Tickets are available November 12 for ICA members and November 19 for nonmembers.

Multi-disciplinary artist Emily Wells will create an evocative one-night experience merging pop, chamber music, and visual art in a live performance of Regards to the End, her 2022 album. This performance will be the fullest live realization to date of the ambitious set of 10 works presented as expanded cinema with 12-piece orchestration. Regards to the End is informed by the lives and work of American choreographers and visual artists, particularly those with ties to the AIDS crisis working in the 1980s and 1990s (Kiki Smith, Bill T. Jones, Arnie Zane, David Wojnarowicz, Alvin Baltrop, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jenny Holzer, Nayland Blake). Centrally, the work is built from the question, “What can artists working at the beginning of the AIDS crisis teach us about how to be artists, people, living and working during climate catastrophe?” The answers often point to a simple truth: we need each other.

This evening will feature Wells, Boston Symphony Orchestra musicians, and Emily’s video work, which utilizes archival footage of early AIDS activism in America, clips of modern and contemporary dance, and captured moments of extreme climate events. She will also be joined on stage by drummer and composer Ian Chang and multi-instrumentalist and singer David Baldwin. The show will be lit and designed by Tuçe Yasak.

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Boston Symphony Orchestra logo featuring stylized text and a circular graphic resembling a musical instrument, possibly a horn, on the left side.

Jazz Urbane Cafe returns to the ICA with a thrilling evening of music featuring some of Boston’s best and most beloved musicians. The enormously gifted pianist Estefanía Núñez Villamandos will open the concert with a solo piano set of music inspired and influenced by her Cuban heritage. Bassist Ron Reid will take center stage with his Liberty Quintet to perform alongside sax legend Stanley Strickland. The Greg Groover Jr. Quartet will close out the evening with music to elevate and nourish the soul.

Celebrate the soon-to-open home of Jazz Urbane Cafe in Nubian Square and hear a preview of what’s to come at the ICA.

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Jazz Urbane Cafe logo

[Project Creatine] is a theatrical memoir written for the unique talents of operatic tenor and drag performer Jordan Weatherson Pitts/Creatine Price. Combining opera and drag, this performance goes beyond the limitations of either genre, offering a story of perseverance and radical self-definition in an age when many are legally forbidden to exist as they are. [Project Creatine] (working title) makes profoundly audible one person’s struggle to actualize a reality without fear or doubt that they are worthy of life.

Conceived and performed by Jordan Weatherston Pitts (aka Creatine Price)

Music by Samuel Beebe

Libretto by Lex Brown and Jordan Weatherston Pitts

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A work of magical realism narrated by and featuring the viewpoints of six women, Marks of RED continues award-winning choreographer Shamel Pitts’s research exploring Black embodiment, aliveness, and human connection. Marks of RED is an Afrofuturistic meditation on the “womb space,” divining the effect that memory has on our experiences, senses, bodies, reality, and imaginative possibilities.

This multidisciplinary work includes scenic designs by Mimi Lien, projection lights by Lucca Del Carlo, and production by TRIBE arts collective. Marks of RED explores the nuanced multiplicity and deep complexity of self-expression and the perceived spaces for regeneration, enfoldment, implosion, rupture, and potential.

About TRIBE

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Support for Marks of RED is provided, in part, by The David Henry Fund for Performance.

Part video game, part political satire, asses.masses is an epic theatrical experience where the audience takes control. Created by Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim, this wild, witty, immersive performance follows a herd of donkeys trying to get their jobs back after automation has made them obsolete. Can they succeed? That’s up to you. Combining live performance and old-school video game aesthetics, asses.masses unfolds over eight hours in a communal gaming experience designed to be played from beginning to end by a live audience, one person at a time, complete with food and drink. Cheeky, political, and best described as Animal Farm meets Pokemon meets Final Fantasy, asses.masses puts the control(ler) in the audience’s hands and asks them to discover the space between the work that defines us and the play that frees us.

Production Details

Production Detailsasses.masses includes flashing lights, audience participation, violence, crude language, sexual scenarios, and references to drug use, suicide, and police brutality. We recommend it for audience members ages 14 and up. This is not a performance that is suitable for young audiences.

Participation and active spectatorship are a central parts of asses.masses. Join our Herd in any way you can.

This performance is approximately seven hours and 30 minutes with four intermissions.

The duration of the show varies depending on how the audience engages with the game and the choices they make. To get the most out of the experience, we strongly encourage you to stay for the entire performance, from start to finish.

Food will be served throughout the experience, offered during each intermission. Drinks will be available for purchase. Intermissions occur every two episodes, approximately every 90 minutes

About the artists

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Created with support from Shadbolt Centre for the Arts, The Theatre Centre, VIVO Media Arts, Embassy of Canada to Argentina and Paraguay. Developed with the funding support from Creative BC and the British Columbia Arts Council and Canada Council for the Arts.

