LITTLE ISLAND ANNOUNCES SEVEN WEEKS OF FREE, LIVE PERFORMANCES AT THE GLADE
Press Contact:
Rick Miramontez / Lee Abrahamian / Briana Sanchez / Ellie Detweiler
rick@omdkc.com / lee.abrahamian@icloud.com / briana@omdkc.com / ellie@omdkc.com
212 695 7400
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE
LITTLE ISLAND
ANNOUNCES
EXPANSIVE LINE-UP OF FREE, LIVE PERFORMANCES
IN ITS 200-SEAT VENUE
THE GLADE
AS PART OF ITS BLOCKBUSTER SUMMER SEASON OF WORLD PREMIERE EVENTS
SUZAN-LORI PARKS’ SULA & THE JOYFUL NOISE
“WONDROUS” DANCER MELISSA TOOGOOD
THE LEGENDARY JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND
ONE OF A KIND OYSTER MARKET ON THE HUDSON
COMIC MORGAN JAY & FRIENDS
THE ENDANGERED LANGUAGE ALLIANCE
MUSIC CURATED BY CÉCILE MCLORIN SALVANT
GIO ESCOBAR’S STANDING ON THE CORNER
AND MUCH, MUCH MORE
New York, NY (July 1, 2024) – Today, Little Island announced the line-up for The Glade Series, an array of free-to-the-public live performances, launching July 10. These events will take place Wednesday through Sunday for seven weeks inside the Island’s 200-seat venue. This announcement comes on the heels of the sold-out run of Twyla Tharp, T Bone Burnett, and David Mansfield’s How Long Blues, which opened Little Island’s blockbuster summer season of world premiere events.
From July 10-14, each night of Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks’s Tell Me More series will thoughtfully pair a musical performance with a conversation between Parks and an expert from a different field. On July 10, for an evening themed “Greens & Blues,” a set by blues legend Ruthie Foster will precede a talk between Parks and Majora Carter, founder of Sustainable South Bronx. Other guests include designer Daisy Wang, who will also dress Lori-Parks, freestyle MC Corey James Gray, Columbia astronomy professor Jane Huang, harpist Brandee Younger, historian Eric Foner, and Parks’ own Psychedelic Soap Box, a post-bop jazz collective with spoken word. On Saturday July 13, Parks will invite the audience into one of her engaging Watch Me Work sessions, alongside a very special guest, before taking the stage with her band Sula & the Joyful Noise.
Taking the Glade stage from July 17-21 will be “wondrous” (The New York Times) dancer Melissa Toogood, in an intimate epilogue to Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night, playing concurrently in Little Island’s Amphitheater (The Amph).
Mx Justin Vivian Bond, downtown cabaret legend and recent recipient of the first Judy Icon Award, will play five nights from July 24-28.
The Island will host a one-of-a-kind Oyster Market, July 31-August 4, curated and overseen by New Amsterdam Market founder and culinary world all-star Robert LaValva. Alongside live oyster shucking, the market will feature local vendors selling their unique culinary creations, which pair perfectly with The Oyster Radio Hour playing simultaneously in The Amph.|
Then, from August 7-11, Morgan Jay returns to Little Island for his third consecutive summer to host and curate a week of comedy, including acts by Jay Jurden, Neel Gosh, and Sarah Tollemache.
From August 14-18, linguists Ross Perlin and Daniel Kaufman, co-founders of the Endangered Language Alliance, will collaborate with Michael Leibenluft and Gung Ho Projects to create a series of performances about the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse city. The series will be led by speakers of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages, talking about their communities in their own words and in their own languages, alongside poetry, music, and movement, with texts based on Perlin’s Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. A multilingual soundscape will draw on ELA’s digital language archive, with its recordings in more than one hundred languages, as well as visual elements from ELA’s digital landscape map and creative translanguaging translation strategies.
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From August 21-25, Grammy Award-winning artist Cécile McLorin Salvant will lend her curatorial vision to the Glade, programming a set of performances by other musicians at the vanguard of their styles and forms, including jazz vocalist Vanisha Gould, folk artist June McDoom, multi-instrumentalist Lua Noah, pianist Sullivan Fortner, and more.
Closing out summer in the Glade, from August 28-September 1, Gio Escobar will host a series of unique, genre-bending experiences, including a bomba and a salsa night, before taking the stage with his own avant-garde collective, Standing on the Corner.
Tickets to Little Island’s summer season of performances, as well as information on free programs, are available at littleislanditickets.com.
THE GLADE SERIES / FULL PERFORMANCE CALENDAR
JULY 10-14 / SUZAN-LORI PARKS
“Tell Me More”
A series of performances and conversation curated and hosted by Pulitzer Prize-winner Suzan-Lori Parks. Each evening, conceived around a pair of ideas, will feature a musical act and a conversation between Parks and a cultural luminary.
