“Have you been here before?” I heard someone behind me ask, as we climbed the back staircase at Judson Memorial Church. We paused on nearly each stair as the line progressed.
“No, I haven’t,” their counterpart replied.
“Oh! Well, welcome to Judson.”
There is a reverence to gathering around work at Judson Memorial Church, where Out-FRONT! Fest., a “high-visibility platform” “dedicated to LGBTQ and Feminist cross-disciplinary artists” with “rigorous, playful, and fabulously outrageous creative practices,” finds its place within the church’s over six-decade-long legacy of championing experimental performance art.
Presented in partnership with BAM, with support from APAP’s JanArtsNYC, the 2025 festival curated by Pioneers Go East Collective presented four split bill programs and a film series event.
On January 10, the second split bill of the evening opened with Blaze Ferrer’s Dick Biter. The audience settled around the wood-floored, square stage and pre-set props: multi-colored neon traffic cones coated in dried drippage of a suggestive white substance and glitter.
From the stage left door of the chancel emerged a mysterious, excessively long-haired figure with a guitar, bent over at the waist. Their hair hung in front of their face and they wore black sneakers and knee pads. They produced a melancholy, staticy and ambient sound in conjunction with a recorded sound-score, at best I could tell. Their hands emerged on the guitar from beneath the hair (two or three feet in length) and they performed a ritualistic, perpetual slow-motion rock concert head-banging motion, with one foot perched on a speaker.
An equally long-haired figure entered from behind the audience in a pink sweatshirt (their hair color matched) black jock strap, and combat boots. As the beat in the sound score picked up, they slid slowly into a straddle. A third and final performer entered, dressed the same but in darkish blue-green. In energetic opposition to their duet partner they thrashed rhythmically about, skipping, swinging, and spinning on their knees.
Soon the pink and green entities were alternating between slow floorwork and chaotic thrashing. They never looked at each other, or out into the space. Their long, straight color-coordinated hair concealed their faces and therefore, somehow, their humanness. For both of them it was as though the hair was a new limb, recently sprouted, and they were anxiously, urgently figuring out what to do with it, and what it might make them capable of. Every so often, I noticed a rogue glimmering streamer floating in the air, and wondered where it came from.
The sound shifted, more ambient, and the performers recovered water bottles—also color-coordinated—from underneath cones, took swigs, and then put them back. Out of breath, they stood across from one another, at stage left and stage right if the work had been proscenium (it was half in-the-round). They yelled a string of declarations in unison, and also very much at one another. I picked up: “we suck and fuck,” “we come and go,” and “what is it to say no to power?”
Then, in the first iteration of a motif, one performer lifted a leg to the back, parallel to the ground, and the other appeared to bite their thigh. Together, they rotated carefully in what reminded me of a promenade in ballet. The performer with the lifted leg was moderately, casually head-banging.
When a performer placed their foot on the head of a cone, the piece’s self-awareness became evident. There was no apparent reason for this development besides the act in itself. That was reason enough. The conviction of this addition was true to both the piece’s form and the history of Judson: a nod to solipsism.
The guitar-bearing performer, coming off the chancel, came downstage to join the thrashing-floorwork score as it resumed. When a performer got close to me, their hair swirling about, I caught a whiff of shampoo. This performer’s hair got caught on a cone (was the substance actually dried?) and dragged it partway across the stage, which roused sporadic chuckles from the audience. I suddenly noticed the guitar player wearing a sparkly purple dildo—it was unclear to me if they put it on mid-performance or if I had only detected it then.
From somewhere unknown emerged what I thought at first were white stickers, but were actually temporary tattoos. I’m not sure what they said or depicted. When the guitar player simulated analingus while strumming (it might have been more than a simulation but I could not tell from where I sat) amidst the somewhat inconspicuous sticker score, I gathered the tattoos might be metaphors, simulacra, for the marks sex can leave. In order to leave a trace on a body, they must linger on it, damp.
More thrashing ensued. The guitar player’s hair got caught in the strings. The pink and green entities removed their sweatshirts and revealed equally color-coordinated thick mops of streamers. They stood in front of industrial fans and let them blow between their legs. The rotating bite motif reasserted itself a few times. Someone tried to stand on a cone; the guitar player stomped and balanced on a speaker, dildo dangling. Streamers came loose and floated about. If the world of a performance is sincere and thorough, and if its duration is substantial, any activity that makes sense within it loses all quotidian absurdity. So when the performers placed traffic cones on their heads and wandered toward the center, searching for something vaguely above as if they had antennae, I looked up.
