldwin and the locale of Harlem as filters through which to view the role of black artists in America, as well as springboards from which to leap into future questions of black art. Notes of a Native Song investigates, at times interrogates, the relationship between art and the black community, and asks what exactly a black American artist owes to this notion of community.

Date: Friday, April 25 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $15, $35 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

Notes of a Native Song is commissioned by Harlem Stage and will premiere in June 2015 at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse. Please note that press attendance to this event is strictly for background information, and not for reviews.

About James Baldwin, This Time! From April 23 to 27, James Baldwin, This Time! at New York Live Arts will present close to twenty events across an array of theater, visual art, dance, video, literature and scholarship featuring such artists as Carrie Mae Weems, Jamaica Kincaid, Charles O. Anderson, Colman Domingo, Fran Lebowitz, Patricia McGregor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Carl Hancock Rux, Stew and Colm Tóibín. The festival inaugurates “The Year of James Baldwin,” a city-wide celebration in 2014 - 15 of the continuing artistic, intellectual and moral presence of James Baldwin, on the occasion of what would have been his 90th year. James Baldwin, This Time! is being presented by New York Live Arts as part of “The Year of James Baldwin” in partnership with Harlem Stage and Columbia University School of the Arts Office of Community Outreach and Education. Other collaborators include: The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics; the School of Writing; NYU; and others to be announced as the year progresses.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

Download a PDF of this release.

MEDIA ALERT Media Contacts: Elizabeth Cooke, New York Live Arts 212.691.6500x210 / [email protected]

Lillian Goldenthal, Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors 212.593.6355 / [email protected]

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS’ FESTIVAL JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! PRESENTS BALDWIN THROUGH DANCE: CHARLES O. ANDERSON AND DIANNE MCINTYRE SATURDAY, APRIL 26 AT 8:00PM, SUNDAY, APRIL 27 AT 2:00PM

Featuring the World Premiere of Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time Inspired by Baldwin’s “Song (for Skip)” and the New York City Premiere of Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives Exploring Baldwin’s Another Country

WHAT: As part of the second annual Live Ideas festival, James Baldwin, This Time!, New York Live Arts presents Baldwin Through Dance: Charles O. Anderson and Dianne McIntyre. The shared program features the world premiere of Time is Time created and performed by acclaimed dancer and choreographer Dianne McIntyre, and the New York City premiere of Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Natives.

Infused with a stunning sound score and original texts by performance poet and singer Ursula Rucker, Restless Natives is an evening of mournful celebration that integrates jazz and blues music, spoken text and African American vernacular gestures and dances. The work explores the core themes—the struggle to love and be loved amid the complexities of racism, sexism and homophobia—from James Baldwin’s Another Country. Set in a fictional speakeasy called “Home,” the piece is a rhythm and blues saturated kinetic story about emotional and spiritual longing.

Restless Natives was conceived, directed and choreographed by Charles O. Anderson in collaboration with performers Jeremy Arnold, Karama Butler, Dina-Verley Christophe, Danielle Currica, Johnnie Mercer, Jr., Alvin Rangel, Ursula Rucker, Ashley Sleeth and Miko Doi Smith. The sound score was designed by Anderson and features music by Gil Scott Heron, James Baldwin, Betty LaVette, Ursula Rucker, Frank London and Chuck and Mac.

Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time is a celebratory offering exploring the emotional soul of Baldwin’s poem “Song (for Skip).” With the foundation of Baldwin’s language—which at times is like a whip, at times like a lullaby—McIntyre weaves a tapestry of dance, text, song, instrumental sounds and contemplation. Time is Time will be performed by McIntyre and five fellow artists including legendary pianist and composer Onaje Allan Gumbs.

Additional programming information and a full schedule of events for James Baldwin, This Time! can be found here.

