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DANCE OUT EAST: NAOMI FUNAKI – IKAGAI

Recognized as a 2023 Princess Grace Award recipient in dance, a 2024 Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” 92NY Artist-in-Residence and 2025 Asian American Jadin Wong Fellow, tap dance artist Naomi Funaki shares an in-process presentation of a new evening-length work, Ikigai. Reflecting on the 2011 Tohoku earthquake & tsunami, Fukushima nuclear disaster, and personal experience, Funaki blends rhythm, live music, and narrative to explore resilience, memory, and connection.

This in-process presentation is a culmination of Funaki’s weeklong Works & Process Tino and Rajika Puri creative residency at Guild Hall. Consisting of both performance and conversation, the evening offers audiences an intimate glimpse into the work’s development and the ideas shaping its evolution prior to its March 8^th premiere with Works & Process at Guggenheim New York as part of the Uptown Rhythm Dance Festival.

This presentation is part of the 2026 Dance Out East Festival—a collaboration between Guild Hall, The Church, The Watermill Center, and Works & Process that highlights the creation of new choreographic work ahead of its continued development within Works & Process’ 2026 dance festivals.

Ikigai was commissioned and created, in part, with the support of Works & Process Residency Tino & Rajika Puri Creative Residency and The Joyce Theater Foundation’s Creative Residencies Program made possible by lead funding from TD Charitable Foundation. Additional support provided through residencies at 92NY, CUNY Dance Initiative at Hunter College, Guild Hall of East Hampton, and an Asian American Arts Alliance Jadin Wong Fellowship.

ADDITIONAL DANCE OUT EAST EVENTS
Saturday, January 10, 2 PM
The Church: Kristine Bendul & Abdiel: The Lineage Project
Info & Tickets

Sunday, January 11, 2 PM
The Watermill Center: Sekou McMiller & Friends’ Palladium Nights
In Memory of Robert Wilson and Michéle Pesner
Info & Tickets

EITAN LEVINE: COMEDIAN. WRITER. MENSCH.

Presented by Guild Hall & Jewish Center of the Hamptons

Join us for an evening of smart, high-energy comedy with Eitan Levine—whose quick wit, sharp observational humor, and distinct voice make him one of today’s most compelling comedic storytellers. Known as a “writer and comedian/human theme park,” Eitan’s appearances include Jimmy Kimmel LIVE, Late Night with Stephen Colbert, The Daily Show, Extra, Access Hollywood and The Kelly Clarkson Show.

He’s also written for The New York Times, New York Magazine (The Cut), Amazon, Sony, and Reader’s Digest, and collaborated on creative campaigns with Nike, Red Bull, JEEP, Audible and TruTV. Eitan’s quick wit, sharp observational humor, and distinct voice has made him one of today’s most compelling comedic storytellers, with a viral social-media presence (150,000+ followers) from series such as “Jewish Man On The Street” – especially “Jewish or Antisemitic” (28 million+ views).

Audiences and community members are invited to arrive early to visit the Student Art Festival galleries, open from 12-5 PM, and then as a special pre-show moment, participate in a Pop-Up Chanukah presented by Rabbi Josh Franklin, Cantor Debra Stein, Rabbi, and Jewish Center of the Hamptons at 5 PM in Guild Hall’s Boots Lamb Education Center.

IN-PROCESS: LOVE LETTERS—CAGE TO CUNNINGHAM

Guild Hall William P. Rayner Artists-in-Residence, Site-Specific Dances (artistic directors: Michael Spencer Phillips and Dino Kiratzidis) share an in-process presentation of their new dance-theater work, Love Letters: Cage to Cunningham.

LOVE LETTERS: CAGE TO CUNNINGHAM is a dance/media-performance work by Site-Specific Dances, based on selected letters from Love, Icebox. These letters reveal the interwoven nature of John and Merce’s artistic and personal lives. They contain moments of flirtation, humor, insecurity, joy, longing, arousal, and jealousy, emotions specific to the letters but also universal to human experiences of love and longing.

The piece unfolds as a series of vignettes that follow the emotional arc of the letters, combining media and live music with a new ensemble dance suite by Michael Spencer Phillips. The set design is an assemblage of various media elements drawn from the text of the letters and curated by Dino Kiratzidis in collaboration with videographer Emma Kazaryan and graphic designer Riley Hooker. Adam Tendler joins the team as a John Cage specialist, performer and adviser, alongside collaborating composers Warren Hildebrand and Matthew Ricketts.

The in-process presentation will be followed by a conversation between the creative team and Executive Director of the John Cage Trust, Jeffrey Lependorf.

THE MET: LIVE IN HD—EL ÚLTIMO SUEÑO DE FRIDA Y DIEGO

Estimated Run Time: 2 hours and 50 minutes with one intermission

On May 30, the Metropolitan Opera’s 2025–26 Live in HD season comes to a close with a live transmission of American composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s first opera, a magical-realist portrait of Mexico’s painterly power couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with libretto by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Nilo Cruz. Fashioned as a reversal of the Orpheus and Euridice myth, the story depicts Frida, sung by leading mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, leaving the underworld on the Day of the Dead and reuniting with Diego, portrayed by baritone Carlos Álvarez. The famously feuding pair briefly relive their tumultuous love, embracing both the passion and the pain before bidding the land of the living a final farewell. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Met-premiere staging of Frank’s opera, a “confident, richly imagined score” (The New Yorker) that “bursts with color and fresh individuality” (Los Angeles Times). The vibrant new production, taking enthusiastic inspiration from Frida and Diego’s paintings, is directed and choreographed by Deborah Colker.