“What does it mean to want a house when you don’t even feel at home in your own name?”
The question hung over the audience for a split second, maybe two. In the crowd, hands clasped red-and-yellow copies of Sandra Cisneros’ The House On Mango Street, the stories all but breathing on the pages inside. Eyes swiveled to the front of the room, where three poets stood at attention. Back at the mic, Journey Rosa pressed on.
“Because my name carries things / It carries history / It carries expectation / It carries the weight of people who came before me / And the fear that I might not be enough to carry it forward. ”
That very essence of home—in so many forms, all of them slowly unfolding—settled over College Street Thursday night, as the International Festival of Arts & Ideas kicked off its 31st season with a lyrical, laughter-filled and intimate gathering at the Shubert Theatre’s second floor cabaret space. Held in a year of intense transition for the organization, the scaled-down season focuses a mix of New Haven and Connecticut-based talent and artists who are coming from much further afield.
Thursday’s event doubled as the launch for this year’s NEA Big Read, for which there is a line up of rich panel discussions, a community quilting effort, and a late June discussion with author Sandra Cisneros, all around her 1983 book The House On Mango Street. As in years past, the Festival has partnered closely with the New Haven Free Public Library, which will host Big Read events at each of its five branches.
“You know, we’ve had to move quickly, but I’m really excited about what we’ve accomplished,” said Thérèse LaGamma, who last year came aboard as interim program lead after leaving her position at the John F. Kennedy Center for The Performing Arts. “We all want to feel like we’re in community, right? And so, that’s why I’m hoping we get the biggest dance party we can right out there on the Green. That’s why I’m excited about ‘Selected Shorts,’ because it gives us the chance to unplug. You know, there’s just a lot of connections.”
Board Co-Chair Annie Lin: "Today, we redefine belonging not as conforming, but as being embraced exactly as you are." Lucy Gellman Photos.
That focus on community comes partly out of necessity: the organization’s $2.7 million budget is significantly tighter than it has been in years past, as this coming season marks nearly two full years without a full-time, permanent executive director. After the departure of Shelley Quiala in August of 2024, the Rev. Kevin Ewing served as interim director from September 2024 through September 2025; the board did not announce the end of his tenure until late December 2025. Since that time, board and staff have been working closely together to keep the festival afloat, while also running a national leadership search. Board Co-Chair Annie Lin said that the search is in its final stages.
Thursday, an aspirational vision of home flowed through the low-lit cabaret, punctuated by original poetry and conversations that danced around each other. From a screen on one side of the room, a portrait of the Afro-Cuban artist Cimafunk glowed, a pair of bedazzled shades over his eyes (he performs with his band, La Tribu, on June 26 on the New Haven Green). Beyond him, attendees wound their way around cabaret tables, voices rising and falling across the space. Cans of Rhythm Lager, brewed by New Haven’s own Alisa Bowens-Mercado, dotted a few tables.
In the center of the action, Hamden-based dancer Alexis Robbins soaked it all in. This year, the Festival welcomes her for the long-awaited premiere of The Mercy Velvet Project, a rock opera that began in New Haven four years ago, and has continued to evolve in church basements, arts incubators and grassroots dance residencies in New Haven, West Haven, and New York City.
For Robbins, a tap dancer and artistic director who uses her body as a percussive instrument, it's part of a long-held dream coming to fruition. In December of last year, she presented excerpts of the performance at CitySeed’s James Street hub, giving New Haveners a chance to see the sheer amount of labor that had already gone into the work. At that time, she knew that she wanted the premiere to be in New Haven, but wasn’t yet able to announce a venue.
Now, she’s got a time and a place. The opera, which is co-presented by Arts & Ideas and the Yale Schwarzman Center, will unfold June 26 and 27 at the Yale Theater, Dance and Performance Studies black box at 53 Wall St. in New Haven. (Tickets and more information on the creative team is available here.)
“I’m super excited!” she said, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow dancer and producer Lara Marcin, who is the stage manager on the premiere. “I feel like this is a child I am birthing. This has been a long time coming.”
Alexis Robbins and Lara Marcin.
That performance is just part of the Festival’s thinking around what makes a creative home, an idea that winds itself from the New Haven Green out to Fair Haven’s Grand Avenue to the vibrant community gardens that dot the city’s 18.7 square miles. Starting this week, Arts & Ideas will bring back its signature neighborhood festivals, which begin with Fair Haven Day on May 2, and end with Freddy Fixer Weekend a full month later.
In between, there will be all-ages fêtes in The Hill, Whalley/Edgewood/Beaver Hills,West Rock/West Hills, and Newhallville. As in years past, each is presented in partnership with a neighborhood-specific committee.
During that same time period, bibliophiles can celebrate the Big Read in all its literary glory, with weekly offerings at all five branches of the New Haven Free Public Library, including book club discussions in Spanish in Fair Haven. In June, the magic continues with “Voices & Belonging: A Day of Literature and Identity,” a full day of literary discussion at the New Haven Museum.
