December 24, 2024

A busy year! Rachel has been developing two Ripe Time projects, touring a third, writing a new opera libretto and directing another!

For Ripe Time:

In[finite] Time, a music theatre performance about a father and a daughter navigating illness and the power of poetry to heal. Grammy award winning composer Rinde Eckert helms the score for a small vocal ensemble and three actors including Kelley Curran (The Gilded Age). A funny, eclectic story about caretaking, illness, and the spaces we call home. Jumping off from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, the new music driven work tells stories based on locally conducted interviews with ICU nurses and aids. 
Conceived, directed and adapted by Rachel Dickstein. Devised in collaboration with Rinde Eckert and ensemble. Work in Progress residencies in 2025 to be announced.

WomenWaterRising

A new music theatre work inspired by Kate Bush’s concept album The Ninth Wave, and Clarice Lispector’s The Waters of the World, WomenWaterRising tells an empowering story of one woman’s imagination, resistance and power to heal in the face of a damaged planet.  Creator Rachel Dickstein and Ripe Time take Bush’s prescient fever-dream, and translate it into a solo, multimedia, concert looking at the power of women’s voices as the temperatures rise. A story about the climate, our bodies and how to rally collective power and survive in times of crisis. An immersive  performance for one, or for 100. 

Compass 

Available for Touring 2025-27

How do systems of power in America today fail us? How can we begin to think of them anew? Based on interviews with American womxn and gender non-conforming voices across the country, Compass is a funny, personal, and inspiring new dance-theatre work about empathy, hope and community. Compass offers a cry for true democracy, weaving together the stories of womxn not invited to the table of today’s systems of power but who, nonetheless, make their voices heard.

Conceived and directed by Rachel Dickstein. Devised and written with writer DeLanna Studi and company. Movement director nicHi douglas. Score by Kamala Sankaram. Designs by Mika Eubanks, Yuki Nakase Link, Anna Kiraly, Sam Kusnetz, Brian Freeland.  Commissioned by ASU Gammage. World premiere at ASU Gammage in 2023. 

(60 minutes)

Opera Projects

Salvaged Pages Adapted from Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust. Collected and Edited by Alexandra Zapruder  Composer: Michael Zapruder Libretto:  Rachel Dickstein

The libretto is adapted directly from the collected Salvaged Pages diaries, capturing the intimate thoughts of an array of teenage Jewish diarists caught in the midst of WWII. Their words provide a window into the capacity of young people to make meaning out of suffering and to grapple with fundamental questions concerning human nature that persist today. 

The characters are teenage Jewish diarists from Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, the Czech lands, and other countries across Western and Eastern Europe from the years 1938-1945.  A Memory Chorus embodies the diarists themselves as well as those who encounter and grapple with their words long after they were written. 

The story takes place in a space like that of the diary itself, a space of memory, of testimony. Their words are translated into virtuosic song, musical landscapes, and dynamic choreography, in a way that is rarely literal. The music and language evoke rupture, resistance, and hope, capturing the power of resistance in the face of hate. 

Star Singer

Composer Juhi Bansal

Libretto by Neil Aitkin

Directed by and Developed with Rachel Dickstein

LA Opera Fall 2026, Prototype NYC 2027.
The stars are dying one by one, fading into darkness held back only by the voice of a single star singer. Drawing on mythology from Polynesian, various Asian and Inuit cultures, Star Singer follows Mina who traverses a frightening world of dying stars and spirits in search of hope and a song. As she walks unknowing in her departed mother’s footsteps, she learns about the nature of truth, history and memory; the irreplaceable loss of knowledge; the value of stories; and the interweaving journeys of mothers and daughters.

June 8, 2023

Our ASU Gammage premiere was a smash success! Read about it! And then come celebrate with us at a summer soiree and garden party benefit on Saturday July 8th in Water Mill, NY! Tickets available here!

March 22, 2023

We are one month out from our ASU Gammage Premiere! Buy tickets here! And making plans for a 24-25 NYC engagement! Consider supporting us in these last weeks before our world premiere!

