Domino Park is pleased to announce the inaugural edition of Sugar, Sugar!—a free outdoor performing arts series. Taking place over the course of a month from June 4-28, 2025, Sugar, Sugar! marks the first ambitious cultural program at Domino Square, the latest addition to Domino Park’s 5-acre public park overlooking the East River.
The program will showcase experimental performances spanning theater, dance, music, and puppetry, with featured artists including: Troy Anthony & The Fire Ensemble; National Sawdust Presents Isaiah Barr, David Frazier Jr. and William Parker plus Special Guests; Lena Engelstein & Lisa Fagan; Nile Harris; Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener; Eli Nixon; Poncili Creación; Evan Silver aka Tiresias; and a two-night closing performance of the immersive production QUINCE.
Organized by Public Assembly, a Brooklyn-based creative strategy and producing practice, partnering with curator, director, and creative producer Ellpetha Tsivicos––whose production company One Whale’s Tale is known for creating maximalist, multidisciplinary performances—Sugar, Sugar! takes place at Domino Square’s multipurpose amphitheater and celebrates the legacy of North Brooklyn and New York’s creative community more broadly, highlighting artists, collectives, and institutions. Annabel Thompson, Co-founder of Public Assembly, comments: “Sugar, Sugar! is a small offering to the city’s already rich landscape of outdoor programming and we are thrilled to invite artistic experimentation that reflects and responds to this site of Williamsburg’s waterfront.”
Independent guest curators, experimental organizations and companies in North Brooklyn are collaborating with Sugar, Sugar! to guest curate a selection of performances. For example, Theresa Buchheister, the former Artistic Director of The Brick Theater—a Williamsburg-based non-profit dedicated to developing and presenting the work of pioneering emerging artists that pushes boundaries of the ever-evolving spectrum of performing arts—has curated a series of performances by downtown fixtures Nile Harris and Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein.
National Sawdust, which supports artists who are passionate about experimentation and innovation rooted in sound, will present a performance by experimental jazz musicians Isaiah Barr, David Frazier Jr. and William Parker plus Special Guests. Sasha Okshteyn, a longtime producer at Performa and The Watermill Center, will curate a new group work by Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener featuring music by Charmaine Lee, as well as a time capsule of Agora, Noémie Lafrance’s legendary site-specific dance performance staged in the then derelict McCarren Park Pool in 2005, which will be screened each night throughout the duration of the series. On Juneteenth, The Fire Ensemble, an intergenerational choir community, will present The Revival: It Is Our Duty, a celebration meant to uplift people using nonreligious songs and rituals that center collective liberation.
Further highlights include Eli Nixon’s DIY Primordial Futurism: An flamboyant invitation to celebrate horseshoe crabs and deep time, which invites audiences to collaborate through naturedrag, comics drawing, fabric handling and singing “crabaoke.” Poncili Creación will debut a new performance in their signature style, transforming salvaged materials into vibrant puppetry as an energetic celebration of life; while Evan Silver aka Tiresias will present a drag performance that augments the body with puppetry contraptions to create surreal and vivid visuals.
The closing performance, QUINCE by One Whale’s Tale, blends a theatrical narrative with the cultural celebration for which it is named, a Quinceañera. The piece is a comedy with soul about a Chicano household navigating how queerness can both contradict and fit within their religious beliefs, and unwavering commitment to family. This playful and profound examination of our connection to tradition has gone from a COVID era performance in a community garden, to the Bushwick Starr and Lincoln Center. Drinks, dancing, food, and live music at banquet tables carries the audience through this beautiful immersive experience.
Ellpetha Tsivicos, Co-Curator and Creative Producer of Sugar, Sugar! comments: “QUINCE is a celebration of cultural traditions and the ability of those traditions to evolve to be inclusive of future generations. The loss of the ‘third space,’ the increased defunding of the arts and the desperate need for strength and community is what inspires me most about the new Domino Park Amphitheater. Being able to bring live art at this capacity to the community reaffirms my belief in the ability of art to make change, herald joy and bring people together.”
Capicu! will host each night’s pre-show with NYC Dominos, DJs, and dancing. The program culminates in a joyful, community-driven plaza party featuring live music and dancing, a vibrant marketplace, local food vendors, and interactive art activities. Partners include the Brooklyn Cumbia Festival, which will showcase a series of performances organized by Escuela Popular de Arte Sonoro, a free music program for BIPOC youth that operates out of Mayday Space, an organizing hub in Bushwick, and Rueda de Oro, a collective musical initiative working to maintain the Afro indigenous drumming and dance traditions of the Colombian coast; as well as community event organizers La Gesta Inc., New York City tape artist Kuki Go, Recess Art and more to be announced!
Free admission by reservation. Tickets are available beginning May 8, 2025. The full schedule of events can be found here.
PERFORMANCE SCHEDULE:
Nile Harris: Untitled (Theresa Buchheister)
Wednesday, June 4 at 8:00 PM
Guest Curated by Theresa Buchheister
Nile Harris is a performer and a director of live works of art. Through performance, Harris creates immersive experiences that use the body on stage to manipulate one’s relationship to time and self-perception. In this untitled work-in-progress presentation, Harris responds to the architecture of the Domino Park amphitheater using the Manhattan skyline as a launching point on a desultory meditation on the characters past/present/future that make New York City, New York City.
