WE are prepping for the Community Garden Rally on Monday with a poster making party this Friday, October 25 during the LUNGS CSA 4-7pm at DeColores Garden 311 E.8^th St Btwn Aves B & C.

Bring your creativity we have canvas and supplies. Open to all!!

We are continue to collect signed petitions please bring any that you have to DeColores on Friday too.

Also there is an online version of the petition at Change.org HERE
 
 REMEMBER the RALLY IS MONDAY, OCTOBER 28 at noon on the steps of City Hall–SAVE THE GARDENS! Share your LOVE! Tell your fellow gardens! Spread the word, we need a good turnout to be heard.

We are standing up to protect our gardens on Monday, October 28 at noon on the steps of City Hall. Please come if you can. We need to be LOUD!LUNGS is coordinating a City-Wide rally with Green Guerillas, the New York Community Garden Coalition and the Elizabeth Street Garden.We are alarmed by the actions and intentions of the City administration in regard to our gardens.Our rally is in response to Mayor Eric Adams’ executive order 43 of August 21 requiring all city agencies to review their city owned and controlled land for potential housing development sites and in response to the Eviction Notice that Elizabeth Street Garden received on October 2. Our community gardens are an integral to the health and well being of our neighborhoods. They are the glue that strengthens our community by bringing people together and providing a healthy, educational, active environment.In the 1960s and 1970s New York City abandoned low income communities. Buildings were allowed to burn, entire neighborhoods became moonscapes. But people, on their own, volunteering their time, converted the urban blight into community gardens. Creating a community garden is an act of self-determination. In marginalized communities, gardeners challenge one of the most dehumanizing consequences of poverty and unemployment — severely limited resources. In community gardens people experience a sense of liberation and empowerment. And, as community gardeners, we demand respect. Since 1978, community gardeners and the Department of Parks and Recreation’s GreenThumb Program have enjoyed a fruitful relationship. Gardeners voluntarily give their time, labor, and money to be stewards of the City’s property and natural resources while GreenThumb has provided much needed organizational support. Yet in 1996 a city-wide struggle ensued when then-Mayor Guiliani tried to sell hundreds of community gardens to developers. Now we fear history is about to repeat itself. In a comment on the Mayor’s E.O. 43, Sue Donoghue, Commissioner of Parks and Recreation, said: Adams’ “new executive order is an important step in addressing New York City’s affordable housing crisis. This effort ensures that we can carefully balance the need for housing with the thoughtful use of the valuable facilities under NYC Parks’ jurisdiction.”  Community gardens signed a ten year license agreement with the city in 2022 but the wording imposed by the city states “ this License is terminable at will by the Commissioner in his or her discretion at any time, upon sixty (60) days written notice, and Licensee shall have no recourse of any nature whatsoever by reason of such termination.” We are the biggest community garden program in the country — and yet we are not safe. We seek a permanent solution to the preservation of community gardens in New York City. For eleven years The Elizabeth Street Garden has been trying to reach an agreement with the city government to insure its continued existence. The city has ignored over a million letters sent to the Mayor’s administration calling for the protection of Elizabeth Street Garden. Pragmatic alternative locations to the proposed housing have been offered, but the City remains intransigent. The past tells us we have to be proactive. We cannot sit back and watch as our gardens are listed as available for development and Elizabeth Street Garden is destroyed. We’ve got to make some noise. We demand that no community gardens be placed on a list of city properties for potential development and that Elizabeth Street Garden be preserved. This is our ongoing struggle, please join us.

ReScheduled Festival LAST DAY–Closing PArty!!!

Sunday OCTOBER 6, 2024 — Details>>

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Green Oasis Community Garden, 370 E 8th St (between Ave C & Ave D)

Sunday October 6,

2 pm. Poetry, Sparrow, the Truffles, Bob Holman, and provisional list.

Sun Oct 6, 4 pm. Mitchell Cheng [Green Oasis]

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Sun Oct 6, 5 pm. Elliott Sharp [Green Oasis]

Sun Oct 6, 6 pm. Kid Java [Green Oasis]

KID JAVA is a NYC‑based band that plays “Blue Note Americana”, ie., music that is deeply indebted to the blues, but mix it up with other rootsy genres and often with a contemporary feel. Sometimes we’ll play a down-home traditional blues, other times more swing-oriented material, and then there is the New Orleans second-line or funk tune thrown in to keep things lively.

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Sun Oct 6, 7 pm. Ray Santiago [Green Oasis]

Afro-Cuban Jazz, Ray Santiago is New York City based pianist, percussionist, singer, composer, arranger and band leader, active in the US Salsa scene from the early 1970s.