WHO: Charles O. Anderson, director and choreographer Ursula Rucker, poet Charles O. Anderson, Jeremy Arnold, Karama Butler, Dina-Verley Christophe, Danielle Currica, Johnnie Mercer, Jr., Alvin Rangel, Ursula Rucker, Ashley Sleeth, Miko Doi Smith, performers Brenda Dixon Gottschild, dramaturg

Dianne McIntyre, choreographer Onaje Allan Gumbs, composer Onaje Allan Gumbs, Dianne McIntyre, Rachel McSween, Yusef Miller, William Roberson and Kalimah Wouadjou, performers

WHEN: Saturday, April 26 at 8:00pm Sunday, April 27 at 2:00pm

WHERE: New York Live Arts New York Live Arts Theater 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

TICKETS: $15, $40 | Festival Passes $175 T: 212-924-0077 | newyorklivearts.org/liveideas Box Office hours: Monday-Friday 1 - 9pm | Saturday-Sunday 12 - 8pm

About the Artists Charles O. Anderson is currently based in Austin, Texas where he is an associate professor of African Diaspora Dance Studies and the M.F.A. coordinator in Dance at The University of Texas at Austin. He is artistic director of dance theatre X (dtX), an afro-contemporary dance theatre company, which he founded in Philadelphia in 2003. Born and raised in Richmond, VA, Anderson earned his B.A. in Choreography and Performance from Cornell University and his M.F.A. in Dance from Temple University. He has performed in the companies of Ronald K. Brown, Sean Curran, Mark Dendy and Miguel Gutierrez among others. His work has been presented nationally and internationally and has earned recognition by numerous grants and organizations, such as the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine, and one of “12 Rising Stars in the Academy” by Diverse: Issues In Higher Education magazine.

Dianne McIntyre is “one of modern dance’s reigning divas” (Time Out New York, 2012). Since 1972 she has choreographed scores of concert dances, four Broadway shows, 30 regional theatre productions, a London West End musical, three feature films, three television productions, stage movement for recording artists and five original full-length dance-dramas. Her company, Sounds in Motion/Dance Visions, Inc. operated a studio/school in Harlem, mentored countless dance artists and toured internationally in the 1970s and 80s. Known for collaborations with musicians in jazz, blues, soul, world and avant-garde (Olu Dara, Butch Morris, Cecil Taylor, Lester Bowie) McIntyre also has the opportunity to work with writers and directors (Ntozake Shange, OyamO, Regina Taylor, August Wilson, Des McAnuff, Marion McClinton, Woodie King, Jr., Jonathan Demme). Her individualistic movement style reflects her affinity for cultural histories, personal narratives and the boldness, nuances, discipline and freedom in music and poetic text. Dance companies, including Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, as well as forty plus university ensembles and the major dance festivals have commissioned her choreography and teaching residencies. As a Tamiris specialist she recreated that choreographer’s 1937 “How Long, Brethren?” from Negro Songs of Protest.

Awards include John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, three Bessies (1989, 1997, 2006), NEA, NYSCA grants and fellowships, AUDELCO and Helen Hayes theatre awards, Honorary Doctor of Fine Arts Degrees from SUNY Purchase and Cleveland State University, ADF Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching, and an Emmy Award nomination for HBOs “Miss Evers’ Boys.” She also choreographed the film “Beloved” based on the novel by Toni Morrison. Her recent and present projects include choreography for Sweet Honey in the Rock’s fortieth anniversary tour, for The Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College dance students and a solo for Roxane D’Orleans Juste “She Who Carries the Sky” with the Límón Dance Company which premieres at the Joyce Theater April 29. Ms. McIntyre’s mentors include faculty of OSU, Gus Solomons jr, Louise Roberts and Richard Davis.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

Download a PDF of this release.

MEDIA ALERT Media Contacts: Elizabeth Cooke, New York Live Arts 212.691.6500x210 / [email protected]

Lillian Goldenthal, Polskin Arts & Communications Counselors 212.593.6355 / [email protected]

NEW YORK LIVE ARTS’ FESTIVAL JAMES BALDWIN, THIS TIME! PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF COMMISSION A person is more important than anything else… BY CONCEPTUAL ARTIST HANK WILLIS THOMAS

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 23 THROUGH SUNDAY, APRIL 27

