Saturday, June 6, 3:00 pm

Discussion (FREE) Please reserve your spot HERE.

The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College presents a discussion with artists and scholars about how Arendtian ideas influenced their work. Moderated by Thomas Bartscherer (Peter Sourian Senior Lecturer in the Humanities at Bard College) and featuring Jenny Lyn Bader (playwright) and three IHRAF artists: Emmanuelle Zagoria (The banality of being a balloon), Shailly Agnihotri (The Supremes) and Dylan Horowitz (Living The Dream).
Thomas Bartscherer (Workshop Leader) holds PhD and MA degrees from the University of Chicago and a BA (summa cum laude) from the University of Pennsylvania. He has held fellowships at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, the University of Heidelberg, and the Center for Advanced Film Studies at the Freie Universität in Berlin. He is a Senior Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities. His writing for performance has been presented at numerous venues, including LA Phil’s Disney Hall, the Baryshnikov Arts Center, the Prototype Festival, the Kaatsbaan Festival, and the First Take Opera Workshop. Roger Berkowitz (Introduction) is an American scholar and professor whose work focuses on politics, philosophy, and law. He is recognized as a leading scholar on the political thinking of Hannah Arendt. In 2006, he founded the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, where he is a Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights. Jenny Lyn Bader (Playwright)'s plays include Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library (Luna Stage), Equally Divine (Theatre at the 14th St. Y), In Flight (Turn to Flesh Productions), and None of the Above (New Georges). A Harvard graduate, she has received the “Best Documentary One-Woman Show” Award (United Solo Fest); Athena Playwriting Fellowship; and the O’Neill Center’s Edith Oliver Award for a playwright who has, in the spirit of the late New Yorker critic, “a caustic wit that deflates the ego but does not unduly damage the human spirit.” Her work has been published by Dramatists Play Service, Smith + Kraus, Applause, Vintage, W.W. Norton, The Lincoln Center Theater Review, Plays International + Europe, and The New York Times, where she served as a frequent contributor to the "Week in Review.”

Saturday, June 6, 7:00 pm

Tickets Available HERE

Songs Against Silence by Rashmi Singh (Music/Narrative Performance)
Songs Against Silence is a new live performance weaving original songs with spoken narrative, placing Hannah Arendt’s ideas in direct conversation with our current political and cultural moment. Through music and storytelling, the piece explores moral responsibility, truth-telling, and the dangers of unexamined participation in unjust systems.
Rashmi (she/her), a Baldwin Fellow of the Arts, Queens Council on the Arts Awardee, and FilmNation × WGAE Fellow is an actor, singer-songwriter, and screenwriter whose work interrogates power, justice, and institutional systems.
My work, Songs Against Silence: Song + Story Cycle, engages directly with Hannah Arendt’s ideas about moral responsibility, truth, and the way systems normalize participation in injustice. Through original songs and narrative performance, I examine how harm is often sustained not by singular “monsters,” but through everyday compliance, silence, and unexamined social roles. Songs like Smile And Look Pretty, Don't Tell Me, and Blame Eve reflect Arendt’s concern with how institutional and cultural structures shape behavior and obscure accountability. The piece also reflects her belief that truth requires a public space to be spoken and witnessed, using performance as a form of reclaiming that space.

Hysterical Women by Contremune Dance (Dance)
Hysterical Women is a physically charged piece that interrogates the invisible architectures shaping women’s lives: labor, care, containment, and control. Through constraint-based choreography, spoken text, and shifting relational dynamics, three performers navigate systems that tether, direct, and fragment the body over time. At once intimate and political, the work traces how pressure accumulates, how agency is negotiated, and how the body resists, adapts, and remembers.
Kimberly Prosa is a New York-based choreographer, dancer, educator, and researcher working at the intersection of choreography, social inquiry, and embodied practice. Her work explores how movement can function as both artistic expression and research methodology, engaging questions of labor, identity, well-being, and the social conditions that shape lived experience. Moira Lo Bianco is a composer, pianist, and sound practitioner whose work explores the intersection of music, embodiment, and human experience. Deeply engaged in the therapeutic and educational dimensions of sound, she brings a holistic perspective to her work, approaching sound as a tool for connection, regulation, and expression. Seneca Lawrence is a performing artist based in New York City. She received her BFA in Dance Performance from SUNY Purchase and is currently a company dancer with HT Chen & Dancers and The Painted Ladies. Seneca is also an actor, singer, comedy improviser, and certified Pilates instructor. Kelly Guerrero is a dancer, choreographer, and arts administrator who received her BFA in Dance from Montclair State University. Currently, she serves as the Managing Director of Dance New Jersey, dances with The Moving Architects and H.T. Chen & Dancers, and is an artist-in-residence with ARTS By The People. Robyn Ayers is a movement artist and arts administrator living on occupied Lenape land (NYC). They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Fordham University & The Ailey School, which they obtained summa cum laude with majors in dance and philosophy. Robyn moves through the worlds of formal stage production, site-specific installation, and film; currently dancing under Katherine Maxwell at Hivewild.
Rooted in Hannah Arendt’s writing on labor, action, and the conditions of human life, Hysterical Women explores how women’s bodies are bound within cycles of repetition, care, and necessity. Arendt’s concern with the loss of agency within systems of survival resonates through the work’s physical constraints and accumulations. The dance moves between compliance and resistance, asking where action,true, self-directed movement, becomes possible. In this way, the piece considers how the body might reclaim space for autonomy within structures that limit it.

