The show’s text blends poetry and prose, exploring, as characters traverse four hundred years of history, dropping references to slavery, lynching, mass incarceration, and police brutality. It is a major undertaking that Port Cities NYC pulls off beautifully.
Port Cities couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time in American history. We are more ready for it now than we ever have been.
CultureBot
Port Cities couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time in American history. We are more ready for it now than we ever have been.
CultureBot
In May 2016, audiences met at Pier 11 in the Financial District, ferried across the harbor accompanied by an original soundscape, docked in Red Hook’s working port, and boarded The Waterfront Museum Barge for an immersive story exploring the ghosts of Wall Street and systemic violence from Slavery to today.
PORT CITIES NYC is a ghost story about inheritance. A haunting. An origin story.
Katie has felt haunted since she was a little girl. Knowing something about her family history, she goes in search of answers beyond the hallway of her childhood home. Examining her own hands and those of her family, her lover, and the city that birthed her, she comes face to face what what scares her most.
Using the cult like popularity of The Settler’s of Catan and turning it on its head, PORT CITIES NY plays its own “Settlers of Manahatta”. An intimate, ironic and sometimes disturbing look into old New York and New Amsterdam . Here Katie’s ancestors traded, bought, sold and helped build a wall that would continue to divide many.
Reckoning with family legacy, a cross racial relationship, and cycles of violence that seem to be visible on the streets of Baltimore, Ferguson and beyond, Katie must navigate through the game that has given her more playing cards than most. If she can't stop the loop, who can? And will everyone lose in the end?
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Process
The concept for Port Cities was inspired by an image I imagined while in Cape Town: actors in white under a highway overpass, with city projections on their clothes, offered a model ship to an outdoor audience. Intrigued by how contemporary cities explore their historical legacies, I focused on the Dutch trade route's impact on Cape Town and New York. The Port Cities Project aimed to connect five port cities through their shared history and contemporary issues.
I developed the project in five stages over five years, involving extensive research, interviews with academics, local historians, and community organizations. Key development phases included generative workshops in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and at the Mount Tremper Arts Residency in Woodstock, script, music and performance work at NJY Campsite in Pennsylvania and SPACE on Ryder Farm, and rehearsals on David Sharpe's Waterfront Museum Barge.
The partners:
Space on Ryder Farm, NJY Camps, Mount Tremper Arts, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Waterfront Museum Barge, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, John Jay College for Criminal Justice Black Heritage Tours, Mapping Slavery Project, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Arts Council Netherlands America Foundation Dutch Culture USA Program, Zankel Foundation, New York Water Taxis
I developed the project in five stages over five years, involving extensive research, interviews with academics, local historians, and community organizations. Key development phases included generative workshops in Bushwick, Brooklyn, and at the Mount Tremper Arts Residency in Woodstock, script, music and performance work at NJY Campsite in Pennsylvania and SPACE on Ryder Farm, and rehearsals on David Sharpe's Waterfront Museum Barge.
The partners:
Space on Ryder Farm, NJY Camps, Mount Tremper Arts, Dixon Place, Old Stone House, Waterfront Museum Barge, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, John Jay College for Criminal Justice Black Heritage Tours, Mapping Slavery Project, Brooklyn Historical Society, Brooklyn Arts Council Netherlands America Foundation Dutch Culture USA Program, Zankel Foundation, New York Water Taxis
See the creative development over five years HERE
