Works-in-Process are excerpts from new work, in development or recently premiered.

The Brobot Johnson Experience

One hundred years from now a race of Hip Hop androids known as Brobots, from the planet Nubian, will form a unit known as The Tribe Called Space Quest: The Brobot Intergalactic Outreach Program. Having mastered the 4 elements of Hip Hop, its members are ordained as ambassadors who go on funky expeditions all over the galaxies: to rock mics and deliver the 13 Codes of Brobot. Through song, story, live looped vocals, rhymes, and beat-boxing, they spread their message of peace, love, and dopeness throughout the entire universe. But there is one planet they are forbidden to go to…earth…until now…in 2017…in Bushwick, Brooklyn. A rookie ambassador has triumphantly returned in the time traveling spaceship The L.L. Cool J, to tell the origins story of “the original”, the first of his kind, and perform what is known as The Brobot Johnson Experience, a genre bending, afrofuturistic, interactive, immersive, Sci Fi Hip Hop solo concert that defies both space…and time.

Darian Dauchan is an award winning solo performer, actor, and poet who has appeared on both Broadway (Twentieth Century) and Off Broadway (Jean Cocteau Rep., Classical Theatre of Harlem). TV and Film credits include Law and Order, Nickelodeon’s Bet the House as Darian the “SoundFX” Guy, and the Lionsgate feature film Things Never Said. He is the 2016 Loop Station Vice Champion of the American Beatbox Championships and is currently developing The Brobot Johnson Project, a Sci-Fi Hip Hop transmedia piece, with the support of the All For One Theater. The web series The New Adventures of Brobot Johnson recently won for Outstanding Score, Theme Song, and Comedy Series at the 2017 LA Web Festival, and BEST music at the Toronto Web Fest. The album Brobot Johnson: Bionic Boom Bap is now available on iTunes.

www.dariandauchan.com

—

Faces of Downtown Scene

Faces of Downtown Scene is an ongoing project that unveils makers of experimental performing arts of New York City. While photographing theatre and dance in New York for past five years, in Faces of Downtown Scene, Maria Baranova presenting artists behind the performances. Maria invites members of performance community of New York, such as Faye Driscoll, Ivy Baldwin, Andrew Schneider, Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith and more, to her studio in Gowanus, Brooklyn, to sit in a same setting with a same natural light for a short portrait session and a conversation. Choreographers, dancers, actors, light and sound designers and producers, outside of stage they committed to, having a rare, one-one-one moment for a result that cannot be seen until film leaves the lab weeks later. Its a risk that make sitter and photographer both excited and humble.

Maria Baranova is known for photographing New York Downtown theatre and dance. Her dynamic and emotionally loaded images published by the New York Times, American Theatre, BOMB, Chance Magazine and more. Maria was born in Moscow, Russia. She grew up in Helsinki, Finland and has been living and working in New York since 2012. She graduated from Art School MAA, Helsinki with a degree in art painting in 2001 and AV-Media Heltech with degree in photography in 2010. With a unique access to the experimental performance community, she expands her photographic work to portraits. Using medium format film camera, she reveals makers of Performance Art of New York.

www.mariabaranova.com

—

Cabin

Cabin is the newest work by dance and theater artist Sean Donovan. Through storytelling, distinct characterization, original songs, dance, and video, Cabin explores the story of three queer men in a poly-amorous relationship who move from Brooklyn to a cabin in a hostile community in upstate New York. Part biography, part fiction, Cabin explores the complexity of intimacy, and the magnitude of loss.

Sean Donovan makes performances that are preoccupied with the way political questions emerge out of surreal, absurd, layered investigations of the everyday. His work, in collaboration with Sebastián Calderón Bentin has been presented at HERE Arts Center, JACK, Incubator Arts Project, FAE Festival in Panama, Stanford University, and New York University. As a performer, he’s worked with Faye Driscoll, Miguel Gutierrez, Jane Comfort, The Builders Association, Witness Relocation, Jennie Marytai Liu, and others. Recent credits include Thank You for Coming: PLAY at BAM Fisher, Thank You For Coming: Attendance at Danspace Project and an international tour, Age & Beauty Part 2 at NYLA, and House/Divided at BAM (NY) along with a national tour. He received his BFA in Theatre from NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing. Sean has been nominated for a 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance.

Collaborating Artists: Collaborator and Performer: Brandon Washington; Sound Design: Brandon Wolcott

Upcoming:
Cabin has been commissioned by The Bushwick Starr and will premiere in the spring of 2019.