OPEN AIR: Melanie Charles & Kayla Farrish

• If you are reserving a General Admission / Free RSVP ticket, you're welcome to bring a blanket or pad to sit on. If purchasing a VIP ticket, you will have a chair for this performance.

• Feel free to bring snacks and non-alcoholic refreshments to the park for the performance!

• We will live stream each show on our Instagram page for audiences who are unable to experience the live event.

• In the event of inclement weather this show will be canceled with no rain date scheduled.

Open Air is a summer series of four live, site-specific performances throughout New York City from June through September, 2021. This series offers a unique show format that bridges dance and music communities through collaboration and aligns audiences to discover new artists. Not only does this series exist as a music and dance discovery platform, but it also provides opportunities for artists to connect and create new work once again in a live setting, stepping out of their usual collaborator circles and expanding their network and audience.

Melanie Charles is a Brooklyn-born singer-songwriter, actress, and flutist of Haitian descent, with a creative fluidity spanning jazz, soul, experimental, and Haitian roots music. Charles latest release “The Girl with the Green shoes” established Charles as a progressive voice in Jazz catching the attention of India Arie and a feature in The New York Times Sunday routine as well as The Village Voice. “You can hear her collaging her musical DNA into jazz-studded multi-instrumentalism and dipping a toe into the experimental... there's an uncanny cohesion to Charles' music." - Village Voice

Charles' latest venture, Make Jazz Trill Again, traces the Journey of Black music from the Haitian Folk songs to Negro Spirituals, from the Blues to Nancy Wilson and Hugh Masekela. Charles creates a space where tradition meets present time, using Roland SPs, loop pedals, and the flute to blur the lines between and among social classes, cultures, genders, and theories to create a world where opposing elements can co-exist.

Charles graduated from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music with a BFA in vocal jazz performance and trained under the tutelage of jazz masters Reggie Workman, Charles Tolliver, Junior Mance, Janet Lawson, Carla Cook, and Billy Harper, has worked with Herlin Riley, Ellis Marsalis, Pedrito Martinez, ELEW, Jean Grae, SZA, Jussie Smollet, the Gorillaz.  Her recent television appearances include Good Morning America, SNL, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.  

I am and always have been a maker.  Captivated by the whim, magic, and melancholy of the human experience, I aim to hold up a mirror to the society we form and participate in, to the communities and cultures we identify ourselves with, and lastly to the tremendous and unique experiences that form us as individuals. Our guts, instincts, weakness, power, voice that we do or don’t find, and our numerous attempts to relate, drive me—I believe in the physicality of what makes us inevitably, catastrophically, heartbreakingly, and wonderfully human.

Blending dance forms, blending artistic mediums, I questioned how could I bring honesty, personality, and unabashed humanness into dance and art. With roots as an African American woman from the south, I have always been aware of the displacement of colored bodies and our continuous seeking for identity and community. Always out of place, and never agreeing to be defined as one thing or one idea, I came closer to my own identity in things that I love.

Inspired by content, meaning, feeling, and movement, I strive to relate and transport through the work. The camera in photography and film allows you to translate the human experience through perspective and helps to build the intimacy and meaning I long for. I aim to be inclusive building a bridge for the audience to connect, imagine, and reflect. Utilizing screenwriting, specific movement studies, writing, photography, and narrative, I share my experience and hope to share a spectrum of the experiences of the others around me.

Forming live dance works, portrait and street/documentary photography, music videos, dance films, and narrative films, my work conjures greater representation, greater spectrum of individuals, and does not hide from what we are.

Since Audiofemme was conceived, it has been our goal to showcase the music writing of women and non-binary journalists in and industry still dominated by male critique. We do this not only by celebrating and nurturing women and non-binary writers, but by evaluating music culture from an intersectional feminist perspective, and by making space for non-traditional forms of music journalism. audiofemme.com

ThrdCoast is a Brooklyn-based music blog and video production company focusing on high-quality cultural documentation. thrdcoastmedia.com

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Maria Hernandez Park, Knickerbocker Ave & Starr St, Brooklyn, United States