FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE
THE FLEA
ANNOUNCES
ARDEN: A RITUAL FOR
LOVE AND LIBERATION
A NEW GENRE-BENDING COMMISSION
PERFORMED & CONCEIVED BY
CARRIE MAE WEEMS, DIANA OH, NIEGEL SMITH,
OKWUI OKPOKWASILI, & PETER BORN
THE FIRST WORK TO EMERGE FROM THE FLEA
SINCE ITS REFOCUSED MISSION WAS ESTABLISHED
New York, NY (December 15, 2021) The Flea announced today the limited engagement of ARDEN: A Ritual for Love and Liberation, a genre-bending, boundary-breaking, and interactive new work commissioned by The Flea and led by Black and queer artists. ARDEN creates space for grace and communal practice in the face of indifference and division. The limited engagement of ARDEN is set to begin previews on February 6, 2022 with an official opening night of February 11, 2022, and play through March 6, 2022.
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Photo by David Fitt
ARDEN is a new performance ritual developed in collaboration by Niegel Smith, Diana Oh, Peter Born, and MacArthur Fellows Okwui Okpokwasili and Carrie Mae Weems.
Tickets for ARDEN are priced $15-$35 and are available now at www.theflea.org.
Love. Liberation. Ritual. Let’s light a light and lay it all down. ARDEN invites you to take a walk down a path that leads to a clearing. In this clearing, you are invited into a strange, raw and delightful ritual full of song, dance, and testimony. Come to Arden and happen upon a kind of love that feels too dangerous for the world we live in.
Bring your hopes. Bring your fears. We’ll stir them together and pass them through our sieve. And hopefully, we will re-emerge with a newfound sense of awe and possibility for ourselves and the others with whom we move through this world.
The Flea’s Artistic Director, Niegel Smith, says, “Arden represents exactly the kind of work we imagined we would present when we refocused our mission. I am proud of the remarkable artists who’ve collaborated to realize this bold vision, and I am excited for audiences to experience the transformative power of their work.”