I Need A New... by Meghan Duffy (Theater)
I Need A New... invites the audience to commit the dangerous act of thinking by considering the ways in which individuals have their humanness extracted from them all in the name of the greater good. This play deals with eugenics and lack of informed consent sterilization in the prison system.
Meghan Duffy, PhD (Playwright/Director) is a theatre artist whose work primarily focuses on the challenges women of all ages encounter. (she/her). Bill Tatum (Man) As an award winning journeyman actor Bill has performed from Maine to Florida and points west in roles that vary from Jessie James to George and Martha with a good deal of shameless commercialization mixed in. he/him. Wendy Ann Powell is a New York–based performer and educator who weaves Black generational memory and diasporic movement into a healing practice inspired by her lived experience with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. (She/Her). Benjamin Sevilla (Production Assistant) produces theater as an actor and playwright in New York, with a background in musical theatre.
Hannah Arendt advocated for the right to have rights. The women who were sterilized while in California State prisons were denied their right to have the right to bodily autonomy by an institution that held that they really did not have that right. The authorities - the State and its agents - that should have protected the “inalienable” rights of the female inmates chose to de-sex them either through coercion or lack of informed consent. Without knowledge, with coercive tactics, the truth loses its power. Worse yet, “Truth” could cease to exist.

The Supremes by 88 Wash Productions (Musical Theater)
"The Supremes" is a participatory musical that examines America's constitutional crisis through the stories of Supreme Court justices, a public defender, and a detained defendant, inviting audiences into collective action through Latin, blues, and gospel musical traditions. Offering a vision of democratic engagement that becomes possible when people gather to reclaim our power as we the people.
Trigger Warnings: Contains themes of immigrant detention, government surveillance, systemic oppression, and direct audience confrontation about complicity in institutional injustice.
Shailly Agnihotri (she/her) is a playwright and lyricist driven by a yearning to examine the crisis of our democracy through the transformative power of participatory theater, creating "The Supremes" as an artistic call to civic engagement. James Bally (he/him) is a Brooklyn-based jazz pianist, composer, and multi-instrumentalist who brings sophisticated musical arrangements spanning Latin, blues, stride piano, and gospel traditions to create the authentic American soundscape of "The Supremes.” Neva Cockrel is the director of Loom Ensemble, performed with Pilobolus, and is the founder of WildHeart: Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice. Jen Anaya is a theater maker, instrumentalist, singer, teacher, reiki practitioner, doula and baby whisperer dedicated to the healing of the collective and the ushering of us all into the next world. Nikita Patel (she/her) is a movement artist, somatics-informed choreographer, and producer crafting dynamic experiences through embodied practice Raphael Sacks (they/them) is an singer, dancer and theatermaker born in NYC -- co-founder of Loom Ensemble, and WildHeart: Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice. Miraya Burka (she/her) is a New York-based actress, writer, & producer and graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts, and is passionate about telling diverse stories and amplifying women’s voices.
"The Supremes" directly embodies Hannah Arendt's analysis of how democracy dies and can be reborn through collective human action. The piece demonstrates Arendt's concept of "the banality of evil" through the Bailiff's gradual transformation from ordinary bureaucrat to authoritarian enforcer, showing how institutional violence emerges through normal procedures rather than dramatic evil. Jones's confrontation with audiences about their complicity reflects Arendt's insight from Eichmann in Jerusalem that systematic oppression succeeds through widespread passive participation by ordinary people. The work's progression from surveillance to detention illustrates Arendt's analysis of how bureaucratic control creates rightlessness, while the participatory finale enacts her solution: that democracy is renewed through collective engagement in public space. By transforming audience members from witnesses of institutional breakdown into active participants in "We The People," the piece literally practices what Arendt called essential to human rights protection—people acting together to defend both individual dignity and democratic institutions.

On Thinking by Cecilia Whalen Dance (Dance)
Cecilia Whalen is an NYC-based dancer, choreographer, and writer making contemporary choreography that explores a wide range of subject matter adapted to a wide variety of spaces. Priscilla Vasquez is an NYC-based dancer and educator originally from Arizona. Rebecca Pelleri is an NYC-based dancer and educator originally from Italy. Ghislaine van den Heuvel is an NYC-based dancer and educator originally from the Netherlands.
"On Thinking" explores Hannah Arendt's theories of thought and thoughtlessness. Arendt was convinced that evil was not only banal in the 20th century, but it was thoughtless. Where thought, for Arendt, is creative and ultimately leads to compassion and friendship, thoughtlessness is destructive and ultimately leads to violence. Thought - particularly through the faculty of imagination - enables us to transcend time: memory and promises, results of imaginative reflections, connect us to the past and to the future within the present moment. Thoughtlessness, on the other hand, which deceptively takes the form of memory and promise through nostalgia and delusion, destroys any possibility of transcendence, instead trapping us in a single time - whether it be the past, the present, or some fantasy of the future. "On Thinking" translates some of these ideas into movement, using repetition, relationships, and spatial configurations to explore Arendt's ever relevant ideas on thought and thoughtlessness.