Arts and Entertainment Brooklyn Navy Yard

GRAMMY-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus to hold annual Spring Gala before first independently-produced work on May 1

April 24, 2025 Special from Brooklyn Youth Chorus

Brooklyn Youth Chorus will debut “Port(al)” at Brooklyn Navy Yard on May 1. Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Youth Chorus

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BROOKLYN NAVY YARD — The GRAMMY Award-winning Brooklyn Youth Chorus, along with founder and artistic director Dianne Berkun Menaker, has announced the performance schedule and ticket sales for the world premiere of “Port(al),” an ambitious new site-specific production considering the history of the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the connective possibilities of port cities.

Engaging young singers in world-class art-making and bringing their anxieties and hopes for the future to the center of the creative process, “Port(al)” is a choral theater work that reawakens history in the goliath raw space of the Navy Yard’s Agger Fish building. It brings co-composer Paola Prestini (co-founder and artistic director of National Sawdust and a close friend and Artistic Advisory Board member of Brooklyn Youth Chorus), co-composer and co-librettist Jad Abumrad (founder and former co-host of Radiolab), multidisciplinary director, designer, co-choreographer and co-librettist Jessica Grindstaff (a co-founder of Phantom Limb Company), and co-choreographer Ogemdi Ude into groundbreaking collaboration with the chorus.

Brooklyn Youth Chorus performs “Port(al)” on Thursday, May 1 at 8 p.m. and May 2 and 3 at 7:30 p.m. Tickets range from $35-45 and are on sale online. The Agger Fish Building is located at 63 Flushing Avenue, #313. Audiences will move through the performance. Seating is limited, and flooring is uneven. Appropriate footwear is advised.

Brooklyn Youth Chorus’ 2025 Spring Gala, honoring Brooklyn Navy Yard Board Chair Hank Gutman, will be held at 6 p.m. on May 1 near the performance space at Building 303 in the Navy Yard (299 Sands Street, ninth floor).

Vividly evoking and honoring Brooklyn’s ghosts, “Port(al)” spins oral histories from recently passed figures like historian Howard Zinn (who worked as an apprentice in the Navy Yard) and activist Clarence L. Irving, Sr. (who had been a riveter in the Navy Yard) into stunning compositions; looks into the legacy of machinist and drag king Rusty Brown; and considers the power of the first live radio singing performance, by mezzo soprano Eugenia Farrar.

Reflected in this séance of text and song are the early prison ships that floated in Wallabout Bay and left over 11,500 victims in their wake, all buried near Navy Yard in the early 1800s; Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”; women’s, immigrants’ and Black Americans’ labor during wartime; the rise of queer culture into the public eye; and more. Ebbing, flowing and interweaving throughout the piece are the voices of the youth chorus speaking to their relationship to their very own time and place.

“Port(al)” follows major Brooklyn Youth Chorus works including “Silent Voices” (world premiere: BAM), “Aging Magician” (composed by Prestini; world premiere: Walker Art Center; New York premiere: New Victory Theater), “Black Mountain Songs” (world premiere: BAM Next Wave Festival), and “Tell the Way” (world premiere: St. Ann’s Warehouse).

“Port(al)” is the first evening-length work commissioned, developed, produced, and presented entirely by Brooklyn Youth Chorus and their first major work built for an unconventional performance venue.

“Port(al)” boldly brings Berkun Menaker’s vision for the Chorus into new interdisciplinary territory. Much like Prestini’s earlier work with Brooklyn Youth Chorus, “Aging Magician,” “Port(al)” sets the strange fluidity and scope of time to song. Like the meticulously researched documentaries and oral histories Abumrad has crafted for radio, it transports audiences to textured understandings of individual stories and moments. Grindstaff, whose works have considered specific places’ — Antarctica, Fukushima or the site of the world’s oldest living tree — and their relationships to a changing globe, here turns her lens on her own city.

