Akutagawa
Feb 23-25 @ Japan Society, NY
Lincoln Center: Summer for the City
Madama Butterfly
Humbled to be joining the cast of Madama Butterfly at the Met as a cover puppeteer!
Dream Machine @ The Brick
Ignacio’s piece is wonderfully oblique, capturing the mania and fear of seclusion without hand-holding you through obvious parallels. - Culturebot
How Theater Stepped Up to Meet the Trump Era - New York Times
How To Sing: A Survival Guide
5 Lessons for the Road, on Singing and Surviving.
Premiering at The Exponential Festival, Jan 2021
Created by Chris Ignacio
Freedom in 5 Speeds
“I find myself averse to the trend of online streaming for live performances. This is difficult, because my job entails that I help to produce and market live streamed performances. Suffice it to say, I’m not doing my best work at the moment. ”
Check out the full article HERE
TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever @ JACK, Feb 13-29, 2020 is a Critic's Pick!
“On Friday night at JACK, in Brooklyn, the audience was at a loss. At the end of James Ijames’s whip-smart satire “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever” (which you would be wise to race to see), we in the audience waited for what felt like minutes. But there was no bow from the actors, who had already left the stage.
That’s when it sank in. The beautiful dare the show had offered us in its final lines? We were expected to take it. Or not. Either way, we had a decision to make as we left the theater — voting, with our very bodies, for the kind of future we want to see.
That’s mysterious, I know, but I won’t ruin the surprise of Jordana De La Cruz’s electrifying production, which offers an extraordinary, deeply moving payoff. The pinch of courage it demands of us — audience participation, like change, is frequently unnerving — proves more than worth it. “
(Read the full NYT review here)
Playwright: James Ijames
Director: Jordana De La Cruz
Assistant Director: Talia Paulette Oliveras
Scenic Design: Gerardo Díaz Sánchez
Lighting Design: Megan Lang
Costume Design: Azalea Fairley
Sound Design: Kathy Ruvuna
Choreographer: Candace Taylor
Dramaturg: Nissy Aya
Producer: Chris Ignacio
Production Stage Manager: Janeill Cooper
Featuring: John Bambery*, Aja Downing*, Drew Drake*, Starr Kirkland, Sierra D. Leverett
*Performing courtesy of Actors' Equity.
The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker
Theodora Skipitares has achieved renown for her large-scale puppetry epics on such topics as physics, genetics and medicine. An early American giant of science is the subject of her latest multi-media spectacle, "The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker." It celebrates the life of the free black man who, living in Maryland from 1731 to 1806, became one of his era's most outstanding engineers and astronomers. La MaMa will present the world premiere of the piece January 23 to February 2 in its Ellen Stewart Theatre, at 66 East Fourth Street.
Planets hang from the ceiling. Actors in oversize bobbleheads dance a quadrille. Puppets come in varying shapes and sizes. Then there are projections, a percolating marching band, a pulsing electronic beat: “The Transfiguration of Benjamin Banneker” is pretty trippy. - New York Times
Hemispheric Institute 2019: The World Inside Out: Humor, Noise and Performance
Spent time in Mexico City with some amazing artists, creating a Meta Fiesta for the future. In our future, water was harvested from the sweat of workers: “Agua del Futuro”
Co-written: Social agency through collaborative songwriting and performance
Co-written is a series of collaborative songwriting and performance workshops in New York by artist and educator Chris Ignacio and local musicians for young people of color. Co-written is the recipient of the 2018 Queens Council on the Arts: Community Engagement Commissioning grant, as well as a Culture Push Fellowship on Utopian Practice.
Big Green Theater @ Bushwick Starr
The ninth annual Big Green Theater eco-playwriting program for public elementary students culminates April 25-28 with performances of kid-written eco-plays, fully staged, sustainably designed, and performed by an ensemble of adult artists! BGT 9.0 marks nearly a decade collaborating with The Bushwick Starr to engage kids in environmental justice and theater-making.
April 25-28
Thursday at 7pm (PS75): Free!
Friday at 6:30pm (PS239): $50 Benefit Event + Performance
Saturday at 1pm (PS75) + 4pm (PS239): Free!
Sunday at 1pm (PS239) + 4pm (PS75): Free!
Riksha Issue V2.2: Speaking with a Korean Accent
2 collage pieces featured in Rikhsa online magazine.
Slant'd Issue 02: Box of Shadows
Originally published in Slant’d Issue 02
Live Reading, Issue 2 Launch Party @ MOCA
On This Side of the World
Stories of domestic workers, young lovers, judgmental church ladies, selfless overseas fathers, undocumented immigrants, and millennials living their best lives on social media. On This Side of the World is a theatrical song cycle capturing voices from the Filipino immigrant experience in the United States. Through fourteen musical monologues, the cycle lifts up the stories of new immigrants and the children of immigrant families. What emerges is a mosaic of love and loss, humor and heartache, yearning and faith eight thousand miles from home.
Reserve your tickets here:
https://onthissideoftheworld.brownpapertickets.com/
On This Side of the World was developed through a residency at Access Theater and is presented by Three Hares.
Composer/ Lyricist- Paulo K Tiról
Director- Noam Shapiro
Producer- Ayana Parker Morrison
Music Director- Ian Phillip Miller
Stage Manager- Angela Griggs
Cast:
Belinda Allyn*
Diane de Boer-Phelan*
Joanne Javien Coudriet*
Sam Simahk*
Chris Ignacio*
Michael Protacio
*Designates member of AEA
February 15th @ 8PM
February 18th @ 3PM
2019 Exponential Festival: Duet-ed
“A series of one-on-one performances prompts us to reflect on the nature of intimacy” - Asya Gorovits, No Proscenium. Full article HERE
The Exponential Festival, a month-long January festival for NYC-based emerging artists working in experimental performance, is proud to present the world premiere production of Duet-ed by What Holds Heat.
Read the full Broadway World article HERE
Their food tastes better when they see us starving (or, coriolanus) @ The Brick
Adapted by Chris Tyler
Directed by Anne Ciarlone
Featuring Andrew D'Anneo, Madeleine Dauer, Chris Ignacio, Molly Jones, Yael Rizowy, Tricia Sorresso
Stage managed by Callan Gies
Designed by Sonya Plenefisch
Produced by Sarah George & Charles Quittner
A warhawk fights to appeal to the same plebeians she holds in utter contempt... A feverish collision of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Brecht’s unfinished adaptation by the same name, this devised multimedia work hypertextually explores the volatile nature of democracy and the complicated role the military-industrial complex plays in the continued subjugation of working-class people around the world.
There's Blood at the Wedding: Songs for Lorca
There's Blood at the Wedding is set within six giant-scale pop-up book constructions, through which we reflect on the lives and deaths of six victims of police violence: Sandra Bland, Sean Bell, Philando Castile, Justine Damond, Amadou Diallo, and Eric Garner. Sxip Shirey composes and performs original songs and music. Fragments of Lorca's masterpiece connect a Circle of Mothers--the mothers of the American victims--with the grieving mothers of the classic Spanish play.
May 17, 2018 - June 3, 2018
Thursday to Saturday at 8pm; Sunday at 4pm* (Sunday 5/20 at 5pm)