January 13, 2023

We are thrilled to be sharing Compass as a work in progress at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center this weekend. Use this link for tickets and information! Showings Friday January 13 at 7 pm and January 14 Saturday at 2 pm. We hope to see you there!

May 21, 2022

Some exciting news to report. Compass, our project that we’ve been developing over the course of the pandemic will now have its world premiere at Arizona’s ASU Gammage’s Beyond Series in April 2023. We are thrilled to have the work commissioned by Gammage. We continue our Impact Residency with the Drama League/ LaGuardia Performing Arts Center for the project and are excitedly looking for new presenting partners for 2023 and Beyond!

Rachel and playwright Eliza Bent are embarking on a new project, Pretty Machine through a NYTW Adelphi residency this June. Based loosely on the story of Britney Spears, Pretty Machine centers the story of a fictional 90’s pop star locked in a tiny room where her only way of communicating with the outside world is through poetic, banal and confessional instagram messages, a 21st century prisoner/cultural icon wrangling for attention. We can’t wait to begin work on this new project with the support of NYTW.

Rachel and renowned performer and composer Rinde Eckert have been creating a new music theatre work, In[finite] Time. The work follows a father and a daughter navigating illness and the power of poetry to heal. Taking place within an old abandoned house, an ICU room, and a landscape transformed through time and memory, the piece immerses its audience in a striking tale of what we need most in times of loss and peril. Inspired by the “Time Passes” segment of Virginia Woolf’s seminal novel To the Lighthouse, In[finite] Time sonically and kinetically wraps us in a music driven landscape of healing, loss and beauty. The work will be in development in the coming year (more news soon on where and when!) and we are aiming for a premiere in 2023/24.

Rachel is under contract by Routledge to write Towards Embodied Performance: Directing and the Art of Composition, a book that aims to bridge what is often considered “traditional” directing training and the training into experimental, devised theatre-making. She is thrilled to put down on paper much of what she has taught in classrooms for many years, offering steps for directors to think visually, sonically, spatially and poetically.

Finally, because the freelance corner of this website has been bursting at the seams, Rachel has launched a site for her own personal projects. Ripetime.org is still very much here, but www.racheldickstein.com will feature her music/opera work, her academic directing work and other aspects of her work as an arts leader and advocate independent of Ripe Time. Please enjoy the new site!

December 22, 2021

We know there is A LOT on our minds right now about our own health and security.

But we also want to keep you in the loop on the multiple projects we are building this year! The good news is 2022 brings live performances in NYC back for us!!! We are in residency at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center as part of the Drama League Impact Residency, continuing to build the work (now with drafts of design by Jessica Jahn, Anna Kiraly, Yuki Nakase Link, Brittany Bland, and Matt Stine and sharing it in March 2022. We have made some exciting new partnerships with regional venues (to be announced soon!) to stage a 2022-23 world premiere of the work nationally!

COMPASS is a ritual gathering. A celebration of collective action. Embodied Interview based storytelling that imagines new models of advocacy, leadership and intersectional feminism. In seven movements of our signature image-laden story-telling, COMPASS centers the minds and bodies of those modeling leadership through empathy, listening and proactive community-based action. Each movement of the piece visualizes - through the lived experience of our interviewees and the systems each has battled with - the physical effort and action to envision the NEXT world. The audience gathers around our own metaphoric table to experience a multi-sensory journey of transforming how we think about leadership in America.

In addition to Compass, we will begin work in 2022 on a new collaboration with playwright Eliza Bent called Pretty Machine. Based loosely on the story of Britney Spears, Pretty Machine centers the story of a fictional 90’s pop star locked in a tiny room where her only way of communicating with the outside world is through poetic, banal and confessional Instagram messages. The piece aims to embrace our heroine’s ferocity but also her life’s tragic paradox. As she rebels, is she bucking the system or just digging her and us deeper into damaging stereotypes of beauty and female power? Pretty Machine interrogates this question, exposing the mechanisms with which our culture enacts that control in order to break out, shave our heads, or even better, dance.

Thank you for making space in this complex time to consider supporting Ripe Time's work and the arts organizations you value. Join the Jerome Robbins Foundation and many other individual donors who have already given towards this end of year appeal. Your donation in 2021 is and will be fully tax-deductible as we are a 501(c)3. Please give securely on our website at www.ripetime.org/support/ or send a check to: 135 Eastern Parkway #14D, Brooklyn, NY 11238. Thank you again!

