Ars Nova Workshop invites you into a new space for radical playfulness.

RECESS is a new immersive performance created by composer-performers Odean Pope and Immanuel Wilkins.

Join us as we transform a North Philadelphia warehouse into a sculptural playground for sound. RECESS invites audiences inside a living model of improvisation, in an installation that is part bandstand, part score, part jungle gym—designed by Immanuel Wilkins and Rachael Elliott. Performance artist Jennifer Kidwell acts as guide and facilitator in this experience of “radical play.”

Odean Pope and Immanuel Wilkins are two points in the Philadelphia music continuum, connected by tradition and innovation. Odean was Immanuel’s teacher—he first heard him play at 9 years old. While Odean remained anchored in Philadelphia—an undisputed jazz elder in the city, leading jazz education while touring for decades with Max Roach and forming the groundbreaking Saxophone Choir—Immanuel went on to Juilliard and then a stellar career as a world-class musician and composer. Now the two have collaborated as colleagues on a new commission that evokes that continuum, drawing on the past, reveling in the present, and projecting into the future. They are joined by Wilkins’ quartet: Micah Thomas, Ryoma Takenaga, and Kweku Sumbry.

“Pope’s solos typically burst with ideas and are refreshingly clear of clichés.”—BBC UK

“Haunting, profound, astonishing… Wilkins [possesses an] improbable balance of ethereal and earthy, of searching and grounded, of virtuosic and plainspokenly lyrical”—Downbeat

“[The Immanuel Wilkins Quartet displays] abundant creativity, firepower, and riveting group communication…a worthy addition to the modern jazz vocabulary”—AllMusic

Jennifer Kidwell is an Obie-winning actor, playwright, and performance artists. Drawing on her training in clown and physical theater, she makes research-intensive, performer-driven works that interrogate and challenge prescribed ways of being. By embracing discomfort and disrupture, she invites all involved to step out of their comfort zones and into the unexpected. She facilitates a playful, exploratory relationship between musicians and audience.

“A comic genius…her extraordinary quality as part chaos Muppet, part deep thinker intensifies as you get closer to the stage.”—The New Yorker