Moonlight Revels

 A Reimagining of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Madness Most Discreet (MMD) is thrilled to announce its upcoming production of Moonlight Revels, an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, making its Buffalo premiere at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (BICA) on Friday May 16th, 2025 at 6pm and 8pm. This bold new work fulfills Madness Most Discreet’s mission to make Shakespeare’s plays radically accessible to all.

Founded in 2014, Madness Most Discreet is best known for their hallmark approach: one play, four actors, endless possibilities. Each actor learns the entire script, and in a spontaneous collaboration with the audience at the top of each performance, roles are assigned on the spot, making every performance unique.

Moonlight Revels invites you to enter Shakespeare’s world of pure imagination and endless possibility. Each showing (6pm and 8pm) will be uniquely shaped by its audience’s choices. With no role that is bound by gender, class, age, or status -- audiences are offered the rare opportunity to witness how interpretation, identity, and storytelling transform across performances.

We believe Shakespeare’s stories are about us. They belong to everyone.

Free For All Forever.

Join us the day after the opening of the maxim of the tomato for a walkthrough with artist Huidi Xiang. She’ll guide visitors through the exhibition, sharing insights into her practice and the inspirations behind the work. Don’t miss this chance for an intimate look at the installation with the artist herself.

Join us for the opening reception of Huidi Xiang: the maxim of the tomato in BICA’s main gallery.

For this exhibition, Brooklyn-based artist Huidi Xiang has created a sculptural installation that transforms the humble tomato pincushion—a ubiquitous sewing tool found in homes for generations—into a poignant metaphor for the contradictions embedded in care work. Traditionally, the tomato has been associated with health, healing, and prosperity, appearing in folklore as a protective charm and in pop culture as a symbol of recovery—most notably as the Maxim Tomato in the Kirby video game series, where it instantly restores a character’s health. But in the form of a pincushion, it becomes a site of puncture, pierced over and over by needles—a vessel of both nurture and violence.

A Conference Hosted by the Graduate Students of the University at Buffalo’s Media Study Department With a Keynote Talk by Yvette Granata, PhD February 9th @ Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art

The end of the world is near. At least, that’s the message we’ve heard from popular media for the last decade or so. And, who can blame them? With on-going environmental, political, and social crises, the worlds we once knew certainly are ending. It begs the question: what can be created in the old world's wake? The graduate students of the University at Buffalo’s Media Study Department are pleased to announce our inaugural graduate conference: Worldmaking at the World’s End. Considering the apocalyptic events of our contemporary moment, what is the artist's role in helping to shape new worlds? How can art, in all its forms, be used to imagine new possibilities and new answers to the problems we face? Our conference aims to address these questions, thinking specifically about art-making as a means of resistance during times of collapse. We are particularly interested in hearing from research-based practitioners who work between creative and scholarly practice. We are also open to unconventional forms and scholars/artists from non-traditional backgrounds.