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We are inspired by ordinary objects that surround us. We are influenced by our context and our everyday activities which allow us to visit and share with different cultures and different individuals. We are inspired by history, art, music, architecture, books and the city itself. We firmly believe that these are the goals of design: To weave and generate interactions, human connections and emotions, to relate to users, and to enhance and translate our inheritance and skills into new expressions.-Hector Esrawe & Ignacio Cadena Mi Casa, Your Casa is inspired by the mercados of Latin America, lively street markets where human connections are made every day. The installation features a series of three-dimensional red frames that illustrate the warmth, comfort, and safety of our homes. With their basic shape recognizable by all, the tiny houses form a blank canvas for community engagement and activity, where people of all ages can socialize in a playful spirit. When a casa is empty, a welcoming white glow bids you to enter. Once inside, the glow intensifies to show that someone is home. ABOUT THE CREATORS OF MI CASA, YOUR CASAHector Esrawe, Ignacio Cadena Esrawe is the founder of the cross-disciplinary design firm Esrawe Studio that develops furniture and interior design solutions for commercial spaces. He is inspired by traditional Latin American design, architecture and folk art, and his works are playful, sometimes humorous, and organic. Cadena is owner and creative director of CADENA+ASOC. CONCEPT DESIGN, which combines art and science using painting, graphic design, photography, sculpture, video, marketing, architecture, and industrial design to generate award-winning works. Esrawe and Cadena brought their design firms together more than six years ago to form E + C. ABOUT CREOSA leading agency for temporary public interactive installations, Creos connects owners, creators, and distributors of public art around the world so installations can travel and shine on the international stage. Creos offers a portfolio of very diverse installations that give visitors a unique sensory and interactive experience that changes based on the location and the users. Creos also offers expert consulting services for technology and art in public spaces, and project management services for the creation and development of participative installations.

Creative, socially conscious . . . it’s perfect.-NPR Born and raised east of the Los Angeles river, Las Cafeteras are remixing roots music and telling modern day stories. Las Cafeteras create a vibrant musical fusion with a unique East LA sound and positive message. Their Afro-Mexican beats, rhythms, and rhymes deliver inspiring lyrics that document stories of a community seeking love and justice in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles. Using traditional Son Jarocho instruments like the jarana, requinto, quijada (donkey jawbone) and tarima (a wooden platform), Las Cafeteras sing in English, Spanish, and Spanglish and add a remix of sounds, from rock to hip-hop to rancheras. Las Cafeteras use music as a vehicle to build bridges among different cultures and communities, and create “a world where many worlds fit.”

… a truly joyous, celebratory work of art… brilliant homage to one of the great rock albums.-The Telegraph Mark Morris meets The Beatles! Created at the request of the City of Liverpool to start its Sgt. Pepper at 50 Festival in May 2017, the Mark Morris’ evening-length dance work features an original score by composer Ethan Iverson interspersing arrangements of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “With a Little Help From My Friends,” “A Day in the Life,” “When I’m Sixty-Four,” “Within You Without You,” and “Penny Lane” along with six original Pepper-inspired pieces intended especially for Mark Morris’ profound understanding of classical forms: Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio, and the blues. This colorful new piece resounds with the ingenuity, musicality, wit, and humanity for which the company is known.

A wonder of theater-making… Cartography is a unique live documentary about young people searching for asylum as harrowing times and hostile environments overtake their lives.-DC Metro How do we navigate our worlds? We build maps of our histories, our memories, and our futures. Inflatable rafts on the Mediterranean. Dark holds of cargo trucks. Family photos wrapped carefully in a backpack that crosses border checkpoints. These are some of the powerful images of modern-day humanity-in-motion depicted in the theater piece CARTOGRAPHY. Sewn from stories of young Eritrean and Syrian refugees, CARTOGRAPHY fuses dance, film, map-making, and projections to explore the tragedy and wonder of young lives in motion. In 2016, theater director Kaneza Schaal and award-winning author for young people Christopher Myers flew to Munich, Germany, as 30,000 people were arriving in the city each day in the largest migration in recorded history. Listening to the stories of young refugees, they pondered how to create an artwork that placed all of us within this historical moment. Combining simple storytelling with interactive video technology (audiences shape the onstage video projections with their own cell phones), Cartography maps the perilous physical journeys and the confusing interior journeys which brought four young people from their old homes to their new ones. Performed by a diverse company of actors from El Salvador, Syria, Lebanon, and Rwanda, this is theater for our times, theater for all ages, theater at its most relevant.