ADDITIONAL VISUAL ARTS ELEMENTS OF FESTIVAL INCLUDE WALL MURAL OF NEW YORKER “LETTER FROM A REGION OF MY MIND” BY SAMANTHA HOLMES AND KEYNOTE CONVERSATION FEATURING CARRIE MAE WEEMS

WHAT: Hank Willis Thomas’ multi-channel video mosaic and sound installation, A person is more important than anything else…, commissioned by New York Live Arts on the occasion of the second annual Live Ideas festival, will have its world premiere showing as part of James Baldwin, This Time! from April 23 through 27. The project weaves together still images, audio and video material of Baldwin--who Thomas cites as having a great influence on his work, politics and memory--to create a fluid- moving, digital stream of consciousness that connects Baldwin’s 20th century discourse with the concerns and urgencies of today.

The work considers the hyper-visuality of the black body in the global discourse by examining provocative phrases found in Baldwin’s writing. The video installation will celebrate James Baldwin’s relationship to the printed page and will explore the spaces in which Baldwin understood the possibilities of life through the use of various voices within for storytelling.

Thomas stated about the project, “If Post-blackness is a possibility, it is safe to say that James Baldwin was a harbinger for this intellectual and spiritual evolution. His refusal to be defined and categorized along any narrow or singular definition was perhaps iconoclast in his era, but what nearly every artist seeks today. He seemed to always be in two or three conversations at time and with two or three seemingly disparate places and cultures. In actuality, he was speaking to the greater potential of any listener and any word. This is the challenge with making work of or about him.”

Full details of additional visual arts events can be found below. Complete programming information and a schedule for James Baldwin, This Time! can be found here.

WHO: Hank Willis Thomas, artist

WHEN: Ongoing throughout the festival Wednesday, April 23 through Sunday, April 27

WHERE: New York Live Arts New York Live Arts Lobby 219 W 19th Street, New York, NY 10011

TICKETS: FREE

Other Visual Arts Events as part of James Baldwin, This Time! include:

WALL MURAL OF NEW YORKER “LETTER FROM A REGION OF MY MIND” The November 1962 issue of The New Yorker magazine (in which the piece “Letter From a Region of My Mind” first appeared later to become the basis for Baldwin’s great book The Fire Next Time) will be reproduced as a mural by visual artist Samantha Holmes. The text, often a single streaming column, is flanked on all sides by advertisements incongruously hawking all manner of luxury goods.

Dates: Ongoing throughout the festival Tickets: FREE

OPENING KEYNOTE CONVERSATION Featuring Bill T. Jones, renowned choreographer and Executive Artistic Director of New York Live Arts in conversation with visual artist and MacArthur Fellow, Carrie Mae Weems and celebrated novelist and essayist, Jamaica Kincaid (Autobiography of My Mother, Lucy, A Small Place). Approaching Baldwin from a range of disciplines, these highly accomplished cultural figures share Baldwin’s commitment to the necessary excavation of the dense, complex and contradictory history of the nation. From the stunning visual imagery of Weems, to the startlingly honest and demanding prose of Kincaid, this conversation reaches across genres to address issues of importance to Baldwin, but crucial for our own transformation--this time!

Date: Wednesday, April 23 Time: 8:00pm Tickets: $60 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

BALDWIN & DELANEY Rachel Cohen, whose critically acclaimed A Chance Meeting braids a sequence of seminal encounters across American cultural history, including Baldwin’s with both Richard Avedon and Norman Mailer, will read from a third chapter, focusing on the young writer’s life-transforming encounter with the sublime painter Beauford Delaney, at the latter’s Greenwich Village apartment. Following her reading, Cohen will engage Diedra Harris-Kelley, Co-Director of the Romare Bearden Foundation and Baldwin and Delaney biographer David Leeming, in a conversation about Delaney’s enduring importance in Baldwin’s life. Two original quintessential Delaney paintings, Portrait of James Baldwin (1965) and Two Women on a Bench (1970) will be on view during the program courtesy of Levis Fine Art, representing the estate of Beauford Delaney.

