What's On View

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Smerz is the Norwegian duo of Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg, based in Oslo and Copenhagen. Their latest album, Big city life, comes to life on stage with one finger piano riffs, strings presets, drums and voices, telling stories lived and imagined. 

Using collages to capture moments of everyday life and dreams, Smerz tell stories of love, apathy, solitude and friendship. The pair operates at the intersection of genres, drawing inspiration from compositional techniques in classical music, the experimentation of computer music and the immediacy of pop music, all in the palettes of girly existentialism.  

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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, multi-instrumentalist and singer David Baldwin, and conductor Alan Pierson. The show will be lit and designed by Tuçe Yasak.

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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

TRIBE’s mission is to cultivate a space of discovery and a platform for artists—specifically artists of color—with huge inspiration from the Afrofuturism movement. This movement states that we have a responsibility through our work to tell new stories and create a brighter future that is different and shines more luminously than our past.

TRIBE (TRI314 Multidisciplinary Visual Performance) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary arts collective founded by MacArthur “Genius Grant”  Fellow Shamel Pitts in December 2019. The collective is composed of international and local artists working across mediums such as movement, choreography, digital storytelling, lighting design, video mapping projection, poetry, spoken word, cinematography, scenography, dramaturgy, costume styling, and music composition.

itsatribe.org | @itsatribe

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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

Official Hotel Sponsor of ICA Performance Season

Logo for Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. The design features a stylized letter R within a circle above the hotel name in bold, elegant text on a white background,

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

asses.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. View the access guide.

This performance is approximately 7 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

Patrick Blenkarn and Milton Lim are conceptual artists exploring urgent questions around the social value of art, digital labor, and the political potential of games. Mixing their backgrounds in performance, philosophy, psychology, and digital media, their collaborations have manifested in video games, participatory installations, digital archives, and card games. Patrick and Milton are the co-founders of the Canadian national video archive of performance and the co-creators behind a performing arts economy trading card game. Their projects have been presented across Canada, in Argentina, Mexico, Europe, and the UK, in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Catalan.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

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.

Opening set by Colle. Colle is the solo project of Maya McGrory (of Chanel Beads) that blends modern anxiety with nostalgic, ethereal soundscapes influenced by trip-hop and early 4AD. Her 2024 debut album, Montalvo, explores painterly textures and the bittersweet tension between childhood innocence and personal growth.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Official Hotel Sponsor of ICA Performance Season

Logo for Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. The design features a stylized letter R within a circle above the hotel name in bold, elegant text on a white background,

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

Since its founding in Boston in 2007, Lorelei Ensemble has been recognized across the globe for creating and championing bold new music that elevates and amplifies women’s voices. Led by founder and artistic director Beth Willer, Lorelei delivers culturally relevant and artistically audacious programs that stretch and challenge the expectations of artists and audiences alike. Lorelei Ensemble is creating a living repertoire for a living audience, partnering with today’s leading composers to commission more than seventy new works that transform the sounds, words, and stories that define vocal ensemble music. Lorelei Ensemble maintains a robust national touring schedule, including collaborations with the Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Cincinnati, National, and Nashville symphonies, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, A Far Cry, and Cantus, and performances at celebrated venues across the country, including Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tanglewood Music Center, and Boston’s Symphony Hall. Committed to education, Lorelei is empowering young artists to be our next creative leaders through its work with rising performers and composers at children’s choirs, high schools, and colleges and universities across the country.

Accessibility

  • Accessible and companion seating can be selected when purchasing tickets online, or at the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact the Box Office at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Official Hotel Sponsor of ICA Performance Season

Logo for Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. The design features a stylized letter R within a circle above the hotel name in bold, elegant text on a white background,

“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.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

Please note: this performance includes strobe lights.

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.

NEFA logo

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 vocal artist Charmaine Lee and electronic musician Mas Ysa, and media design by Jesse Stiles, seven extraordinary dancers 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

Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves building collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance company. Since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works including site-responsive installations in public spaces, dances for film, and performances in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout, they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aesthetics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists, and cultural institutions.

Accessibility

  • Accessible seating is available first-come first-served and may be selected upon theater entry. Please contact our Visitor Services team at visitorservices@icaboston.org or 617-478-3100 for more information.
  • Assistive listening devices are available for all theater programs at the theater entrance.
  • A link to live captioning will be shared by the day of the event and will be available in the theater.
  • ASL interpretation is available by advance request; please contact our Visitors Services team at 617-478-3100 or visitorservices@icaboston.org to make a request.

Are there other access accommodations that would be useful to help you fully participate in this program? Let us know at accessibility@icaboston.org or learn more about Accessibility at the ICA at icaboston.org/accessibility.

The presentation of Open Machine was made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Foundation and the Mellon Foundation.

The logo features the acronym nefa in bold, black, stylized lowercase letters, with NEW ENGLAND FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS in uppercase text below,

Production support provided by Audio Spectrum

Official Hotel Sponsor of ICA Performance Season

Logo for Renaissance Boston Waterfront Hotel. The design features a stylized letter R within a circle above the hotel name in bold, elegant text on a white background,