OTHER WORLDS
Stories for Future Ancestors Part II
PROGRAM
Stolen...Bow (October 11 and 12 only)
Performed by Medea Exogiinos & Karen Poleshuck
Music: "Stolen" by Allison Loggins-Hull
PAUSE
Stories For Future Ancestors Part II: OTHER WORLDS
ACT I
1. Other Worlds Are Possible Out There
2. For Vandana
3. For Rokeya
4. For Ursula
5. Everywhere
INTERMISSION
ACT II
6. For Octavia
7. For Stan
8. Other Worlds Are Possible Right Here
Performed by Medea Exogiinos, Summer Lacy, Wendy Louie, Lisa Natoli, Maia Ramnath, Monika Ramnath (on video)
Written and directed by Maia Ramnath
Choreography contributed by all the performers, organized by Maia Ramnath
Lighting design by Jillian Garibaldi
Costumes by all of us
Rehearsal director/dance captain Medea Exogiinos
Video by Maia Ramnath and Monika Ramnath
SPECIAL THANKS: Marna and Suresh Ramnath, Nancy and Dick Christiansen, Elena Delgado, Mike Cavallaro, Nicki Miller, Benny Oyzon, Rebecca Fey Collins, Zoob Fernandez, Crystal Field, Alex Bartenieff, Emily Pezzella
And to this all-star cast. They are all veteran performers and multifaceted artists, some of the most interesting humans I know on or off the stage. This production would not have been possible without their overflowing creativity and generosity. At every turn their ideas made it better than what I had come up with by myself. Furthermore, they've each been through some SHIT: they carry in their bodies and minds the knowledge and experience of many survivals. i am so honored that they agreed to be a part of this exploration with me.
BIOS
Medea Exogiinos (it/its/they/them) is a movement alien, finding its happy place when combining together different physical modalities. It loves to bend, stand around on its hands and, as of Mermaid Parade 2025, play on wheels. Every once and a while, one might find it in the air too. Medea finds solace within the ocean year round, the only place it is quiet enough to consistently find its voice. Medea has done a few things at a few theaters like City Center, The Joyce and the like, but prefers Theater for the New City. Here, it can experiment and gratefully create whatever art it wants with its spouse Maia, who accepts it in any of its forms. Medea expresses gratitude for not only this, but its spirit family of open water swimmers who, just this week, gathered in the ocean's waves for the full moon. Magic aside, Medea also thanks this wonderfully genuine cast for its dance captain nomination.
Jillian Faye Garibaldi (she/her) is a jack of all trades, but primarily a dance artist and educator based in Queens. Her work is ephemeral: meant to be seen live and developed intentionally around specific dancers and performance spaces. It is about love and grief, memory and dreams, softness and violence, and, most of all, change. Recent credits include Nicki Miller’s Ghost Love (Brooklyn Art Haus) and choreographing for in-version ensemble’s Two for One (The Tank).
New York native Summer Lacy has dazzled audiences across the country with their graceful,awe-inspiring aerial artistry for over a decade. They’ve performed off Broadway with Circus Abyssinia, with Dzul Dance Company, Hideaway Circus, AfroPunk festival, at the CFDA Fashion Awards, and on NBC’s hit reality competition “America’s Got Talent.” Summer draws inspiration from diverse sources from ballet to anime, from Broadway to Black Metal, driving a continuous creative evolution to inspire the artist within us all. In addition to performing, Summer is a resident instructor at Body & Pole and CirqueHaus in NYC, where she works alongside the industry’s best, teaching aerial arts to future circus stars! @winterbrocade
Wendy Louie is thrilled to be back performing at Theater for the New City. This is her 7th production with Constellation Moving Company. She made her debut with Constellation back in 2013 with the production of Time Co/Lapse and went on to perform with the company in other featured shows through the years. Many thanks to Maia for getting her to come out of retirement and merde to the cast.
Lisa Natoli has been making and performing solo and ensemble work around New York City for a couple decades. She’s a sought after aerialist known for her unconventional approach and intensity of artistic curiosity. She’s that character you meet in films and books you want to root for, except this one’s flesh and blood. Lisa’s art isn’t printed, published, or filmed. It can’t be sold off a merch table. It exists for a moment of beauty, right in front of you, and then it’s gone. Lisa is an instructor at Vital Climbing Gym and Aerial Arts NYC.