Date: Thursday, April 24 Time: 2:00pm Tickets: $10 Location: New York Live Arts Theater

About Hank Willis Thomas Hank Willis Thomas is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He received his B.F.A. from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and his M.F.A. in photography, along with an M.A. in visual criticism, from California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Thomas has acted as a visiting professor at CCA and in the M.F.A. programs at Maryland Institute College of Art and ICP/Bard and has lectured at Yale University, Princeton University, the Birmingham Museum of Art and the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris. His work has been featured in many publications including Reflections in Black (Norton, 2000) 25 under 25: Up-and-Coming American Photographers (CDS, 2003) and 30 Americans (RFC, 2008). Thomas’ monograph, Pitch Blackness, was published by Aperture in 2008. He received a new media fellowship through the Tribeca Film Institute and was an artist in residence at John Hopkins University. In 2011, Thomas was a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the U.S. and abroad including, Galerie Anne De Villepoix in Paris, Annarumma 404 in Milan, the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, among many others. Thomas’ work is in numerous public collections including the Museum of Modern Art New York, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. His collaborative projects have been featured at the Sundance Film Festival and installed publicly at the Oakland International Airport, The Birmingham International Airport, The Oakland Museum of California and the University of California, San Francisco. Recent notable exhibitions include Hank Willis Thomas at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Strange Fruit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Picture Windows: Hank Willis Thomas in collaboration with Sanford Biggers at the International Center for Photography, and The Istanbul Biennial. Thomas is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City and Goodman Gallery in South Africa.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Live Ideas is made possible by The Ford Foundation. Additional support is provided by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, The Samuel M. Levy Family Foundation and Theatre Development Fund.

PRESS KITS AND DIGITAL IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST

###

For Hi-Res images please contact Elizabeth Cooke, Communications Manager [email protected] | 212. 691. 6500 X 210

James Baldwin book covers courtesy of Vintage Books For Hi-Res images please contact Elizabeth Cooke, Communications Manager [email protected] | 212. 691. 6500 X 210

Festival images from select performances and panels will be available the day after the event Bill T. Jones Bill T. Jones Carrie Mae Weems Photograph by LaMont Hamilton Photograph by Stephanie Berger Photograph by Todd Gray. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Lawrence Weschler Lawrence Weschler Photograph by Gregori Starrett Pencil drawing (titled “The PT Barnum of the Mind”) by Riva Lehrer

Jamaica Kincaid Photograph by Russell Mac- Masters

For Hi-Res images please contact Elizabeth Cooke, Communications Manager [email protected] | 212. 691. 6500 X 210

Festival images from select performances and panels will be available the day after the event Bill T. Jones and Lawrence Weschler Bill T. Jones and Aisha Karefa-Smart, neice of James Baldwin Photograph by Ian Douglas Photograph by Ian Douglas

2012 Live Ideas Festival: The Worlds of Oliver Sachs Curators Lawrence Weschler and Bill T. Jones with Oliver Sachs Photograph by Philip Habib

For Hi-Res images please contact Elizabeth Cooke, Communications Manager [email protected] | 212. 691. 6500 X 210

Festival images from select performances and panels will be available the day after the event

New York Live Arts Leadership Bios

JEAN DAVIDSON was appointed Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of New York Live Arts in 2011 after serving as the Executive Director of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company for six years. She was instrumental in leading the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company through its merger with Dance Theater Workshop to create New York Live Arts. As Executive Director and CEO, Davidson is charged with ensuring that New York Live Arts fulfills its mission, realizes its vision and achieves its institutional goals. Under her leadership, the organization has launched two new programs—the Resident Commissioned Artist program and an annual arts and humanities festival titled Live Ideas—and has expanded its international cross-cultural exchange work into Africa and the Middle East.

During her tenure with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company, the company launched two successful initiatives entitled Partners in Creation and Partners in Education; the budget increased from $2.2 million to $3.2 million; and touring revenue increased by 25 percent. Previously, she served as the Managing Director of the Silk Road Project, a not-for-profit music organization founded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. During her tenure the Project commissioned twenty-five chamber works, launched a worldwide tour, released three recordings, created an educational initiative and co- produced the 2002 Smithsonian Folklife Festival which drew a record 4.5 million visitors and included more than 400 artists from 26 countries.

