Art & Creativity Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

The sentence looks like simple promo chatter, but it quietly smuggles in a worldview: art as transit hub. Jessica Hagedorn doesn’t say she’s writing a play or staging a show; she’s “preparing” for a “multimedia theater piece,” a phrase that foregrounds process and hybridity over the tidy prestige of a single form. Preparation is labor, not inspiration. Multimedia is an aesthetic stance: fragmentation, collision, overlapping signals. It’s also a promise that the piece won’t behave politely onstage.

“Airport Music” is the real tell. Airports are engineered for movement and managed emotion: security lines, announcements, duty-free seductions, the low-grade anxiety of being processed. Pairing that setting with “music” suggests a score for modern dislocation, a soundtrack for bodies in limbo. There’s an implied irony, too: airport music is usually designed to soothe and anesthetize. Calling a theater work by that name hints at a détournement, taking the numbing ambience of global travel and turning it into something you actually have to feel.

Then there’s New York City, functioning as both marketplace and amplifier. Hagedorn, long associated with work that stitches diaspora, pop culture, and political history into dense collage, signals she’s bringing that sensibility to a capital of constant arrival and reinvention. The subtext reads like a dare: in a city that fetishizes “the next thing,” she’s offering a piece about transit itself - who gets to move freely, who gets surveilled, and what happens to identity when life is lived between gates.