The Apollo’s New Works Initiative Expands Slate of Participating Artists to Premiere Multidisciplinary Projects Across The Apollo Stages

Harlem, NY – May 4, 2023 – The Apollo announced today an expanded list of artists tapped to be a partof its Apollo New Works initiative, which aims to further the non-profit's mission to build a new Americancanon centered on work by Black artists from across the Diaspora. Through their relationship with TheApollo and role as New Works fellows, these artists will create, develop, and present work across TheApollo stages, including the Historic Theater, Soundstage, and The Apollo’s Victoria Theater, which willopen this winter and serve as the main incubation space for new works. The series of commissions—whichwill be workshopped and presented in various stages of development—will feature world premiereperformances, festivals, and programs rooted in music, dance, theater, poetry, and more. Through thisinitiative, The Apollo seeks to cultivate the creation of Black art across all disciplines, adapting to the needsof the individual works and offering the resources of an inimitable cultural fixture.

‍

The award-winning group of artists presenting new works at The Apollo in the coming year include verticalaerial dance company Bandaloop with composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain, composer BillyChilds, playwright Francisca Da Silveira, actor and playwright Kevin R. Free, multimedia artist EbonyNoelle Golden, vibraphonist Stefon Harris, photographer Alex Harsley and The 4th Street PhotoGallery, choreographer Aku Kadogo and poet jessica Care moore, playwright Jonathan Payne,singer/songwriter/composer Martha Redbone, musical duo Soul Science Lab (Chen Lo and AsanteAmin), director Talvin Wilks, and playwright Nathan Yungerberg. The Apollo’s current Master Artistin-Residence, Kamasi Washington, will also present new works.

‍

“Apollo New Works expands our commitment to supporting creative innovation by emerging andestablished artists whose work challenges, reflects, and is in dialogue with the most pressing issues withinour communities,” said Kamilah Forbes, Apollo Theater Executive Producer. “We thank the FordFoundation and The Mellon Foundation fyor their incredible support of our Apollo New Works and MasterArtist-In-Residence initiatives. I’m excited that these initiatives will be some of the first works at TheApollo's Victoria Theater, a space where The Apollo will engage, create, experiment, and incubate newwork.”

‍

Apollo New Works builds upon The Apollo’s commissioning history, including Russell Gunn’s The Bluesand Its People, which debuted this Spring and celebrated the 60th Anniversary of Amiri Baraka’s bookBlues People: Negro Music in White America; the 2018 stage adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between theWorld and Me; and the 2017 genre-defying opera We Shall Not Be Moved by Daniel Bernard Roumain,Marc Bamuthi Joseph, and Bill T. Jones, co-commissioned by Opera Philadelphia. The initiative alsoencompasses The Apollo’s Salon Series one-week residency program and Master Artist -in-Residencethree-year program, providing leading artists of color with a home to create new works, curate and developprogramming, and engage with students for the non-profit's education programs.

‍

The opening of The Apollo’s Victoria Theater will draw upon the organization's longstanding role as ananchor in the Harlem community and enable the organization to increase the number of performances andcommunity and educational programs it offers. The new performance spaces will be integral to Apollo NewWorks and provide additional resources and space for The Apollo to incubate and develop thesecommissions. Scheduled to open for performances this winter as part of the Victoria TheaterRedevelopment Project (a public and private partnership), The Apollo’s Victoria Theater is a 25,000-square-foot facility, featuring two black box theaters designed by Kostow Greenwood Architects, and willenable The Apollo to expand its vibrant, year-round artistic, educational, and community programs thatbuild on the cultural heritage of Harlem and celebrate uptown’s enormous well of creativity. It will alsoprovide access to professional-quality theater space for local artists, artist collectives, and small and midsize Harlem and NYC-based arts organizations for the development and presentation of new work. To learnmore about The Apollo’s Victoria Theater, click here. Additional details about inaugural programming inThe Apollo’s Victoria Theater will be announced at a later date.

‍

Apollo New Works is generously supported by the Ford Foundation with additional funding from TheMellon Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.

‍

2023 APOLLO NEW WORKS ARTISTS

Bandaloop with composer/violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain

Redemption Too, At Least Some

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Redemption Too, At Least Some is a collaboration between vertical dance company, BANDALOOP, andcomposer/violist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR). This collaboration explores the themes of home, urbanbelonging, race, and privilege, charging performers and audiences to see their community in a new light.Drawing from Black and Haitian culture and musical influences, DBR’s contemporary classical voice willmerge with BANDALOOP’s perspective-shifting choreography to create impactful public art thatphysically and creatively elevates predominantly BIPOC artists, while affording a dynamic platform fromwhich place-based stories can be told.

