NEW YORK CITY: New Victory Theater, which presents theatre for young audiences, has announced its 2016-17 LabWorks artists. The LabWorks program  is designed to facilitate the creation of new work and provides resources and networking opportunities for a select group of New York City artists and theatre companies to develop a new project. Each recipient will receive a stipend, rehearsal space, and the opportunity to hold open rehearsals for industry professionals.

The 2016-17 New Victory LabWorks artists are listed below.

• Only Child Aerial Theatre, led by Nicki Miller and Kendall Rileigh, will use aerial and ground acrobatics, live music, projection, and shadow work to celebrate how imagination and play connect the young and the old in Story Hour.
• Tim Kubart will team up with Mario “The Magician” Marchesethe, subject of the indie documentary Building Magic, to create a combination of magic and music that celebrates creativity and imagination in Makers and Shakers.
• Andrew Gerle will pen a musical adaptation of The Great Blueness by Arnold Lobel, about a town where everything is gray until the local wizard accidentally discovers a magical new world of color.
• Blessed Unrest, led by artistic director Jessica Burr, will adapt The Snow Queen, using physical theatre to build the peculiar lands and wild creatures encountered by the courageous heroine as she journeys to rescue her friend.
• Spellbound Theatre, a New York theatre company that creates work exclusively for ages 0-5, will explore how the human body works through humor, music, puppetry, and digital media in The World Inside Me.
• Kathleen Doyle, a two-time Fulbright Grant recipient and costume and puppet designer, will share the ancient art of Vietnamese water puppetry in an untitled new work.
• Puppet Kitchen Productions will use puppetry and clowning to tell the story of two best friends who disappear into the art they were tasked to hang. Pictures at an Exhibition is inspired by the real life story behind Mussorgsky’s piano suite of the same name.
• Louisa Thompson Pregerson will create a new work inspired by her recent project Washeteria, a site-specific work set in a fantastical laundromat.
• Maaa Theater, cofounded by director Mohammad Aghebati and filmmaker Mehrnoush Alia, will stage The Little Black Fish, an Iranian children’s story about a young fish who leaves his home stream for new waters and goes on an eye-opening adventure.
• The Village of Vale will use live music, storytelling, puppetry, and visual arts to animate a series of dark folktales.
• Drew Petersen, associate artistic director of Trusty Sidekick Theater Company and drama teacher at the Blue School, will bring to life the unlikely friendship between Nera, an abstract art-obsessed Brooklyn fifth grader with synaesthesia, and Chester, a middle-light class boxer with more passion for the sport than skill in The Prizefighter of P.S. 217.
• Zachary Fine will take a closer look at Dennis, a character that appears only once in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in So Please You or The Tragical Comical Tale of Dennis, The Almost Silent Shakespearean Actor.
• Chad Beckim will explore the mental, physical, and emotional landscapes that American trans youth and their families must navigate in Little Man.

The artists will have access to feedback and support from New Victory staff, and will be invited to participate in professional development and networking events.

Founded in 1995, the New Victory Theater is based in New York City and produces theatre for young audiences.