What’s New and What’s Next: Center-Funded Projects in 2017

The New Year will bring ambitious and innovative Center-funded projects to the Philadelphia region that will inspire audiences and push the boundaries of artistic discovery and expression. These exhibitions, performances, and public programs will engage the city through site-specific experiences, weave the community’s voices into artistic narratives, re-interpret history for today’s audiences, and more. We’ve rounded up a sampling of what’s on the horizon in 2017.

Stay up to date year-round by viewing our events calendar or subscribing to our monthly e-newsletter.

Pushing Performance Boundaries

• The Institute of Contemporary Art’s Endless Shout, an exploration of performance and improvisation inside a museum, will continue with performances and interactive programs by dancer and scholar Danielle Goldman, choreographer taisha paggett, poet Fred Moten, and artist collective The Otolith Group. (Through March)
   
• The Wilma Theater will premiere artistic director Blanka Zizka’s first play, Adapt!, inviting audiences to consider the immigrant experience and questions surrounding identity, homeland and exile, and the compromises of adulthood. (March 22—April 22)
   
• Composer Lembit Beecher will create Sophia's Forest, a multidisciplinary chamber opera that features a mechanical, electronic sound-generating sculpture that grows from a small music box into a seven-foot tall object as the performance unfolds. (September)
   
• Pig Iron Theatre Company will present A Period of Animate Existence, a symphonic theater hybrid for actors, classical musicians, and intergenerational choirs that will offer a meditation on life and planetary cycles, set in a time of rapid ecological and technological changes. (September)
   
• Playwright MJ Kaufman will debut the play Destiny Estimate, an experiment in narrative structure that combines several forms of storytelling, physical language, and a cappella choral music to investigate questions of prophecy, fate, and predestination. (October)

Engaging the City as Subject

• Headlong will continue The Quiet Circus, a 15-month-long series of participatory performances at Washington Avenue Green, a one-acre site on the Delaware River waterfront that served as the entry point to Philadelphia for immigrants in the early 20th century. (January—November)
   
• The Barnes Foundation will present Person of the Crowd: The Contemporary Art of Flânerie, a multi-part project, including a gallery exhibition, newly commissioned public installations, and citizen-created photos and videos, that will capture urban life in novel ways. (February 25—May 22)
   
• The Philadelphia Museum of Art will engage Dutch artist Jeanne van Heeswijk in Philadelphia Assembled, a project that reimagines Philadelphia’s changing landscape through a series of installations and public programs across the city. (April—December)
   
• Artists Ai Weiwei, Zoe Strauss, Kara Crombie, Kaitlin Pomerantz, and Alexander Rosenberg will create five temporary public artworks that explore the modern concept of a monument for Philadelphia for Monument Lab, presented by Mural Arts Philadelphia. (Fall)

Interpreting History

• Philadelphia Chamber Music Society will present Departure and Discovery: New Directions at the Apex of Creativity, a trio of concerts that will provide new insights on the forms of expression found in the late stages of the lives of nine great composers. (February 16—March 13)
   
• The work of African American composer Julius Eastman will be at the center of That Which is Fundamental, the first multi-concert retrospective of Eastman, presented by Bowerbird, and featuring a number of rarely-performed works. (May)
   
• The Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia will debut the exhibition Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Monster Within, highlighting the seminal Gothic works through a selection of rare books, manuscripts, and artifacts to illustrate how these horror stories reflect ethical and scientific questions that continue to challenge us today. (October—November)

Amplifying Community Voices

• Curator, community artist, and historian Erin Bernard will explore the lived experience of welfare through The History Truck W.I.C. Work/Shop, a mobile exhibition and series of public programs informed by first-person accounts of the Women, Infants, and Children (W.I.C.) nutritional assistance program. (Spring—Fall)
   
• Temple Contemporary will commission Symphony for a Broken Orchestra, a composition by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang for 1,500 broken instruments gathered from Philadelphia public schools, to be performed by a 600-member orchestra comprised of students, teachers, and professional and amateur musicians. (September—October)
   
• Journalism and first-person storytelling will intersect in Commonspace, a multi-media project featuring a series of public radio broadcasts and podcasts, presented by WHYY in collaboration with First Person Arts. (October—December)