Davidson has held positions at the American Conservatory Theater; the Theater and Dance Program at Oberlin College; the American Dance Festival; and the Cleveland Play House. As a freelance lighting designer early in her career, she lit national and international classical music and dance tours. Highlights include international tours of Yo-Yo Ma's Soul of the Tango and Appalachian Journey, both Grammy Award winning recordings, Annie-B Parson's City of Brides at Dance Theater Workshop and the Guggenheim Works in Process Series at Lincoln Center. An Oberlin College alumna, Davidson is a frequent guest lecturer on arts management, most recently lecturing at the Università di Bologna in Bologna, Italy, and at New York University Tisch School of the Arts.

BILL T. JONES is the Executive Artistic Director of New York Lives Arts, which is the home of his Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Jones’ vision provides direction across all of New York Live Arts’ programming and ensures that the organization is contributing to a vibrant cultural landscape and dialogue.

In addition to his Company and Broadway work, Mr. Jones also choreographed Sir Michael Tippet's New Year (1990) for Houston Grand Opera and Glyndebourne Festival Opera. His Mother of Three Sons was performed at the Munich Biennale, New York City Opera and the Houston Grand Opera. Mr. Jones also directed Lost in the Stars for the Boston Lyric Opera. Additional theater projects include co-directing Perfect Courage with Rhodessa Jones for Festival 2000 in 1990. In 1994, he directed Derek Walcott’s Dream on Monkey Mountain for The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, MN. Mr. Jones is also an Artistic Advisor to the National YoungArts Foundation, In 2010, he was featured in HBO’s documentary special “YOUNGARTS MASTERCLASS,” which follows notable artists as they mentor aspiring young artists who are alumni of the YoungArts program.

CARLA PETERSON was appointed Artistic Director of New York Live Arts in February 2011, after providing overall direction for the artistic mission of Dance Theater Workshop, serving in the same position from 2006 to 2011. Peterson curates and commissions New York Live Arts’ performing arts programs including the New York Live Arts Season, DTW Commissioning Fund, Replay Series, Studio Series and the Fresh Tracks Performance and Residency Program, among others.

Previously, from 2002 to 2006, she held the position of Executive Director of Movement Research, an internationally recognized dance laboratory. From 1993 to 1996, she served at Dance Theater Workshop as both Managing Director of the National Performance Network and Director of The Suitcase Fund, now New York Live Arts’ international artist exchange program. From 1988 to 1993, she was the Assistant Performing Arts Director at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio.

She has held numerous positions in freelance arts consulting, fundraising and management working with artists such as Tere O’Connor, Jennifer Monson, Chamecki/Lerner, Ann Carlson and others, and for such foundations as the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and Surdna Foundation. Peterson continues to serve on panels, most recently Creative Capital’s Performing Arts panel, the MacDowell Colony, as advisor for the New England Foundation for the Art’s National Dance Project, the Princess Grace Awards, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Fellowship Grants to Individuals, the Pew Fellowships in the Arts’ Discipline-Specific and Final Interdisciplinary Panels, and The Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography’s Choreographic Fellowships panel.

In 2005, she was awarded a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie“ Award in recognition of her leadership of Movement Research and her dedication to the dance community. She currently serves on the boards of Movement Research and Mount Tremper Arts, and on the Steering Committee of the NY Dance and Performance Awards, under the auspices of DanceNYC. She holds an M.F.A. from The Ohio State University and a B.S. from the University of Illinois. She was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012, by the French government.

LAWRENCE WESCHLER, Director Emeritus of the New York Institute of the Humanities at NYU, is a graduate of Cowell College of the University of California at Santa Cruz (1974), and was for more than twenty years (1981-2002) a staff writer at The New Yorker, where his work shuttled between political tragedies and cultural comedies. He is curating James Baldwin, This Time! in conjunction with Bill T. Jones. He also curated the inaugural Live Ideas festival The Worlds of Oliver Sacks in 2013.

