Stage Voices

(via Emily Owens)

The Kick Inside is made possible through support by New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). Developed with residency support from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). early stage 3D support from The Mercury Store. Richard Foreman’s text is used with the permission of the Richard Foreman Literary Trust.

Nicolás Noreña (Director/Creator) is a Colombian theater maker and performer living in Brooklyn. His work recognizes theater as a memory medium in relation to the forces of Chaos, Form, and Change. He is the founder and Artistic Director of THE MILLION UNDERSCORES. With his company, he has developed, produced, directed and designed over twenty original productions presented at The Museum of Modern Art, Target Margin Theater, Theater Flamboyan, The Brick Theater, O.D.C San Francisco, Le Mondo Baltimore, 62’ Center for Theater and Dance in Williamstown, as well as in DIY venues, gallery windows, and public spaces in New York City. He had the pleasure of working closely with Mary Overlie and Richard Foreman, their mentorship, their transgressive ideas on theater, and deep sense of humor have been foundational to Nicolás and his company. Over the years he has performed with wonderful theater artists such as The Talking Band, Richard Foreman, Mary Overly, Jess Barbagallo, Liz Swados, Jeff Weiss, Theresa Buccheister, Normandy Sherwood, and Object Collection. He was a resident artist with MABOU MINES 2015-2016 under the mentorship of JoAnne Akalaitis,  a LEIMAY fellow 2015-2020, LAB artist with Target Margin Theater in 2019, and has developed work at multiple residencies at Mercury Store since 2023. Nicolas currently teaches at the Experimental Theater Wing at New York University and is the Archive Director of the Mary Overlie Legacy Project. He has taught workshops and given lectures at Playwrights Horizons, MIT, Julliard, HB Studios, Mercury Store, as well as abroad in schools in Colombia and Switzerland. Lately he’s been curious about forgetfulness, dancing with sprinklers, and how places on earth attract ideas and people to them through magnetism.

THE MILLION UNDERSCORES _ _ is an experimental theater company based in Brooklyn under the artistic direction of Nicolás Noreña. Founded in Summer 2013  the company has developed alongside a qualitative study of numbers, and experiments in space bending, abstract composition, and collaborative writing. We make highly visual and physically eccentric theater works that interrogate the action and form of theater. We value every element of performance as an independent voice; through density, multi-directionality and juxtaposition we generate fields for the audience to notice, think and reify modes of perception, organization and understanding. We believe Theater is an arrangement of the elements of reality–an architecture that invites a certain way of seeing. Each of our projects reorganizes theater in a different way: we have done a show that looped until all audience members left the theater; a show performed for two audience members at a time; another in which all the audio played in the audience’s headphones and different people in the audience received different tracks; another in which the order of the scenes was set at the beginning of the performance by chance operations. We are interested in entering a relationship with the audience where their reading of the piece finishes the work, making them part of the artistic process. Our work has been presented in a wide array of spaces ranging from the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art to abandoned buildings in Baltimore; from the grandiose playhouse of the 62′ center in Williamstown to fields of sprinklers on Governors Island. However, we have grown within Brooklyn’s underground experimental theater scene, presenting our shows at The Exponential Festival, The Brick Theater, Target Margin Theater, Triskelion Arts, and WE ARE HERE among others.  We develop original work as a company, beginning always with a group of artists in a space rather than from a pre-existing text, knowing that in the end theater is people in a room feeling each other’s energies. www.themillionunderscores.com

ABOUT HERE ARTS CENTER
Since 1993, HERE Arts Center has been one of New York’s most prolific arts organizations. Today, it stands at the forefront of the city’s cultural scene, producing and presenting daring, new, multidisciplinary performance experiences. From our home in Lower Manhattan, HERE builds an inclusive community that nurtures artists of all backgrounds as they disrupt conventional expectations to create innovative performances in theatre, dance, music, puppetry, media, and visual art. By providing these genre-blending artists with an adaptive, flexible home for developing and producing their work, we share a range of perspectives reflective of the complexity of our city. HERE welcomes curious audiences to witness groundbreaking performances, responsive to the world in which we live, at free and affordable prices.

Under the leadership of Co-Directors Jesse Cameron Alick, Annalisa Dias, and Lanxing Fu, HERE continues to evolve as a home for artists and audiences alike. Appointed by the Board in 2024, the Co-Directors collaboratively lead the artistic and executive functions of the organization, shaping its vision, programming, and community engagement. HERE strives to create an equitable, diverse, and inclusive home in which all people have fair access to the resources they need to realize their visions. We acknowledge structural inequities that exclude individuals and communities from opportunities based on race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, class, age, and geography, and seek to counter those inequities in our work. Through mindful actions on sustainability and regenerative practices, we work toward climate justice, and a safe, livable planet for present and future artmakers and audiences. www.here.org