Wednesday, July 10, 2024, 7:00 PM
Blues & Greens: Conversation with Suzan-Lori Parks and Majora Carter / Performance by Ruthie Foster
The Glade
Thursday, July 11, 2024, 10:00 PM
The Runway & The Street: Conversation with fashion designer Daisy Wang / Performance by MC Corey James Gray & Freestyle Monday
The Glade
Friday, July 12, 2024, 10:00 PM
Outer Space & Inner Space: Conversation with Columbia Astronomy Professor Jane Huang / Performance by Psychedelic Soap Box /
The Play Ground
Saturday, July 13, 2024, 7:00 PM
Work & Play: Watch Me Work w/ Suzan-Lori Parks & Special Guest / Performance by Suzan-Lori Parks’s Sula & the Joyful Noise
The Glade
Sunday, July 14, 2024, 7:00 PM
Past & Future: Conversation with Suzan-Lori Parks and Eric Foner / Performance by Brandee Younger
The Glade
JULY 17-21 / MELISSA TOOGOOD
“Epilogue: Pam Tanowitz’s ‘Day For Night’”
“Wondrous performer” (New York Times) Melissa Toogood dances an epilogue to choreographer Pam Tanowitz’s Day for Night, playing at 8:30pm each night in The Amph.
Wednesday, July 17, 2024, 9:30 PM
Epilogue: Day for Night
The Glade
Thursday, July 18, 2024, 9:30 PM
Epilogue: Day for Night
The Glade
Friday, July 19, 2024, 9:30 PM
Epilogue: Day for Night
The Glade
Saturday, July 20, 2024, 9:30 PM
Epilogue: Day for Night
The Glade
Sunday, July 21, 2024, 9:30 PM
Epilogue: Day for Night
The Glade
JULY 24-28 / JUSTIN VIVIAN BOND
A Week of Cabaret
Wednesday, July 24, 2024, 6:30 PM
Justin Vivian Bond
The Glade
Thursday, July 25, 2024, 6:30 PM
Justin Vivian Bond
The Glade
Friday, July 26, 2024, 10:00 PM
Justin Vivian Bond
The Glade
Saturday, July 27, 2024, 10:00 PM
Justin Vivian Bond
The Glade
Sunday, July 28, 2024, 6:30 PM
Justin Vivian Bond
The Glade
July 31-August 4 / NEW AMSTERDAM OYSTER MARKET
A week of food. Curated by Roberta LaValva & the New Amsterdam Market
Food & Beverage available for purchase*
AUGUST 7-11 / MORGAN JAY & FRIENDS
A Week of Comedy
Wednesday, August 7, 2024, 7PM
Morgan Jay, Usama Siddique, Isa Medina, Daniel Bridgegadd
The Glade
Thursday, August 8, 2024, 7PM
Morgan Jay, Sean Donnelly, Tatiana Frank, Myq Kaplan
The Glade
Friday, August 9, 2024, 10:00 PM
Morgan Jay, Sahib Singh, Shane Torres, Jordan Jensen
The Glade
Saturday, August 10, 2024, 7:00 PM
Morgan Jay, Jay Jurden, Carmen Lynch, Neel Gosh
The Glade
Sunday, August 11, 2024, 7:00 PM
Morgan Jay, Sarah Tollemache, Leclerc Andrew, Erin Jackson
The Glade
AUGUST 14-18 / ENDANGERED LANGUAGE ALLIANCE
“Language City”
A series of performances about the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse city. The series will be led by speakers of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages speaking about their communities in their own words and in their own languages, alongside poetry, music, and movement, with texts based on Perlin’s Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York. A multilingual soundscape will draw on ELA’s digital language archive, with its recordings in over a hundred languages, as well as visual elements from ELA’s digital landscape map and creative translanguaging translation strategies.
Conceived by Ross Perlin, Daniel Kaufman, Michael Leibenluft, the Endangered Language Alliance, and Gung Ho Projects. Directed by Michael Leibenluft.
