Long Island City Waterfront Theater - Can Roosevelt Island Be Next?

Mabou Mines is performing "Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting" on a barge off the shore of Long Island City"s Gantry Plaza State Park. This is the type of event that should occur on Roosevelt Island and Southpoint Park. From today's NY Times:

Mabou Mines is known for epic works and unflinching experimentalism. But even for this group, “Song for New York: What Women Do While Men Sit Knitting,” a seaborne celebration of the city in music and verse, is a first: its first site-specific piece. Its first major one outdoors and on the water. And the first requiring not just the support of civic arts groups but also agencies like the Coast Guard and the Parks and Police Departments. If all goes according to plan, the show is to open tonight off the shore of Long Island City, Queens (the audience will be safely onshore), and run through Sept. 9.

“It’s a response to Walt Whitman’s great New York poems, and Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge poem,” she said. “Those poems are old now, and I thought it would be good for women to speak for the city.”

And:

The new verses are sung by five of them to a mishmash of musical styles, from jazz ballads to tarantellas. They’re connected by a historical narrative — a yarn, in Mabou’s parlance — written by Nancy Groce, an urban folklorist who has worked with the Smithsonian Institution.