Assemblymember Brian Barnwell, in collaboration with Titan Theatre Company, proudly presents, “A Midsummer’s Night Dream”. Brian Barnwell is the Assemblymember of Assembly District 30, which includes Maspeth, Middle Village, Woodside, Sunnyside, Astoria, Long Island City, Rego Park, and Glendale.
It has been Assemblymember Barnwell’s goal to promote the performing arts in our community and recognize local talent. We are pleased to announce that Titan Theatre Company, based in Woodside, will be putting on the production for our community.
Titan Theatre Company is also committed to breathing new life and clarity into classical works of theatre, exploring new and contemporary language plays, and delivering adventurous and visceral theatrical experiences for our audiences and community.
“A Midsummer’s Night Dream”, a comedy written by William Shakespeare, is an infectious comedy of sly sprites, rude mechanicals and confused lovers.
- Life is a celebration so dress the part
- Professionally tuned four-point Funktion One sound by One Source Audio
- Crowd centered booth for 360 degrees of dance floor excellence
- Custom fabricated reactive laser installation
- Large outdoor patio
++ more surprises and announcements
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Music
– Kate Simko
– Animal Trainer
+ More TBA
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Reminders
This is not your ordinary gathering of conscious bodies, we encourage everyone to connect, be present and most importantly express yourself creatively & comfortably. We are a community with an ethos founded with a passion for mindfulness and connectivity.
If we’ve had the pleasure of your presence in the past, then you know words fail to capture the moments and memories that make these gatherings such a wild success. If you’re here for the first time, welcome to our collective of compassionate creators & dreamers – don’t hesitate to reach out to anyone in the community if you need help or have any concerns.
“We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I’ve ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing.”
—Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics
For some nine months now, Sunday Service host Janani Balasubramanian has been in residence with the brown dwarf research group at the American Museum of Natural History. (Brown dwarfs are celestial objects which are neither planet nor star but somewhere in between in mass and brightness.) There, a motley group of astrophysicists examine brown dwarfs, low mass stars, and other objects whose existence disrupts our very notion of what is planet and what is star—and consequently disrupts the story of the universe.
Here, Balasubramanian brings together artists, astronomers, and artist-astronomers to show and tell stories of transformation. A dataset becomes music; a telescope reading becomes Art Deco; dust becomes a system; a shift in planetary motion becomes a folk tale; a rock becomes a family. The evening becomes a great deal of magical fun.
About the Curator
Janani Balasubramanian is a writer and gamemaker whose work has been presented at more than 160 stages across North America and Europe, including The Public Theater, MOMA, Abrons Arts Center, Andy Warhol Museum, Red Bull Arts, Ace Hotel, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Most recently, Balasubramanian premiered Heisenberg (an audio augmented reality game on uncertainty and chaos) at the New York High Line. Balasubramanian is currently a Van Lier fellow in new media at the Public Theater, and is working on Stargeit, a Cold War era novel about an extraordinary friendship.
About the Artists
JP Ventura
Jean-Paul (JP) Ventura is a New York native and was born and raised in Washington Heights. As a kid, he was drawn to the mystery of waves after spending weekends with his father, a fisherman, on the Pilot II ship of Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. This interest manifested artistically in exploring sound waves through DJing musical genres such as Chill-out, Disco, House, Electronica and Techno. Academically, JP is a senior undergraduate at CUNY Hunter College, where he is a Physics and Earth & Atmospheric Science double major. He is also currently interning at the American Museum of Natural History where he studies radiation signals produced by the magnetic fields of low-mass stars and uses that data to model the potential effects of those fields on the atmospheres of orbiting extrasolar planets. His hopes are to develop frameworks for the study of astrophysical data through sound for use in public outreach, and in the future, to help improve scientific access to the visually impaired community.
Ellianna Schwab Abrahams
After working for the better part of a decade as a graphic designer, Ellianna Schwab Abrahams moved to New York City to pursue a career in astrophysics. Curious about most anything physics, Ellianna has combined her two passions, observational astronomy and electromagnetic theory, in her research at the American Museum of Natural History, where she is a Helen Fellow. She studies stellar activity in the smallest, coolest stars, using light from across the electromagnetic spectrum to investigate large and small-scale magnetic properties. In her free time, Ellianna is an avid hiker and stargazer. She also likes to swim and visit the penguins in Central Park.
Bex Kwan and Sophia Mak
Bex Kwan and Sophia Mak are not the same person. However, being housemates and friends who are both queer, chinese, gender non-conforming performers of roughly the same height (Bex is half an inch taller), people kept confusing them for each other even though they had just met. Together, they peel back their alleged sameness to explore histories of foreignness, family mythologies and tender friendship. Through performance, they investigate where their mirrors of each other will fail, and where they will be transformative.
Mark Popinchalk
Mark Popinchalk is a science educator and PhD student at the CUNY Graduate Center. He analyzes brown dwarf and exoplanetary atmospheres with the Brown Dwarf NYC research group, usually by comparing them to computer models. He is a planetarium presenter at the American Museum of Natural History, and a co-host of Astronomy on Tap NYC. He plays ultimate frisbee, enjoys nerdy games, has more liquid water than Mercury but fewer rings than Saturn, and his favorite color is sky-blue-pink.
