MIKAYLA STANLEY

Hit the Lights! collaborated with Vogue Magazine to produce large scale flower puppets for their March 2021 cover shoot featuring Gigi Hadid.

Photographer: Ethan James Green

Fashion Editor: Gabriella Karefa-Johnson

Set Design: Julia Wagner

Originally produced at AP Studio in New York City.

Three sisters escape their war torn island to save their mother and rediscover the meaning of home. Inspired by the original poetry and songs of Maria De Lourdes Blain, a Cuban political refugee who escaped Cuba with her sisters in the ‘69 Freedom Flights to the United States, Hit the Lights! presents a magical world not so different from our own.

Production History:

2017: Original workshop premiere at Dixon Place in New York City.

2018: NYC premiere performed in residence at ARS NOVA in New York City.

2022: Performed as apart of the New Ohio Theatre’s ICE Factory festival

In HORSETALE, a Horse and his Tail become separated and in their search for each other, find themselves. HTL! weaves together handmade shadow puppetry, five vintage overhead projectors, live original folk music, and American iconography to tell a story as wild and expansive and intimate as the West itself.

Production History:

2017: Ars Nova (ANTFest)

2018: Portland Stage Co (PortFringe), Minnesota Fringe’s Family Fringe Festival

2019: New Victory Theater (Lab Work’s Artist), Franklin Stage Company, Ars Nova (Company-in-residence)

In 2019, The New York City Children’s Theater approached Hit The Lights! to adapt the picture book Taste the Clouds by Rita Marshall for the stage. In 2020 Taste the Clouds premiered at The Flea’s Pete Theater to a sold out run. With hand painted backgrounds, liquid light techniques, and the companies first foray into direct manipulation puppetry, Taste the Clouds delighted families and audiences of all ages.

Nominated for the 2020 Off Broadway Alliance Award for Best Family Show.

In 2018, Gimlet Media released its hit podcast The Habitat, and presented its first live podcasting festival GimletFest. They commissioned HTL to create a live component for The Habitat portion of the festival, using unreleased material from the podcast. BIGFOOT tells the story of a mouse the crew members found while simulating life on Mars, incorporating HTL!’s signature blend of live music and shadow puppetry.

Production history: 2018 GimletFest

Hit The Lights! has worked alongside Sammy Miller and the Congregation many times over the past three years, elevating their lives shows and bringing their most ambitious theatrical ideas to life. In June of 2018, Hit The Lights! opened for the band at Bowery Ballroom as a part of Sammy Miller’s Camp Congregation, and that December the two groups collaborated again at the Bowery for The Completely Non-Religious Holiday Spectacular. Their collaborative relationship took another step forward in 2019 and 2020 when HTL! conceived, puppeteered and directed the music video for the song Date A Jew, a single from the band’s first feature length album Leaving Egypt.

More on the collaboration, with features “ stunning shadow puppetry” can be found here.

In the fall of 2016, Hit the Lights! was invited to Cincinnati, Ohio by local experimental company The Know Theatre to create a site-specific immersive theatrical experience. Drawing on the work of HP Lovecraft and Cincinnati’s robust beer brewing history, The Other Rhine was born in the bowels of The Mockbee Building on Central Parkway. Audiences were thrilled and delighted across three floors of immersive entertainment, with students of Cincinnati Conservatory of Music (CCM) Acting Department helping to flesh out the nightmare that HTL! had meticulously created.

Read more about the immersive collaboration here.

Hit The Lights! and the New York Botanical Garden began their partnership in the fall of 2019. As a part of NYBG’s Spooky Garden Pumpkin Nights, Hit The Lights! created an original shadow short The Secret Life of Scarecrows that delighted the Garden’s patrons. Additionally, Hit The Lights! created interactive shadow puppet installations throughout the garden that patrons were able to illuminate and manipulate themselves.

A young man falls into the unknown to rescue the thing he holds most dear, his sister. Inspired by kabuki, video games, horror movies, and pixar shorts, DUNGEON builds a world where darkness speaks louder than the light.

“This show sets your expectations on their head and gives them a spin. The use of mime, shadow puppets, and light to transform the space into their canvas is extraordinary.” - Twin Cities Arts Reader Editors Pick Award 2017 -

"New York’s Hit the Lights! does all sorts of clever things with one of humankind’s oldest art forms, shadow puppetry, creating theatrical magic with a screen, spotlight, some flashlights and small figures that grow intimidatingly large in shadow. ‘...it’s eye-popping.” - St. Paul Pioneer Press -

AWARDS

Encore Winner - Minnesota Fringe 2017

Editor's Pick of Minnesota Fringe 2017 - Twin Cities Arts Reader

Audience Pick of the Fringe- Cincinnati Fringe 2015

Encore Winner - Cincinnati Fringe 2015

Production History:

2014: PortFringe Festival

2015: Cincinnati Fringe Festival

2016: New York Fringe Festival

2017: Minnesota Fringe Festival

2018: Performed in residence at Williams College

2018: Ars Nova (company in residence)

Inspired by punk rock house bands, interactive game shows, documentaries, and Herman Melville’s seminal masterpiece Moby Dick, Hit the Lights! Theater Co. invites you to catch a glimpse of the world that brought us a certain legendary white whale and the men that hunt him. Diving into the unknown, HTL explores the classic title using shadow puppetry, the interplay within darkness and light, rock and roll sea shanties and all the curiosity and terror of the sea.

“WHALES” IS A PUNK-ROCK SHADOW-PUPPET SEA-CHANTEY SING-ALONG MARVEL" - THE VILLAGE VOICE

"WHALES SWEEPS YOU UP INTO THE ACTION AS SOON AS YOU SET FOOT INSIDE. THE STORYTELLING IS INNOVATIVE, ENGAGING, AND EDUCATIONAL. IT'S NOT YOUR AVERAGE SIXTY MINUTE ONE-ACT.” -THEATRE IS EASY

Awards:

Encore Winner - Minnesota Fringe 2018

Artist Pick of the Fringe - Minnesota Fringe 2018

Venue Pick of the Fringe - Minnesota Fringe 2018

Outstanding Original Design (Puppets) - New York Innovate Theatre Award (nominated)

Outstanding Original Music - New York Innovative Theatre Award (nominated)

Outstanding Premiere of a Play - New York Innovative Theatre Award (nominated)

Production History:

2016: Portland Stage Company (Portland, ME)

2017: Jungle Theater (Minneapolis, Mn)

2018: The PIT (NYC)

An original musical adaptation of “The Blue Jar” that tells a story of adventure, romance, and infinite longing set at sea where one young woman discovers the cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears, or the sea.

Originally produced at The Cherry Lane Theater in New York City.