Wednesday, August 14, 6:30 PM
Language City
The Glade
Thursday, August 15, 2024, 6:30 PM
Language City
The Glade
Friday, August 16, 2024, 10:00 PM
Language City
The Glade
Saturday, August 17, 2024, 6:30 PM
Language City
The Glade
Sunday, August 18, 2024, 6:30 PM
Language City
The Glade
AUGUST 21-25 / CURATED BY CECILE MCLORIN SALVANT
A Week of Celebrated Jazz and Folk Artists
Wednesday, August 21, 2024, 8:30PM
Vanisha Gould (ASL Interpreted)
The Glade
Thursday, August 22, 2024, 8:30-9:30PM
June McDoom
The Glade
Friday, August 23, 2024, 10:00 PM
Lua Noah
The Glade
Saturday, August 24, 2024, 8:30PM
Sullivan Fortner
The Glade
Sunday, August 25, 2024, 8:30PM
TBA
The Glade
AUGUST 28-SEPTEMBER 1 / CURATED BY GIO ESCOBAR
A Week of Music and Performance Art
Wednesday, August 28, 2024, 7PM
The Glade
Thursday, August 29, 2024, 7PM
The Glade
Friday, August 30, 2024, 10:00 PM
TBD
Saturday, August 31, 202, 7PM
The Glade
Sunday, September 1, 2024, 7PM
The Glade
After the conclusion of these public performances in September, The Glade will become New York’s newest outdoor cocktail lounge, complete with a bar designed by Green River Project and a menu of beer, wine, cocktails and mocktails that can be consumed in The Glade or enjoyed anywhere on Little Island. This is just one of the multiple food and beverage venues in the park, throughout the summer.
Little Island’s first annual, four-month-long summer season of world premieres, which kicked off on June 1, features a total of nine newly commissioned pieces. Little Island’s new arts program moves towards the future with a commitment to a multi-year roster of original work, all commissioned by and developed at Little Island. Bookended by the premiere of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s newest work How Long Blues and a 90-minute remix of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in which outré opera diva Anthony Roth Costanzo sings every leading role, the season offers premieres of varying scales across all areas of performance – including music, dance, theater, opera, comedy, jazz, pop, and funk, all outdoors and directly sited on the Hudson River at 14th Street in New York City. The Amph, the park’s 700-seat amphitheater, will house larger scale performances at a $25 ticket price, while The Glade, the park’s 200-seat venue, will be home to more intimate works, all of which will be completely free to the public.
KEY ART FOR SUMMER SEASON AVAILABLE HERE
IMAGE OF LITTLE ISLAND AVAILABLE HERE
Tickets to Little Island’s summer season of performances are available for purchase on littleislandtickets.com, TodayTix.com, or by downloading the TodayTix app.
BIOGRAPHIES
Suzan-Lori Parks is a multi-award-winning American writer/musician and the first African-American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Topdog/Underdog which recently enjoyed its twentieth anniversary Broadway revival. The production won the 2023 Tony Award, (Best Revival Of A Play). Last season she had new works which received world premieres, notably, at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Sally & Tom and, at Joe’s Pub in New York City, Plays for the Plague Year (winner of The Drama Desk Award for Best Music in a Play). As a college student Parks studied creative writing with James Baldwin, who encouraged her to begin writing for the theatre.
Pam Tanowitz is a celebrated New York-based choreographer and collaborator who has steadily delineated her own dance language through decades of research and creation. She redefines tradition through careful examination, subtly questioning those who came before her yet never yielding to perceptions stuck in the past. And now, the world’s most respected companies—Martha Graham Dance Company, Royal Ballet, New York City Ballet, among others—are proudly integrating Tanowitz’s poetic universe into their repertories. Her combination of intentional unpredictability, whimsical complexity and natural drama evoke master dance makers from Cunningham to Balanchine through the clever weaving of movement, music and space. Tanowitz holds degrees from Ohio State University and Sarah Lawrence College, where she clarified her creative voice under former Cunningham dancer and choreographer Viola Farber. In 2000, she founded Pam Tanowitz Dance to explore dance-making with a consistent community of dancers. She has since been commissioned by Fisher Center at Bard, The Joyce Theater, The Kennedy Center, and many other leading arts institutions, and has received numerous honors and fellowships from organizations ranging from the Bessie Awards, Guggenheim Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Herb Alpert Award, and Doris Duke Charitable Foundation among others. ”Her dances have been called a “rare achievement” (New York Times) and her 2018 work, Four Quartets, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s literary masterpiece, was called “the greatest creation of dance theater so far this century” (New York Times). Tanowitz is an assistant professor of professional practice at Mason Gross School of the Arts/ Rutgers University and is the first-ever choreographer in residence at the Fisher Center at Bard.
Mx Justin Vivian Bond has appeared on stage (Broadway and Off-Broadway, London’s West End), screen (Shortbus, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Sunset Stories, television (High Maintenance, Difficult People, The Get Down), nightclub stages (most notably a decades long residency at Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater in NYC), and in concert halls worldwide (Carnegie Hall, The Sydney Opera House). Their visual art and installations have been seen in museums and galleries in the US (Participant, Inc, The New Museum) and abroad (Vitrine, London).
Their memoir Tango: My Childhood Backwards and in High Heels (Feminist Press) won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction.
They are the recipient of an Obie, a Bessie, and a Tony nomination, an Ethyl Eichelberger Award, The Peter Reed Foundation Grant, The Foundation for Contemporary Art Grant for Artists, and The Art Matters Grant.
