wild project in association with New York City’s Open Culture program present
Wild Culture
Wild Culture is a series of outdoor performances & events occurring every Saturday throughout the Summer. Wild Culture’s purpose is to facilitate cultural sustainability and help support our artists and venue by bringing the East Village neighborhood together to overcome the challenges brought by the pandemic through art and performances.
Throughout the summer Wild Culture will produce downtown artists across music, spoken-word, poetry, dance, theater & more on our E. 3rd St. block, just outside our venue to help revive, with our neighborhood partners, the East Village, and our city.
Saturday, August 14
Jacob Shipley, 2:00 PM
Jacob Shipley writes, sings, and tells stories about the awkward, uncomfortable, and painful moments in life that he’d rather not repeat. Some of his music is sorrowful, some sardonic and humorous, but all of it comes from a deeply personal place that is easy to connect with because we’ve all been there. His lyrics are poignant, his voice accessible, his range impressive, and his guitar work effortless and subtly intricate. Listening to Jacob is like reminiscing with an old friend: not everything was easy, but at least we made it through.
Jacob has been compared to Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, and Taylor Swift and has received accolades from AlexRainbirdMusic, Indie Band Guru, and Ear to the Ground Music. He has performed live at The Bitter End, Rockwood Music Hall, and the Delancey. In theatre, Jacob has starred as John Newton in the first national tour of “Amazing Grace: the Musical” and was featured in the first actor-musician production of “Godspell.”
He splits his time between unceded Mohawk and Lenape lands (Upstate New York and New York City).
Ryan McCurdy, 3:00 PM
Ryan McCurdy is a multi-disciplinary Actor-Musician and Producer who has worked extensively on both coasts and across the United States.
As an Actor-Musician and Music Director/Supervisor, he has worked with Manhattan Theatre Club, Rattlestick Playwrights, Second Stage, Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, and Center Stage Baltimore, among others. Broadway audiences saw him for several years in Broadway Cares fundraisers supporting the original production of Once, which he has since worked on seven times including productions at Actors’ Playhouse, Saint Michael’s Playhouse, and Mason Street Warehouse. In 2019, Ryan spent a year in Off-Broadway’s Pip’s Island playing the role of villain Joules Volter.
Ryan has composed recently for Shakespeare on the Sound, Gulfshore Playhouse, the film Misty Button, Marvel Entertainment, and in his work with New York rock bands Bonfire Falls and Arboretum, both of which he is a co-founder of. His work as a writer for the stage includes Whiterock Cliff with Ellie Pyle, the Stationed trilogy, and The Currents with Lauren Widner.
Ryan is the NYC Producer of Bespoke Plays, a bicoastal production company dedicated to supporting playwrights, and the Executive Artistic Director of Savannah Rep, South Georgia’s only Equity house.
Laura Galindo featuring Sam Revaz , 4:00 PM
performing songs off her upcoming EP and also performing some deep cut Beatles covers!
Johnny Butler, 5:00 PM
Johnny Butler is playing his saxophone under a bridge, into a little box, filling the room with sound like a mossy creek, a red mountain plateau in the sun, an icy tundra at dusk. The sounds remind you of traveling, moving to a new city, a new job, a new apartment. They remind you of an orchestra tuning before a concert. They remind you of a renaissance court jester, groveling before the queen. You imagine florescent watercolors spilling off the page, pooling on the floor. You find yourself looking inward, thinking about when you were young. You think about your secrets, the ones you don’t want anyone to know.
Johnny Butler is a Brooklyn-based, Grammy-award winning saxophonist, recording artist, arranger, composer, dancer, and technologist. Over the years, he has performed, written, and recorded with many of his musical heroes, including Beyoncé, Stevie Wonder, Donald Fagen (Steely Dan), Warren Haynes (Allman Brothers, Gov’t Mule) Wynton Marsalis, The Levon Helm Band, Tune-Yards, Joe Lally (Fugazi), Sister Sparrow & The Dirty Birds, and Escaper, among others.
Butler will be joined by dancer choreographers Alex Oliva and Xenia Mansour for this performance.
Alex Oliva is a performer, director, choreographer and mover. A creator of worlds–a storyteller. She dances like a creature disappearing into the foggy night air, bent, broken, reaching back to you. She is unique and visceral, playing intense characters with clarity. She’ll make you laugh even if she scares you or makes you cry. She’ll take you away from here, but she’s here for you.
XENIA MANSOUR (she/her) is a dancer, mover, and performer based in NYC & Chicago. She is currently a member of Katherine Maxwell’s Hivewild and BodyStories: Teresa Fellion Dance. She has also worked with Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener, Angie Moon Dance Theatre, Gabrielle Johnson + Artists, Javier Padilla & The Movement Playground, and experimental dance theater HOLDTIGHT’s site-specific and immersive show, Nourishment, in both Denver and NYC. She holds a BFA in Dance from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
Open Culture is a program created by New York City to help cultural institutions secure outdoor space for safe live performances.
Made possible with generous support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Department of Cultural Affairs.
*Any opinions or other content expressed by wild project and the artists do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the New York State Council on the Arts and/or other supporters of this program.