About
Mission
Hook & Eye devises new, non-linear, mash-up plays through ensemble co-creation and co-authorship. We mine themes from history and science, and flirt with myths. Incongruent source materials are fastened together to disrupt the everyday. We invent uncommon relationships, blend genres, and craft multigenerational stories, offering audiences visceral experiences that move through their heart, head, and civic spaces.
Every artist engaged with H&E is a generator of content, revision, and performance. We celebrate the power of creativity by making stories that honor the agency of the individual artist, as well as the group as a whole. We create new works of performance as a collective, utilizing a creative process as rigorous in its joy as it is in its inquiry. Our core values guide the plurality of artists to create at the intersection of play-making and script-writing:
Performers and designers are more than interpreters; they are multi-dimensional creators.
Intersectionality creates ensembles that play & stay together.
Wage parity is non-negotiable.
Audiences can hold contradictions in source material.
A repetitive cultural diet limits curiosity and civic growth.
History
HOOK & EYE’S work has been called “rich, intelligent, funny,” and “a testament to the collaborative process of theatre making.”
Our original works - each crafted over one to two years - brim with magic, rhythm, and ridiculousness; built in worlds where the obvious is harpooned by the absurd.
Works include:
FIDIGITAL SPRING (2012), a rhapsody of movement and mobile devices in homage to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.
THE SUMMONERS (2014), supposes that America has been "sun-less" for three years. It's an impressionistic flip-book of what occurs when big capital meets small-town America in times of crisis.
GOD IS A VERB (2015), inspired by the mind and myth of R.Buckminster Fuller and set in 1969, the play follows a team of academics set out to play a game with one goal: make the world work for all of humanity.
SHE-SHE-SHE (2018), shares a modern tale of alienation through the stories of six women skipping across generations. Set on Bear Mountain in a New Deal-era women’s work camp, the play explores the nonlinear nature of progress, and our complex relationship with our inheritance.
SPACE NUNZ OF THE RESCUE MAINFRAME (2022), Two space nuns race against time to make sense of this century in a new pick-a-path sci-fi andromedy. The play examines, with a wink, the precariousness of our legacies and the vastness of our shared digital reliance while the audience votes on important moments, altering the course of the show in real time as two families - one Iranian immigrants and the other blue blooded New Englanders - meet their inevitable collision.
Who & How We Do
Hook & Eye operates with a fluid ensemble model and functions in concentric circles - a core ensemble with the freedom to come and go based on life & career demands, and a larger circle of performing & design artists which we refer to as our "Cloud" of artists. Invitations to create and perform ripple out through our core company, our artistic colleagues, and to the city's creative community at large, including our audiences. For each new piece, we work with new artists who enjoy crafting work over time.
Ensemble:
Parnia Ayari
Cynthia Babak
Emily Kunkel
Elizabeth London: Board Member
Carrie Heitman: Co Founder, Artistic Director, Board Member
Leah Mc Veigh: Production Manager, Board Member
Chad Lindsey: Co Founder
Nylda Mark
Sade Namei
Virginia Venk
Partners and Sponsors
t
Hook & Eye Theater is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature.
Hook & Eye Theater is sponsored, in part, by the Greater New York Arts Development Fund of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, administered by Brooklyn Arts Council (BAC) and by The NYSCA-A.R.T/New York Creative Opportunity Fund (A Statewide Theatre Regrant Program).