‍

Billy Childs

Kindred, An Operative Adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Grammy Award-winning composer, jazz pianist, arranger, and conductor Billy Childs will adapt OctaviaButler’s Kindred into an opera. In Butler’s bestselling novel, protagonist Dana time travels back and forthbetween 1970s Los Angeles and the pre-Civil War South, where she meets her ancestors. Each visit to thepast becomes progressively longer, and her relationships with her family and their enslavers become morecomplicated. During these visits Dana tries to help her people in antebellum slavery, while still ensuringher safe return to her own time. The musical score will be rooted in the historical traditions of opera, whileat the same time be representative of Black American music.

‍

‍

Francisca Da Silveira

barefoot in mindelo

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

barefoot in mindelo, a play with music about the life and music of Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Évora whois described as “the voice that lifted Cape Verde's little-known blues, morna, beyond the island and into theinternational world of music.” Évora sang in Kriolu, which draws from West African dialects andPortuguese—the language of Cape Verde's former colonizer. Évora had a gift for elevating morna ballads,a style of song whose lyrics address poverty, longing, and most deeply, partings of both the physical andemotional kind. Her melodic voice conjured the beauty and struggle, melancholy and yearning of life inCape Verde.

‍

‍

Kevin R. Free

A Hill on Which to Drown: a one man show with Andre De Shields

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

The theatrical work A Hill on Which to Drown is a geriatric coming-of-age story on the importance oflegacy and inheritance told from the perspective of a 94-year-old queer Black man. He recounts his lifestory backwards, decade by decade. As he tells the story, he grows younger and younger, discovering—ashe speaks—exactly what inheritance he’s leaving behind. The play can be seen as a complement orcompanion piece to the August Wilson American Century Cycle, continuing to bear witness to the eventsin Pittsburgh’s Hill District throughout the 20th Century. The main character’s story stands on its own, aseach of Wilson’s plays do, but adds a dimension to the Century Cycle, focusing on rebirth, renewal, legacy,inheritance, and maintaining the visibility of the LGBTQ community on the backdrop of the AfricanAmerican life in the 20th century. A Hill on Which to Drown is made possible by the New York StateCouncil on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

‍

Ebony Noelle Golden

In The Name of The Mother Tree

Co-produced by National Black Theatre

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

A performance work for flexible spaces, farms, gardens, and waterbodies, In The Name of The MotherTree is a theatrical ceremony that combines music, dance, and poetry to tell the story of a community inthe process of reclaiming earth-fortifying rituals after a major climate rupture. The work was originallydeveloped as an Open Call project with The Shed, then commissioned by The Apollo. In The Name ofThe Mother Tree is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of theOffice of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. Additional support for the development ofEbony Noelle Golden’s In the Name of The Mother Tree has been provided by Double Edge Theatre andMercury Store.

‍

‍

Stefon Harris

Untitled

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Award winning jazz vibraphonist, thought leader, and developer Stefon Harris, will create an app that givessoftware the ability to improvise unpredictable harmony in tandem with artist-created melody and rhythm,resulting in a unique collaboration between software and human. Harris will build an evening-length workexploring the collaboration between live performance and technology.

‍

‍

Alex Harsley and The 4th Street Photo Gallery

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

From The Victoria to The Village: A Visual History of Black Creative Spaces in NYC will offer a visualhistory of Black creative spaces in NYC starting with E. 4th Street Photo Gallery’s Alex Harsley’s rarecolored photographs of The Jewel Box Review at The Apollo in the 1950s, then moving downtown, andeverywhere in between. The exhibition will showcase Black art collectives, individual artists at work intheir studios, and the camaraderie of Black artists. Dawoud Bey, Harsley’s mentee who began his career inAlex’s The 4th Street Photo Gallery, is an advisor on this project.

‍

‍

Aku Kadogo and jessica Care moore

Salt City: A Techno Choreopoem

The Apollo’s Historic Theater

Salt City: A Techno Choreopoem is a collaborative work between acclaimed poet and writer jessica Care moore and award-winning director and choreographer, Aku Kadogo, along with a myriad of Detroit techno music legends. The script, written in poetic form, is centered around Detroit in the year 3071 and tells the story of a brown girl named “SALT” who time travels to the future but can’t find her tribe.

‍

Jonathan Payne

LINTON: A History Play

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Following the main protagonist, Jeffrey, and spanning the Great Depression of the 1930s and Reconstruction after the Civil War to contemporary New York during the Great Recession, LINTON, tells an epic story of Black American life, ambition, and tragedy. Inspired by Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and the Slave Narratives gathered by the Works Progress Administration in the 1930’s, the play will explore

the haunting toll of the past and how historical fact is often crafted not by truth but an agenda.

