The second annual A+J Summer Happening Festival features artists sharing a diverse range of performances in neighborhoods throughout New York City. All events are free and open to the public, and the week opens with a special performance and party in Red Hook at Coffey Street Studios presented in partnership with Asia Stewart.

Click the images below or hyperlinks on dates to reserve tickets!

SATURDAY June 11, 7:30pm: Fabric Softener by Asia Stewart at Coffey Street Studios (Red Hook, Brooklyn) 

Fabric Softener is an interdisciplinary performance that combines song, movement, and painting to meditate on intergenerational trauma and the perverse inheritance(s) passed down by Black m/others. Using words of advice from her late grandmother, Asia Stewart crafted a narrative that focuses on the survival strategies she learned to navigate the world. Fabric Softener’s hour-long ritual is a cross between a blood-strewn baptism and funeral. The performance is punctuated by outbursts of spirituals and excerpts from a 1977 archival recording of Toni Morrison reading her novel, Song of Solomon. Morrison’s reading describes the special wisdom that circulates between three characters: Pilate, her daughter Reba, and granddaughter Hagar. They form a family much like the one Stewart grew up in where “women produce[d] women who produce[d] women [without] men.” Throughout the performance, Stewart’s gestures, movement, and voice become intertwined with Pilate, Reba, and Hagar’s story and enact the “litany of growing up” as a Black woman in the United States. In this performance, Stewart is joined by violinist Yaz Lancaster. Lancaster’s musicality and sound design ground the work and provide the energy and dynamism necessary to push Fabric Softener forward.

SUNDAY June 12, 6pm: A special crossover Sessions x Summer Happenings Festival at the Urban Oasis that is the Smiling Hogshead Ranch, a working community garden and agriculture farm in Long Island City.

THURSDAY June 16, 6:30pm: New works by evan ray suzuki, Anna Hull and Jace Weyant in Fort Greene Park (Fort Greene, Brooklyn)

New Work by Anna Hull: In the continuation of this solo score, Anna explores structure, limits, breaking down, pushing through, self generated power and softening into desire. She meditates and moves through the layers of her space and body. She is determined to overcome uneasiness and find an equal amount of strength and softness. All movement is inspired by and created to music by Shara Lunon. 

The Nephilim by Jace Weyant: is a dance piece which looks to hyper-realize personhood into figures of pure representation. Through a rigorous attention to the ways in which quality of movement produces mood, the dancers are transformed into icons. The title is a reference to The Book of Enoch, a piece of early Christian scripture, where bastard children of angels and humans, named Nephilim, wreak havoc upon the earth.

Performed by: 
Mingjun Han
Shea Cheves
Sabrina Leira
Jingjing Han
Cat Clifford
Jace Weyant

FRIDAY June 17, 6:30pm: New works by Milie Nelson & Dylan Loyd Peyton, and Amanda Hameline in McCarren Park (Williamsburg, Brooklyn)

Consistent Inconsistencies by Milie Nelson + Dylan Loyd Peyton: Is consistent inconsistency consistent? If a person is always consistent, that’s consistenty inconsistent (meaning “never consistent”); if a person is consistent some of the time but not the rest of the time, that’s inconsistently consistent (meaning sometimes consistent, which isn’t the same as “never consistent”).

Duet with a Speaker by Amanda Hameline: A duet with myself, which is also a solo, but also a duet. I think that I know that that is true.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Last year’s festival …

Photos by Rebecca J Michelson.