Mission
New Paradise Laboratories is a not-for-profit creative studio that thinks outside of every box it inhabits. Part theatre company, part imaginarium, NPL invents fresh and unexpected experiences and performances for audiences, spectators, and participants, onstage and out in the world. NPL began in 1996 as an ensemble theatre company, and has established a proven track record of original theatre works, invented interactive games, internet performance, and experience design.
Vision
From the beginning, NPL has created all of its offerings from the ground up. Our work is cut from whole cloth and demands collaboration on all levels. NPL collaborates with a range of curious researchers – visual artists, actors, musicians, scientists, theatre designers, composers, philosophers, economists, architects, and the public at large – to imagine the widest possible vista for every project.
The future of NPL will extend from this base to museum exhibitions, books, computer code, film and video, and ambulatory experiences, to provoke compelling ideas, sudden inspiration, enduring engagement, and a sense of awe.
Team
Whit Maclaughlin, Artistic Director
Whit MacLaughlin is the OBIE and Barrymore Award-winning Artistic Director of New Paradise Laboratories. He has conceived, written, and produced 25 original works with the company since 1996, nationally and internationally. His work is known for its strong visual sensibility, visceral muscularity, and pop treatment of philosophical discourse.
His recent work includes large-scaled outdoor and indoor experience design: How To Get To The River (2022), an ecological art adventure for the Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia, Gumshoe (2017) for the Central Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia, and Spectre Vivant (2017) for Opera Philadelphia.
His work for the stage and other media include: 707 Hazardous Moves (2021), Hello Blackout (2017), O Monsters (2016), The Adults (2014), and the web-based immersion pieces Extremely Public Displays of Privacy (2011) and Fatebook (2009). He has created work in New York, Seattle, Minneapolis, Louisville KY, Princeton NJ, at CalArts, Ankara, Turkey, and Kansas City, MO. He has received Fellowships from the Pew Charitable Trust, the NEA, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; grants from The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Mapfund, NEA, TCG, and the William Penn Foundation.
His publications include Batch, An American Bachelor/ette Party Spectacle by Alice Tuan and Whit MacLaughlin, Humana Festival 2007; Prom, U of Minnesota Press, 2010; Live Movies, a Field Guide to New Media for the Performing Arts, ed. Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White, George Mason University, 2006. His work has been presented in NYC at the Ontological Theatre, the Connelly Theatre, and PS 122; at the Walker Art Center, Warhol Museum, Humana Festival of New American Plays, Fusebox Festival, Philadelphia FringeArts Festival, and Prague Quadrennial.
Email: whit.maclaughlin@newparadiselaboratories.com
Pete Angevine, Creative Producer
Pete Angevine works as a creative producer and musician with a constellation of individuals and organizations in fields such as life sciences, public art, and experimental music. He has collaborated to conjure and present many creative projects including music albums, experimental theater, Ice Cream dreams, public history themed augmented reality apps, art exhibitions, a Wide Range of Popular and Avant Garde Musics, free food for the People, a comically small residential art gallery, murals large and small, watershed science infused walking tours, two beloved children, psychedelic sound healing ceremonies, a grass couch, interactive sound sculptures, site-specific historically-interpretive artist-designed miniature golf holes, gongs, and more. He is the Creative Producer of New Paradise Laboratories.
