Exponential is the only month-long January festival dedicated to New York City-based emerging artists working in experimental performance. The participants in this multi-artist, multi-venue festival are committed to ecstatic creativity in the face of commercialism. Exponential is driven by inclusiveness and a diversity of artists, forms, and ideas coupled with utopian resource-sharing, mentoring and the championing of risky, rigorous work in eclectic fields to keep theatre kicking. Chez Bushwick is thrilled to be one of the supporting venues for this year’s Exponential Festival!  

More Information About the Exponential Festival HERE!

Community Exercises for Sanctuary Spaces is an interdisciplinary work for five performers using movement, original text and sound to unearth how iconography and worship within designated queer spaces plays a crucial role in shaping modern queer identities.

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Directed and Choreographed by Brendan Drake in collaboration with the performers

Composer Matthew Ricketts

Featuring: Quentin Burley, Lena Engelstein, Shannon Nash and Calvin Tsang

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The work investigates how emulation and impersonation can function as a coping mechanism for navigating modern systems of gendered power dynamics and homophobia. Drawing explicit connections between the benediction of the blessed sacrament in Catholic Mass tradition and the ritualistic nature of building queer communities through mutual adulation for female icons and shared trauma, we show how the psychological understandings of this type of fantasy and worship both helps and hinders the development of social communities.