New York, NY – January 7, 2025 – Tonight is the opening performance of SpaceBridge at the 2025 Under the Radar Festival. Presented by La MaMa in association with En Garde Arts and Visual Echo, SpaceBridge is a workshop program and live performance conceived and directed by Irina Kruzhilina. The Stella Adler Center for the Arts served as an educational partner, providing actor training to the nineteen child performers as part of the Center’s Arts Justice Division.
Said Tom Oppenheim, Artistic Director of the Stella Adler Center for the Arts, “I love SpaceBridge as I love all things Arts Justice because it offers a theatrical response to a refugee crisis we see growing in our very midst and worldwide.”
SpaceBridge is a live performance that connects a group of Russian refugee children, who fled their homes due to their families’ anti-war stance and now reside in NYC shelters, with their American-born peers to build a more welcoming world where their new friendships can thrive and grow. SpaceBridge is devised and performed by eleven young Russian refugees, aged ten to fifteen, alongside eight American-born participants of the same age.
To help the young participants prepare for these performances, the Center created an eight-week workshop offered in-person in downtown Manhattan. The actors received vocal and theater training with Christa Kimlicko Jones, Director of Teen and Young Artist Programs at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the world is experiencing a refugee crisis of unprecedented proportions, with more people displaced than ever before in modern history. In 2023, over 117 million people were forced to flee their homes due to conflict, persecution, violence, and human rights violations. As of May 2024, UNHCR estimates that the number of displaced people exceeds 120 million.
Said Oppenheim, “When the world feels like it’s falling apart and becoming less friendly, make theater and, through theater, build community!”
SpaceBridge will run for six performances from January 7-11 at La MaMa, Ellen Stewart Theatre (66 East 4th Street, NYC, NY.) More information can be found at https://utrfest.org/program/spacebridge/.
The Stella Adler Center for the Arts is a public arts center with an actor-training conservatory at its core, the world-renowned Stella Adler Studio of Acting. Public programs invite audience members to join us in our quest to understand the human experience through art, to ask what it means to be a theater with a higher purpose and to explore what artists might do in the face of atrocity and injustice. There are many programs that comprise the Center, from curricular initiatives to public cultural programming to arts justice work. All of these programs, whether they are poetry readings, jazz concerts, dance performances or training programs, share common ideals.