Apollo New Works

Kindred: An Operative adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred 

Grammy Award-winning composer, jazz pianist, arranger and conductor Billy Childs will adapt Octavia Butler’s best selling novel  Kindred into an opera. The musical score will be rooted in the historical traditions of opera, while at the same time be representative of Black American Music.

barefoot in mindelo

barefoot in mindelo, a play with music about the life and music of Cape Verdean singer Cesaria Évora who is described as “the voice that lifted Cape Verde’s little-known blues, morna, beyond the island and into the international world of music.”

A Hill On Which To Drown  – a one man show with Andre De Shields

The theatrical work A Hill On Which To Drown is a geriatric coming-of-age story on the importance of legacy and inheritance told from the perspective of a 94-year-old queer Black man who recounts his life story backwards, decade by decade. The play can be seen as a complement or companion piece to the August Wilson American Century Cycle, continuing to bear witness to significant events in African-American History.

From The Victoria to The Village: A Visual History of Black Creative Spaces

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

Salt City: A Techno Choreopoem 

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.

LINTON: A History Play

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.

Guardian Spirit- ode to bell hooks

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

THEA 

THEA is an Afrosurreal 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.

The Apollo’s 2023 Master Artist-in-Residence Kamasi Washington will create a composition for a yet-to-be named ballet in collaboration with dancer/choreographer Lula Washington, Vision Theatre, and WACO Theater Center in Los Angeles.

The Renaissance Mixtape

The Renaissance Mixtape is a mixed reality musical work that celebrates The 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.

Redemption Too, At Least Some 

Redemption Too, At Least Some is a collaboration between vertical dance company, BANDALOOP, and composer/violist Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR). This collaboration explores the themes of home, urban belonging, race and privilege, drawing from Black and Haitian culture and musical influences, DBR’s contemporary classical voice will merge with BANDALOOP’s perspective-shifting choreography.

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

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.

In The Name Of The Mother Tree

Co-produced by National Black Theatre

A performance work for flexible spaces, farms, gardens, and waterbodies, In The Name Of The Mother Tree is a theatrical ceremony that combines music, dance, and poetry to tell the story of a community in the process of reclaiming earth-fortifying rituals after a major climate rupture.

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