Onassis USA, an affiliate of the Onassis Foundation, has commissioned a number of artists around the U.S. and the world to create new work (from home) as part of its new ENTER project. Theatre artists invited to take part in the global initiative include 600 Highwaymen, Isabella Rossellini, MacArthur Fellow Annie Dorsen, and Radiohole, among many others.
Developed from the artists’ homes in 120 hours or less, the ENTER pieces will draw on different experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic and its many transformations of life as we know it. The series of original works launches April 24 and can be viewed for free on the Foundation’s YouTube channel and at Onassis.org/enter.
Among the first works to be freely available will be 600 Highwaymen’s short narrative film Fighting World; Maria Antelman’s video work AntiBody; married duo Kimberly Bartosik and Roderick Murray’ The Game, created with their daughter Dahlia Bartosik-Murray; Radiohole’s Happy Hours, a new work from playwright and screenwriter Efthimis Filippou; and Dorsen’s Training Text, Step 2250, a short cartoon featuring a text generated by a machine learning algorithm trained on answers to the question: “What is the meaning of life?”
“The space created, filled, and tragically sometimes taken away by COVID-19, has challenged how we experience and make new art,” says Vallejo Gantner, the artistic and executive director of Onassis USA. “This strange combination of isolation and constant reaching out; of new ways of listening and talking; and of touching and being touched; have inspired us to create a new commissioning program called ENTER which we hope will be in part a kind of artistic time capsule, refracting the frustration, grief, comedy, and fear of this moment of pandemic.”
