The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) continues its return to safe and socially distanced in-person events with the premiere of Beast Visit, a free, intimate, outdoor experience created by HERE resident artist Normandy Sherwood for her company, The Drunkard’s Wife, which she co-leads with musician Craig Flanagin who provides sound design. Commissioned by HERE as part of its new #stillHERE: IRL series, Beast Visit centers on a sunset encounter with a group of lonesome creatures currently living in a mysterious sculpture garden in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Running August 20–27, Beast Visit incorporates extravagant design, modular electronics, and music.
“At this moment, I think a physical experience of wonder is necessary,” says Sherwood. “With Beast Visit, I wanted to pair my lifelong love of mythical and monstrous beasts with the loneliness so many of us have witnessed. Setting that experience inside Rubulad’s mysterious sculpture garden felt like the perfect and safe way to explore all of that right now.”
Beast Visit features Nikki Calonge, Braulio Cruz, Blaze Ferrer, Craig Flanagin, Daniel Allen Nelson, and Normandy Sherwood. Glorious electronic noise along with original songs by Sherwood and Flanagin surround guests, with costumes by Sherwood, and lighting design by Christina Tang.
Beast Visit will welcome 13 lucky visitors each day on August 20–22 and 25–27 at 7pm inside the sculpture garden at Rubulad in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Reservations are limited and strictly required for this free event. The exact location will be shared 24 hours prior to the date. Beast Visit follows strict social distancing and safety guidelines. Masks and health screenings are required of all attendees. Please visit here.org for more information.
About the artists
The Drunkard’s Wife is a theater company led by Normandy Sherwood and Craig Flanagin that creates theatrical and musical spectacles in New York City. Our mission is to create and produce experimental musical plays and site-specific theatrical environments with a generous, maximalist design sense. Our plays are darkly comic, language-drunk, full of reverence for the hand-made, and therefore wholeheartedly feminist and anticapitalist. We are drawn to represent festivals and celebrations in our work, as well as complex moments of moral and emotional ambiguity. As such, our theatrical style combines our impulses towards camp, the carnivalesque, and the maximal with an appetite for subtlety, complex argument and tenderness. We make music that draws from folk mountain music traditions and no-wave dissonance, and that incorporates complex time signatures and improvisation. Visit www.thedrunkardswife.com for more information.
About HERE
The OBIE-winning HERE (Kristin Marting, Founding Artistic Director) was named a Top Ten Off-Off Broadway Theatre by Time Out New York and is a leader in the field of producing and presenting new, hybrid performances viewed as a seamless integration of artistic disciplines—theatre, dance, music and opera, puppetry, media, visual and installation, spoken word and performance art.
HERE’s standout productions include Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues, Taylor Mac’s The Lily’s Revenge, Trey Lyford & Geoff Sobelle’s all wear bowlers, Young Jean Lee’s Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, James Scruggs’ Disposable Men, Corey Dargel’s Removable Parts, Robin Frohardt’s The Pigeoning, and Basil Twist’s Symphonie Fantastique and, this season Looking at You by Rob Handel, Kristin Marting and Kamala Sankaram and Zoey Martinson’s The Black History Museum According to the United States of America.
Since its founding in 1993, HERE and the artists it has supported have received 18 Obies, 2 Bessies, 5 Drama Desk Nominations, 2 Pulitzer Prizes, 4 Doris Duke Awards, 7 Tony Nominations, and 2 MacArthur Fellowships.