“Port(al)’s” creative team includes Ogemdi Ude (co-choreographer), Brian H Scott and Bruce Steinberg (lighting designers), Darron L West (sound cesigner), S. Katy Tucker and Kylee Loera (video projection designers), and Erik Sanko (foley designer, additional music) and Gary Graham (costume design). Featured performers include Obie-winning performance artist and musician Cynthia Hopkins as “Rusty Brown” and, on film, multidisciplinary performer Tara Khozein as “Eugenia Farrar.” The production team comprises Jared Klein (production manager), Randi Rivera (stage manager), Rachel Katwan (creative producer), Duncan Sutherland (producer) and Ras Dia (producer).

The performance anchors themes the chorus has long considered — identity and history — in the space in which it’s presented, using the Navy Yards’ rich past as a point of departure for exploring the complex social and cultural intersections specific to port cities. Following its world premiere in the Agger Fish building, Brooklyn Youth Chorus intends to bring the work to other port cities, where it can continue to collect oral histories and build layers upon layers of youth choristers’ voices and experiences from around the world, becoming a site of cross-cultural connection.

“The piece starts to sort of serve the role of a port: it flows like information and water and people do in and out of a port and it starts to create community and meaning with this group of young people,” Berkun Menaker describes.

Berkun Menaker sees the Navy Yard as “a little microcosm of the world inside our own borough.”

She added, “Through the Navy Yard, choristers are learning about their own history, the history of the world, and the evolution of how marginalized groups have been treated in our society and how they’ve shaped it. As we’ve all dug into the past, the more personal and individual stories have taken center stage, rather than the grand movements of history.”

Berkun Menaker brought Prestini back into collaboration with Brooklyn Youth Chorus, and Prestini began brainstorming the creative dream team for the project: “The aspect of oral histories we wanted to mine and the depth with which we wanted to do it led me immediately to Jad, and I’d always wanted to work with Jessica,” said Prestini. “In ‘Aging Magician,’ we had very porous collaborative roles, and this project is the same. There’s musical collaboration between Jad and me, a textual collaboration between Jad and Jessica. Jad has created sound world compositions with recorded voices for me to then compose music into. And the kids’ own experiences are so central to our collaboration: they have brought into the project a lot of complex emotions around the current state of affairs. The anxiety they carry about the future is profound, and it’s juxtaposed with their hopes and desires, sometimes something as simple and poetic as wanting to do a handstand or to fly like a seagull. And these join with the anxieties and hopes of those that have filled this space before them.”

Abumrad said, “All of these successive rounds of people whom America needed to build ships have been in this space and they all have stories — many contradictory. Often you will find somebody who felt this was a liberatory experience; they came to the Navy Yard and found it was filled with possibility. And then you find people who describe it as hell, with the smells and the noise. This place was an engine of social progress, where women and Black Americans were entering the labor force, yet its function was to make things to kill people. The idea that this space holds multitudes of histories and perspectives was interesting to us, and the project became like a séance in a way: you walk into a space and try to listen to the whispers. The piece is, in a way, trying to bring the dead back to life, and have kids respond to them, sing to them, from where they are.”

“It’s hard to think of something more hopeful than a group of young people united and raising their voices to talk about something they care about. When asked what gives them hope in the questionnaire, they said singing with this chorus over and over and over again,” said Grindstaff. “You feel that, and it’s powerful. Part of sharing that feeling with the audience is having this not be a proscenium experience. The audience moves through this space, interacting with the set that’s then animated with voices, both recorded and live. That sound world created from the choristers’ strength and bond envelopes them, and they become part of it.”