Karen Poleshuck is a New York City teacher, soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral musician. As a performer she loves to seek out new ways to break down the barriers between audiences and musicians by playing in unconventional venues and creating an interactive experience for all involved. Karen has performed in and collaborated on many educational outreach performances throughout the US, including The New York Philharmonic’s Very Young People’s Concert Series, and regularly subs on Broadway. She has been teaching cello for the past 20 years both privately and in schools throughout the tri-state. When Karen is not with her cello, she can be found meditating on a cushion or swimming in the ocean.
Maia Ramnath is sometimes an aerialist and modern dancer, sometimes an aerial teacher, sometimes a history professor, sometimes a NYC walking tour guide, sometimes a writer, and always a lover of sci fi, fantasy, speculative fiction and the utopian liberatory imagination in theory and practice. Xe has been co-creating collective works through the form of Constellation Moving Company for 15 years while also freelancing with various other choreographers and companies—most recently Fly-By-Night Aerial Dance, and Pat Catterson—and doing all the things mentioned above. Xe has always had trouble fitting into the boxes (see Stories For Future Ancestors Part I) but feels much more at home outside and between.
Monika Ramnath is a cat lady, kathak dancer and actor based in Los Angeles. She enjoys pottering about in her garden, and studying and performing with Bhakti Bhav Dance. She recently compiled a list of “reasons people have been accused of witchcraft throughout history” and found herself guilty on dozens of counts.
PROGRAM NOTES
Stolen...Bow
Karen and Medea met at the ocean in the summer of 2023. A few days after meeting, Medea was already trying to handbalance on Karen, as is the way of any typical friendship. They began discussing how amazing it would be to create a piece that would not simply be a dance/acrobatics with live music, but an actual duo between the musician and the mover. Big thanks to Maia for supporting this piece and giving the needed deadline to complete its first iteration. (We hope you enjoy!)
Stories For Future Ancestors Part II: Other Worlds
Astronaut Sunita Williams was stuck on the International Space Station for nine months in 2024. Astronaut Kalpana Chawla was lost in the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003. Could the mysterious radio transmissions Suni is picking up while waiting for transport possibly be from Kalpana? Could they be a conversation on which she's inadvertently eavesdropping, between aliens, AIs, and marine mammals? Could other worlds like the ones imagined by utopian speculative fiction ever exist on earth?
But why Part II, you may ask? What happened to part Part I? Stories For Future Ancestors Part I: Other Boxes was essentially my contribution to Conjunction, the joint program created by Medea Exogiinos and me, performed here at TNC in January 2024. There is also a textual counterpart to the live performance and video shown at that time, a document that is still in progress. I aim to finally finish it once this performance is over and will make it available to read at this program link by January 1, 2026. Fun fact: both parts were first imagined as solo projects. But Part I morphed into a duo, and Part II morphed into an ensemble.
1. Other Worlds Are Possible Out There
Music: "Mahamatar" by John Tavener, with Steven Isserlis and Abi Sampa
2. For Vandana:
Words from Vandana Singh, Utopias of the Third Kind
Music: "Space Truckin'" by Deep Purple
The song was chosen because it is one that astronaut Kalpana Chawla used as a wake-up call for her space shuttle team during their final mission in 2003. As a fan of Deep Purple, Chawla communicated with band members from space; they wrote a song called "Contact Lost" as an homage to the Columbia crew on the album they were then recording.
3. For Rokeya:
Music: "Ki Jana?" by Zeshan B (his funky take on a Bulleh Shah poem)
Words from Sunil Amrith, in an interview with Rachel Donald on the podcast Planet Critical
What you see in the zoom tour (inspired by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's famous story) are glimpses of various community gardens and public parks in Lower Manhattan and the East Village/Lower East Side; homes/vicinities of some of the artists' family members, works at Storm King Art Center and Kenkeleba House sculpture garden. Final shot from the film The Wild Robot.
4. For Ursula
Music: "Heron Dance" and "Long SInging" by Todd Barton and Ursula K. Le Guin, Music and Poetry of the Kesh
Words from Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home
Circular and spiral dances may be found in many cultures, folk traditions and spiritual practices new and old, including ecofeminist neopaganism. But my primary inspiration here was from the shapes seen in drawings from Le Guin's imaginary future post-technological west coast Kesh culture.
