Here & Now: 2023

The 2023 program features new dance and theater short form work representing a broad cross section of the most exciting and diverse talent in Miami’s field of emerging performance artists.

Arsimmer McCoy is an international poet, teaching artist, cultural worker, and collaborative artist, from Miami, Fl. McCoy has been a practicing artist for 12+ years, with work that can be seen in several publications, 2 large scale visual art pieces, an anthology, and 3 films. Arsimmer’s new work, I’m So Depressed is an ambitious poetry driven stage play about losing my entire life as knew it during the pandemic and finding it in an Abner Jay Blues album.

Carlos Fabián is a multidisciplinary artist from Caracas, Venezuela who works essentially in performing and visual arts as an actor, director, and creative producer. TOWARDS NOW is a multidisciplinary performance that reflects on the experience of “consciousness” within the current global landscape of virtuality, delusion, and mass communication. Represented in short theatrical vignettes, the piece explores concepts such as detachment, identity, and sensibility, through real and fictional stories; where both characters and performers examine the notion of “present” as an experience of external and inner awareness of reality. TOWARDS NOW is the second chapter of “Ruminations”, a series of new works that use video projection, movement, spoken word and real testimonies to explore different concepts and ideas.

Darius V. Daughtry is a poet, playwright, director, and educator. He is the Founder and Artistic Director of Art Prevails Project, a performing and literary arts organization cultivating community and creating equitable access to the arts through performance, arts education, and community engagement. Darius’ new work, Reverie in Black, combines the magic of theatre, spoken word poetry and music into a beautiful mosaic. One poet/actor, a musician and DJ engage to tell stories of life, love and everything in between.

Gentry George is the Founder of Zest Collective and a Professor at Miami Dade College’s New World School of the Arts. George is a recipient of a Level 1 YoungArts award and is featured on HBO’s ‘Masterclass.’ In 2012 Gentry graduated from the Juilliard School and began dancing with Ailey II and later with the Dance Theatre of Harlem. Afro Blue is Gentry Isaiah George’s latest installment from his series ‘Roots & Rhythms,’ designed to commemorate Black Musicians of the 20th century. Renditions of the Jazz standard Afro-Blue recorded by American Jazz Vocalist Abbey Lincoln and Cuban Percussionist Mongo Santamaria are the centerpieces for the new work. Harmonizing biography, social history, music, and performance, George’s Zest Collective dance troupe celebrates the beauty and triumph of musical pioneers whose songs rang out despite America’s dark history of oppression.

Letty Bassart is a choreographer, director, improvisor, performance artist, researcher, teacher, and caregiver whose work takes many forms. They create performances at the intersection of dance, theater, and visual art. Letty’s new work, eponymously titled, Here, Now., will be an improvisational performance duet by Letty Bassart and Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR) that aims to challenge the American consumer-culture internalized by the financial and formal structures of our arts community, one which all too often centers marketing, replication, and distribution. Here, Now., aspires to do so while taking on the impossible task of paying homage to the invisiblized labor of arts organizations, stage workers, marginalized communities, artists, and every person that enters the performance space. At the heart of this form-rupturing effort is TRUST.