Nowhere to sleep

St. Ann’s Warehouse plays a vital role on the global cultural landscape as an artistic home for international companies of distinction, American avant-garde masters and talented emerging artists ready to work on a grand scale. St. Ann’s signature flexible, open space allows artists to stretch, both literally and figuratively, enabling them to approach work with unfettered creativity, knowing that the theater can be adapted in multiple configurations to suit their needs.

In the heart of Brooklyn Bridge Park, under the vision of St. Ann’s founder and Artistic Director Susan Feldman, Marvel Architects, DBI Projects, theater consultants Charcoalblue and a team of expert engineers have designed a theater that offers St. Ann’s signature versatility and grandeur on an amplified scale while respecting the walls of the original 1860 Tobacco Warehouse. The new building complex includes, a Studio for smaller-scale events and community uses, as well as The Max Family Garden designed by landscape architects Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, which is open to Brooklyn Bridge Park visitors during Park hours, and Bar Jolie curated by Vinegar Hill House in the lobby.

Almost four decades of consistently acclaimed landmark productions that found a home at St. Ann’s include: Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s Songs for ‘Drella; Charlie Kaufman and the Coen Brothers’ Theater of the New Ear; TR Warszawa productions of Festen, Macbeth (outdoors in the Tobacco Warehouse), and Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis; The Globe Theatre of London’s Measure for Measure with Mark Rylance; Druid Company’s The Walworth Farce by Enda Walsh; Walsh’s Misterman, featuring Cillian Murphy, Arlington, and Ballyturk; Lou Reed’s Berlin; the National Theatre of Scotland’s Black Watch and Let the Right One In; Kneehigh Theatre’s Brief Encounter, 946, and Tristan & Yseult; the Donmar Warehouse/Phyllida Lloyd’s All-Female Shakespeare Trilogy: Julius Caesar, Henry IV, The Tempest; the Young Vic production of A Streetcar Named Desire with Gillian Anderson; Mark Rylance’s Nice Fish; and the World Premiere of Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, including the one-time only 24-hour marathon in 2016. Last season, St. Ann’s presented the National Theatre/Headlong production of People, Places & Things with Denise Gough and the Schaubühne Berlin’s Returning to Reims, directed by Thomas Ostermeier. This season: Daniel Fish’s reimagined Oklahoma!, Good Chance Theatre’s The Jungle, and The Wooster Group’s The B-Side.

Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork. Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists. She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film. The film, currently in pre-production, is supported by the Sundance Institute Feature Film Program through the 2021 Sundance Screenwriters Lab and 2022 Sundance Directors Lab fellowship.

Sxip Shirey is the composer and music director for the circus arts production “LIMBO”, produced by Melbourne based Strut N Fret Productions and London based, Underbelly and South Bank Center. “LIMBO“ toured internationally for six years (2015-2020) including runs at the Sydney Opera House, London’s Southbank Center, the Bogota International Theater Festival, and Madonna’s 57th Birthday Day party. Shirey teaches workshops in “Text and Object Oriented Composition” at Norwegian Theater Academy in Fredrickstad.  Shirey’s immersive choral works, “The Gauntlet”, developed with his artistic partner Coco Karol, have been performed at Rockefeller Center, The Sydney Opera House, Bard College and for the Arts Center at NYU Abu Dhabi. He has released several tracks in collaboration with Rhiannon Giddens, including, “Woman of Constant Sorrow”.  Shirey has presented at TED (2008), is a 2011 United States Artist Fellow and has been artist curator (2016) and artist in residence (2017) at National Sawdust, Brooklyn. Shirey composed for the short Neil Gaiman film “Statuesque” which premiered on Christmas Day on SKY TV, UK (2009).  Recent projects include composition for “The One You Feed”  at M.I.T. and “Ocean Filibuster” at A.R.T.  He is currently working a new opera with co-composer Paola Prestini based on a play written by Winter Miller, “No One Is Left Behind” and for puppeteer Kate Brehm’s “The Poacher” at MIT.