About Dianne Berkun Menaker

Dianne Berkun Menaker is the founder & artistic director of Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Under her visionary leadership, the chorus has become one of the most highly regarded ensembles in the country and has stretched the artistic boundaries for the youth chorus. Hailed by The New York Times as “a remarkable choral conductor,” Berkun Menaker has prepared choruses for performances with acclaimed conductors, including Alan Gilbert, Gustavo Dudamel, Marin Alsop, James Levine and Charles Dutoit. Most notably, she prepared the Chorus for its 2002 debut with the New York Philharmonic in John Adams’s “On the Transmigration of Souls,” the recording for which the chorus won a Grammy Award in 2005. Berkun Menaker has also prepared the chorus for appearances and recordings with artists such as Barbra Streisand, Sir Elton John, Philip Glass, The National, David Byrne, Bon Iver, Grizzly Bear, John Legend, Natasha Bedingfield and Alicia Keys. She has developed an active commissioning program, born out of a desire to showcase the chorus’s versatility and uniquely beautiful sound and has collaborated with some of the most important composers of our time.

Berkun Menaker is a regular choral clinician and teaching artist for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic and The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall and has also presented workshops and master classes for New York University, New York State School Music Association, the American Choral Directors Association and the New York City Department of Education. She is the creator of the Chorus’s Cross-Choral Training® program, a proven holistic and experiential approach to developing singers in a group setting encompassing both voice and musicianship pedagogy.

About Paola Prestini

Composer Paola Prestini, named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America, is co-founder of National Sawdust and has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming. Her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, London’s Barbican Center, Mexico’s Bellas Artes and many more.

Prestini’s 2024-25 season features a staggering five world premieres of major opera and music-theater works (including “Port(al)”) across the United States. A tireless advocate for equity across her industry, Prestini has repeatedly shattered the glass ceiling by conceiving and creating programs such as the Hildegard Commission for emerging women and marginalized composers and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers and women mentors at the Juilliard School. Prestini has been named as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, and has been composer-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, MASS MoCA and the American Academy of Rome. Prestini is also the co-founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City.

About Jad Abumrad

Jad Abumrad, born in Syracuse, is a composer, musician and storyteller who lives in Brooklyn. He is the host and creator of several podcasts (Radiolab, More Perfect, Dolly Parton’s America) that collectively are downloaded over 130 million times a year. He’s been hailed for his unique ability to combine cutting edge sound-design, cinematic storytelling and a personal approach to explaining complex topics, from the stochasticity of tumor cells to the legal foundations of the war on terror.

Abumrad studied creative writing and music composition at Oberlin College in Ohio. He wrote much of the music for Radiolab and continues to compose music for film, television, theater and live ensembles. Amongst his many recent collaborations, he’s scored a new commission for the Dance troupe Pilobolus, composing an album of Nocturnes along with a “sleep opera” (i.e. an opera performed by live waking performers but conducted via brainwave by a sleeping human). Jad has received three Peabody Awards, the highest honor in broadcasting. And in 2011 he received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship. He’s currently a Distinguished Professor of Research at Vanderbilt University.

About Jessica Grindstaff

Jessica Grindstaff is a New York City-based visual artist, writer, director and co-founder of Phantom Limb Company. For the past decade, Grindstaff has created a trilogy exploring humans’ relationship to nature or the environment, through several different lenses with her partner Erik Sanko. This work has taken her to Antarctica; on an expedition to discover the oldest living tree in the world; and finally to Fukushima, where the tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown of 2011 have devastated a tremendous area of Northern Japan to this day. These pieces have been performed across the United States and internationally. Her work in theatre is collaborative, image based and intuitive, using a collage-like approach while centering on the intersection of puppetry, movement, and storytelling.

Recently, Grindstaff has extended an arm into television and film. She is currently writing, directing, and executive producing several projects with a focus on women that have transcended all ideas of what it is to be a woman and a creative phenomenon. She continues to collaborate with her partner Erik Sanko and will travel to Norway in 2025 for a residency for their next Phantom Limb theatrical collaboration: an existential circus work. She has taught, workshopped, and lectured around the world at AFUK in Copenhagen Denmark, NYU Abu Dhabi and NYC, The New School, Victoria College of Art, Melbourne Australia, Dartmouth College, Maryland Institute College of Art, UCLA, CAL Arts and others.

