Last Updated on September 19, 2023
Beginning September 19, 2023, as a part of Perelman Performing Arts Center NYC’s mission to provide accessible programming for the community, the institution will launch the Lobby Stages program. Perelman Performing Arts Center NYC will open its doors for free, daily performances on the Vartan and Clare Gregorian Stage in the lobby.
On October 20, 2023, PAC NYC will present Britton and the Sting, a show which is a ritual of grief, that creates a sanctuary of communal letting go of dead things in our lives that are no longer serving us. The performance will be a ticketed event on the Vartan and Clare Gregorian Stage in the lobby.
Beginning January 5, 2024, PAC NYC will present Motion/Matter: Street Dance Festival, a celebration of the multitude of street dance movements emerging from New York City and from around the world. The festival will feature legendary DJs, epic battles and concert dance premieres. All performances will offer Pay What You Wish tickets.
Beginning June 2024, PAC NYC will present National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival (CQF), an annual theater festival that presents works by international queer and trans artists. The festival will present works by Achiro P. Olwoch, Raphaël Amahl Khouri, and Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko. All performances will offer Pay What You Wish tickets.
PAC NYC (251 Fulton Street) is a dynamic new home for the arts, serving audiences and the creative sector through flexible venues enabling the facility to embrace wide-ranging artistic programs. The inaugural year will feature commissions, world premieres, co-productions, and collaborative work across theater, dance, music, opera, film and more. The vision for PAC NYC began when then Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his team worked to ensure the plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center site included a performing arts center.
Lobby Stage
Beginning September 19, 2023, Perelman Performing Arts Center NYC will partner with guest curators to provide family performances, community programs, and free performances in the lobby on the Vartan and Clare Gregorian Stage. Performances will take place Wednesdays – Sundays in September and October. For a complete list of programs, please visit PACNYC.org.
Unless noted otherwise, all will be free and open to the public on a first come, first served basis with limited capacity; initial presentations include the following.
Spotlight at PAC NYC
A concert series that shifts the focus onto the often-unsung heroes of the music world – the background singers, band members and producers who breathe life into live music. Most performances will take place on Fridays in September and October.
Spotlight performances will include Shaan Ramaprasad (Tue September 26), Alita Moses (Fri October 6), and Natalie Tenenbaum (Fri October 27) among others to be announced.
Oscillate
Oscillate is a free happy hour dance event curated by Peter X (Park Avenue Artists, Siduri Records) that features diverse sounds and emerging talent from across the boroughs of NYC. Most performances will take place on Thursdays in October. DJs include Akari (Thu October 5), Nadia (Thu October 12), Peter X (Thu October 19), and Pei Up (Thu October 26) among others to be announced.
Annie O Presents at PAC NYC
A free series for music lovers in an intimate setting presented by music curator and publicist Annie Ohayon. Performances will take place on Saturdays in October and November. Musicians include Martha Wainright (Sat October 7), Beau (Sat October 28), Malika Zara (Sat November 4), Alexia Bontempo (Sat November 11), and Naomi Green (Sat November 18).
Family Programming at PAC NYC
PAC NYC and hip-hop artist and theater curator Baba Israel (Bronx Banda, Soul Inscribed) will curate family programming at the PAC, folding in his passion for multi-disciplinary arts, young people, and his roots in Downtown NYC. More details will be announced in the coming weeks.
Civic Alliance Programming at PAC NYC
Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC/CUNY) will begin presenting free monthly performances at PAC NYC, including student performances curated by the college’s music program (Wed September 27 and Wed November 15) as well as a “monologue slam” (Wed October 18) and “storytelling live” (December 20) performed by students and faculty from the college’s speech, communication, and theatre arts department. BMCC’s inaugural performance on September 27 will feature music program students, showcasing a wide variety of contemporary and original material.
Education Through Music (ETM), a nonprofit organization that partners with under-resourced New York City schools to integrate music education into the core curriculum, will present five concerts throughout the school year at PAC NYC. The series will kick off on October 18 with the Modern Band from All Hallows High School in The Bronx. Each performance will be presented by students from one of the five boroughs of the city.
Motion/Matter: Street Dance Festival
January 5-14, 2024
Motion/Matter is a celebration of the multitude of street dance movements emerging from New York City and from around the world including legendary DJs, epic battles and concert dance premieres. The performances in Motion/Matter will draw on styles emerging from New York City, Asia, Africa and Europe, illustrating the reach of the forms themselves across a spectrum of disciplines and culture.
In addition to the dance program, PAC NYC will open with two of NYC’s most beloved DJ’s – DJ Spinna and Rimarkable – to celebrate the dance music that helped to create the conditions for the array of street dance forms. Complementing the series will be an All-Styles Dance Battle. The battle format has been used as a development space for street dancers across the globe. It is both a training ground, a space to build skills, network and hone one’s craft. PAC NYC will bring the battle form to the stage for a special one-night event featuring a grand prize and several guest judges.