Moiya McTier
Moiya McTier grew up in a log cabin in the middle of the woods in a small coal mining town in Pennsylvania. From there, she went on to Harvard University where she combined her lifelong passion for fantastical narrative storytelling with her newfound interest in space to become the college’s first ever double major in folklore and astrophysics. After graduating, Moiya continued her education in the Astronomy PhD program at Columbia University, where she specializes in exoplanets and galactic dynamics. In her spare time, Moiya enjoys communicating science, cooking, and looking at pictures of dogs online.
About Sunday Service
Taking place the first Sunday of each month, a guest curator is invited to organize a salon style evening of cross-disciplinary performances and presentations that brings together a multiplicity of views around a singular prompt, such as a question, theme, or formal structure. Sunday Service centers works in progress, interdisciplinary endeavors, and diversity in format showcased in a lo-fi environment to foster the testing of ideas and critical discourse amongst peers.
Sunday Service is programmed by Stephanie Acosta and Alexis Wilkinson, Knockdown Center’s Director of Exhibitions and Live Art.
Knockdown Center is pleased to present Who Is Watching You More Than You Are Watching You, a mural by Macon Reed as a part of Knockdown Center’s FiftyTwo Ft. series of commissioned wall-based artworks in the East Corridor.
Macon Reed works across sculpture, installation, video, painting, and participatory projects to address social and political issues using a bright palette and storybook-like imagery in order to disarm viewers while depicting disturbing moments in history like the medieval torture of women or the troubling disappearance of dyke bars.
Who Is Watching You More Than You Are Watching You depicts a series of caves surrounded by brightly colored stalactite and stalagmite forms and plants. Eyes stare outward from deep inside each cave, forming constellation patterns. Surrounded by living matter, the mysterious interior space of the caves connects to an even more expansive and imperceivable space of the universe. With this gesture, Reed combines the threat of extinction of popularly known species of plants and animals to the extinction of a more intangible nature: the cognitive space of the imaginary.
For Reed, the decline of the imaginary causes minds to become more susceptible to coercion by tyrannical forces of power. The parallel threat of extinction to both species and imaginative thought is symptomatic of dire global ecological and political conditions. In constructing this fictional landscape, Reed aims to foster spaces for the collective imagination.
Macon Reed is an artist working in sculpture, installation, video, radio documentary, painting, and participatory projects. Her work has shown at venues including PULSE NYC Special Projects, BRIC Media Arts, ABC No Rio, The Kitchen, Art F City FAGallery, Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, Roots & Culture, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, ICA Baltimore, and Athens Museum of Queer Arts in Greece. Reed completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Chicago as a University Fellow in 2013 and received her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007. Additionally she studied Radio Documentary at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies and Physical Theater at the Dah International School in Belgrade. Most recently Reed was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and a Research Fellow at Eyebeam Center for Art+Technology.
Join us for a conversation about the issues surrounding the exhibition Treatment: A Plan for Rain, a project by net-based artist Nicholas O’Brien. The artist will moderate a discussion with architect and urbanist Jillian Crandall, artist Ellie Irons, and engineer Paul Grogan. Topics to be discussed include biodiversity, urban planning, and maintenance, and participants will aim to unpack and sort through the interweaving disciplines that influence and affect the strategies and implementation of green infrastructure in the city and beyond.
Treatment: The Plan for Rain rethinks the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) stormwater collection program by focusing on soil biodiversity, transparency, maintenance, and its impact on citizens.
Jillian Crandall
Jillian Crandall is a Registered Architect, urbanist, and researcher focused on local and global networks in infrastructure, mediated urban ecologies, and spaces of cultural and social production across time. She has worked on the design and construction of several civic projects in the New York City metropolitan region. As a writer she is focused on theory and analysis, as well as speculative and experimental fiction.
Paul Grogan
Paul Grogan is an Assistant Professor in the School of Systems and Enterprises at Stevens Institute of Technology. He leads the Collective Design Lab which develops and studies the use of information-based methods and tools for engineering design in systems with distributed architectures.
Ellie Irons
An artist and educator based in Brooklyn and Troy, New York, Ellie Irons works in a variety of media, from drawing to gardening, to reveal how human and nonhuman lives intertwine with other earth systems. She is currently researching the intersection of socially engaged art and urban ecology as an Arts PhD student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Artist Nicholas O’Brien will guide a conversation with Margot Walker, the Managing Director of Green Infrastructure Planning & Partnerships for NYC’s Department of Environmental Protection. The conversation will walk through some of the policy decisions the city has put in place to help water treatment via green infrastructure projects in the city.
About Margo Walker
Margot Walker has worked in environmental and stormwater management planning at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection since 2008 and with DEP’s Green Infrastructure Program since its inception in January 2011. Previously, she worked on stormwater related projects at the Pratt Center for Community Development while attending graduate school at Pratt Institute. She is currently the Managing Director of Planning and Partnerships in the Bureau of Sustainability, which is responsible for implementing the NYC Green Infrastructure Program.
This event is a part of the exhibition Treatment: The Plan for Rain, a project by Nicholas O’Brien that rethinks the NYC Department of Environmental Protection’s (DEP) stormwater collection program by focusing on soil biodiversity, transparency, maintenance, and its impact on citizens.