LUNGS is working in conjunction with the Green Guerillas and the New York City Community Garden Coalition to coordinate a Day of Action this Saturday 12-4pm at El Jardin del Paraiso, 710 E5th St between Aves B & C, you can also enter on E.4th St.

This Day of Action coincides with GreenThumb’s City-Wide Community Garden Harvest Fair at El Jardin.

Our purpose is to make a public statement supporting community gardens and our total opposition to the gardens being put on a list for development. The gardens are too important to lose, we must protect them for our families, ourselves and future generations.

On Saturday we will collecting signatures and making posters and signs to express our love for our community gardens. This is an all out effort, we are asking you to wear green on Saturday to show your support. We need to make our voices heard. We must be proactive.

We’ve been through this before. In 1996, Giuliani was mayor, and he tried to auction off every community garden across the city to developers. The gardens were listed by the city as empty lots. Gardeners mobilized city-wide, demonstrations, pranks, and arrests followed. We lost some gardens but ultimately prevailed.

In 2015 de Blasio proposed building housing on over 40 community garden sites. After fierce advocacy, 36 of these gardens were preserved.

Losing green space to buildings is obscene. This is not a housing issue, this is a developers scheme. Once an open public space in NYC is gone, it will be lost forever.

We are supporting the work of GreenThumb, and welcome the chance to meet gardeners from across the city.. But our message to Mayor Adams is Hands Off Our Community Gardens!

Please Print this out and circulate, we need this Saturday at El Jardin del Paraiso

Preserve Our Gardens, Protect Our Future: Tell Mayor Adams to Stand with Community Gardens!

Beginning in 1973, the NYC Community Gardens movement is the largest urban gardening program in the United States. Community gardens provide free, public, green space to the residents and visitors alike. These community gardens provide ecological, nutritional, and health benefits to the all and provide space for community building. Many community gardens sprang up on vacant or abandoned lots that the City of New York owned. The city issues 10 year licenses to community groups to steward and maintain the gardens under the NYC Parks Department’s GreenThumb program.

However, on August 21, Mayor Eric Adams issued Executive Order 43, ordering all NYC agencies to review city property to identify potential sites for housing development. NYC Parks Department property is included in this review.

We demand that Mayor Eric Adams issue a clear directive exempting community gardens on city-owned land from Executive Order 43, reaffirming their protection, and ensuring that any land review process fully recognizes the irreplaceable value these spaces bring to our city.’

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Please join us Saturday, the GreenThumb Harvest Fair will be fun!

LUNGS 13th Annual Harvest Arts Festival continues this week, see the complete schedule HERE.

FESTIVAL PROGRAM

In 1956, Joe Papp began the outdoor theater tradition on the Lower East Side when he introduced “Shakespeare in the Park” in East River Park Amphitheater. From the 1950’s to the present, the Park was the site of frequent free Evening-in-the-Park concerts and plays. In 2022, LUNGS (Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens) launched the first FREE annual LUNGS

Summer Theater Festival and continues to honor the tradition with the third annual festival this June. The 2024 festival will be hosted by Lower East Side icon Riki Colon and feature poems by  Loisaida Poetas, read by Carlos Rodriguez. 

The 3rd Annual LUNGS Summer Theater Festival is supported in part by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. The festival was curated by Erez Ziv, Riki Colon, Roman Primativo Albear, Bonnie Sue Stein and Charles Krezell. Special thanks go to 6B Garden, Sally Young, Jason Trucco, Bunny and Rina Root. Festival banner by Theresa Linnihan

2024 Festival Schedule

2pm:  CZECH AND BENGALI STORIES WITH PUPPETS

By Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre

Created and performed by Vit Horejs & Sayma Karim

Featuring The Naughty Tiger performed by Sayma Karin and The Devil and The Lawyer & The Twelve Months  performed by Vit Horejs. In addition: The Devil marionette announces his 2024 Presidential Campaign. Sayma Karim and her Muppet Titly will tell a Bengali folk tale she heard as a child in her home country of Bangladesh followed by Vít Hořejš and his Century old marionettes telling his childhood story from Czechoslovakia, where the naughty creatures are, of course, the devils.

Sayma Karim, a versatile puppeteer and educator, worked for 19 years in Bangladesh before emigrating to the USA. As a teacher, she trained emerging talents in voice, acting, and puppetry and acted in television dramas as well as puppetry. She joined the Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre this year. 

A native of Prague, Vít Hořejš emigrated to the US in 1979. In 1990, he found a trove of antique marionettes in the attic at Jan Hus Church on East 74th Street, in the heart of the once-upon-a-time Czech and Slovak neighborhood and founded Czechoslovak-American Marionette Theatre in NYC. He has lived in the once-upon-a-time Czech and Slovak Lower East Side since 1980.