January 5-7
Afrikan Party
Supa Rich Kids by Oulouy
Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Spain
January 11
Motion/Matter: Mmmmm
DJ Spinna and Rimarkable
NYC
NYC legends DJ Spinna and Rimarkable are taking over the turntables in PAC NYC’s Vartan and Clare Gregorian Lobby to celebrate all that is Motion/Matter. Get into the groove with the official party of the festival. Mix, mingle, and move to a mesmerizing flow of hip-hop, deep house, jazz, soul, and funk that transcends boundaries and generations. Mmmmm…This is going to be a party!
January 11-12
BreAking | P is For Pop and D is For Dip
BreAking
Korea National Contemporary Dance Company
Choreographed by Lee Kyungeun
South Korea
P is For Pop and D is For Dip
By Kia La Beija
NYC
A PAC NYC Commission.
January 13
All Styles Dance Battle
Get ready to feel the rush of adrenaline as leading dancers invited from the NYC Club Scene and beyond compete for a cash grand prize in the Motion/Matter: All-Styles Dance Battle. Competitors will go toe-to-toe demonstrating a wide range of street dance styles chosen by the Battle DJ including Breaking, Waacking, Locking, Voguing and more. The champion will be determined by a panel of guest judges including Princess Lockerooo, Ken Swift, and Omari Wiles. Motion/Matter: All-Styles Dance Battle is more than a competition — it’s a celebration of passion, a testament to dedication, and a showcase of the transformative power of street dance.
January 13-14
The Barefoot Diva | P is For Pop and D is For Dip
The Barefoot Diva
Choreographed by Nicolas Huchard
France
P is For Pop and D is For Dip
By Kia La Beija
NYC
A PAC NYC Commission.
Criminal Queerness Festival
June 2024
National Queer Theater’s Criminal Queerness Festival (CQF), an annual international theater festival presented each year during Pride Month. Back for its sixth year and premiering for the first time at PAC NYC, the CQF uplifts and celebrates queer and trans artists around the world who have the guts to risk it all – censorship, imprisonment, and violence – for simply sharing their truth. The plays featured in this year’s festival include The Survival, She He Me, and Waafrika 123.
The Survival
By Achiro P. Olwoch
Achan, feeling pressure from her mother for not yet being married at 27, falls for Oyat after meeting him at a bar. Unbeknownst to Achan, Oyat is hoping she will be a surrogate for him and his boyfriend’s child. When Achan learns the truth from Oyat’s boyfriend, John, she must confront her own traditional upbringing to find love and new notions of family in modern Uganda.
She He Me
By Raphaël Amahl Khouri
She He Me is the first Arab transgender play. It follows the true stories of three Arab characters who challenge gender norms. Randa is an Algerian transwoman who is expelled under the threat of death from her homeland because of her LGBT activism there. Omar is a Jordanian gay man, who, rather than body dysphoria, suffers social dysphoria when it comes to the strict codes of masculinity imposed and expected of him by both the heterosexual and gay community around him. Rok is a Lebanese transman. His main challenge is convincing his very conservative religious mother that her daughter is actually a boy. Through humor and horror, the three characters come up against the state, society, and family, but also themselves.
Waafrika 123
By Nick Hadikwa Mwaluko
On the eve of the country’s first democratic elections, everyone is brewing with expression, even in the tiny, rural village, Luoland, with no electricity or running water some 250 kilometers northwest of Nairobi. There, although lesbians ‘don’t exist’ in Kenya, two women fall in love: Bobby, a blond American development worker and Awino from the Luo tribe. To complicate matters, Awino’s father is also the Chief who enforces traditions and codes. So when famine strikes, the villagers blame the lesbians for the many, many deaths by starvation. To regain equilibrium, to make everything “normal” once again, Awino – butch bordering on trans – must be “circumcised” – by force – so s/he can act like a real woman rather than a woman “who wants to be” a man, and Bobby must leave. Will Awino and Bobby agree to separate for the good of their community? Or will the village itself change?
About Perelman Performing Arts Center
The inaugural season showcases the unparalleled flexibility of three performing arts venues inside Perelman NYC: the John E. Zuccotti Theater (seating up to 450 people), the Mike Nichols Theater (seating up to 250) and the Doris Duke Foundation Theater (seating up to 99). The venues can be used individually or combined (total capacity up to 950 seats) with configurations that include theater-in-the-round, end stage, thrust and traverse, to accommodate artistic innovation that can engage and delight audiences in new ways at every visit.
Named for businessman, philanthropist and benefactor Ronald O. Perelman, the Perelman Performing Arts Center is a 138-foot-tall, cube-shaped building with radically flexible capabilities designed by the architecture firm REX, led by founding principal Joshua Ramus. REX’s design, created in collaboration with executive architect Davis Brody Bond, theater consultant Charcoalblue and acoustician Threshold Acoustics, is conceived for an artistic program that will have vast and varied needs to serve New York’s extraordinarily diverse arts community.
The building is wrapped in nearly 5,000 half-inch thick marble tiles which have been book matched to create a symmetrical pattern, which is identical on all four sides of the building. The marble façade allows light to radiate in during the day and glow out during the evening.
David Rockwell and his architecture and design firm Rockwell Group designed the interior of the lobby and restaurant with a dynamic, glowing ceiling visible from the street to create an inviting entry experience. The lobby’s restaurant by chef Marcus Samuelsson, along with the bar and outdoor terrace, offers a new gathering space for the Lower Manhattan community.
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