BIRDHOUSE presents

WAKE ME UP

May 5th | 5pm + 8pm

May 7th | 1pm + 4pm with talkback

reserve your FREE ticket here

BIRDHOUSE MISSION

BIRDHOUSE is a community of activist artists who move their body-minds in performance and installations to change conceptions of humanity.

BIRDHOUSE creates physical performance works aiming to uncover the essence of humanity within us. We break down performance from its classical format of audience watching “other” into something much simpler: Humans being humans with each other.

We are a collective of up of eleven artists, each with unique identities and histories. We strive to perform as our vulnerable and complicated selves in order to allow people to truly see us — and each other — as human.

Our works deal intimately with the human body, the implications of the body on identity, and the many ways in which we see and are seen, erase and are erased. BIRDHOUSE functions as a community that works collaboratively on all creations with one or several artists taking the directorial role. We work from a place of improvisation and communication so that we are always ourselves before we are something else, using our community as a microcosm to investigate the realities of the human condition.

BIRDHOUSE creates and performs in galleries, theaters [TheaterLab, Art House NJ, La Mama], public forums [The World Trade Center Oculus], and non-traditional spaces like cafés [Little Skips] and apartments, always with the intent of bringing ourselves and others into a deeper place of empathy and understanding of each other’s experiences.

We are expanding our projects now to include workshops, open rehearsals, and classes. To move forward with our mission of bringing people together, we have incorporated pay-what-you-can access to shows and educational programs, including our summer week of improvisation, AVIARY.

“We are a collective of humans who take part in a physical practice together. We create different worlds and environments that we can explore and research through movement, the senses and connection. We immerse ourselves not only in our own worlds but the world of each other. The worlds of each viewer, the worlds of the spaces we find our work in. We are a collective of creative collaborators. We seek to know what is at stake in our work. We indulge in the process within ourselves and the connections we create with one another. We don’t know but it is okay. We jump into the abyss and remain curious.”

- Bryn Hlava, BIRDHOUSE artist

ARTISTS