Related Features
IMPRESSIONS: Christos Papadopoulos Presents “Larsen C” at Powerhouse Arts
IMPRESSIONS: Mette Ingvartsen Rolls Into Powerhouse Arts with "Skatepark"
DANCE NEWS: "Powerhouse: International" Debuts This Fall at Brooklyn’s Powerhouse Arts, September 25 - December 13
The New Festival Will Feature Electrifying, Large-Scale Performance Works from around the World
“Powerhouse: International builds on the legacy of New York’s boundary-pushing performance scene by adding new forms, new voices, and new energy to the mix.”
— David Binder, Powerhouse: International Artistic Director
Powerhouse: International launches this fall at Powerhouse Arts (322 3rd Ave, Brooklyn), drawing on Brooklyn’s legacy of cultural intersection and creation to convene artists from around the world in an awe-inspiring space and imagine beyond the confines of what is (September 25 - December 13, 2025).
As opportunities for cultural exchange diminish and division overtakes cultural dialogue, Powerhouse: International is a vital platform for international performance and a deliberate act of possibility. Propelling the borough’s artistic legacy toward the future in a venue purpose-built for art and connection, the festival transforms the Powerhouse Arts facility, a former power plant, into a charged meeting ground. Here, theater, music, dance, and genre-defying works become acts of connection, where artists and audiences move through each other’s rhythms, stories, and forms. Three major artists make their American debuts while numerous others return with groundbreaking new work for this festival where exchange and a plurality of perspectives are celebrated.
Over the course of nearly three months, high-voltage works from global superstars and daring emerging artists alike will challenge norms, ignite dialogue, inspire democratic engagement, and forge new creative possibilities. Powerhouse Arts—with its graffiti-clad walls, vibrant artistic community, and ethos of radical possibility—is more than a venue. It’s a statement, and the perfect home for a festival rooted in artistic freedom, experimentation, and bold response in a moment that demands nothing less. That artistic spirit—unstuffy, unbound, porous, alive—is exactly what the festival seeks to build.
Deeply committed to accessibility, this spirit extends to ensuring more than 10,000 tickets are available at $30, recognizing that art's power can only multiply when everyone has the opportunity to experience it.
“Powerhouse: International responds to this cultural moment by creating a space for creative collisions—between disciplines, between cultures, between artists and audiences. This convergence generates the kind of transformative energy that has always defined New York's artistic spirit,” says festival Founder and Artistic Director David Binder, the former Artistic Director of BAM, the 2018 Guest Artistic Director of LIFT (the London International Festival of Theatre), producer of the High Line Festival, and Tony Award-winning Broadway producer (Hedwig and the Angry Inch).
“Powerhouse Arts envisions creative expression as central to personal and civic development,” reflects Eric Shiner, President of Powerhouse Arts. “This festival brilliantly extends that vision by turning our building into a home where artists generate new possibilities and extend Brooklyn's legacy as a crucible for cultural transformation.”
Global artists and local skaters converge in Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s Skatepark, which—in a grand gesture to kick off the festival—transforms Powerhouse Arts’ massive Grand Hall into a point of connection between European and Brooklyn skaters (September 25-27). Similarly, the festival concludes with a joyous, breathless celebration whose local spirit is given epic proportions at Powerhouse Arts: Amari Marshall’s The Imagining, a performance inviting audiences and artists onto the dance floor in an evening of catharsis (December 13).
Three works mark the U.S. debuts of internationally celebrated artists and introduce American audiences, for the first time, to their electrifying visions. Probing the stage’s capacity to explore sexual violence, Brazilian theater-maker, writer, and performer Carolina Bianchi and the Cara de Cavalo collective’s CADELA FORÇA TRILOGY, Chapter I: The Bride and the Goodnight Cinderella is an “all-too-real performance” that “single-handedly jolted Avignon alive over the first week of the festival,” writes The New York Times (October 23-25, 2025). French-Malagasy choreographer Soa Ratsifandrihana’s Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna seeks a vocabulary between bodies and history to understand what binds children of the diaspora and what makes them unique (October 28-30, 2025). Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos’s elemental dance Larsen C—winner of the 2024 Rose International Dance Prize from Sadler's Wells—is “a quietly powerful” work (ArtsHub) that takes its name from the deteriorating Antarctic ice shelf; its movement stems from the initial metaphor of an iceberg melting within itself (October 16-18, 2025).