[Sundance] hit the jackpot this year with a film/performance combination called A Thousand Thoughts… It’s as magical an amalgamation as anything you can imagine.-Los Angeles Times Oscar-nominated filmmakers Sam Green and Joe Bini have teamed up with Grammy-winning Kronos Quartet for a wildly creative multimedia performance piece that blends live music and narration with archival footage and filmed interviews with such prominent artists as Philip Glass, Tanya Tagaq, Steve Reich, Wu Man and Terry Riley. Green tells the multi-decade and continent-spanning story of the groundbreaking string quartet, Kronos revisits its extensive body of work, performing music by George Crumb, Aleksandra Vrebalov and many others. Together on stage, Green and Kronos interact with the stirring cinematic imagery on screen to craft an important record and exploration of late 20th– and early 21st–century music. Transcending the typical live music and film event, this collaboration quickly becomes a meditation on music itself – the act of listening to it closely, the experience of feeling it deeply, and the power that it has to change the world.

Ashwini Ramaswamy’s dancing “weaves together the human and the divine.” -The New York Times Evoking mythography and ancestry, Let the Crows Come uses the metaphor of crows as messengers for the living and guides for the departed. This dance for three with live music explores how memory and homeland channel guidance and dislocation. Featuring Ramaswamy (Bharatanatyam technique), Alanna Morris-Van Tassel (Contemporary/Afro-Caribbean technique), and Berit Ahlgren (Gaga technique), Bharatanatyam dance is deconstructed and recontextualized to recall a memory that has a shared origin but is remembered differently from person to person. Composers Jace Clayton (dj/rupture) and Brent Arnold extrapolate from Prema Ramamurthy’s classical Carnatic (South Indian) score, utilizing centuries-old compositional structures as the point of departure for their sonic explorations. Let the Crows Come premiered in November 2019. 

Born for showbusiness-NPR One of the best-known musicians of his generation, virtuoso pianist, singer, bandleader, educator, and television personality Jon Batiste has spent his career bringing music back to where it started —with the people. Born into Louisiana’s legendarily musical Batiste family, Jon studied at Juilliard, where he established his Stay Human band by playing around New York City’s subways and in street performances he called “love riots.” He developed a fluency in jazz and popular music of all stripes, collaborating with legends from Wynton Marsalis to Prince. In 2015, Jon was named bandleader and musical director of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Batiste’s latest studio album, WE ARE, was released in March 2021 to overwhelming critical acclaim including praise from New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Forbes. 

…their expressiveness was as moving as it was breathtaking-The Wall Street Journal Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring has inspired dances and ballets for over 100 years, but never circus – until now. See the bodies of 10 fearless acrobats – highlighted by a technically and artistically stunning lighting design – hurl, twist, and collide in an electrifying explosion of physicality and power. These performances also feature a stirring new composition by Phillipe Bachman that pairs with Stravinsky’s classical music masterpiece. In this first-ever circus setting of The Rite of Spring, CIRCA weaves together powerful acrobatics with poetic tenderness and raw emotion – penetrating the senses and stirring the soul. Seen by over one million people in 40 countries, the Australia-based performance troupe, CIRCA, is at the forefront of contemporary circus, leading the way with a diverse range of thrilling creations. Under the direction of circus visionary Yaron Lifschitz, CIRCA features an ensemble of exceptional, multi-skilled circus artists.  CIRCA is a regular fixture at leading festivals and venues in New York, London, Berlin, and Montreal with seasons at Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Barbican Centre, Les Nuits de Fourvière, Chamäleon Theatre as well as major Australian Festivals.