They have self-released several full length recordings: most notably Dendrophile, and Silver Wells. As one half of the legendary punk cabaret duo Kiki & Herb they toured the world and released two cds: Do You Hear What We Hear? and Kiki and Herb Will Die For You at Carnegie Hall.
Mx Bond has been at the forefront of Trans visibility and activism since the early 1990s.
They have a Masters Degree in Live Art from Central Saint Martins College in London and have taught performance composition and Live Art Installation at NYU and Bard College.
Currently Viv divides their time between residences in New York City’s East Village and the Hudson Valley.
In December of 2019 they made their debut at The Vienna Staatsoper in the world premiere of Olga Neuwirth’s Orlando as Orlando’s child.
Robert LaValva is a designer and placemaking consultant with expertise in sustainable infrastructure, food systems, and economic development. His practice focuses on the connections between culture and environment. He was the founder and executive director of the acclaimed New Amsterdam Market, a gathering of sustainable food purveyors held on the East River waterfront in Lower Manhattan from 2007 to 2014. Since then he has consulted on initiatives for the private sector, government agencies, and non-profit organizations combining his passion for design with his understanding of food systems and public space. He played a key role in the redevelopment of New York City’s Essex Market and is currently programming the revitalization of Buffalo’s historic Broadway Market. His clients include the New York City Economic Development Corporation; New York State Empire State Development; and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation (Monticello). Robert studied urban planning at NYU and received a Master’s in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Morgan Jay is a musician and comedian based in Los Angeles. Along with winning numerous awards and festivals across the country he’s become a fixture on social media with his viral TikTok’s and Instagram posts. Morgan has made appearances on MTV’s Wild n Out, NBC, and Comedy Central. In addition, Morgan was a featured comedian at the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal as a new face of comedy. He will be curating and performing at this years Little Island festival bringing some of the funniest comics across America to The Glade.
Ross Perlin is a linguist, writer, and translator focused on exploring and supporting linguistic diversity. His new book Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York is about the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis. He has been co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance since 2013 and teaches linguistics at Columbia. Ross’ writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Harper’s, and elsewhere, and his first book Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy ignited a national conversation about unpaid work.
Founded in 2010, the Endangered Language Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to documenting Indigenous, minority, and endangered languages, supporting linguistic diversity in New York City and beyond.
Cécile McLorin Salvant is a composer, singer, and visual artist. The late Jessye Norman described Salvant as“a unique voice supported by an intelligence and full-fledged musicality, which light up every note she sings”.
Salvant has developed a passion for storytelling and finding the connections between vaudeville, blues, theater, jazz, baroque and folkloric music. Salvant is an eclectic curator, unearthing rarely recorded, forgotten songs with strong narratives, interesting power dynamics, unexpected twists, and humor.
Salvant won the Thelonious Monk competition in 2010. She has received three consecutive Grammy Awards for Best Jazz Vocal Album for “The Window”, “Dreams and Daggers”, and “For One To Love”, and was nominated for the award in 2014 for her album “WomanChild”.
In 2020, Salvant received the MacArthur fellowship and the Doris Duke Artist Award. Nonesuch Records released “Ghost Song” in March 2022, and has since gone onto receive two Grammy Nominations as well as appearing on a number of year end best lists for 2022. On March 24th, 2023 Nonesuch Records released the highly anticipated follow up – “Mélusine”, an album mostly sung in French, along with Occitan, English, and Haitian Kreyòl.
Born and raised in Miami, Florida, of a French mother and Haitian father, she started classical piano studies at 5, sang in a children’s choir at 8, and started classical voice lessons as a teenager. Salvant received a bachelor’s in French law from the Université Pierre-Mendes France in Grenoble while also studying baroque music and jazz at the Darius Milhaud Music Conservatory in Aix-en-Provence, France.
Gio Escobar is a Brooklyn-born artist and member of the experimental music collective Standing on the Corner.
ABOUT LITTLE ISLAND
Little Island, the 2.4-acre park that sits along the Hudson River, opened in May 2021 and has since been enjoyed by 4.6 million visitors. In 2013, Barry Diller, in partnership with Hudson River Park Trust leadership, embarked on the unique opportunity to envision a solution for the repair and reactivation of Pier 54, which had been badly damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The park was designed as an entirely new type of public space for New York, one that would create an immersive experience of nature and art. Born from a collaboration of the UK-based Heatherwick Studio and the New York-based landscape architecture firm MNLA, led by Signe Nielsen, the park’s imaginative design offers all New Yorkers and visitors a new public space that is dynamic, captivating, and restorative.
Little Island is operated year-round by a 50-member staff co-helmed by Producing Artistic Director Zack Winokur and Executive Director Laura Clement.
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