The festival nods to its host institution and its intersections of performance and visual art, on both vast and intimate scales. South African artist William Kentridge’s genre-transcending performance Sibyl (2023 Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera winner) brings together visual art, film, improvised piano, choral music, and dance (October 8-11, 2025), and has been deemed “an extraordinary achievement, no matter how you categorize it” and “relentless, vertiginous and astonishing… Kentridge at his best” (The Guardian). Aotearoa New Zealand artist Kate McIntosh’s site-responsive Worktable activates installation: here, it’s the audience who becomes the player — given a chance, one by one, to don safety goggles, enter a series of rooms, and decide how things come apart or fall together (October 4-November 9, 2025).
Whether via theatre or dance, the motions of two primal human experiences—sex and dreaming—are dissected and revealed to us anew. Dead Centre and Emilie Pine’s “beguiling, chaotic, hilarious, and profound” (Irish Examiner, in a five-star review) Good Sex makes intimacy coordinating into its main event: two acclaimed featured guests who’ve never met are joined by an Intimacy Director in a performance that asks, “How do you have sex onstage?” (November 5-8, 2025). Choreographer Hofesh Shechter’s “richly rewarding” (The Guardian) Theatre of Dreams delves deep into the world of fantasy and the subconscious, evoking emotions that penetrate not only the dreaming mind but also our waking thoughts (November 13-15, 2025). Accompanied by live musicians, the dancers bring to life an interplay between poetry and reality. “The dance dazzles, defined by razor-sharp gestures, a contagious energy and the irresistible beauty which characterizes Shechter’s work,” writes Le Figaro. A week prior to Theatre of Dreams performances at Powerhouse: International, Shechter’s Red Carpet will make its New York premiere with the Paris Opera Ballet at New York City Center—making for a banner moment in the city for Shechter.
Throughout the festival, performances from a diversity of vanguard musicians push the boundaries of the concert. Two evenings of concerts will be presented in-the-round, bringing audiences and artists up-close: Moor Mother, an artist who “thread[s] connections between past, present, and future in a sensory overload fusing industrial noise, ‘witch rap,’ and free jazz” (Pitchfork), in a double bill with Pussy Riot Siberia, fronted by Nadya Tolokonnikova (December 2, 2025); and claire rousay (November 21, 2025), whose most recent album sentiment used “found sounds and field recordings to enrich [its] texture, depth, and storytelling” and open “up a new expressive frontier” (Pitchfork). The festival also features concerts from Japanese vocalist and visual artist Yamantaka Eye in his solo debut as EYE, in a double bill with aya, whose recent album Hexed Pitchfork called “one of the best, most unhinged albums of the year” (December 5, 2025); and multiple artists performing for Red Hot Presents TRAИƧA — A Live Experience, (December 6, 2025).
Whether creating an energized meeting site for skateboarders from two continents or using installation to turn viewers into active participants; exploring the comedy, awkwardness, expressiveness, or violence of sex; revealing dance's capacity to give form to the subconscious, to connect people across a diaspora, or to bring something as immense as climate change into the human body; works at the inaugural Powerhouse: International provoke exhilarating interactions and conversations. Bringing artists and audiences into proximity at the capacious and inspiring Powerhouse Arts for nearly three months, Powerhouse: International ensures—as our country becomes associated with borders, walls, and shutting doors—that Brooklyn continues to be a place of openness and internationalism.
DANCE / MOVEMENT WORKS:
Skatepark
Mette Ingvartsen
Denmark / Belgium
September 25-27, 2025 at 7:15pm
The festival opens with a charged exchange—where art meets the street and international artists join local skaters in a raw, rule-breaking work of art.
Mette Ingvartsen transforms Powerhouse Arts' Grand Hall into a space of friction, flow, and velocity—where skaters and dancers move together and carve out worlds of their own.
Legend has it that skateboarding began when low waves drove surfers onto the asphalt of Los Angeles. Gliding through city streets and navigating obstacles, it became a peculiar choreography—fierce, fluid, and boundary-defying. A way of reclaiming public space. A vessel for many dreams.
In Skatepark, Mette Ingvartsen works with skaters and dancers to explore the speed and charge of movement on wheels—a physical memory from her own youth. This is more than a spectacle of virtuosity. It’s the slow emergence of a community defined by repetition, risk, and resilience. Individuals try, fall, and stretch the edge of what’s possible, alone but together.
Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer whose work blurs the line between movement, theory, technology, and political inquiry. Known for expanding the choreographic field, she has created landmark performance cycles including The Artificial Nature Series (2009–12)—featuring evaporated landscapes, The Light Forest, and Speculations—exploring non-human agency, and The Red Pieces (2014–17)—including 69 positions, 7 Pleasures, and 21 pornographies—a daring inquiry into sexuality, nudity, and power. Her group work Moving in Concert (2019) and solo The Dancing Public (2021), inspired by historical dance manias, continue this radical experimentation. A P.A.R.T.S. Brussels graduate with a PhD in choreography, she co-founded platform EVERYBODYS (2005–10) and has been artist-in-residence at Kaaitheater and Volksbühne. She has collaborated with Xavier Le Roy, Bojana Cvejic, Jan Ritsema, and Boris Charmatz.
William Kentridge’s
Sibyl
With music composed and conceived by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd
South Africa
October 8, 10, & 11 at 7:30pm
October 9 at 8pm
October 11 at 2pm
2023 Olivier Award winner for Outstanding Achievement in Opera for conception and direction
Visual and performing art collide and synthesize in this acclaimed work from one of the world’s most distinctive storytellers.
Part 1: The Moment Has Gone
Part 2: Waiting For The Sibyl
William Kentridge electrified the opera world with his acclaimed stagings of works by Berg, Mozart, and Shostakovich, performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Théâtre National de l’Opéra (Paris), and beyond. In Sibyl, he offers a two-part production that confronts our desire to know the future—and the forces that obscure it. Sibyl earned Kentridge the 2023 Olivier Award winner for outstanding achievement in opera.
Inspired by the ancient myth, Waiting for the Sibyl is a chamber opera featuring ten singers and dancers immersed in Kentridge’s dynamic visual language: hand-painted backdrops, animated ink drawings, projected text, collage, and shadow play. The score by Nhlanhla Mahlangu and Kyle Shepherd layers South African vocal harmonies with rhythmic chant and piano.
The evening opens with The Moment Has Gone, a film by Kentridge with live musical accompaniment featuring Shepherd’s original piano score and an all-male vocal chorus led by Mahlangu.
William Kentridge is a globally celebrated South African artist working across drawing, animation, sculpture, theatre, and opera. Known for his handmade stop-motion films and erasure-driven drawings, Kentridge explores the psychological and political residues of apartheid and colonialism. His stage works, including Refuse the Hour, The Head & the Load, and The Great Yes The Great No, integrate music, movement, and projection into dynamic visual scores. Kentridge has exhibited worldwide at MoMA, Royal Academy of Arts, The Broad, LUMA Foundation, and UCCA Beijing and has received honors including the Kyoto Prize, the Princesa de Asturias Award, the Charles Eliot Norton Lectureship at Harvard, and induction into the Beaux Arts in Paris (February 2025).
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Larsen C
Christos Papadopoulos
Artist American Premiere
Greece
October 16-18, 2025 at 7:30pm
Winner of the 2025 The Sadler’s Wells Rose International Dance Prize
Named after the vast Antarctic ice sheet which broke away in 2017, Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos’ work explores the universal patterns of change and the monumental shifts occurring around the world.
What lies beneath the tip of an iceberg? A form constantly shifting and transforming, dissolving into itself. We could ask this of our own bodies too—how much control do we really have over what lies beneath? Landscapes, bodies, and sounds all evolve and change, just like the ensemble of dancers.
The presentation of Larsen C is supported by Onassis Stegi Touring Program.
Christos Papadopoulos is a Greek choreographer whose meditative, finely structured works explore the poetics of repetition and rhythm. A graduate of SNDO Amsterdam and Greece's National Theatre Drama School, he founded the group The Lion and the Wolf. His breakout works Elvedon and Opus were both selected by Aerowaves and toured extensively across Europe. Ion, commissioned by Onassis Stegi and Théâtre de la Ville, and Larsen C—an international co-production—have continued his reputation for crafting trance-like ensembles. In 2023, he premiered Mellowing for Dance On and Mycelium for Lyon Opera Ballet and Biennale de la Danse.