His books of political reportage include The Passion of Poland (1984); A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers (1990); and Calamities of Exile: Three Nonfiction Novellas (1998). His “Passions and Wonders” series currently comprises Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees: A Life of Contemporary Artist Robert Irwin (1982); David Hockney’s Cameraworks (1984); Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995); A Wanderer in the Perfect City: Selected Passion Pieces (1998) Boggs: A Comedy of Values (1999); Robert Irwin: Getty Garden (2002); Vermeer in Bosnia (2004); Everything that Rises: A Book of Convergences (2006), and most recently Uncanny Valley: Adventurer in the Narrative(2012). Mr. Wilson was shortlisted for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Everything That Rises received the NBCC award for criticism in 2007.

Mr. Weschler has taught, variously, at Princeton, Columbia, UCSC, Bard, Vassar, Sarah Lawrence and NYU.

Alongside his role as director of the New York Institute of the Humanities (2001-2013), he concurrently held the position of Artistic Director of the Chicago Humanities Festival from 2006 through 2011 (and is still actively engaged there on an emeritus basis). He is also a contributing editor of McSweeney’s and the Threepeeny Review, curator at large of the DVD quarterly Wholphin, and art wrangler for the Virginia Quarterly Review; (recently retired) chair of the Sundance (formerly Soros) Documentary Film Fund; and director of the Ernst Toch Society, dedicated to the promulgation of the music of his grandfather, the noted Weimar émigré composer. He is currently launching a new monthly column on visual culture, “Pillow of Art,” in The Believer magazine. THE YEAR OF JAMES BALDWIN A City-Wide Multidisciplinary Celebration of James Baldwin on his 90th Anniversary

April 2014 – June 2015

A consortium of cultural organizations from throughout New York City are uniting to declare 2014-15 The Year of James Baldwin on what would have been the great American essayist, novelist, playwright, poet, and activist James Baldwin’s 90th year (he was born in Harlem on August 2, 1924). The principal conveners of this multidisciplinary festival will consist of copartners Harlem Stage; New York Live Arts; and Columbia University School of the Arts. Other collaborators include The New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the School of Writing, New York University, The Poetry Society of America, The James Baldwin School and others to be announced as the year progresses.

PROGRAMMING As of March 5, 2014 All details subject to change

Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time! April 23 – 27, 2014 At New York Live Arts

Curated by celebrated non-fiction writerLawrence Weschler, in collaboration with New York Live Arts Executive Artistic Director Bill T. Jones, this five day festival—the second annualLive Ideas—will include lectures, panels, performances and a full range of artistic responses to the enduring pertinence of the work of the American essayist, novelist, playwright and social critic.

Among the highlights of the festival are the theatrical world premiere of Nothing Personal, based on the 1964 collaborative book by James Baldwin and Richard Avedon, directed by Patricia MacGregor and starring Colman Domingo; a preview of Carl Hancock Rux’s play Stranger on Earth, featuring vocalist Marcelle Davies Lashley and a view into the creative process of award-winning composer Stew’s Notes of a Native Song both produced and commissioned by Harlem Stage; the New York premiere of choreographer Charles O. Anderson’s Restless Native; and the world premiere of choreographer Dianne McIntyre’s Time is Time. Also featured during the festival are an original video installation, inspired by the writings of Baldwin, by contemporary visual artist Hank Willis Thomas; and the speaking program “Jimmy at High Noon,” presented in partnership with Columbia University School of the Arts, featuring poet Nikky Finney, writers Hilton Als and Darryl Pinckney playwrights Susan Lori Parks and Marcus Gardley and others reading Baldwin’s work and discussing its impact.

For a full schedule of events, please visit: newyorklivearts.org/liveideas.

Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival 2014

The Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival is an annual six-day celebration mounted by Harlem Stage, The Apollo Theater, and Jazz Mobile, in collaboration with Columbia University School of the Arts, to consider the historical and contemporary significance of classic jazz venues in Harlem.