March 2, 2021

We were honored to be a part of Ghostlight’s pep-rally/roll call gathering of changemaking organizations/projects last night! If you couldn’t make it, you can watch it here! We put out a call for how you can participate in the making of Candidate X!

If you know a kickass BIPOC leader (could be a person running for office, the head of a community board, your mom) tell us about them, or even better, volunteer to conduct an interview! Womxn activists lead from the heart, and define their own rules. So do the makers and the do-ers reading this page! Contact us at rachel@ripetime.org to check out ways you can help our grassroots effort.

The project is being developed and produced with Ronee Penoi and Victoria Detres at Octopus Theatricals. We have have had the support of the Civilians R & D group, a choreographic workshop this past January 2021, and are psyched to launch our next rehearsal residency at Robert Wilson’s renowned Watermill Center in May-June 2021. The project will also be developed at the Drama League as part of the Impact Residency in 2022 at the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center, Rachel will be the director-in-residence for all of 2021-22 and we look forward to immersing ourselves in the local Queens community in sourcing new interviewees. Octopus Theatricals and Ripe Time have engaged multiple colleges and arts presenters across the country to for development residencies of the work in 2022 (yea!) and have a 2023-24 world premiere planned (details on that soon!)

June 4, 2020

Come hear our first reading of Candidate X on Friday June 5th at 3 pm as part of The Civilians Findings Series. RSVP here. Zoom link will be sent to confirm your RSVP. Thanks to Aisha Zia, and actors Paula McGonagle, Delissa Reynolds, Calliope Pina Parker, DeLanna Studi and Alia Tejeda for their work in the last few weeks of workshop!

June 25, 2019

Ripe Time just returned from the Prague Quadrennial where our BAM Next Wave production of Sleep was featured in the USITT exhibit! Here is a wonderful interview USITT did with the creative team alongside some fab pictures and video!  This renowned international exhibition featured the best of stage design from across the globe. We could not be prouder of this wonderful honor.  

Other exciting news in the funding category: we just received a generous a Japan Foundation Touring grant for Sleep for 2019-20! Plans for the tour are still under wraps but will be announced soon! And our newest piece in development, Candidate X (an interview based project based on women, power and activism built by myself, playwright Aisha Zia, and Kamala Sankaram) just moved on to the next stage of consideration for the amazing Creative Capital grant!  We are committed to this exciting new piece creating a dialogue in the coming years about women-identifying candidates!!!!

Speaking of 2020, next year marks the 20th anniversary of Ripe Time. In collaboration with writers, actor-devisers, dramaturgs, and designers, we have built a body of work that translates the literary into the kinetic. We look at the experience of women-identifying bodies, on the brink of change and transformation, fighting the battle to preserve her own integrity in defiance of stereotype. We could not be more thrilled to have our newest work, Candidate X  take a more direct approach to our activism, using interview-based devising with award winning playwright Aisha Zia to speak to the gendered politics of our upcoming elections. 

In addition, in the next few months, I will be staging two new world premiere chamber operas  with some amazing women designers: Desire by Hannah Lash  commissioned by the Miller Theatre at Columbia for Jack Quartet in the fall of 2019, with designs by Kristen Robinson, Kate Fry and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew. I will also be staging Blood Moon by Garrett Fisher and Ellen McLaughlin (adapter of Septimus and Clarissa) for Beth Morrison Projects and Prototype(with designs by Susan Zeeman Rogers, Maiko Matsushima, Kate Freer, Yuki Nakase, the amazing Takemi Kitamura from Sleep and puppet design by Erik Sanko of the internationally renowned company Phantom Limb) in January 2020. 
 
If you have not yet contributed to us this year, please do! Your donation would provide a necessary boost to help us embark on our newest work about the lives and experience of women-identifying bodies. We need you to make this anniversary season count!
 
Your donation in 2019 is and will be fully tax-deductible. Please give securely at www.ripetime.org/support/ or send a check by June 30th to: 138 South Oxford Street, Suite 4D, Brooklyn, NY 11217. Thank you again!