Email: pete.angevine@newparadiselaboratories.com
Collaborators
Jeffrey Cousar
co-creator, Avalanche of No
Jeffrey Cousar, from Logan, North Philadelphia, was enamored as a child with the boys who gathered to dance on the street corners. Not being allowed to hang out with them, he imitated what he saw on television. Witnessing this, his mother enrolled him in Philadanco, a staple in the Philadelphia dance community, headed by Joan Myers Brown, a Dunham protege who wanted to bring classical dance training to the Black community of Philadelphia. Under her parentage Jeffrey studied jazz, tap, ballet and gymnastics. After four years at Philadanco he was enrolled at Freedom Theater. There he performed in plays and dance concerts, even going to the National Black Arts Festival in Atlanta in 1991. In 1992, Jeffrey performed in his first professional productions, Bobos, written by Ed Shockley and James McBride, and Beat Down the Negative, directed by Mel Williams, co-starring alongside Nakia Dillard, Phillip Brown, and Kes. After graduating from high school, Jeffrey became a full-time actor. Since then, he has performed in film, most recently in a scene opposite Richard Gere in The Benefactor; on stage in Monaco performing with Rennie Harris Pure Movement and Rick Watson’s Your Girlfriend Need to Mind Her Business. In 1027 after performing in New Paradise Laboratories’ Gumoshoe, an interactive theater experience at the Free Library of Philadelphia, he started in their Hello Blackout!, a collaborative play about contingency and chance.
Janani Balasubramanian
Co-Creator, How to Get to the River
Janani Balasubramanian is an artist and researcher working at the intersections of contemporary art and science. Janani’s work is rooted in years-long collaborations with scientists, through which they discover how artistic inquiry can meet, expand, and provoke new thought in relation to a given scientific discipline. They are committed to accessibility, adaptive design, and play as generative principles of their multimedia practice.
Janani’s work has been presented and/or commissioned by over 160 venues across North America and Europe, including The Public Theater, MoMA, Andy Warhol Museum, Red Bull Arts, Ace Hotel, Brooklyn Museum, High Line, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have been an innovator-in-residence at Colorado College; artist-in-residence at Brooklyn College; artist-in-residence at the University of Colorado; Hemispheric Institute Fellow at NYU; Sundance Institute Fellow; Pioneer Works Narrative Arts Fellow; Jerome Hill Artist Fellow; and Van Lier Fellow at the Public Theater. Janani has received additional development support from MAP Fund; Stanford University Ethics, Society, and Technology Hub; Harvard University Critical Media Practice fund; Tow Foundation; and National Endowment for the Arts.
Janani is currently artist-in-residence in the brown dwarf astrophysics group at the American Museum of Natural History; visiting artist at Stanford University’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts; resident artist with the Stanford Compression Forum; Pew Foundation grantee through the Academy of Natural Sciences; inaugural Collider fellow at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts; and member of the Guild of Future Architects. They are a 2021 NYFA Fellow in Fiction.
Producing Fellows
Rohan Hejmadi
Alongside being a Producing Fellow with NPL, Rohan is a student at Swarthmore College where he is majoring in Computer Science and Theater. His previous experience includes chairing the Swarthmore Drama Board; producing and directing An Exquisite Corpse – an experimental theater piece performed at the Lang Performing Arts Center; and organizing multiple festivals in his hometown of Bangalore, India. In addition to improving his understanding of the art of producing, Rohan hopes to use this experience to explore the intersection of coding and theater to see outside the normal boundaries of each field and create unique projects at their intersection.
Outside of the theater, Rohan can be found laughing at dad jokes, holding his head in despair when Arsenal (his favorite soccer team) is losing a game, shouting angrily at his computer when his code doesn’t work correctly, or revelling in the fact that his name is also a kingdom in The Lord of The Rings. It really never gets old.
Salvador “Cinco” Placensia
Cinco is an avid home cook and comic book connoisseur, who has recently moved to Philadelphia from Colorado to work with New Paradise Laboratories as a Producing Fellow. He earned a BA in Visual and Performing Arts from the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, and is beyond excited to become more involved in the Philadelphia arts community. Cinco imagines art as an immersive experience built through deep collaborations. He finds that it’s imperative to make meaningful connections with artists, lend insight that is both logistical and creative, and create space and time for the project to develop. He has had many formative experiences throughout his artistic journey, namely an internship at The Public Theater for Under the Radar 2019, a research assistant position at Brooklyn College with lead artist Janani Balasubramanian on a project titled The Gift, and technical assistant for the UCCS Theater Company. There are very few experiences that teach individuals how to be producers, so opportunities such as NPL’s producing fellowship seriously contribute to the development of his own practice.