“The Key to the Language”: James Baldwin and his Muse Tuesday, May 6, 2014, 6pm As part of Columbia University School of the Arts’ humanities programming for the 2014 Harlem Jazz Shrines Festival, this panel presents faculty in a conversation about how the music of Harlem shaped Baldwin’s writing. Farah Griffin, Marcellus Blount, Robert O’Meally (Moderator: Rich Blint), Columbia University (Venue TBD) Harlem Book Fair 2014 July 17-19, 2014

The 16th annual Harlem Book Fair presents three-days of panels, readings, and events in collaboration with Columbia University School of the Arts, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL, and C-SPAN-Book TV.*

Events being presented as part of The Year of James Baldwin include: The First Annual Harlem Book Fair Fiction Festival Friday, July 11, 2014 Jerome L. Greene Hall, Columbia University School of Law, Room 104/106 (Venue Subject to Change) “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity:” James Baldwin and the Writer’s Life, 10am-12pm Inheritance: James Baldwin and his Literary Progeny. 2:30pm-4pm “Where the Poet Can Sing, The People Can Live”: Readings from the Book of Baldwin, 6pm-8pm

Harlem Book Fair Author Panels Saturday, July 11, 2014 Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Our Present Danger: James Baldwin in Contemporary Times, 2pm-4:30pm “Achieving Our Nation”: James Baldwin and American Morality, 4pm-6pm

*All events on Saturday, July 12, 2014, will be broadcast live on CSPAN-BOOK TV in collaboration with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, NYPL. Please note that the precise time of panels is subject to change.

*For up-to-date information on Columbia University School of the Arts’ programming during The Year of James Baldwin, please visit: arts.columbia.edu/coe/news/2014/year of-james-baldwin

Carl Hancock Rux Stranger on Earth February, 2015 Commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage, premiered at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (Previews at New York Live Arts on Apr 26)

This theater production, imagines a chance meeting between Baldwin and singer Dinah Washington at a Harlem jazz club in 1963. Drawing from Baldwin’s essays including Notes of a Native Son; Nobody Knows My Name; and The Fire Next Time--combined with Rux’s original dialogue and performed by Rux and Marcelle Davies Lashley--the work addresses issues of race, identity, music and the future of a world that both are struggling to understand.

Stew on Native Song June, 2015 Commissioned and produced by Harlem Stage, premiered at the Harlem Stage Gatehouse (Previews at New York Live Arts on Apr 25)

This new work by award-winning composer Stew features songs, poems, sermons and projections, using the work of James Baldwin and the locale of Harlem as filters through which to view the role of black artists in America, as well as springboards from which to leap into future questions of black art. Via Baldwin’s work, Notes of a Native Song questions the relationship between art and the black community, and asks what exactly a black American artist owes to this notion of community.

The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the School of Writing Installations, Readings, Writing & a Film Screening

James Baldwin was the keynote speaker and a panelist in 1965 at The New School conference “The Negro Writer in America,” so it is with a sense of celebrating one of our own that the School examines his life and work. Focusing on the intersection of writing and politics in his life and work, faculty, students, and artists will explore the many facets of this extraordinary artist through installations, readings, online writing, and a film screening. Over the course of interrelated events during the Fall 2014 semester, a geographical and cultural map emerges of Baldwin’s formative encounters and engagements with institutions, people, and neighborhoods in the city he eventually left for its racism and homophobia. PARTNERS/COLLABORATORS

Harlem Stage Since 1983, Harlem Stage has been one of the nation’s leading arts organizations devoted to the creation and development of new works by performing artists of color. We support artists and organizations around the corner and across the globe. And we provide children and adults with engaging and interactive education programs.

New York Live Arts Located in the heart of Chelsea in New York City, New York Live Arts is an internationally recognized destination for innovative movement-based artistry offering audiences access to art and artists notable for their conceptual rigor, formal experimentation and active engagement with the social, political and cultural currents of our times. At the center of this identity is Bill T. Jones, Executive Artistic Director, a world-renowned choreographer, dancer, theater director and writer.