5. Everywhere
Music: “Popcorn” by Hot Butter
6. For Octavia
Music: "seal" by Ganavya; "On Children" by Sweet Honey in the Rock with lyrics from Kahlil Gibran, “Silver Ladders” by Mary Lattimore
Words from Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; and Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children." By the way Sweet Honey in the Rock's Bernice Johnson Reagon and Toshi Reagon also wrote an opera based on Parable of the Sower. The movement inspiration here though derives just as much from the Xenogenesis trilogy.
7. For Stan
Music: "Blue Was In Their Wings" by Juan & the Pines, "Don't Make Me Over" by Dionne Warwick (Burt Bacharach)
Words from Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future, and Ursula Le Guin, Always Coming Home.\
8. Other Worlds Are Possible Right Here
Music: "Always On My Mind" by Pet Shop Boys
READING LIST
Joking/not-joking, the cast asked for this. If you’re interested, you could read anything and everything by these prolific authors. But the most direct ingredients that went to this piece came from the following.
Vandana Singh: Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories, Utopias of the Third Kind
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain: Sultana's Dream (and Chitra Ganesh's artwork inspired by it)
Ursula Le Guin: Always Coming Home (and Hainish things like The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness)
Octavia Butler: Lilith's Brood (Xenogenesis) trilogy, Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents
Kim Stanley Robinson: The Ministry for the Future, the Mars trilogy, New York 2140
Plus
Sunil Amrith: The Burning Earth (and related ideas from, to name just a few, Amitav Ghosh in The Nutmeg's Curse, Olufemi Taiwo on reimagining reparations, Françoise Verges on racial capitalism...). See also Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 by M.E. O'Brien and Eman Abdelhadi, Pluriverse: A Post-Development Dictionary by Ashish Kothari et. al., kalpavriksh.org, vikalpsangam.org, globaltapestryofalternatives.org, thischangeseverything.org, Ayana Elizabeth Johnson's What If We Get It Right? (www.getitright.earth)
DISCUSSION RESPONSES FROM OUR FIRST ROUND! (Deep thanks to all participants!)
Q: Given the state of the world, and our finite resources and time…does our future lie here on earth or journeying out in space?
A(s):
–Here!
–Leave!
–Why not both?
–hopeless either way (stay or go)
–no idea
–I think in the short term, right here is where we must start
–I really did find myself thinking about how much I want us to make things better here on Earth instead of trying to leave
–why does futurism always involve space? what about the future right here
–stay here and fix it
Q: If we do journey out, what would prevent us from continuing the same (colonial, extractive) patterns as the last 500 years?
A(s):
–intention matters:
learning, research, science, fact finding; not extraction, taking, conquest
–spiritual quest vs. greed
–reframing of extractive logics of space travel
–exploration with curiosity, respect, less exploitation
[btw this fits with our Octavia text]
Q: If we do stay here, well then…we often place our imagined other worlds on other planets, but what if we imagined those other worlds here on earth?
“What if things were not as they are?” If they weren’t, what would you change? What kind of values would you want to base a society on? What kind of social forms, structures, organization etc would be based on those values? What would that look like?
A(s):
–no us vs. them
–no borders between people
–sustainability
–no scarcity > no war
–no wars
–no billionaires
–no patriarchy/racism
–no bigotry is needed for true utopia
–compassion
–compassion
–compassion
–compassion
–empathy
–kindness
–kindness
–truth
–working together
–community
–curiosity
–curiosity
–discovery
–balance
–not waiting to be the change> the courage to step out
–not waiting for someone else to do it…do it!
–sharing [our? as?] strength
–compassionate anarchism
–syndicalism
–not capitalism
–true democracy
–mutual aid
–shared resources
–socialized medicine
–whole is more than the sum of the parts (Buckminster Fuller)
–public libraries
–public spaces and public goods of all kinds
–pay nurses and teachers better
–nuclear disarmament
–everyone would be so well supported and have resources they need so there would be no need for prisons
–maybe a community kitchen,
cook together,
talk through dance and food
–daily dance break!
–”you already showed it” (e.g. in dance break, Sultana’s dream tour, et al)
–42 (duh)
Q: If we built a different kind of society, then what might be different about the way we would go out into space?
A(s):
–realize better the value of our own resources here and then carry the same ideals outward, if we first respect here then we can respect elsewhere
–nothing we can do out there worse than what we’ve already done here
we need to learn here first
[what would change our behavior to do it differently?]
–defamiliarize our own experiences [critically question the status quo, not taking for granted what is because that’s the way it is]
–a more universal mindset to leave things better than when you found them
–comprehensive solidarity where we are, with all entities, including between ourselves and nature