About Brooklyn Youth Chorus

Brooklyn Youth Chorus’s Grammy Award-winning ensemble, led by Berkun Menaker, has collaborated with a range of organizations and artists including the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, Joe Hisaishi, The National, David Byrne, Wye Oak, Bon Iver, Shara Nova, London Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Barbra Streisand, Arcade Fire, Sir Elton John and Grizzly Bear.

As a commissioner of new music, the chorus has introduced more than 140 original works and world premieres by contemporary composers, including collaborations with Pulitzer Prize-winner Caroline Shaw, Tania León, David Lang, Nico Muhly, Angélica Negrón, Bryce Dessner, Paola Prestini, Nathalie Joachim, Paul Moravec, Toshi Reagon, Alev Lenz, Anna Clyne, Aleksandra Vrebalov, John King and William Brittelle. The chorus has a strong reputation as producer of original works; most recently with “Silent Voices: Lovestate,” premiering Off-Broadway at The New Victory Theater in 2019. Previous productions include the first two installments of the inclusive, social justice-oriented “Silent Voices” series (BAM 2017; National Sawdust 2018); “Black Mountain Songs” (BAM Next Wave Festival 2014); and “Tell the Way: (St. Ann’s Warehouse 2011). The Chorus has released two albums through New Amsterdam Records — “Silent Voices” (2018) and “Black Mountain Songs” (2017) — and has appeared at important contemporary music festivals including the Ecstatic Music Festival, MusicNOW, 21c Liederabend, Barbican Mountain and Waves Festival and the PROTOTYPE Festival.

Founded in 1992, Brooklyn Youth Chorus has served nearly 10,000 students in its after-school and public-school programs. The chorus’s faculty teach a range of repertoire and styles using Berkun Menaker’s Cross-Choral Training® method, emphasizing healthy and versatile vocal technique, music theory, sight-singing and ear training.

About VisionIntoArt

VisionIntoArt (VIA), “always intriguing and frequently beguiling,” is a multimedia production company that “facilitates flamboyant, confounding and enticing collaborations” (New York Times). VIA creates and commissions works that involve various disciplines, presented around the world for the general audience, and forged from the most exciting emerging and established artists living today, as well as interdisciplinary experts including scientists and conservationists. Incubating, producing, and disseminating, VIA projects often bridge impact, community building and scientific inquiry, with the belief that collaboration sustains artistic innovation and promotes a healthier society.

VIA’s works range from the “Hubble Cantata” — the largest communal VR operatic event — to multiplatform works like “The Colorado,” now viewable on PBS. VIA productions have been seen at Lincoln Center, the Barbican Centre, HIFA in Zimbabwe, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Kennedy Center and through residencies at MASS MoCA and The Park Avenue Armory.

The company’s most recent world premieres and tours of work include “Primero Sueño,” co-commissioned and produced with The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Live Arts, Con Alma at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, and at The United Nations for the world’s largest equity conference presented by Death of Classical in partnership with Carnegie Hall and UN Women; “Houses of Zodiac” at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles, a live Butoh, Ballet, and cello work with film installation presented as part of The Broad’s special exhibition “Takashi Murakami: Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow,” also seen at the 2022 Romaeuropa Festival in Rome, and Bang on a Can’s 2023 LOUD Weekend at MASS MoCA; “Archive of Desire” presented as part of the Onassis Foundation’s 2023 New York City-wide festival at National Sawdust, also seen at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Italy and The Broad; as well as the forthcoming opera, “Sensorium Ex,” which cultivates community-centered practices, and will premiere at Common Senses Festival in Omaha, NE. “Sensorium Ex” was most recently developed as part of UnMute ArtsAbility Festival in Cape Town (Africa’s premier disability-led inclusive arts festival), as well as in collaboration with The Shed, Performance Space NY, and with The REACH and Washington National Opera at the Kennedy Center.