Description
American Realness is a festival of contemporary performance returning to the Abrons Arts Center for its eigth consecutive year, from January 5-15, 2016.
The festival features dance, theater, performance, and song-based performance artists who employ experimental tactics in their performance works. These include performative realness, self reflexivity, make believe, transformation, the ecstatic body, and an interplay between spectacle and banality. The artists of American Realness are creating theater that engages audiences with a rich perceptual experience of light, sound, thought, text, movement, and song. This is not psychological realism. This is not pretty dancing on a stage. It is theater, dance, performance, and song as phenomenological event. These works are created with rigor, and the performances are fully embodied. American Realness is digging deep, getting wet and inviting you to come along for the ride.
For the past eight years, the festival has served as a platform for these American artists to reclaim and reshape the identity and trajectory of their contemporary performance forms. American Realness welcomes the global performing arts marketplace that converges in New York annually for the Association of Performing Arts Presenter's Conference (APAP) to bear witness to the pop-tastic explosion that is redefining American performance.