Lisa Fagan & Lena Engelstein: This Could Be You
Wednesday, June 4 at 8:00 PM
Guest Curated by Theresa Buchheister
Lisa Fagan and Lena Engelstein have worked together since 2017. Intensely physical and visually maximal, the pair’s works are rooted in dance-adjacent physicality but reimagine what choreography can be used to accomplish theatrically.
Evan Silver aka Tiresias: Tiresias Presents Mysteriosa
Thursday, June 5 at 8:00 PM
Guest Curated by Theresa Buchheister
Evan Silver aka Tiresias is a hybrid writer, director, composer, performer, puppeteer, mythmaker and ritualist based in Brooklyn. Recently called “a rara avis of experimental theatre” by The New Yorker and “one of the most enchanting performers in New York City” by The Brooklyn Rail, their work explores queer ecologies, weird mythologies, and speculative futures. Featuring some of the most visionary performing artists in New York City, Tiresias Presents Mysteriosa is a fantasia of short new works that promises untold mystery and magic.
Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener: Outside Out
Wednesday, June 11 at 8:00 PM
Guest Curated by Sasha Okshteyn
Rashaun Mitchell & Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists whose work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. Rashaun and Silas will create a new group work for Domino Park, featuring music by Charmaine Lee.
Eli Nixon: DIY Primordial Futurism: A flamboyant invitation to celebrate horseshoe crabs and deep time
Thursday, June 12 at 8:00 PM
Eli Nixon builds portals and gives guided tours to places that don’t yet exist. They collaborate on imaginative interventions through cardboard constructionism, theatermaking, drawing, and choreography of low-tech public spectacle. Join suitcase theater artist and rabble rouser Eli Nixon to explore what and how to celebrate so as to survive for 450 million years (or at least tomorrow!). Audiences will be invited into low-stakes opportunities for participation including naturedrag, comics drawing, fabric handling, and singing “crabaoke” (power ballads with altered lyrics about crabs!).
Poncili Creación: Dirty Laughing Molecules
Thursday, June 12 at 9:00 PM
Poncili Creación is a Puerto Rican performance duo that focuses around their foam rubber sculptures, to create activities based on the concepts of Raw Magic and Beautiful Nothingness. These sculptures created to be manipulated by the human body or parts of it, some as small as a cherry, others as large as trees, are tools for creating whimsical power that stains reality. For Dirty laughing Molecules, the audience will be forcibly caught in a traffic jam and fall witness to life and death in ginormous proportions thru the windshield, a warped mirror of reality.
National Sawdust Presents: “Back to Nature” featuring Isaiah Barr, David Frazier Jr. and William Parker plus Special Guests
Wednesday, June 18 at 8:00 PM
Guest Curated by National Sawdust
“Back To Nature” is a focus on improvisation on acoustic instruments from around the world, colliding with minimal electronics, creating a zone for contemplation about past present and future through sound. Presented by National Sawdust, the performance will feature artist, multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Isaiah Barr, co-founder of the multi-disciplinary group Onyx Collective, alongside drummer David Frazier Jr. and free jazz double bassist William Parker, plus additional special guests.
Troy Anthony & The Fire Ensemble: The Revival: It Is Our Duty
Thursday, June 19 at 8:00 PM
Written by Troy Anthony
Additional Songs by Sam Appiah, Tony George, and Johnathan Johnson
Additional lyrics by Vonae McCray and Assata Shakur
Music Direction by Sam Appiah
Dramaturgy by Ava Tiye
Produced in Partnership with 651 Arts
The Fire Ensemble is an intergenerational choir community dedicated to using song and ritual as tools for collective liberation centering BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ folx. The Fire Ensemble will present The Revival: It Is Our Duty on Juneteenth––a celebration about the self-liberation of Black people. Composed and officiated by celebrated Creative Director Troy Anthony, The Revival is meant to lift people out of their sorrow using nonreligious songs and rituals that center collective liberation. 651 Arts, an organization that deepens awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora, and provides professional and creative opportunities for artists of African descent, is a producing partner for this event.
QUINCE
Wednesday, June 25 and Thursday, June 26 at 8:00 PM
Produced + Created by One Whale’s Tale
Directed by Ellpetha Tsivicos
Written by Camilo Quiroz-Vázquez
QUINCE is a magical immersive comedy born in Bushwick, that follows a 15 year-old Chicana confronting her queer identity, family and religion on the eve of her quinceañera––a rite-of-passage ushering a girl’s transition into womanhood, emphasizing the importance of family and community. The vibrant, immersive experience features music, dance, food, and art inspired by Latin American rituals, mythology and magic! A workshop of QUINCE premiered at The People's Garden in August of 2020 as part of the TEAM's Petri Projects. It was the first live theater to happen in New York during the pandemic, and revolutionized the way we explored the arts and community within Covid. This was followed by a full run as the inaugural performance at The Bushwick Starr’s new theater. Join us for a party!
Closing Celebration
Saturday, June 28 at 1:00-6:00 PM
Closing the series will be a daytime celebration featuring live music, DJs, domino tournaments, and food and drink vendors, with artists and partners including Capicu! NYC, Recess Art, Kuki Go, La Gesta Inc., Brooklyn Cumbia Festival, Escuela Popular de Arte Sonoro and Mayday Space, Rueda de Oro, and more to be announced!
