Every day is opening night.

THE FLEA ANNOUNCES NEW WORK: “ARDEN: A RITUAL FOR LOVE AND LIBERATION” LIMITED ENGAGEMENT TO BEGIN FEBRUARY 6, 2022

Press Contacts:
Rick Miramontez / Morgan Zysman
rick@omdkc.com / morgan@omdkc.com
212 695 7400

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

THE FLEA
ANNOUNCES
ARDEN: A RITUAL FOR
LOVE AND LIBERATION

A NEW GENRE-BENDING COMMISSION
PERFORMED & CONCEIVED BY
Carrie Mae Weems, Diana Oh, Niegel Smith,
Okwui Okpokwasili, & Peter Born

THE FIRST WORK TO EMERGE FROM THE FLEA
SINCE ITS REFOCUSED MISSION WAS ESTABLISHED

New York, NY (December 15, 2021) The Flea announced today the limited engagement of ARDEN: A Ritual for Love and Liberation, a genre-bending, boundary-breaking, and interactive new work commissioned by The Flea and led by Black and queer artists. ARDEN creates space for grace and communal practice in the face of indifference and division. The limited engagement of ARDEN is set to begin previews on February 6, 2022 with an official opening night of February 11, 2022, and play through March 6, 2022.
Photo by David Fitt

ARDEN is a new performance ritual developed in collaboration by Niegel Smith, Diana Oh, Peter Born, and MacArthur Fellows Okwui Okpokwasili and Carrie Mae Weems.

Tickets for ARDEN are priced $15-$35 and are available now at www.theflea.org.

Love. Liberation. Ritual. Let’s light a light and lay it all down. ARDEN invites you to take a walk down a path that leads to a clearing. In this clearing, you are invited into a strange, raw and delightful ritual full of song, dance, and testimony. Come to Arden and happen upon a kind of love that feels too dangerous for the world we live in.

Bring your hopes. Bring your fears. We’ll stir them together and pass them through our sieve. And hopefully, we will re-emerge with a newfound sense of awe and possibility for ourselves and the others with whom we move through this world.

The Flea’s Artistic Director, Niegel Smith, says, “Arden represents exactly the kind of work we imagined we would present when we refocused our mission. I am proud of the remarkable artists who’ve collaborated to realize this bold vision, and I am excited for audiences to experience the transformative power of their work.”

This last year has been a momentous transformation for The Flea. They have proudly focused their new mission to support and invest in experimental art by Black, brown and queer artists, and are the only theater in New York City focused on supporting experimental work at this intersection.
For all information, please visit www.theflea.org.

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The Flea Theater, led by Artistic Director Niegel Smith and Board Co-Chair Nona Hendryx, supports and invests in experimental art by Black, brown and queer artists. Winner of several Obie Awards, a Special Drama Desk Award for outstanding achievement and an Otto Award for political theater, The Flea has presented over 100 theatrical, musical and dance performances since its inception in 1996. Past productions include premieres by Steven Banks, Thomas Bradshaw, Erin Courtney, Bathsheba Doran, Will Eno, Karen Finley, Amy Freed, Sarah Gancher, Sean Graney, A.R. Gurney, Jennifer Haley, Hamish Linklater, Enrique Gutiérrez Ortiz Monasterio, Itamar Moses, Anne Nelson, Qui Nguyen, Adam Rapp, Jonathan Reynolds, Kate Robbins, Roger Rosenblatt, Elizabeth Swados, and Mac Wellman. Successes include Drama Desk nominated She Kills Monsters, These Seven Sicknesses, Restoration Comedy, The Mysteries and ten World Premiere productions by A.R. Gurney, including the WSJ Best New Play of 2013, Family Furniture.

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www.theflea.org

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