The following is a republished press release and is NOT written by The Ithaca Voice. To submit community announcements directly to The Ithaca Voice, email tips@ithacavoice.com.
ITHACA, N.Y. — The Cherry Arts, Ithaca’s innovative performing arts company, announces the grand opening of Ithaca’s newest performance venue, the Cherry Artspace. The Artspace is located on the Cayuga Inlet waterfront and will formally open on Wednesday September 13th at 3:30PM with a ribbon-cutting ceremony with Mayor Svante Myrick.
The Cherry’s 2017-18 season of theatre and music, the first to take place at the Cherry Artspace, begins on September 15 with What Happens Next, a new play by Saviana Stanescu commissioned by the Cherry Arts. The Cherry season will continue with the return of last year’s holiday hit The Snow Queen, followed by the English-language premières of two strange and wonderful new international plays: Rule of Thumb, by Serbian playwright and filmmaker Iva Brdar, and George Kaplan by French writer/performer Frédéric Sonntag.
Rounding out the Artspace’s season will be performances from an eclectic variety of artists and companies, including Opera Ithaca, Whiskey Tango Sideshow, Powerdove/Annie Lewandowski, Ithaca Fantastique, and many others.
This season full of world- and English-language premieres reflects The Cherry Arts’ commitment to work that is “radially local, radically international, and seriously fresh.”
Our season-opening commission, What Happens Next, is a world première multimedia play by Ithaca-based Romanian playwright Saviana Stanescu. Stanescu is a recipient of NYC’s Innovative Theatre Award and has been an Indie Theater Person of the Year as well as an inductee to the Indie Theater Hall of Fame. Her works have been produced at over fifty theatres in the United States, including The Women’s Project, La MaMa, and The Lark in NYC, as well as Hollywood’s Theatre Row, Sacramento’s B Street Theatre, and Cincinnati’s Know Theatre. Internationally, her plays have been translated into 11 languages and produced in Mexico City, Toronto, Paris, Avignon, London, Stockholm, Bucharest, Ankara, Vienna, Tel Aviv, Sidney and many others.
Developed over the course a year with members of The Cherry’s company of artists, What Happens Next is a wild, funny and innovative new work with a house-of-mirrors structure. Equal parts humor, poetry, and image, the play explores the relationship between two (or more?) women whose identities seem to continually shift in one mysterious room. What Happens Next is as entertaining and thought-provoking as it is ultimately moving, exploring our relationship to
technology alongside the bonds that link us to the people we love.
The play stars Jennifer Herzog (The Cherry’s Associate Artistic Director, A Cherry Timedive, Storm Country) and Erica Steinhagen (The Snow Queen, White Rabbit Red Rabbit) and is directed by Cherry Artistic Director Samuel Buggeln.
What Happens Next performs September 14–23, Thursdays through Saturdays at 8:00PM. Tickets are $25 and available at www.thecherry.org.
The season continues with more locally-grown theatre. In December we bring back The Snow Queen, last year’s sold-out family show. This holiday season audiences will enjoy Andersen’s fantastic tale with even more songs, puppets, and
magic. The Snow Queen tells the story of Greta, a young girl on a mission to rescue her best friend Kai from the clutches of the Queen, encountering along the way a chatty raven, a feisty robber girl, a friendly reindeer, and a host of other curious characters. The Cherry’s company of artists are busy learning new songs and dances and building new puppets, and can hardly wait to bring the show back to enchant audiences once again.
Subscriptions to all four productions of the Cherry Arts season are available for just $90 at www.thecherry.org.
The Cherry Artspace, grand opening in September, is a new flexible, multidisciplinary performance space at 102 Cherry Street on the Cayuga inlet in Ithaca’s West End. The Artspace will house not only the innovative works produced by our company, but the works of a host of other Ithaca-based creators.
The Cherry Arts, Inc. is a not-for-profit theater company devoted to creating theater that is radically local, radically international, and/or formally innovative. The company creates works over long periods of time, developed by an ensemble of professional theater artists who are based in Ithaca.
All photos and images provided.