Ping Chong + Company amplifies the voices of young New Yorkers in the 25th Anniversary of UNDESIRABLE ELEMENTS with GENERATION NYZ. With affecting vulnerability, bold honesty and enduring spirit, Syl, Porscha, Edwin, Mohammad, Monica, De-Andra and Rafael bravely speak their truths and share their stories. From East New York to West Harlem and from the South Bronx to Far Rockaway, witness the jubilant victories, recent discord and distant dreams of coming of age in this great, big city. Real People. Real Lives. Real Theater.

There is the idealized New York the world sees on film, and then there is the real New York the people live out every day. And no one lives it more fully than a young person whose greatest, and sometimes only, resource is their own resilience. Seven young New Yorkers, all born in the latter half of the 1990s, openly share their personal stories in Undesirable Elements: Generation NYZ. In a spoken word presentation that has the cadence of 1960s Beat poetry, all of the artists show that, no matter how different their stories are, they are united in their questioning if anyone else can understand what they are going through. The artists begin by telling their parents’ and grandparents’ stories, and how they tie in with New York City’s history, including the Great Migration between 1916 and 1970 during which 6 million African-Americans moved out of the rural South to other parts of the country. All of these historical details show the continuity of how New York has always brought people from different walks of life together in ways that are unimaginable anywhere else. In elementary school when the World Trade Center was attacked and in middle school when the housing bubble burst, all s …Read more