3pm: EL TENDEDERO 

Presented by Something from Abroad 

Written and Directed by Regina Romero

Performed by Regina Romero, Silvana Gonzalez, Pelayo Alvarez and Martha Lorena Preve

In El Tendedero Latin New Yorkers Zaira and Nadia deal with the arrival of new neighbors; and with everything that it might imply: gentrification? Love? Infidelity? This short comedy is set in the perfect chisme (gossip) spot: a rooftop “Tendedero”. The reflection of a quintessential NY community. 

Something From Abroad produces material from different cultural backgrounds to give “outside” stories a voice in America today. It is a theater company made up of a couple of broads from abroad, proud to promote art created by women. Our mission is to provide an opportunity for actors from all over the world to perform on stage in New York. We tell the stories of our people and our struggle as immigrants. We believe that the differences and diversity that an international group brings to the table are our strength.

Pelayo Álvarez  is a Spanish actor and singer who honed his skills studying theater and film in Madrid, London, and New York. Since moving to New York, he has combined his work training diplomats at the United Nations with the development of his art by performing in venues such as Club Cumming, Don’t Tell Mama, or House of Yes, where he currently works as the Welcome Committee member. Under the pseudonym Pelayo AF, he has released original music and covers, producing eclectic music videos that you can find by searching for Pelayo AF on YouTube. Recently he has starred in “Hamlet, La Telenovela,” and is set to release his album “Don’t Call Me, Don’t Text Me, My Phone Is Busy…” Pelayo h. (IG: @pelayoaf)

Silvana Gonzalez is a Mexican actress, dancer and choreographer who graduated from NYU Tisch with a Founders Day Award and BFA in Theater. Her theater credits include Olena in Mariupol: Diary of War, Liuba in Radio 477!, Ondine in A Thousand Suns at La MAMA, Hera in FauxBia! The Musical at Carnegie Hall, Milenia at The Lucille Lortel, Hermia in A Midsummer Night´s Dream, Cynthia in WarLovers at Theater Row, and Louise Overbee in Love/Sick. Her film credits include Alejandra in Perfidia, Dr. Esperanza Haddid in Call The Sandman, Maria in Disconnect by Ryo Jaegger. Silvana is a company member of Something From Abroad, Yara Arts Group and Magis Theater and is very excited to perform “El Tendedero”

Martha Lorena Preve Ayora is a Mexican multi-disciplinary theater artist. She is the co-founder of the theater company Something from Abroad where she plays different roles like producer, playwright, performer and stage manager. She has worked as an assistant stage manager for three OFF BROADWAY shows at the Theater Center. Her original play Pastorela: A Very Merry Immigrant Christmas was staged at the Lucille Lortel Tinsel Festival. Her original monologue The Hammock received the Audience Choice Award at NBC’s Ya Tu Sabes Monologue Slam! contest. Recently she has starred in Hamlet: La Telenovela, a production that received the “Billy Bard Award” at the Young Howze theatre awards. She is thrilled to participate in this amazing festival with this talented group of artists, she would like to thank her parents, LUNGS and everyone that made this possible, thank you team, LOVE YOU ANDREW. IG: @martha_preve

Regina Romero (she/her/hers) is a Brooklyn based actor and writer, originally from Mexico City. She is interested in bringing Latine stories to the forefront, which can be seen in the productions she has written and starred in: Suficiente, La Sombra de Sofía, and Erial. Her latest short film, Suficiente, won second place in the Binational Kaleidoscope Film Festival Contest. Her poetry has been published at The Acentos Review. IG: @reginaromerof

4pm: OUR DAD IS IN ATLANTIS

Written by Mexican playwright Javier Malpica

Directed by Roman Primitivo Albear

Performed by Daniel Gutierrez Isaiah Garcia

The play concerns two young Mexican brothers who are left with their grandmother in a rural village while their father goes to the United States to look for work. Motherless, missing their father, and left in the care of relatives they scarcely know, the boys rely on one another for emotional support they are unequipped to provide, and for physical support in a naive and desperate attempt to reach their father in “Atlantis.”

Roman Primitivo Albear, playwright, poet,  director, and painter, was born in Mexico City and lives in New York City. 

5pm: LORCA’S LAST NIGHT

Written by Charles Krezell

Directed by Daria Faïn, Music by Leonid Galaganov

Performed by Leonid Galaganov, Rocco George, Jhonatan Zapata Garcia, Owen Engesser and David Fasano. Guitar by John King

1936, Lorca is arrested by La Guardia de Civil in fascist Spain. He is waiting for the morning to come.  

