Global Arts Festival Taking Shape Inside Gowanus Power Station

New York Times

25-06-2025

A new arts festival, featuring performance art from Brazil, an interactive installation from New Zealand, and a party presented by a Beyoncé dance captain, will be staged this fall inside a onetime power station along Brooklyn's industrial Gowanus Canal.
The three-month series, called Powerhouse: International and scheduled to run Sept. 25 to Dec. 13, is being curated by David Binder, a longtime performing arts producer and former artistic director of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It will take place at Powerhouse Arts, a hulking structure that since 2023 has housed fabrication studios for artists from a variety of disciplines.
The festival will be the building's first series of performing arts events, and will feature acclaimed artists like William Kentridge, from South Africa, who is presenting his multidisciplinary opera-theater work 'Sibyl'; Christos Papadopoulos, from Greece, whose prizewinning dance piece 'Larsen C' is about a melting ice shelf; and Carolina Bianchi, from Brazil, who will perform her 'Cadela Força Trilogy,' a stage work about sexual violence, with her collective Cara de Cavalo.
'We're in this moment when there are so many barriers — cultural, physical, ideological — and this festival aims to break down those barriers,' Binder said in an interview. 'What really interests me is the convergence of artists from different countries and different disciplines.'
To keep the events accessible, the festival is making at least 10,000 tickets — just over half of the expected total — available for $30 each. At most configurations, the venue will have about 800 seats.
Binder said he was motivated in part by a change in the types of work being presented in New York City in recent years. 'There's obviously a lot less international work in the city, a lot less art, a lot less new plays, a lot less music and dance,' he said. 'I'm hoping we're adding to the conversation.'
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