Little Island Series

Outdoor performances featuring text adapted from the book Language City as well as documentary film, live music, and poetry in New York's endangered languages, featuring speakers of Tibetan, Kuranko, Nahuatl, and Pontic Greek.

Language City is an outdoor performance series about the past, present, and future of New York — the world’s most linguistically diverse city, premiering at Little Island, Manhattan’s extraordinary new park, in August 2024. Produced in partnership with Gung Ho Projects.

All shows are free and no tickets are required

August 14, 15, 17, and 18 at 6:30 pm (note no Friday performance)

A collaboration between ELA and Gung Ho Projects, the performances feature text adapted from the book Language City as well as documentary film, live music, and poetry in some of the city’s more than 300 endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages, including Tibetan, Kuranko, Nahuatl, and Pontic Greek.

With performances by:

Kewulay Kamara, a finah (lineage-based oral bard) originally from Sierra Leone long resident in Queens, will perform in his mother tongue, Kuranko. He is the Director of Badenya, a cultural and educational non-profit.

Tenzin Donsel is a leading musician and singer in the Tibetan diaspora community in Queens. She trained at the government-in-exile’s Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamsala, north India, and her musical albums have been a major hit among Tibetan and Himalayan communities. Accompanied by Tenzin Chunney on dranyen.

Irwin Sánchez is a Nahuatl-speaking chef and self-taught poet originally from Puebla, Mexico. His work reviving Indigenous Mexican cooking—through knowledge of the original Nahuatl words—was nominated for a James Beard Award.

Dimitris Stefanidis is a lyra player and singer in New York’s Pontic Greek community, which originates primarily in what is now Turkey along the Black Sea and now has a major center in Queens. Accompanied by Vasilios Koutsoumbaris on the Ntauli drum.

Directed and developed by Michael Leibenluft 

Curated by Ross Perlin and Daniel Kaufman 

with narrators Julia Gu, Malcolm Opoku, and Shubhra Prakash

Video design by Cinthia Chen

Sound design by Megumi Katayama

Costume design by Karen Boyer 

Stage managed by Joshua Bloom

In association with Badenya