‍

Martha Redbone

Guardian Spirit- ode to bell hooks

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Singer/songwriter/composer Martha Redbone draws from her Appalachian culture and heritage to create

music and songs inspired by the poems prose and essays of writer and activist bell hooks.

‍

Soul Science Lab

The Renaissance Mixtape

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

The Renaissance Mixtape is a mixed reality musical work that celebrates Harlem Renaissance and its contemporary impact, while envisioning Black culture, history, and art 100 years into the future. With a group of performers, lead artists Chen Lo and Asante Amin are Black artists who use music, verse, and extended reality to reflect on compelling aspects of the Harlem Renaissance that parallel their current experience, while speculating on the Renaissance to come. Like any mixtape, The Renaissance Mixtape is

a quantum mashup of time, ideologies, and Black art. The Renaissance Mixtape is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

‍

Kamasi Washington

Master Artist-in-Residence

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

The Apollo’s 2023 Master Artist-in-Residence Kamasi Washington will create a composition for a yet-tobe named ballet in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Lula Washington, Vision Theatre, and WACO

Theater Center in Los Angeles. The Master Artist Residency Program is generously supported by The

Mellon Foundation.

‍

Talvin Wilks

Snakehips In Our DNA: PREQUEL AFFIRMATION #1 (RENAISSANCE TO PERMANENCE)

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

Conceived and directed by Talvin Wilks, Snakehips In Our DNA: Prequel Affirmation #1 (Renaissance to Permanence) is a choreographic video exploration in homage to tradition and lineage. Following the dancer Lil Buck’s mantra, “The DNA of Snakehips is embedded in contemporary street dance,” and utilizing stock

footage, animation, collage and commissioned dance video, Director/Dramaturg Talvin Wilks will develop a 15-minute, looping visual and audio experience through video installation and meditation that will celebrate the Harlem Renaissance and its relevance today.

‍

Nathan Yungerberg

THEA

The Apollo’s Victoria Theater

THEA is a theatrical experience with music that celebrates the life of Sr. Thea Bowman. Thea, the granddaughter of enslaved Africans, was the only African American member of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration, and she transcended racism to leave a lasting mark on U.S. Catholic life in the late 20th century. In November 2018, U.S. Bishops endorsed the canonization of Sr. Thea Bowman who will be the only Black female canonized as a saint.

‍

Support

Apollo New Works is generously supported by the Ford Foundation with additional funding from TheMellon Foundation, The Sherman Fairchild Foundation, and Silicon Valley Community Foundation.The Apollo's 2022-2023 season is made possible by leadership support from Coca-Cola, Citi, ShermanFairchild Foundation, Ford Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, the Jerome L. Greene FoundationFund in The New York Community Trust, and The Mellon Foundation.Public support for the Apollo Theater is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New YorkState Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature,the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York City Council.

‍

‍

ABOUT THE APOLLO

The legendary Apollo—the soul of American culture—plays a vital role in cultivating emerging artists and launching legends. Since its founding, The Apollo has served as a center of innovation and a creative catalyst for Harlem, the city of New York, and the world. In 2024, The Apollo opened The Apollo Stages at the Victoria Theater, marking the first ever expansion and renovation of The Apollo in its nearly 90-year history. The Apollo also has plans to renovate its Historic Theater. For more information about The Apollo, visit www.ApolloTheater.org.

‍

With music at its core, The Apollo’s programming extends to dance, theater, spoken word, and more. This includes the world premiere of the theatrical adaptation of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me and the New York premiere of the opera We Shall Not Be Moved; special programs such as the blockbuster concert Bruno Mars Live at the Apollo; 100: The Apollo Celebrates Ella; and the annual Africa Now! Festival. The non-profit Apollo is a performing arts presenter, commissioner, and collaborator that also produces festivals, large-scale dance and musical works organized around a set of core initiatives that celebrate and extend The Apollo’s legacy through a contemporary lens, including the Women of the World (WOW) Festival as well as other multidisciplinary collaborations with partner organizations.

‍

Since introducing the first Amateur Night contests in 1934, The Apollo has served as a testing ground for new artists working across a variety of art forms and has ushered in the emergence of many new musical genres—including jazz, swing, bebop, R&B, gospel, blues, soul, and hip-hop. Among the countless legendary performers who launched their careers at The Apollo are Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, James Brown, Stevie Wonder, Gladys Knight, Luther Vandross, H.E.R. D’Angelo, Lauryn Hill, Jazmine Sullivan, Machine Gun Kelly, and Miri Ben Ari; and The Apollo’s forward-looking artistic vision continues to build on this legacy. For more information about The Apollo, visit www.ApolloTheater.org.

‍