Daria Faïn (Director) is a Brooklyn-based dance theater artist and somatic explorer originally from the Mediterranean. She fuses her European cultural background with three decades of practice in Asian philosophies of the body and American dance training. Faïn studied theater in France with the Roy Hart Theater and the Peter Brook Company and has researched ancient Greek Theater. She has extensively researched the reciprocal influence between the environment and human behaviors. In 2006, with poet/architect Robert Kocik, they created the Prosodic Body, a new field of research on the embodiment of language that manifests in performance, education, architecture, and writing. Faïn has presented seventeen evening-length performances, numerous other short works, installations, four durational pieces, improvisations, and a feature film. 

Leonid Galaganov (Lorca, Music) is a NYC-based composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist from Estonia. Shaped by an eclectic background in jazz, classical, world and spiritual music, his work feeds on a broad range of both traditional and experimental influences. Leonid has toured in Europe and the US, played on 20 record releases, and received commissions from the American Modern Ensemble, Cassatt String Quartet and Ensemble Mise-En. A frequent multi-disciplinary collaborator, his role has expanded into acting with Lorca’a last night.

Rocco George (Dióscoro) is a unique character actor, puppet maker, and puppeteer who starred in numerous horror, comedy, and experimental films. Rocco is best known for playing “Coach Rocco” on THE ELLIE SPARKLES SHOW on YouTube. For more information visit www.roccogeorge.com

Owen Engesser (Francisco) is an actor and improviser based in Harlem. He graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design with a B.F.A in Performing Arts. Owen is thrilled to be back at LUNGS, and for the opportunity to work with Charles and this incredible cast and team.

Jhonatan Zapata,(Joaquín) actor and dancer from Cali, Colombia. Taught by mentors like América barrera, Alfonso Ortiz, Bernardo García, Clark Middleton, Alejandro Aguilar, Catherine French or Juan Pablo Felix. He studied at “Más Latinos, the academy” in New York City. Among his most recent projects we can find “Esto se puso color hormiga”, directed by Jorge Pérez (2020), or the short film “Russian Rulette”, one of the winners of the Latino Film Market, directed by Catherine French and produced by Yennifer Cordoba and John Rengifo. In 2022, he took part in the improvising shows “Improshot” and “Latinos Night Live” under Fabián Valbuena’s guidance. He took part in “Diles que no me maten”, directed by Germán Jaramillo (2023), as well as the short film “Renacer”. He was recently awarded as Best New actor after his role on “Perdona bonita pero Lucas me quería a mí”, by Félix sabroso in New York City.

Dave Fasano (Guard) is a Filmmaker/Photographer who has lived in the East Village for 20 years. Dave has worked on various projects with local artists, including documentary film projects about the history of the neighborhood. While primarily a filmmaker, he enjoys contributing to the arts scene in many capacities — with acting being the latest addition. 

John King is a composer/guitarist who’s been working as a freelance experimental musician for many years. He’s worked with La Mama, CultureHub, Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Ballets de Monte Carlo, among others. He has written more than 130 string quartets in his series Free Palestine.

Charles Krezell founded LUNGS in 2011. He has lived in the NYC since 1983. He is very happy to be able to work this year with this talented troop of artists.His theater work has been performed at the BACA Dowtown; work shopped at the Public Theater, and performed at the Greenwich St Theater and LUNGS Theater Festival in 2022. He collaborated with William Mesnik on “Anais Nin, Songs of Sin” performed at Nadine’s on Washington St and the West Bank Cafe. Krezell has made numerous documentaries, many focusing on the Presidential change of power in this country. Much of his work can be found on vimeo.com

LUNGS (Loisaida United Neighborhood Gardens) was formed in 2011 as a grassroots community gardens-based organization to unite the many volunteer-run community gardens in Loisaida, the Lower East Side and the East Village. LUNGS works to promote, protect and preserve gardening and greening through cooperation, coordination and communication. We believe that permanent community gardens and public greenspaces are necessary for a healthy New York. www.lungsnyc.org

GOH Productions is a nonprofit arts organization based on the Lower East Side that has been creating, producing and managing performing arts projects for over 35 years. 

FRIGID New York’s mission is to provide both emerging and established artists the opportunity to create and produce original work of varied content, form, and style, and to amplify their diverse voices. We do this by presenting an array of monthly programming, mainstage productions, an artist residency, and eight annual theater festivals that create an environment of collaboration, resourcefulness, and innovation. Founded in 1998, the aim was and is to form a structure, allowing multiple artists to focus on creating and staging new work and providing affordable rental space to scores of independent artists. Now in our third decade we have produced a massive quantity of stimulating downtown theater. www.frigid.nyc