That afternoon, Kulturally LIT Founder IfeMichelle Gardin will hold a discussion with author Sandra Cisneros as a kind of keynote and culmination of the event.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the Festival takes place from mid to late June, with Ideas programming like “America 250: Democracy at a Crossroads” that begins on June 7, just as the Freddy Fixer Parade will be making its way triumphantly down Dixwell Avenue. In addition to Robbins, New Haven highlights include familiar and beloved names like poet and playwright Aaron Jafferis (June 24 at the University Theatre, with composers Dahlak Brathwaite and Daniel Bernard Roumain), local culinary phenoms like Meg Fama (June 15 at 6 p.m.), Juneteenth organizer and Artsucation Academy Network Founder Hanan Hameen, and New Haven Symphony Orchestra Maestro Perry So, who with the NHSO will conduct on the New Haven Green on June 27.
Community Impact Manager Shannon Miller, who is the brain behind this year's NEA Big Read Programming.
Likewise, several of this summer’s panel discussions feature New Haven creative luminaries, from hair and beauty experts to chefs leading the way in sustainable culinary practices. On June 17, for instance, the Festival will host “Hair, Home & Belonging,” a power-packed panel discussion with Stacy Graham-Hunt, Dr. Siobhan Carter-David, Theodore Kim, Luvena Leslie, Renee Loren Brown, and author Jazmi Zanders. Or on June 14, there is “Chef’s Table,” a conversation on local foodways and with chefs Emily Mingrone, Arturo Franco-Camacho, and Damon "Daye" Sawyer at the New Haven Museum. That talk will be moderated by New Haven’s own Tagan Engel, a familiar face at the Festival and a force in culinary storytelling and food justice in the region.
From both close by and further afield, the Festival is excited to welcome several artists who are both performing for the first time, and returning in a new context. There is, for instance, the dance company Pilobolus (June 18 at 8 p.m.), which formed in New Hampshire but for years has operated out of Washington Depot, Conn., and yet never appeared at the festival. There’s musician and artist Somi Kakoma (June 25 at 7:30 p.m.), who folks may know from the Broadway musical Jaja’s African Hair Braiding, and then local favorites Matt Kampe & The Hub just a day later on the Green.
Those who have been following the festival for several years will also recognize names—a homecoming, perhaps, of sorts—like Haitian American musician Jo. L, who has performed multiple times at the New Haven Caribbean Heritage Festival and is coming back as an opener for Trinidad-born Sosa sensation Denise Belfon, and Indigenous artist Ty DeFoe, who last graced the stage when the Festival was virtual in 2020, and now returns for two nights (June 19 and 20 at the University Theatre) with his work "Skeleton Canoe.”
As staff and board members celebrated the season Thursday, many also took a moment to acknowledge the power of looking more deeply at one’s own home base, and rediscovering the treasures that exist within it, even and especially when the wider world has a different perception.
“What does ‘home’ mean in the 250th year of our imperfect union?” Lin asked aloud, taking a moment to lift up the staff and board members who have kept the organization running without an executive director. “Today, we redefine belonging not as conforming, but as being embraced exactly as you are. Experience the powerful stories and performances of our curated artists as they map their own paths toward home.”
It was the evening’s poets, Journey Rosa, Christian Herron and New Haven Poet Laureate Yexandra “Yex” Diaz who brought the meaning of the night, well, home. Beaming as she watched the youth poets perform, Diaz made it clear before ever hopping on the mic how at home she feels as an educator and literary mom to dozens of kids in New Haven.
When she began to read minutes later, it was with one of the most candid and intimate reflections she’s shared during this term as poet laureate, a piece that lived closer to personal essay and prose poetry than straight up spoken word. Diaz, who hails from Chicago but grew up mainly in New Haven, wound the clock back to her own childhood and her mother’s before that, reflecting on the matriarchs in her own life.
She explained that initially, she had been excited to read The House on Mango Street, because of her own upbringing in Chicago. But as she read the book, “I quickly realized that Cisneros’ angst was my mother’s dream deferred.”
Diaz traced the arrival of her mother, Nivia Alida Diaz, to Chicago “as a 13-year-old runaway,” already scarred by her own mother’s sudden death 11 years prior, and years of abuse from an older sibling who took the younger kids in, but struggled with alcoholism. By then, she had lived more lives than any little girl should need to, “Prisoner of a pretty island / And a petty abuser.”
“And I can only imagine what she would have given for her biggest point of contention with life to have been cleaning the common areas behind inconsiderate, ungrateful neighbors,” Diaz continued, her voice steady, strong. “She couldn't even consider her role in the patriarchy. Instead, she was forced to stay in a child’s place while fulfilling adult obligations until her development was arrested.”
She pressed forward, in a tribute to the woman who made a two-bedroom apartment in New Haven feel palatial and cozy all at the same time, a safe space to land for Diaz and her siblings. When Diaz said the words “my mama,” a person could feel them deep inside their ribcage.
“My mother turned nuisance into nuance. Scrape into feasts, trial into triumph, slums into paradise,” she read, her voice a rising tide. “I come from the salt of the earth and the bottom of the rice pot. A caudero that doubled as a cauldron. My mother was a curandera, proud to wash laundry for a living. Made domestic labor her bread and butter. Could get a stain out of anything.”
Her mother cleaned things, Diaz continued: stains, spirits, souls that were exhausted and falling apart. She held things up and together: her children, her friends, her neighbors who needed an extra set of hands just to hold theirs for a moment. She made magic in spaces where other people—maybe other New Haveners, maybe Cisneros—saw none. She was an alchemist.
“Is’nt that what The House on Mango Street is all about?” she finished. “Telling your own story as you want.”