At 8pm and 9pm on both Thursday, October 19th & Friday, October 20th ISSUE celebrates its 20th Anniversary with two evenings featuring work from influential composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies. Each presentation will feature a showing of Hennies short film Passing plus the premiere of a new collaborative work with bassist Tristan Kasten-Krause. 

The film Passing takes its inspiration from the life of Mark Hogancamp, a Kingston, NY artist who was beaten nearly to death after revealing his obsession with high heel shoes to a group of men in a bar. This minimalist film considers the existential condition of those who cannot walk through the world unnoticed. For these people, an awareness develops of one’s “otherness” that pervades their entire existence and self-image. This is especially a concern for many transgender women who are disproportionately affected by unwanted attention, verbal abuse, violence, and murder. Through repetitive imagery of Hennies dragging a toy train car along a country road, an arresting musical score, and an unexpected interview, Passing is a meditation on one’s greatest joy provoking their worst fears. ISSUE is thrilled to be presenting Sarah Hennies Passing for the first time to an in-person audience, in addition to a preview performance of a new in-progress collaborative duo work with Tristan Kasten-Krause as part of the 20th Anniversary Season.

Between Friday, Oct 13th and Saturday, Nov 4th, ISSUE invites audiences to experience numerous programs including new commissions and restaging of programs specifically designed for a limited capacity environment of 74 people. The program includes Hennies’ film Passing, which was originally presented as part of ISSUE’s 2020 Artist Fund Benefit, a critical fundraising initiative that enabled ongoing commissions through the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Hennies, who is a member of ISSUE’s Artistic Advisory Council, has an important history with the organization where in 2017 she debuted her monumental piece "Contralto", a one-hour work for video, strings, and percussion that exists in between the spaces of experimental music and documentary. The piece featured a cast of transgender women speaking, singing, and performing vocal exercises accompanied by a dense and varied musical score that includes a variety of conventional and "non-musical" approaches to sound-making. At ISSUE, Hennies also participated in the Queer Trash (2018 Suzanne Fiol Curatorial Fellowship) symposium, an auspicious meeting of some very bright and very queer minds, that showcased the myriad ways that queers make sound, make sound queer, or skim around terms that may attempt to contain queer life. At the event, Hennies performed a solo rendition of Fleas (2017), a composition made entirely from objects found at thrift stores and flea markets including a dozen small bells and a bass drum someone had converted into a lamp with Lou Reed’s face painted on it before throwing it out. Fleas was again presented in 2019, this time with an ensemble, as part of Nate Wooley’s FOR/WITH festival organized by performer, composer, and 2011 ISSUE Artist-In-Residence Nate Wooley. The festival, which ran at ISSUE 2017-2019, simultaneously premiered distinct new compositions for solo trumpet while also embarking on a celebration of the independent work of commissioned composers. In 2019, Wooley presented the world premiere of Monologue for solo trumpet by Hennies, her first-ever piece for trumpet, in which she instructed Wooley to take the tubing and valves as instruments in themselves to be activated, or not, by the player’s breath. The 2019 performance of Fleas was the closing event aligned with Suzanne Fiol: Ten Years Alive, an exhibition of mixed media work from ISSUE’s late founder Suzanne Fiol, marking 10 years since her passing. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with Suzanne’s daughter, Sarah Fiol. 

Notes from Sarah Hennies on the duo with Tristan Kasten-Krause:

I am a great admirer of two works from the early 1980s by French composer Jean-Claude Eloy made in collaboration with American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta, “Yo-In” and “Anahata.” These works each last three and a half hours and move at an almost impossibly slow pace and yet fully engages the listener at every moment. I have been pushing my practice towards increasingly extreme durations over the last decade and have found in duo partner Tristan Kasten-Krause’s rich, virtuosic and beautifully simple explorations of the double bass a great potential for a multi-hour work. We recently spent a week together in rural New Hampshire generating material, and for our performance at ISSUE Project Room we present to you the opening sections of this in-progress work.

During these presentations Laurie Berg’s (Sports) Bar-In-Residence will be activated as well as a lobby installation by Eva Davidova: Vinson and Catherine in the Garden, a series of augmented reality prints.

This Fall marks the 20th Anniversary of ISSUE and will be celebrated with a series of commissioned programs, orbiting around our annual Gala and affiliated Benefit events. During the Anniversary celebration, between phases of renovation, ISSUE returns to our 22 Boerum Pl. theater for a special series of twenty limited-capacity events. Featuring artists from across our history as well as new projects, these gatherings - including our 20th Anniversary Gala - present an opportunity to celebrate and support ISSUE as we continue an ambitious calendar of programming. Join us in recognizing this important milestone in our history.