National Sawdust Announces Fifth Season: “Take Root”

National Sawdust, the hot-on-the-rise performing arts institution in Williamsburg, announced its landmark fifth anniversary, “Take Root.” This season will be focused on celebrating the artistic process, from incubation to dissemination, while honoring the local and global artistic community that National Sawdust serves.

An artistic home for creatives and an incubator of vital new works, National Sawdust has practiced a devotion to representation of voices. In its fifth season, National Sawdust deepens its ties to its community and digs into its roots with the Artists-In-Residence program, which takes artists’ work from incubation to dissemination. This season’s class of residents are Lucy Dhegrae, Ash Koosha, Against The Grain Theatre, Kinds of Kings, Mwenso & The Shakes, and Sonic.

For its fifth season, National Sawdust is dedicating a week to each of its diverse National Sawdust Curators to better ensure that the organization’s curatorial model provides an invaluable platform for the artists selected and guided by the curators to advance their careers through performances on National Sawdust’s stage. This season’s curators are Black Thought (Tariq Trotter) and Ted Hearne.

“Take Root” also sees the public debut of National Sawdust’s partnership with Juilliard: the BluePrint Fellowship Program, a dual-track career, project mentoring, and commissioning course designed to leverage the extensive project development and presenting experience of the National Sawdust team and guest women and female-identifying mentors to help bridge the fellows’ training and bring their interdisciplinary projects to completion at National Sawdust. Guest composers for this first round, spearheaded by Prestini, include Prestini, Claire Chase, Reena Esmail, Nathalie Joachim, Alex Temple, and Laura Kaminsky. 

Also, National Sawdust continues to stretch the boundaries of creative possibility through the launch of a long-term sound partnership with legendary Berkeley company Meyer Sound. With the installation of Meyer Sound’s Constellation® acoustic system as well as its immersive component Spacemap®, National Sawdust builds upon its already stellar reputation as a place for bold experimentation and creativity. Spacemap’s sophisticated, multi-channel panning system provides artists an extraordinary amount of freedom to explore and play with three-dimensional spatial sound, while Constellation offers an almost unlimited palette of acoustic possibilities with the press of a button.