2019 Residencies

Announcing the 2019 HB Residency Recipients

The HB Artistic Council has selected the following six projects for an 2019 HB Rehearsal Space Residency. All public showings take place at 8:00 PM in HB Studio’s First Floor Studio, 120 Bank St, New York, NY.


MEMORY HOME, created by Zoe Lasden-Lyman and Allison Plamondon

You enter from the street. A nurse in black gives you a name tag with an unfamiliar name. She says: “Don’t speak anymore.” She brings you to a room in Memory Home. She asks you to wait, says: “You are safe. You are home. You are loved,” and leaves you alone. There’s a door left ajar to an adjacent room. Unobserved, you watch the director speaking to an unseen audience: your family. She thanks them for entrusting Memory Home with you, their loved one with dementia. An immersive play.
Public showings: May 11 & 12, 2019 @ 8PM 


STARR STREET by Jesse Regis

The project is two parts. The first part, STARR STREET, is based in Maria Hernandez Park in Bushwick. It is the story of a young black drag queen pleading reinstatement to the drag home she abandoned. The second part, A CASE FOR INCLUSION, takes the form of a discussion between the writer of STARR STREET and the performer cast in the role of the young drag queen. The performer questions whether STARR STREET is the writer’s — a white man’s — story to tell. Together we grapple with the complex questions of appropriation, intersectionality, and the age old question: Who gets to tell your story?
Public showings: July 26 & 28, 2019 @8pm


THE COMPLICITY MACHINE by Diane Davis Steiker

Set in the 2018 business of Hollywood, one woman, once a victim of a Hollywood predator, turns the tables, and seeks justice against the system who supported him. One woman leads a challenge against the Hollywood system, targeting one man’s power and his complicity machine, challenging unspoken rules about business. As Tig Kennedy breaks against the status quo, she sets out to make things right at any cost.
Public showings: August 24 @ 8PM, August 25 @ 7PM


THE SPACES IN BETWEEN by Paula Pizzi-Black

What happens when a child’s resilient spirit breaks right through the binary chains of intolerance defying the most ingrained platitudes? We are in Midtown. The time is now. We see Luciano standing Left on a rotating bare stage. He is very still, too upset to move as if if he did, the whole world would collapse around him. Slowly, very slowly, his left foot goes back, his right foot goes forward and then back, then the left foot goes forward and he begins to dance whispering some internal tune that only he can hear … The stage keeps turning revealing Arabella in the kitchen… wearing an apron with an arsenal of pockets. Everything everyone needs comes in and out of those pockets. Everything…
Public showings: October 5 & 6, 2019 @8pm


SPECIALLY PROCESSED AMERICAN ME by Jaime Sunwoo

A multidisciplinary performance using SPAM, the canned meat, to share memories of artist Jaime Sunwoo’s Korean-American upbringing and her family’s accounts of the Korean War. It investigates SPAM’s legacy in the military, its place in individual and collective memory, and its influence on Korean cuisine through a narrative collage of monologues, animation, soundscapes, sculpture, and cooking. Oscillating wildly between absurd humor and sober tragedy, genuine affection and biting criticism, ‘Specially Processed American Me’ is a thought-provoking exploration of one of America’s most misunderstood foods.
Public showings: December 14 & 15, 2019 @7pm


BLACK DOVES by Reynaldo Piniella

Loosely inspired by Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL, BLACK DOVES follows a middle class African-American family in present day Brooklyn, New York. When a loved one commits an unforgivable crime, will the family deal with the generational trauma that has shaped their lives or will they choose to ignore it which only continues the cycle?
Public showings: February 29 & March 1, 2020 @8pm
(formerly Nov 2 & 3, 2019)


In partnership with the City Council - HB Studio

New York State of Opportunity - HB Studio

This program is supported in part by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and many generous supporters.