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Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna
Soa Ratsifandrihana
Artist American Premiere
Co-presented with L’Alliance New York’s Crossing The Line Festival
Belgium
October 28-30, 2025 at 7:30pm
“Delivers truth to power … fractured, fantastical, stylish, and funky.” —Air Mail
Fampitaha, fampita, fampitàna—Malagasy for “comparison, transference, and rivalry”—is a conversation between bodies, histories, and sounds. Brussels-based choreographer Soa Ratsifandrihana draws on her Madagascan origin and diasporic experience to tell the story she longed to hear as a child. She is joined by guitarist Joël Rabesolo, and performers Audrey Merilus and Stanley Ollivier as they weave together dance, music, and storytelling in an ever-evolving performance. The piece reflects their entangled histories—rooted in Madagascar, Haiti, Martinique, and Guadeloupe, and shaped by life in France and Belgium, where they all live today. Voices, gestures, and rhythms overlap, reminding us that bodies, like words, hold memory, and sometimes speak what can’t be said.
Soa Ratsifandrihana is a French-Malagasy dancer and choreographer whose work bridges choreographic composition, radio narrative, and sonic experimentation. After training at the Conservatoire de Paris, she danced with Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, James Thierrée, and Salia Sanou. Her first solo, g r oo v e, premiered in Brussels in 2021 and has since toured widely across Europe and abroad (Japan, Canada). In 2024, she created a diptych—Rouge Cratère (radio work) and Fampitaha, fampita fampitàna (stage piece)—a diasporic mythology she wished she'd heard. She is currently an associate artist at Kaaitheater (2023–25).
Theatre of Dreams
Hofesh Shechter Company
United Kingdom
November 13-15, 2025 at 7:30pm
“astonishingly beautiful, constantly inventive” — The Observer
Hofesh Shechter and his inimitable dancers take the audience on a wild headfirst dive into the theatre of dreams. They delve deep into the world of fantasy and the subconscious, revealing fears, hopes, desires and a myriad of emotions that penetrate not only the dreaming mind but also our waking thoughts. The dancers’ bodies bring to life on stage this interplay between poetry and reality, accompanied by live musicians and Shechter’s trademark cinematic composition.
In a milestone season for Shechter’s work in New York, Theatre of Dreams follows the New York premiere of Red Carpet (with Paris Opera Ballet) at New York City Center.
Hofesh Shechter OBE is a choreographer, composer, and Artistic Director of the UK-based Hofesh Shechter Company. Famed for his visceral, rhythm-driven works, his defining pieces—Political Mother, The Art of Not Looking Back, Sun, barbarians, and Grand Finale—combine raw physicality with cinematic lighting and original scores. Shechter's choreography has been staged by major companies including Alvin Ailey, Martha Graham, Paris Opera Ballet, and the Royal Ballet, and commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Broadway. His films Clowns and Political Mother: The Final Cut have earned international acclaim, including Best Dance Film at Cannes. He is Associate Artist at Sadler's Wells and was awarded an OBE for Services to Dance in 2018. In theater, he choreographed the 2016 Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof, and this year co-directed with Matthew Warchus a new adaptation of Oedipus starring Rami Malek and Indira Varma at the Old Vic in London.
The Imagining
Amari Marshall
New York City
December 13 | Doors at 9pm, Show at 10pm
One night. Nothing held back. Everyone in.
Amari Marshall—who has created iconic movement for Beyoncé, Missy Elliott, and Rihanna—brings her own signature movement ritual to Powerhouse Arts. This living, breathing celebration brings the dance artists that inspire Marshall onto the floor with audiences.
Featuring Ladies of Hip-Hop, Lolita Leopard, Jore Marshall, and Tany Ora, plus DJs Alberto Reyes, Vonnie Mack, and Tim Fields, and many more.
Amari Marshall—also known as AmariMonster—is an internationally acclaimed choreographer, dancer, and creative force whose movement language fuses Hip-Hop, Krump, Dancehall, and African dance to electrifying effect. She served as Dance Captain and Contributing Choreographer for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter World Tour and Co-Dance Captain on the Renaissance World Tour, where her bold, expressive style helped define the tour’s cultural imprint. Her choreography has powered performances for Rihanna, Missy Elliott, Lizzo, and FLO, among others, with credits spanning the Super Bowl, Savage X Fenty, and New York Fashion Week. A Nike muse and barrier-breaking runway performer, she champions body inclusivity and cultural empowerment. Amari also leads The Little Monstas Experience, a youth program uplifting the next generation through dance.