The most heartfelt and evocative sounds imaginable.-Roots World Small Island Big Song celebrates 5,000 years of Pacific Islander culture.  From Taiwan to Aotearoa/New Zealand – Madagascar to Rapa Nui/Easter Island. Islanders who share an ancient seafaring ancestry and language. Over three years, Small Island Big Song evolved from visits to 16 Island Nations, and work with over 100 artists, solo artists, elders, community groups, and grassroots musicians, all recorded in their homelands in nature using traditional instruments and languages, with each contributing to each other’s songs. The result is a surprising and stunning musical collaboration reuniting the distant yet interconnected musical traditions of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

So different, so original, so creatively fresh and so much fun no one wanted to go home.-Waikato Times Indians throw crazy parties. Heard of Diwali? A million lamps floating on a river and fireworks to wake the dead. Heard of Holi? An explosion of color and joy and massive dry cleaning bills. How about Onam? No? It’s the harvest festival, and this one could be the craziest of them all! Mrs. Krishnan is renting an apartment to the overzealous wannabe DJ, James. James has invited a few friends into the back room of Mrs. Krishnan’s corner shop as a special surprise to celebrate Onam and the return home of her son. But when 100 strangers turn up (you, the audience) and settle in, Mrs. K has no choice but to throw the party of her life! An immersive experience like no other, join the party with music, dancing and vegetarian dal prepared live for each performance. Come as you are or break out that festive sari. Indian Ink Theatre Company continues to bridge cultures and expand boundaries with this utterly disarming new comedy that seats the audience around the dining table and at the kitchen bench in the back room of Krishnan’s corner shop. Now that her son is grown up, Mrs. Krishnan is thinking of selling the shop. It’s Onam, a time to celebrate life, death, and rebirth, and Mrs. Krishnan has to throw the party of her life in this joyous, heart-warming show.

…a sonic distillation of a blistering American past and its perilous present, with a transcendent strength of spirit woven through.-The Washington Post With 13 tap dancers and one acoustic bass player, Michelle Dorrance’s SOUNDspace strips tap dance down to its most raw basics—movement as pure music. SOUNDspace invites the audience to experience tap dancing with a fresh pair of eyes and ears, with both an acknowledgment towards the past and a look into the future.  Dorrance Dance is an award-winning tap dance company based in New York City. The company’s work aims to honor tap dance’s uniquely beautiful history in a new, dynamic, and compelling context not by stripping the form of its tradition, but by pushing it rhythmically, aesthetically, and conceptually. The company’s inaugural performance garnered a Bessie Award for “blasting open out notions of tap,” and continues its passionate commitment to expanding the audience of tap dance. Street, club, and experimental dance forms – all of which are American dreams – awake to the sound of furious rhythms and find their boundaries missing.

an interactive experience where children will be expected to take off their shoes and dive right into a whimsical world…-The National Two dancers move, play and paint in the air, telling the story of the slow metamorphosis of the butterfly.  COMPAGNIA TPO’s “theater of the senses” weaves dance, storytelling, and visual experience into a magical hands-on performance like nothing you’ve seen before. The audience is invited to enter the performance and interact with the beautiful, immersive world created on stage. Under the direction of Francesco Gandi and Davide Venturini, Italy’s COMPAGNIA TPO (Teatro di Piazza o d’Occasione) is the world’s foremost pioneer in interactive performance media for all ages – creating works for proscenium and alternative spaces – melding astonishing digital imagery with multi-disciplinary performance techniques in the use of music, dance, art, sculpture, digital media, computer technology, lighting, and sound. Their vision of accessibility in the arts is unprecedented, simultaneously allowing festivals and venues worldwide their most rewarding audience experiences while redefining them from the inside out.