February 18, 2019

Ripe Time is launching a new project! Candidate X is a music, text and image driven theatre work that plunges inside the mind of the woman-identifying or trans person running for office in America today. A dynamic cross between documentary theatre, dance theatre, and immersive spectacle, Candidate X puts the audience in the perspective of these risk-takers forced to be chameleons to enact change. What does she/they sacrifice in learning how to adapt to radically divergent views in America of who deserves to wield power? Candidate X is intended to premiere in tandem with the 2020 election and 2021 inauguration, propelling election-anxious American audiences through a lyrical, humorous and bracing labyrinth of gender identity on the political stage. We aim for the piece to challenge and expose bias on both sides of the aisle, and help broaden the gendered expectations our country has of those who lead.

Candidate X is built around texts and songs penned by playwright Aisha Zia, composer Kamala Sankaram and a diverse team of other writers and composers with whom we are currently in conversation. Building on Ripe Time's signature kinetically-driven, visually immersive style, Candidate X plunges headlong into the divisive politics of gender and leadership. Structured loosely on The Odyssey, the piece tracks a young grassroots activist coming of age in Trump's America, both interrogating and celebrating the moxie and transgressive fervor with which women–identified and trans public figures must navigate and overcome societal expectation and gender stereotype in the charged American political climate today. Rachel Dickstein will collaboratively devise and choreograph with a company of six actors and singers.

In 2019 America, there are more women and trans candidates running for office (and negotiating political power in the face of gender discrimination, racial bias, and religious intolerance) than ever before. In the wake of Trump's brutal misogyny and racial intolerance, Candidate X serves as both an anthem and cautionary tale to accompany this revolutionary movement. It embraces stories of those transgressing gender norms in seeking public office, and exposes and dismantles some of the dangerous assumptions made about race, class, and gender in American politics today.

The texts and songs of Candidate X will be told from the point of view of women-identifying, trans and non-binary candidates running for office, serving in leadership roles or simply negotiating their identity in the public and private sphere. Commissioned writers and composers will be invited to write based on actual candidates and elected officials, or fictionalized versions of real life citizens. Director and conceiver Rachel Dickstein will link monologues/scenes within a bed of choreography and design driven image inspired by the candidates interior thoughts fears, dreams, and imagined victories/defeats. The piece is created by a diverse community of women-identified artists by design - to tell the stories of a wide array of change-makers, we want to have a creative team that represents that diversity.

December 13, 2017

Premiering Sleep at the BAM Next Wave Festival was a career highlight and a landmark moment for Ripe Time. The New York Times called Sleep “a gorgeous and surreal adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story” and praised its “ravishing aesthetics.”  Read the review and other exciting coverage here. 
 
After sold out houses at both BAM and at Philadelphia's Annenberg Center, we are pleased to announce Sleep will tour to Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, appearing for a limited run from March 1-3, 2018 as part of Yale Rep’s renowned No Boundaries Series! Yale Rep’s NO BOUNDARIES series explores the frontiers of theatrical invention through cutting-edge and thought-provoking performance from around the world. NO BOUNDARIES has introduced Yale Rep audiences to an astonishing array of performances—including theatre, dance, music, and multimedia—from the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Poland, Peru, Colombia, Spain, Germany, Japan, Israel, Georgia, East Africa, West Africa, and right here in the U.S. We're honored to be included alongside the esteemed roster of  work presented at No Boundaries. Information and tickets available here.

November 1, 2017

Sleep had its world premiere at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts this past weekend! Philadelphia audiences loved the piece and we can't wait to bring it to Brooklyn at the BAM Next Wave Festival at the end of the month!  Read the preview article in the Philadelphia Inquirer! A few tickets remain for our benefit at BAM and Black Forest Brooklyn on December 2.  Write us directly at rachel@ripetime.org for more information on securing tickets!

May 22, 2017

We are thrilled to announce that SLEEP will have its NYC premiere at BAM Next Wave Festival November 29-December 2, 2017 in Brooklyn, NY. The World Premiere will be at Annenberg Center Live in Philadelphia October 27-28, 2017. This is our Next Wave debut and the start of our inaugural tour!

