We are so excited for our third annual New Works Festival!
Celebrating groundbreaking original live performance, the festival features world premiere productions across theater, music, and contemporary dance—the culmination of months of development by Culture Lab LIC’s New Works Lab resident artists.
Designed to counteract the high costs of creative space in New York City, the New Works Lab provides emerging companies and independent creators with free rehearsal and performance space, technical resources, and artistic mentorship. The resulting New Works Festival puts these fresh, risk-taking original works directly on stage for NYC audiences.
When buying tickets, keep in mind that Culture Lab does not receive a cut of these sales– 100% goes to the artist! It is in part due to your membership that we are able to offer artists these opportunities.
Atalanta: The Long Shot
A Sapphic Musical Epic by Lucier & Rose
Thursday, November 5, 7:30-10:30pm
Friday, November 6, 3-6pm
Friday, November 6, 7:30-10:30pm
Saturday, November 7, 7:30-10:30pm
Sunday, November 8, 5:30-8:30pm
Join us for a special pre-show experience 30 min before the performance!
Atalanta: The Long Shot is a boundary-breaking new queer musical that resurrects the long-forgotten mythology of history’s original Amazon and unsung heroine of Ancient Greece.
icchā
Friday, November 13, 7-8pm
Saturday, November 14, 7-8pm
Sunday, November 15, 3-4pm
Often the things we desire are not ours.
In Hindu philosophy, vasanas are unfulfilled longings that survive the death of the physical body, passed down through bloodlines as living, present icchā / desire.
icchā is contemporary kathak work weaving original music, set design, a communal Gujarati folk form called garba. Barkha is visited by her maternal ancestors in a dream. They choose her to express, release, and fulfill their desires: born from survival, loss, intimacy, violence, the denial of dance and embodied selfhood.
Matrilineages are most often the unnamed, interrupted, and absorbed into the histories of patriarchs. The work confronts the body as a site of ancestral history asking: who do we carry within us? This work allows these ancestors to breathe again and ask what in your body might be their unfinished reaching?
icchā is meant to be a somatic shraadh, an ancestral reverence of many secret tragedies that have dissolved with passing time.
Rabbit God
A Queer Chinese Fantasy
A new dance work by Jiemin Yang and dancers.
Thursday, November 19, 7:30-8:45pm
Friday, November 20, 7:30-8:45pm
Saturday, November 21, 7:30-8:45pm
Sunday, Nov 22, 3-4:15pm
Rabbit God: A Queer Chinese Fantasy is a contemporary dance-theater work rooted in the folklore, mythology, and spiritual traditions of Fujian, China. Blending contemporary dance, martial arts staff work, immersive projection, and theatrical storytelling, the piece transports audiences into a fantastical world where ancient myth collides with a queer present.
Inspired by the legend of the Rabbit God, a deity associated with same-sex love in Chinese folklore, the work follows a journey through friendship, love, desire, identity, loss, and redemption — where the boundaries between human, divine, and underworld begin to blur. An original sound score and live vocals bring the audience into this world.
Visually rich and physically dynamic, the piece combines expressive movement, martial arts, and dreamlike projection to create a cinematic stage world — inviting audiences into a universe where forgotten stories are reclaimed and brought back to life.
ABOUT THE CHOREOGRAPHER:
Jiemin is a NY-based dance artist and choreographer. His work has been supported by Culture Lab LIC’s Emergence Artist Residency (2026); the NYSCA Support for Artists grant (2026); the Simons Foundation & Gibney Open Interval Residency (2025–26); the CUNY Dance Initiative at Queens College (2020–22). His dance film Wo/我 received the Outstanding Dance Film Award at the Queens World Film Festival 2022. He was named an Artist of Exceptional Merit by the Asian American Arts Alliance (2022). He has presented works at Battery Dance Festival, Mare Nostrum Elements at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, and at many other venues across the city.
Learn more about the work and the creators: www.jieminyang.art
Content Advisory: This performance contains mature themes and depictions of violence and may not be suitable for minors.
This piece was created during Culture Lab LIC’s 2026 New Works Lab and produced as a part of Culture Lab LIC’s New Works Festival. It is made possible, in part, with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a regrant program supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
notAmuse Theater presents
The 8th
Thursday, December 3, 8-9pm
Friday, December 4, 8-9pm
Saturday, December 5, 8-9pm
Sunday, December 6, 8-9pm
The seven deadly sins are constructs of our social architecture. Guiding, limiting, and controlling our social behavior. Guilt holds this architecture in place; sticky mortar of the soul. What would happen if guilt was prohibited? The 8th deadly sin. Would it all crumble? Can we “behave” without guilt? We are putting this experiment in the hands of the Bouffons, masters of guilt free subversion. Through play, metamorphosis and mask we explore and undermine the rickety social structure of morality with all its capitalist and patriarchal underpinnings. Will you dare to sit with us in this house of cards while the Bouffons frolic in the attic?
Conceived by Sophie Amieva and Katerina Marcelja
Devised by Hannah Gross, John Kang, Kayla Juntilla and Sophie Amieva
Directed by Sophie Amieva
Production Design by Katerina Marcelja
Line Producer by Giorgia Valenti
Light Design by Jaqueline Scaletta
notAmuse Theater’s mission is to teach classes and create visceral theatrical work that peels back layers of human complexity and social power in order to recognize the true core of one another’s humanity. We work from the core understanding that while theater isn’t always outwardly political, it is always inherently political. As audience members and artists we arrive in a theatrical space as a product of the world around us. We are steeped in its power dynamics, traumas, and resulting fears. notAmuse’s goal is to create spaces where we can deconstruct and transcend that fear to connect with one another on a deeper level.
New Works Lab 2026
We are proud to announce and congratulate our 2026 New Works Lab Residents (previous Emergence Artist in Residence)!
Lucier&Rose @lucierandrose
notAmuse Theater @notamuse_theater
Jiemin Yang @jiemin.art
Barkha Dance Company @barkha_dance
Culture Lab LIC's New Works Lab is a developmental performing arts program geared toward the support and creation of new work.
Started in 2021 by former Director of Performing Arts, Tana Sirois, the residency began as a desire to offer free rehearsal and performance space to performing artists. Since its conception the residency has been further developed and led by Artistic Director Tess Howsam expanding the program to include peer review sessions during the artists year and culminating in Culture Lab LIC’s New Works Festival November and December.
“New work is the heartbeat of the arts. It is through the creation and courage of bringing forth something never before seen— once only a glimmer in an artist’s mind—that we witness our world anew through their lens. It is through this work that makes New York City the epicenter for arts and culture.
It is contradictory that the very thing that makes this city is under supported. We see this primarily in the cost of space to create. I cannot overstate the importance of protecting and nurturing safe spaces for new creation. Programs like the New Works Lab residency are rare—few organizations take the risk of offering nine months of free space, resources, and a platform for presentation with the mission to serve the artist and their work at no fiscal gain.
This is what we desperately need to cultivate to ensure NYC remains the cultural hub it has historically been and Culture Lab LIC aims to offer this support.
I am deeply proud to lead an organization that centers its mission on giving performing artists what they need most: time, space, and trust. These elements form the foundation and the soul of Culture Lab LIC’s New Works Lab residency program. "
— Tess Howsam, Artistic Director, Culture Lab LIC
Thanks to our sponsors: Plaxall Properties, Steve Madden, TF Cornerstone, Douglaston Development, Paragon LIC, Schuman Properties, SPR Law, Howard Gilman Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts
