A new arts festival, featuring performance art from Brazil, an interactive installation from New Zealand, and a party presented by a Beyoncé dance captain, will be staged this fall inside a onetime power station along Brooklyn’s industrial Gowanus Canal.
The three-month series, called Powerhouse: International and scheduled to run Sept. 25 to Dec. 13, is being curated by David Binder, a longtime performing arts producer and former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will take place at Powerhouse Arts, a hulking structure that since 2023 has housed fabrication studios for artists from a variety of disciplines.
The festival will be the building’s first series of performing arts events, and will feature acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who is presenting his multidisciplinary opera-theater work “Sibyl”; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece “Larsen C” is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who will perform her “Cadela Força Trilogy,” a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.
“We’re in this moment when there are so many barriers — cultural, physical, ideological — and this festival aims to break down those barriers,” Binder said in an interview. “What really interests me is the convergence of artists from different countries and different disciplines.”
To keep the events accessible, the festival is making at least 10,000 tickets — just over half of the expected total — available for $30 each. At most configurations, the venue will have about 800 seats.
Binder said he was motivated in part by a change in the types of work being presented in New York City in recent years. “There’s obviously a lot less international work in the city, a lot less art, a lot less new plays, a lot less music and dance,” he said. “I’m hoping we’re adding to the conversation.”
The idea for the festival, he continued, was sparked when he toured Powerhouse Arts two years ago and saw the vastness of the building’s grand hall — a 22,000-square-foot space still adorned by graffiti left by the squatters who lived in the building.
Powerhouse, for its part, had been looking to expand its programming.
“We were, from the get-go, thinking about the multitude of ways to support creative expression, and how to best utilize our spaces,” Eric Shiner, the nonprofit organization’s president, said in an interview. “We’re definitely going to see how this goes, and as long as it’s successful, we’ll consider future iterations.”
The festival is being financed by private philanthropy. Binder and Shiner declined to say how much it will cost, but Shiner said one donor, who has opted to remain anonymous, was covering a significant portion.
Binder said that by putting together a program that features performers from multiple parts of the world, he was interested in presenting “the most adventurous work for the biggest number of people,” he said.
The festival is not seeking to compete with other New York presenting organizations, but to complement the work they are doing, he said, and there are plans to partner with organizations including Crossing the Line (which supports French-speaking artists in New York), Onassis Stegi (which supports touring Greek artists) and Culture Ireland (which supports Irish artists at international festivals).
The festival, which will begin with “Skatepark,” a skateboarding performance choreographed by Mette Ingvartsen of Denmark, will also include: “Worktable,” an installation in which audience members destroy and rebuild household objects, from Kate McIntosh of New Zealand; “Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna,” a dance piece from Soa Ratsifandrihana, a Franco-Malagasy choreographer; “Good Sex,” a theatrical work about intimacy from Dead Center and Emilie Pine of Ireland; and “Theater of Dreams,” a dance exploring the subconscious, from Hofesh Shechter Company of Britain.
The festival will conclude with concerts by Claire Rousay; Moor Mother and Pussy Riot Siberia; Yamantaka Eye and aya; and Red Hot’s Transa, followed by a closing performance and party led by Amari Marshall, the choreographer who has worked with Beyoncé.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
The post Global Arts Festival Taking Shape Inside Gowanus Power Station appeared first on New York Times.