We are also proud to be working with Octopus Theatricals as our touring producer. Octopus works with amazing companies like Phantom Limb, The Civilians, and Anais Mitchell/Rachel Chavkin/Hadestown.

February 22, 2016

Our work in progress run of Sleep at the Japan Society is SOLD OUT!  Please contact their box office for possible tickets that will be released on February 24.  NEWS SOON ON NEXT STEPS FOR THIS EXCITING PROJECT!

November 16, 2015

We're thrilled to announce that the Center Theatre Group (home to the world renowned Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and Kirk Douglas Theatre in Los Angeles, CA) has awarded us a completion commission for our upcoming project Sleep, based on Haruki Murakami's short story and adapted by Naomi Iizuka.

CTG joins the Obie-winning PlayCo as our partners on Sleep, offering invaluable support from two leading national theatre companies as we work towards our work-in-progress presentation at the Japan Society February 26-28, 2016. Tickets are on sale now! 

These amazing partnerships make Sleep a breakout project for our company. And we have equally thrilling plans just around the corner (to be announced next year) for the NYC premiere of the work in 2017. Stay tuned! 

Joining our accomplished ensemble of Akiko Aizawa (SITI Company), Saori Tsukada (Ludic Proxy), Takemi Kitamura (The Oldest Boy) and Paula McGonagle (Innocents, Septimus) is Jiehae Park (Peerless at Yale Rep) and Brad Culver (LA's Poor Dog Group). And the storyboards you see above suggest the exquisite projection design Hannah Wasileski is dreaming up with us! Hannah joins Mimi, Ilona Somogyi and Ji-Youn Chang (our Obie award-winning all-girl design team from The World is Round) to design the show.

In other great news, we're thrilled to announce that Mimi Lien, our set designer on The World is Round and the upcoming Sleep has just been awarded a MacArthur "genius" award. We could not be more proud of Mimi and are so happy to have her part of the Ripe Time artistic family.

March 27, 2015

Ripe Time is thrilled to announce that we're headed West this June! SLEEP, our collaboration with Naomi Iizuka, has been invited to join an impressive roster of projects in development this summer at Berkeley Rep's Ground Floor. The Ground Floor Summer Residency Lab is a fantastic opportunity, providing us with two critical weeks of intensive rehearsal and workshop time as well as invaluable community engagement and project-feedback from the Berkeley Rep staff and invited artists.

To make this opportunity a reality we need your support! Berkeley has offered us generous travel and housing funding but it is only enough to bring a portion of our company. To bring all of our New York and San Diego-based artists to the Bay Area, we need to match that funding, dollar for dollar. We must raise $8,000 by May 8, 2015 to be able to take advantage of this one-of-a-kind development opportunity. Please contribute to our Kickstarter campaign to make this dream a reality! 

Beyond our Berkeley adventure, we have solidified plans to have a Brooklyn based design workshop in August 2015 and to partner with The Japan Society in February 2016 to present a fully-staged workshop production with design of SLEEP.  We continue to partner with the wonderful Play Company as our co-producer for this workshop and the world premiere in 2016-17. Septimus and Clarissa and The World is Round models, renderings and set pieces are headed to Prague for the 2015 USITT Prague Quadrennial.

Lastly, on Monday March 16th, I was honored to receive the League of Professional Theatre Women's Lucille Lortel Award in honor of my work with Ripe Time. The Lucille Lortel Award is given to an aspiring woman theatre artist who is showing creative promise and deserving of recognition and encouragement. I was thrilled to be honored by the League and to have Ellen McLaughlin introduce me. Click here to share her beautiful words. 

December 1, 2014:

We are thrilled to announce that Septimus and Clarissa and The World is Round have been selected as finalists in the Overall Production category for presentation at the USITT's 2015 Prague Quadrennial. Congratulations to Susan Zeeman Rogers, Oana Botez, Keith Parham, Jane Shaw, Gina Leishman (Design team for Septimus & Clarissa) alongside Mimi Lien, Hannah Wasileski, Ji-youn Chang, Ilona Somogyi and Jane Shaw (design team for The World is Round.) The Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space is often described as "the Olympics" of performance design with only 19 productions represented from US productions from the last four years of design. (There are many more from across the globe as well!) We are so honored to have two of our productions chosen for this major international exhibition.

