American Idle continues to exist beyond its one day performance run as a collection of behind-the-scenes footage, promotional material, and audience videos, all collected into an Instagram highlight that runs over 15 minutes long. It’s exciting to tap through, and mind-numbing to watch continuously.
I want to propose a kind of Newton’s Law of Social Media: when someone has produced polished and addictive content, one can assume they have spent an equal and opposite amount of energy scrolling dead-eyed through the same platform. When we produce high-performing posts, it is a sign of how much of ourselves we’ve already invested in the algorithm.
Which I guess is also how rehearsing works. A well-run performance comes from time invested in the form prior to the work’s conception. So really, Maia and Lena are flexing double artistic investment in both live performance and social media.
American Idle by Maia Chao
Choreographed by Lena Engelstein
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Duffy Square | Broadway & 46th St
Performed by Aeon Andreas, Miguel Alejandro Castillo Le Maitre*, Paola Castro, Marin Day*, Jack Dexter, Nyeema Raynn Dimitriou, Natalia Heaven Dimitriou, Benin Gardner, Isa Goldberg, Ben Hard*, Katrina Leung, Bob Murphy, Yurika Ohno, Iliana Penichet-Ramirez, Ampersand Paris*, Molly Ross, Parker Sera, Lisa Tracy Taber, Nicholas Troncoso, and Coco Villa. (*Devising Partner)
It’s impossible to see anything here in Times Square
A perfect place for audience plants, a perfect place to be on your phone
People gather because people are gathering
Outside the barrier before the show, a white girl in a skater skirt does a lax tik tok dance for a camera. It’s always surprising to see people get over the social shame of dancing in public while failing to conquer the physical shame of dancing Full Out.
The speakers go quiet, revealing that they’ve been playing some kind of cityscape this whole time. Already, artifice.
The doubles start to enter. Each time I wonder if some tourist has just wandered into the performance area, but every person is followed by a twin in the exact same outfit. The performers take out their phones, which means everyone else takes out their phones.
Someone with a Nikon films over the shoulder of someone in the audience, who is filming the performers, who are filming themselves. Imagine how many gigs of video we’re producing.
The show is an attention funnel like I’ve never seen. Any New Yorker with sense walks through Times Square with blinders on, weaving and charging to exit as quickly as possible. Standing here at the barrier, I start to notice every detail of the performers. In the face of 30-foot tall screens begging for your attention, you can still notice when two people are wearing matching Van Cleef and Arpels pearl alhambra earrings.
When your performance happens in an area so saturated with phones, you’re not really performing live, you’re waiting for someone to capture you. Ampersand and Benin kiss over and over until someone in the audience pulls out their phone to record them. Nearby, I watch another audience member with plucked eyebrows scowl aggressively. She was putting on a show, so I took her picture.
In watching American Idle, you can watch the performers on their phones and think about how nice it is to be outside watching a show instead of staring at your phone. Or, you can pull out your phone and join them.
Then come the many selfie arcs. A selfie up, a selfie down. A group selfie with an arabesque panché. A selfie in the middle of a ring of phones. All hail the mighty selfie arm, the latest innovation in hand-eye coordination and posture. In the distant background, the cops begin to clear tourists off the TKTS stairs. They can’t catch everyone, so a few stragglers make it back up there. A blithe woman in a white sundress tilts her body back in unison with the dancers before the police come to herd her away.
More props appear. Iliana and Paola (doubles) pull out selfie sticks and get on the ground, arching for their cameras. Every pair returns as some kind of hazard: a shopper laden with an inadvisable number of bags, a mom with a stroller. Molly and Ampersand are carrying too many cans in their hands, Jack and Ben are holding stacks of boxes and dribbling basketballs, Aeon and Miguel have snake plants and guitars like they’re each moving out of a college dorm. This is a special New York hell, a minefield of people with no spatial awareness and lots of objects to keep track of.
The performers get sloppier, repeating and breaking down. Many small disasters happen at once as cans and bags and AirPods drop to the ground. Marin and Parker pull out bottles of contact solution and spray them again and again directly into their eyes until they’re both crouching, heads tilted back under a self-administered waterfall of saline. It takes me a few glances to realize it’s even happening. So many times in American Idle the absurd and the mundane swap places until you have no idea why you’re staring at something.
New York trains you to swiftly ignore socially deviant behavior, whether for safety or politeness. This goes for ecstasy and for suffering: we’re equally adept at tuning out people on the verge of fucking and people on the verge of death. But in tourist-central, it’s perfectly acceptable to stare and stare and overreact to anything you deem out-of-the-ordinary. In fact, it’s your duty to capture it.
Some onlookers, limp and wide eyed, prop up their elbows and film the entire hour from the worst angle imaginable. I want to shake every one of them and ask, “What are you going to do with all that footage?” For Maia and Lena, hopefully put it on Instagram to boost their profiles and get them another gig.
The scene devolves into weird, gross hedonism. Bad behavior turns worse, the performers lounge and stretch their gum and drip juice from oranges into each other’s mouths.
Then a perfect moment of Times Square Iconography: The New Year’s Eve Countdown!
The performers, in unison: nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two…
The performers, overlapping: foursix three eight five two nine six seven
No one knows what time it is any more, but it’s definitely not midnight. Until it is, and everyone is standing in a line reuniting with their double. Some cry, many kiss. It’s the Times Square of people’s dreams, the 2000s rom com setting where the light is soft and there’s just enough space around you to slow dance with the person you love.
There are explosive highs and lows in this performance: the movement ranges from precise, small gestures to a wild dance party where Paola splits off to execute a perfect circle of aerials. Lena and Maia have a perfect understanding of what reads in a public space–I think of all the humiliating times people have performed jazz squares and triumphant layouts at flash mobs, grinding their sneakers on concrete, trying to catch the attention of uncaring passersby while slowly degrading the cartilage in their knees. The American Idle performers, contained in their Sim enclosure, had no issues drawing attention because they were so invested in their internal narratives–just like every other person passing through the site.
In our current moment, most New Yorkers block Times Square from their view—many will avoid even transferring in that station if they can help it. But it is New York’s most visible face, as ugly and strange as it is. Someone on Instagram said “I wish this show had a residency in Times Square as long as the Lion King” and I wholeheartedly agree. It deserves to live in the suspended animation fluid that permeates Times Square, joining the deluge of human behaviors that repeat indefinitely in that place.
American Idle doesn’t do much by way of commentary. It simply says: this is what you’re doing, this is what you like. Can you learn to love it?
Can you love the billion dollar industries and the soft, doughy, illogical creatures they cater to? Can you love the easy predictability of people? Can you love them at their sloppiest, most wanton, attention-seeking lows? Can you love your phone, the thing that lured you here and validated your attendance by capturing a shitty zoomed-in video and spreading it to a bunch of people you vaguely know on social media?
I’m reminded of something David Byrne said in his Broadway show American Utopia, “Looking at people? Yeah, that’s the best.” We love to look at other people. Before there were any screens in Times Square, before people even wanted to be seen here, people were coming to look each other up and down and lock eyes. Decades after Times Square was scrubbed of its porn theaters and cruising spaces, Miguel and Aeon bring back an essential piece of this place’s history: homosexual debauchery. It feels only right that we applaud them, the twinfuckers, as they end the piece–kissing gently before leaving with no goodbyes and disappearing, anonymous, into the crowd.
The performance continues immediately after it’s over, as echoes of the choreography appear like fireflies in the mass of tourists. People perform for their phones, people perform for each other. We continue to watch.
Leave a Reply