CREATIONS

to commission a BIRDHOUSE creation, email info@birdhouseny.com

It fell between chairs.

wet inside my outside

becoming where you live to see

what home

tells me

how to fall

when will home find my eyes

haven't felt their winds before

bodies never touch the ground

who will fall between the chairs?

Directed by Bryn Hlava, Sebastian Abarbanell, and Raven Taisce White

4th floor studios, Brooklyn, NY | July 19 - 28, 2019 | pay-what-you-can

Created in the months leading up to the departure of four BIRDHOUSE artists to various countries across the globe, Ifbc. deals intimately with the tragedy and power of change, while also deconstructing gender and what are perceived as “normal” relationships.

Ifbc. exists in three parts and is the first collaboratively directed work by BIRDHOUSE.

remember the lake we used to go to?

Directed by Bryn Hlava, this ensemble work is an exploration of what it is to be in the context of another. What it is to be alone, how we leave, how we are left behind. What is it to truly see another? This collaboration with BIRDHOUSE exists as a redefinition of gender and bodily intimacy, and a glimpse into a community moving through the reverberations of loss and relation.

#12/21

Directed by Raven Taisce White, this duet challenges conceptions of gender roles and loneliness, as Bryn Hlava and Mitchell Christie push through misunderstandings and unexpected unions even as the space between them grows to unimaginable size.

All that was taken from me is still here

Directed by Sebastian Abarbanell, this ensemble work normalizes gender expression while challenging power dynamics that inherently exist in any community. Nakedness and coveredness become a means of connection and honoring the power of the human body.

Always Already

Always Already is a public improvisational score performed for the first time on June 26th, 2019, in the World Trade Center Oculus. BIRDHOUSE partnered with musician Jonah Udall to stage four hours of intimacy, contact, and consent among 24 artists, each with their distinct gender and sexual identities and unique backgrounds. There are no wrong bodies or identities for Always Already.

The installation was performed as part of the World Pride celebration of the 50th anniversary of the Stone Wall riots. It was fully funded by the Port Authority of NY & NJ.

photos and video by Liana Kleinman

HOT WINTER

HOT WINTER is the first evening length creation by BIRDHOUSE. The work follows five people existing in a surreal world of their creation in close proximity with the audience, shifting between pedestrian and inhuman movement, and between intimate care and childish violence. A single lightbulb illuminates their universe sheltered from culture and society, yet still rife with the implications of identity, love, and violence.

TheaterLab, NYC | April 2018

Little Skips Café | May 2018

Art House Productions | September 2018, as their artists in residence

i see the sun on your back

i see the sun on your back is the most intimate and vulnerable of Raven’s BIRDHOUSE creations. It presents a world askew, in which adults are children and fantasy merges with reality. The work deals with the childhood traumas that children(adults) inflict upon one another, the ways in which they(we) have already begun to erase and exclude one another, and the imaginary worlds to which they[we] flee.

TheaterLab NYC | December 2018, as part of TL’s “Homecoming” season

#12/21

The duet/solo depicts Bryn Hlava and Mitchell Christie, two/one human(s) in an undefinable relationship full of missteps and compassion.

This duet is the practice of patience with self/another and the process of leaving and reuniting even when the space within/between expands to immeasurable size.

Directed by Raven Taisce White

La Mama, NYC | July 2018, as part of Susan Marshall’s Prototypes

4th floor studios, Brooklyn | July 2019, as part of It fell between chairs.

Petrichor (the smell of earth after it rains)

Petrichor, Raven’s thesis work, exists as one show in two parts. The first is a solo created and performed by Raven, in which she tells a story of overcoming shame while draping a plaster-soaked sheet over her naked body and waiting for it to harden. She then needs — truly needs — the audience’s help in the painful process of removing the plaster shell. She leaves, discarding the new cast among a pile of crumbling casts from previous showings.

The second part is an intensely physical dance-theater work created by Raven in collaboration with the twelve cast members. It follows two queer couples as they find power in solidarity, suffering at the hands of society, and the ways in which they are complicit in the perpetuation of violence towards their own communities.

Directed by Raven Taisce White in collaboration with Princeton students

Princeton, NJ | March, 2016

Petrichor was awarded the Princeton Dance Thesis Award in 2016, and, in 2017, was the subject of Dance Scholar Judith Hamera’s published article “Dancing, Reaching”, a response to the Pulse Nightclub Shooting and call to unify across identities.