This month we launch our work developing Sleep. As always, we welcome you into our studio to see the work being built. Thursday December 18th and Friday, December 19 at 3 pm, come to an open studio to see some of our earliest ideas. Free admission but you must reserve since there is very limited seating: Email us at info@ripetime.org to RSVP.

Ripe Time is proud to participate in #GivingTuesday, a global day for giving back. On December 2nd, send us a check or give on our website. It's the "anti-Black Friday," a way for individuals across the globe to take back the holiday season as a time for giving.

August 5, 2014:

We are pleased to announce that Ripe Time will be launching a new project in the next two years, 

Sleep is a singular story of a young Japanese woman with a double life. The archetypal housewife and mother harbors another self within she is afraid to express. Sleeplessness opens a door to escaping this fear: the constrictions of her prescribed role melt away, releasing a woman who takes risks, indulges in the things her husband otherwise forbids and embraces what is unpredictable and dangerous. This “escape” however, then leads to a loss of security: changing the rules of her own life opens a space of lawlessness and danger she never expected.  

We have commissioned Naomi Iizuka, a nationally recognized playwright and winner of the Alpert Award and the PEN/Laura Pels Award to write the text in collaboration with the company.

This original multi-disciplinary play is inspired by the short story by Haruki Murakami, Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard. Bachelard's philosophy describes how the home is a place like no other, a place where we experience memory and imagination together in a powerful synthesis. And the binding agent, he writes, is the daydream, through which we go beyond the present moment and travel deep into our past experiences. This taps into something core to what we examine as a company: How seeing experience through the filter of dream and memory approaches a truer, deeper understanding of experience. 

The Obie winning Mimi Lien and Hannah Wasileski head the design team and Katie Down, the Drama Desk nominated composer who composed our first two productions brings her New Born Trio to perform an original live score commissioned for the production. With Ripe Time’s signature blend of expressionist movement, inspired visual design and original live music, Sleep will explode what is lost and found in one woman’s awakening. 

May 19, 2014:

The World is Round wins an Obie! (three times!)

Special Citation honoring Heather Christian (music and lyrics), Hannah Wasileski (Projections design), and Jiyoung Chang (lighting design).

It's hard to contain how thrilled we all are to be recognized by the Obie Committee for our BAM premiere production. Thanks to the whole TWIR creative team, cast, crew at Ripe Time and at BAM for helping make this show such a success! And if you want to see these amazing women onstage at Webster Hall last night, watch here!

The World is Round received its World Premiere April 17-30 at BAM. 

Coming in 2015: And Suddenly a Kiss, There on the Back of My Neck

A site specific dance theatre performance set in a deeply wooded garden that uses movement, sound design, and augmented reality technology to investigate the ways memory infuses the present moment with shards of the past. Sylvan Wood asks its audience to step inside the mind of 83 year old Isabel Wright, a retired neuroscientist en route to receiving a lifetime achievement award. Traveling through outdoor “rooms” and down hidden pathways, the audience is catapulted through her past listening to her thoughts and dreams and fears intermingled in an immersive mix sound and music. With the surreal soundscape of a Janet Cardiff installation, and the lush choreography of a Pina Bausch dance, And Suddenly a Kiss.... takes us down Isabel's own rabbit hole of memories and visions as the intimacy of the garden unleashes a treasure trove of secrets and dreams.

Commissioned by Peopleʼs Light & Theatre and Longwood Gardens, Kennett Square, PA.

Learʼs Shadow

A new version of Shakespeare's King Lear that offers a visually powerful, kaleidoscopic journey through the visions and dreams of one of Shakespeare's most iconic and tragic figures. Through language, image, dance and music, Lear's Shadow explodes one dying woman's search for self in the midst of chaos. Created with Estelle Parsons, and developed with Craig Baldwin, Timothy Doyle, Adam Green, LeeAnne Hutchison, Paula McGonagle, Tommy Schrider, and Miriam Silverman.