Citizen Arts’s Artistic Director Meg Araneo produced the first U.S. version of Poetic Consultations at the South Street Seaport Plaza and Marcus Garvey Park in September 2025. Presented in partnership with Théâtre de la Ville Paris and the 2025 Down to Earth Festival (reimagined in 2026 as the Citizen Arts International Festival), Poetic Consultations places theater artists, dancers, musicians, and poets in public spaces for one-on-one encounters with passers-by. Each exchange begins with a question,—“How are you?”—and culminates in a personalized artistic “prescription” designed to foster restoration and open new ways of moving through life. Consultations were offered in multiple languages to make all New Yorkers and visitors to the city feel welcome and supported.

Conceived in the 2002 by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, the current Artistic Director of the Théâtre de la Ville Paris, the project took on a new form during the COVID-19 crisis. Artists started to offer consultations by phone, addressing directly the pain of isolation so many were experiencing as a result of the pandemic. As public life resumed, the consultations returned to public spaces with renewed energy and has since expanded internationally..

Honored to be part of the first U.S. presentation of Poetic Consultations, Citizen Arts is broadening the project’s reach. In September 2026, in continued partnership with Théâtre de la Ville Paris, Citizen Arts will present consultations across all of the five boroughs of NYC as part of the 2026 Citizen Arts International Festival’s Performing Arts + Health programming. Through Citizen Arts’s own Arts + Health + Medicine initiative, we will be bringing Poetic Consultations into NYC hospitals, long-term care facilities, and rehabilitation centers—underscoring the vital role of the arts within systems of care for those living with illness or impairment, and for those who support them.