The two traffic cone-equipped individuals formed a joint kneeling shape not entirely visible beneath curtains of both hair and streamers, while the guitar player adjusted the fans, angling them to produce a breeze over the sturdy structure. Then, the guitar player sat in the middle of the shape to recite a poem in the wind. Rather than three disparate entities, I saw one figure sprouting cones, hair, streamers, and socked feet in combat boots.
From the echoey text, I caught:
“Blow up a pipe to save a kid. Burn down an office to prove a point. Level a palace to stay hard.”
To close: “I think I got it.”
At intermission, leftover streamers were swept up Zamboni-style, and replaced by a complicated tangle of electrical cords, light bulbs, and LED light bars. It was a loose network, layered with the precise directionality of an irrigation system.
thegarden by Stuart B Meyers began when a figure in white (Meyers) entered stage left, in the dark assuming a fetal position amidst the web. A recorded voice narrated an “exercise for the surgical procedure” cited to Dr. Catherine Shainberg. I did not catch much of this first iteration of the text. A single light clicked on to reveal Meyers’s active, alive hand. Their elbow extended robotically at a vectorial right angle, before twitching and contorting, independently alive, and then resting.
Limbs asserted their independence, much to the confusion and awe of their owner. They reached for disparate, intangible things. Meyers locomoted in response, appeared to awaken the lights in their vicinity. The lights worked in perfect tandem with the otherworldly wavelength noises and Meyers’s limbs. I wondered if they were pre-programmed or operated live.
In contrast to Meyers’s disjointedly cataclysmic movement, evocative of popping, the performance itself existed in thorough entirety and wholeness due to the distinct synchronicity among limbs, light, and sound. Nothing was left to chance and if performed on another night, nothing would be different. Like the thunderstorm simulation at the Museum of Science in Boston—a fabricated, contained, and repeatable representation of a spontaneous event.
The lights, designed by Connor Sale, were the linchpin of the dance’s world, fundamental to its existence. This was especially apparent when the cord complex bumped off and the house lights bumped on. We were all visible, staring at a figure dressed in all white, watery-eyed and confounded, with no clear reason for their state. Sale’s design relied on Meyers’s delivery of an incisive and smart performance.
In a poignant moment, they positioned themselves choosing where on their body light was shed. Facing downstage, while standing neutrally, they raised their right hand. The glow came from stage left. Meyers looked at their hand and brought it into the light, rendering it the only illuminated part of their body. This choice was a stark contrast to the acquiescent disposition that defined much of their performance.
When Dr. Shainberg’s text was repeated, I clung to its insistence on submissive autonomy. The program indicates its purpose: “to confirm that the body subconsciously accepts a proposed surgery and to envision the ideal conditions for perfect healing.”
“Open the gate, walk into the garden,” it instructed, and Meyers’s torso twisted into an exposed spiral. “If your garden is not as you like it, do what is necessary to clean it up.” It demanded a “precise visualisation” to “ask permission of your body to allow the operation.”
The lighting shifted from a low gray wash to a bright blue, pale, and clinical exposure under which nearly matched Meyers’s skin bleach blonde hair, and clothes. With hands on their body, placed and careful, they walked with absurd meticulousness, each toe deliberating its direction before peeling off the floor and landing back down. By contrast, their spatial awareness was nonchalant; they stepped on the cords, which they had managed to avoid thus far. Then they anxiously rubbed their forehead, and I registered it as the work’s first quotidian gesture.
Dr. Shainberg’s text made me think about gardening, the cultivation of life, and how it mirrors a surgical procedure. A gardener tends to plants, a surgeon to bodies—both nurture lives separate from their own. Dr. Shainberg suggests a patient might be able to prepare their body to be temporarily managed by someone else in order to promote healing. The words “clean” and “precise” didn’t strike me as fitting for the image of a garden—dirty, outdoors, susceptible to and reliant upon weather. They are, of course, important attributes of an operating room. I wonder if, in conjunction with her instructions to “ask permission” and “allow,” they might allude to the fact that a body is an unruly place; in permitting this unruliness, the body becomes more receptive to healing, as a garden might thrive when left to grow naturally.
Hugging themselves, holding their sternum, Meyers eventually found their way back to a fetal position. There was a pulsing, low bass. The work might have ended when they splayed, laying prone, before contracting upwards in a tense “c-curve,” their mouth a silent scream amidst a bright strobe. But instead, they stood, embodied and enlivened, ever-performing. They were docile, warm, and subservient to all they appeared to passively endure before; parsing, sifting, and pinching the air with childlike wonder. The sound evoked a sense of resolve.
The climactic tension just a few moments before might have been a threshold, indicating that healing occurs just as floodgates open, completely and all at once. Or maybe it’s not the healing that occurs with sudden entirety, but the arrival at the place where healing can happen. Regardless, thegarden concluded with a drastic tonal shift towards a pleasant serenity making the possibility of healing imaginable.
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