Produced in association with the National Arts Centre of Canada’s National Creation Fund.

Experience Maria Somerville’s singularly lush dream pop in a one-night-only performance. Inspired by the landscape of her youth—the wild, mountainous terrain of Galway’s rural west coast—Somerville has developed a spellbinding sound world of gusting ambient electronics, ethereal guitar strums, sparse percussion, and hushed lyrical vignettes. Luster, her 2025 landmark album for the independent label 4AD, was named “Best New Music” by Pitchfork and heralded as an “Irish dream pop masterpiece” by Fader Magazine. Somerville is also known for her beloved Early Bird Show on NTS Radio, where her dawn chorus selections range from blissful ambient and shoegaze to traditional Irish folk songs.

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Heralded for their “white-hot intensity” (The New York Times) and “stunning precision of harmony, intonation, and . . . spectacular virtuosity” (Gramophone Magazine), the Grammy-nominated Lorelei Ensemble performs LOOK UP, a concert of music inspired by the sea and sky. 

The program features Christopher Cerrone’s Beaufort Scales, a new 36-minute oratorio for eight voices and live electronics commissioned by Lorelei Ensemble, that draws inspiration from various iterations of the Beaufort Wind Force Scale created by Sir Francis Beaufort in 1805, along with texts from Melville, Fitzgerald, and Anne Carson. Composer Christopher Cerrone explains, “The piece tries to posit—through both historical sources and technological intervention—what increasingly tempestuous weather is doing to our lives.”

The concert also features Meredith Monk’s “Other Worlds Revealed” and “Earth Seen from Above,” from Atlas, Molly Herron’s “Stellar Atmospheres,” and Elijah Daniel Smith’s “Suspended in Spin” (Lorelei commission). 

“The idea of LOOK UP is about looking up to the sky and seeing we are one entity in this expansive universe, but also looking up and seeing what is happening on the planet right here,” says Artistic Director Beth Willer.

About Lorelei Ensemble

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“A tour-de-force” —The New York Times

“What is life? Is it the thing that happens between birth and when you die?” These questions animate Leslie Cuyjet’s wickedly funny and deeply moving For All Your Life, a performance and social experiment that investigates the value of Black life and death. Encapsulating numerous characters through film and live performance, Cuyjet explores and satirizes the labyrinthine world of the life insurance business, its darker links to the transatlantic slave trade, and how monetary value is affixed to human life. Are you prepared for what comes next? For All Your Life may have the answers.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Leslie Cuyjet is a performer and choreographer who aims to conjure life-long questions of identity; confuse and disrupt traditional narratives; and demonstrate the angsty, explosive, sensitive, pioneering excellence of the Black woman. Hailed as “a potent choreographic force” by The New York Times, Cuyjet is a 2025 Guggenheim Fellow and received New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards in 2019 and 2022.

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Leslie Cuyjet: For All Your Life is funded in part by the New England States Touring program of the New England Foundation for the arts, made possible with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Regional Touring Program and the six New England state arts agencies.

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Choreographers Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener return to the ICA with their newest experiment, Open Machine. Exploring the relationship between human and machine intelligence, Mitchell and Riener enact a constantly shifting, multi-sensory performance that blurs the boundaries between public and private perceptions. Featuring a sweeping sound score by electronic musician Mas Ysa, the duo is joined by five other dancers who erupt in a dynamic choreography for the stage that reimagines live gathering, decision-making, and our influence on a technologically mediated and rapidly changing world. 

About Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener

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Filmmaker and visual artist Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) curates a selection of short films by Native North American contemporary artists relating to the themes of An Indigenous Present, including abstraction, transculturalism, and Indigenous creative practice. Runtime: 48 minutes.

“These are fleeting works, grounded in the land and in the ways these artists move through it. Through footsteps and memory, through the sounds of voices both present and past, through family and friendship, their gestures trace a continuity between what has been and what is yet to come. The impressions they leave recall the depressions of paths once walked in another life, now retraced toward another future. Each work is a site of remembrance and becoming—one that acknowledges how the act of moving through a place is also an act of shaping it. Together, these films carve their own marks on the landscape, blurring the boundaries of when and where they belong, and revealing the porous line between presence and absence, between what endures and what drifts away.”

—Sky Hopinka

Program

About the Curator

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An Indigenous Present is organized by Jeffrey Gibson and Jenelle Porter, guest curators, with Erika Umali, Curator of Collections, and Max Gruber, Curatorial Assistant.

This exhibition is supported in part by Mathieu O. Gaulin, the Leonard and Ruth Horwich Family Foundation, Peggy J. Koenig, Kim Sinatra, the Fotene Demoulas Fund for Curatorial Research and Publications, and an anonymous donor.

With warmest thanks, we gratefully acknowledge the generosity of the ICA’s Avant Guardian Society in making this exhibition possible.