Hannah Arendt
Special IHRAF Festival
Celebrating the life and ideas of Hannah Arendt
(1906-1975)
June 5-7, 2026
The 30th Street Theater
259 West 30th Street
(btw 7th and 8th Avenues)
New York, NY 10001
Tickets Available HERE
Ticket sales open April 15.
Hannah Arendt by Tom Block
Friday, June 5, 7:00 pm
Tickets Available HERE (coming April 15)
The banality of being a balloon by Emmanuelle Zagoria (Music/Performance)
Flaco by Dakota Silvey (Theater)
Free to Change the World by MJM Dance (Dance)
Cultured by HyoJeong Choi & Ashley Olive Teague (Theater)
“Cultured” is a satirical horror play about the price of human dignity. Following an epidemic that killed most livestock, lab-grown meat has replaced the traditional food chain. When people start experiencing bizarre side effects, we are led to ask questions about what we agree to sell, what we agree to eat, and how we trade in literal flesh and blood to survive in a culture where everything is a commodity.
Olive Teague is the Artistic Director of Notch Theatre Company (www.notchtheatre.org) and winner of the Embark Award for Social Innovation in Entrepreneurship. HyoJeong Choi is an English-Korean bilingual writer for stage and screen based in NYC (hyojeongchoi.com).
When Olive and Hyo embarked on this project, our interests lay at the intersection of horror and hyperreality as tools for laying bare the human atrocities of our time. Hyperreality strives to blur the boundary between reality and simulation, between truth and fabricated content, between the natural world and the man-made. The play explores our human and animal nature and what it means to participate in a “civil and cultured” society.
Get Home Safe by Poppy Louise Miller (Dance)
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.
Saturday, June 6, 7:00 pm
Liberty, Justice, Truth: A Song + Story Cycle by Rashmi Singh (Music/Narrative Performance)
Hysterical Women by Contremune Dance (Dance)
I Need A New... by Meghan Duffy @mac.com (Theater)
The Supremes by Shailly Agnihotri (Musical Theater)
On Thinking by Cecilia Whalen (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.
Sunday, June 7, 3:00 pm
Hannah Arendt: a Cantastoria by Redwing Blackbird (Puppets)
This Together by Rebecca Lloyd-Jones (Dance)
“This together” explores how to be present together -truly present- despite the knowledge of impermanence and impending doom. What do we choose to do with the awareness that the world is sinking, that we are not permanent, and that nothing is?
Rebecca Lloyd-Jones (She/her) is a NY based dancer and choreographer who creates live performances using movement, voices, and videos.
The piece I want to present is about choices we make, and is related to the theme of Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt. As Arendt asserts, “great evils can be perpetrated not by fanatics or monsters, but by ordinary people who are thoughtless and complacent, simply following orders and conforming to the systems they are part of. The concept suggests that evil can be a result of a failure to think critically and empathize with others, allowing injustice to become a matter of routine, bureaucratic procedure” In the face of impending doom and the current state of the world (war, collapse of democracy, climate crisis, and impermanence/death) we must be present and not be half asleep to this moment, and be conscious of the choices we each make in life.
Living The Dream by Dylan Horowitz (Theater)
Small Things That Go Boom! by Marcus Harmon (Theater)
The Sky is Green and The Grass is Blue by DoubleTake Dance Company (Dance)
Sections 2, 3 and 4 of a contemporary dance work based on the concept of Willful Ignorance. Willful Ignorance is often used in psychology as well as criminal law, to address those who lack the information or facts because they refuse to acknowledge them. It's useful and safe to avoid resolving an issue by convincing oneself about their inexistence. This is a technical and athletic piece that explores soft, peaceful and organic movements, against, and in conjunction with fast and sharper ones, showcasing the contradiction in one's mind.
Ashley Carter and Vanessa Martínez de Baños are co-directors and choreographers of DoubleTake Dance; a NYC-based contemporary company in its 16th year. Vanessa Martínez de Baños (co-director, co-choreographer), Jenna McNeill (dancer), Pear Spanna (dancer), Maggie Fischer (dancer), Madison Meredith (dancer), Paige Finley (dancer).
Hannah Arendt has ideas about truth as well as truth in politics. The willful ignoring of truth as well as it's involvement with the approach to politics is well aligned with our work in this piece. She also talks about concepts surrounding human nature, which factor greatly into the narrative.
The International Human Rights Art Movement was thrilled to receive a National Endowment of the Arts grant to produce work around the American hero Hannah Arendt (as designated by Donald Trump, Executive Order 13978, January 18, 2021). She was chosen as one of 244 heroes from American history to be so honored.
Specifically, we are looking for performance work along the following themes, which defined some of her most important ideas. You may agree, disagree or opine as you like - it is about the conversation!
Banality of Evil: Arendt asserts that great evils can be perpetrated not by fanatics or monsters, but by ordinary people who are thoughtless and complacent, simply following orders and conforming to the systems they are part of. The concept suggests that evil can be a result of a failure to think critically and empathize with others, allowing injustice to become a matter of routine, bureaucratic procedure. “The transformation of the family man from a responsible member of society, to a ‘bourgeois’ concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon. The exigencies of our time can at any moment transform him into the mob man and make him the instrument of whatsoever madness and horror.”
Refugees: “The calamity of the right-less [refugee] is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion—formulas which were designed to solve problems within given communities—but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them.”
Human Rights: “The Rights of Man had been defined as ‘inalienable’ because they are supposed to be independent of all governments; but it turns out that the moment human beings lack their own government and have to fall back on their minimum rights, no authority is left to protect them and no institution is willing to guarantee them.”
Totalitarianism: “Masses are attracted by every effort which seems to promise a man-made fabrication of the Paradise they had longed for and of the Hell they had feared. The stability of the totalitarian regime depends on the isolation of this fictitious world of the movement from the outside world.”
Truth: “Factual truth, ignores it happens to oppose a given group’s profit or pleasure, is greeted today with greater hostility than ever before . . . Throughout history, the truth-seekers and truth-tellers have been aware of the risks of their business: as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of their life.”
Truth and Politics: “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues . . . Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys a rather precarious status in the eyes of governments that rest on consent and abhor coercion.”
Free Will: “When there is no possibility of resistance, there exists the possibility of doing nothing . . . It is this possibility of non-participation that is decisive if we begin to judge, not the system, but the individual.”
Human Nature: “Human's 'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to [a person] the possibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a human . . . It is quite conceivable, and even within the realm of practical political possibilities, that one fine day a highly organized and mechanized humanity will conclude quite democratically—namely by majority decision—that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof.”
Discrimination/Segregation: Arendt had controversial ideas around the discrimination and segregation that she saw in the United States. While she was passionate in her belief that the political and private spheres should remain fiercely egalitarian - from the right to marry who you like to the right to sit where you want and have access to all public spheres - she was against forced school desegregation, as well as for the right of private clubs to exclude “others” from their midst (all-Jewish dining clubs; all Christian country clubs, all-Black book clubs etc.). “Discrimination is as indispensable a social right as equality is a political right. The question is not how to abolish discrimination, but how to keep it confined within the social sphere, where it is legitimate, and prevent its trespassing on the political and personal sphere, where it is destructive.” To learn more about her ideas on discrimination and segregation, please visit THIS PAGE.
Biography: Hannah Arendt was born into a German-Jewish family, was forced to leave Germany in 1933, and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organizations. In 1941 she immigrated to the United States and soon became part of a lively intellectual circle in New York. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. More biographical information HERE.
