Our January grant was awarded to SLAMDANCE garage, a solo performance on punk and blackness. Nestled somewhere between performance art, a rock show, and an one-act opera, Ian Andrew Askew hurdles through an hour of music, movement, and text celebrating the absurdity of explaining Black people’s participation in their own culture.

SLAMDANCE garage utilizes text from Nina Simone, Audre Lorde, Drexciya, and other liberatory luminaries, reharmonizing their words to the sounds of drums, distorted vocals, electronics, and the blaring resonance of a custom-one string bass called the babatoni. Inspired by the Malawian musician Gasper Nali’s babatoni, Mississippi bluesman Moses William’s diddley-bow, and the Afro-Brazilian berimbau, the handmade instrument (nearly the same height as its player) is an homage to the technological through-lines of music across the African diaspora.

The Bushwick Starr is currently presenting a new iteration of SLAMDANCE garage, offering the first multi-week run of a work by Ian Andrew Askew. The production will reach over 2000 patrons across communities in experimental theater, opera, and punk music. The renewed production – first presented at The Performing Garage in 2021 – features new songs, expanded immersive design, additional choreography by Justin Allen, and the use of open captioning and audio description for increased accessibility.

Inspired by the use of supertitles in opera and the tradition of liner notes in punk records, SLAMDANCE garage will feature open captioning, allowing the audience to experience spoken and sung text in real time, fostering a more accessible experience for deaf audience members and expanding the visual experience of all audiences. Funds from AwesomeNYC will fund the position of a captions operator for all performances.

• SLAMDANCE garage plays Wednesday - Saturdays from 2/8-3/1, 2025 at The Bushwick Starr
• Purchase tickets online and find out more about special events such as a special vendor market (2/22), Black Theater Night (2/21), and Closing Party (3/1)