We commission, produce and present performances in our 20,000 square foot home, which includes a 184-seat theater and two 1,200 square foot studios that can be combined into one large studio. New York Live Arts serves as home base for the Bill T. Jones/ Arnie Zane Dance Company, provides an extensive range of participatory programs for adults and young people and supports the continuing professional development of artists. Our influence extends beyond NYC through our international cultural exchange program that currently places artists in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Columbia University School of the Arts The School of the Arts is an innovative graduate professional school with a tradition of risk-taking, grounded in a deeply intellectual Ivy League university and energized by our location in New York City--one of the great cultural capitals of the world. The study and practice of art-making at the School is an immersive, constantly evolving process. Aspiring, emerging or established, our filmmakers, writers, theatre practitioners and visual artists grow individually through intensive engagement with their craft and lively, often profound exchanges of ideas and work.

The Office of Community Outreach and Education conceives and implements the School of the Arts initiatives designed to strengthen existing community partnerships and develop new, mutually beneficial and sustainable opportunities for dynamic engagement in coordination with the School’s Public Programs, the Arts Initiative, and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery. In consultation with faculty in Film, Theatre, Visual Arts and Writing, the Office develops and executes projects and events with crucial stakeholders and works to shape opportunities for MFA students to gain teaching and work experience in schools and alternative settings. Our mission is the exchange of ideas and perspectives in the arts and the development of educational and programmatic collaborations that engage the School of the Arts, the University, and cultural organizations in Upper Manhattan and New York City.

The New School and its Vera List Center for Art and Politics and the School of Writing Forward-thinking educators founded The New School in 1919 to defy the intellectual constraints of traditional college education. As The New School approaches its centennial, it remains on the cutting edge—attracting active scholars, artists, and pacesetters who deploy creativity and innovation to challenge the status quo.

In New York City, Paris, and online, The New School enrolls 10,000 degree-seeking students in more than 130 undergraduate and graduate programs focused on collaborative, project-based, interdisciplinary learning. Education is driven by open discussion in small classes and a human-centered approach to problem solving, combining design thinking and social research to address the complex issues of our time. Live Ideas: James Baldwin, This Time!

Selected Partner Bios

Harlem Stage

PATRICIA CRUZ began her term as Executive Director of Harlem Stage/Aaron Davis Hall, Inc. in 1998.

Ms. Cruz is responsible for overseeing programming and administrative management as well as long range planning, fundraising, fiscal management and program development in accordance with the mission of the institution. She directs a staff of 18 and also serves on the Board of Directors. Accomplishments include: securing over $2 million in endowment funds; expanding programs and audiences; and successfully completing a $26 million Campaign for Aaron Davis Hall for the adaptive restoration the Harlem Stage Gatehouse.

The highlight of her tenure is securing and renovating a historically landmarked 100 year old gatehouse building of the Croton Aqueduct System, across the street from the ADH facility. Following a two-year renovation, the facility provides a state of the arts theatre and offices for Harlem Stage. The project, completed in 2006, also has served as a catalyst for economic and community development for the four-block area surrounding the Gatehouse. All of the activities cited above were made possible through public and private partnerships and designed to expand services to artists and communities.

Cruz is a member of the board of The Urban Assembly where she serves on the Executive Committee and on The CalArts Board of Overseers. She is a past Board Member of The Andy Warhol Foundation. She is also past president of The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), an organization that supports and nurtures the work of artists and arts organizations throughout the state and ArtTable, a national organization of women in the Arts.

Columbia University

A scholar and curator, RICH BLINT is co-editor (with Douglas Field) of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin (forthcoming Winter 2013); contributing editor of The James Baldwin Review; co-curator (with Ian Cofre) of the exhibition Bigger Than Shadows; and curator of the exhibition series built environments, an initiative conceived to engage contemporary issues in fine art concerning aesthetics, value, difference, and public space. Prior to joining Columbia, Blint held positions at New York University's Institute for African American Affairs and the Center for Labor, Community, and Policy Studies at the Murphy Institute. Blint holds a B.A. in English and Honors from Hunter College, The City University of New York, and earned his Ph.D. in the Program in American Studies at NYU. A frequent interlocutor with artists across the genres, Blint has taught courses and guest lectured at Hunter College, Vassar College and NYU. He currently serves on the Adjunct Faculty for the Masters Program in African American Studies at Columbia, and sits on the boards of Vanderbilt University's Issues in Critical Investigation: The African Diaspora, and The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the Graduate and University Center, CUNY.