The first dancer in Friday Night Rat Catchers’ is a baby. Lisa Fagan, dressed in a butter yellow babydoll dress, marches around the stage, pumping her arms up and down like a determined toddler. Every so often, the swishing of her skirts reveals a purple diaper underneath. She knocks her knees, salutes, and pouts in a miniscule pink plastic folding chair. When, in the next moments, she plays the part of a five year old party girl—“I’m wet,” she says, touching her pull ups—it’s equal parts brilliant and absurd.
These two poles serve as the foundation of the Friday Night Rat Catchers, a piece of dance theater created by Fagan and her long-time collaborator Lena Engelstein. Throughout the performance, part of the 2026 Under the Radar Festival, the two use hyperbolic characters and captivating choreography as tools for experimental storytelling. A piece that begins with a baby quickly morphs into a jerkily displeased woman searching for her airpods, and climaxes with a disco dance. When, later, Engelstein snorts crushed fruit loops off the floor, you know we’ve gone beyond traditional categories of performance. You might not know exactly what’s happening, but you’re riveted nonetheless.
The piece’s guiding character—the only one to remain consistent throughout—is a finger-gun-wagging, warmly misogynistic 70s game show host played by co-deviser Marianne Rendón. The night’s loose framework is the arch of the show he’s hosting, complete with lucky winners and cash prizes. In the very beginning, he goes up to a viewer on stage left, asking where they’re from. “A roller-skating waitress from Ohio?” he croons, regardless of their answer. There’s something unsettling about this character, whose face is etched in plastic happiness behind the wise-cracking eyes. While he often disappears during Fagan and Engelstein’s dances, the piece always comes back to his hollow smile. Rendón’s performance by itself – singing “Maybe I’m Crazy” and slapping his assistant on the ass – would, itself, make for a compelling evening.
Works of experimental performance often keep the audience at a distance, continuously getting more abstract, almost as if to challenge the viewer to find any sense of meaning (see: Jack Smith’s excellent 1963 Flaming Creatures). In this piece of avant garde, however, the audience is in on the joke. Some sections that resist narrative—the airpod dance, for example—are never at the expense of the people watching, and instead feel like good, old-fashioned fun. The host and dancers both laugh when they do something absurd, hamming it up rather than forcing us into silence. It’s been noted by other critics that they aren’t afraid to make fun of themselves, and they suffuse Friday Night Rat Catchers with a laugh-out-loud humor. This, perhaps, is part of what makes us feel more forgiving of the sections we don’t understand. There’s never the imperative to intellectualize – instead, Fagan and Engelstein help us to feel, experiencing the choreography as a vibrant whole.
Last year, in an online interview with Bill T. Jones, Fagan began by defining dance as a “body based form released from the confines of language.” It is, as she goes on to say, an expression without information. This perspective rules over Friday Night Ratcatchers, which resists easy rationalization. Some sections—when, for example, Fagan and Engelstein run to suck nipple-shaped HVAC tubes on the back wall—are a far cry from the familial and anti-capitalist motifs that the piece references elsewhere. It’s evocative by itself, no theme needed. The dancers move in fluid, wave-like rolls, sexual subtext rising to the surface. The dance that follows doesn’t have the character/prop use of the rest of the show, but, as the two arch on the floor, mirroring each other from opposite sides of the stage, there’s a true emotional release. This is storytelling through the body, dance theater at its peak potential.
“Friday Night Rat Catchers” is a title of disparate things. As the pair explain it, it can be broken down into two parts: Friday night is a time of potential, the culmination of your hopes from the week. It’s fun, it’s playful, it’s not unlike the Travolta-pointing-at-a-disco-ball reenacted in the piece’s closing segments. Rat catching is impossible, a futile and disgusting task that no one wants to do. Between Friday night/rat catchers, dance/theater, thinking/feeling, Fagan and Engelstein are creators that embrace the both/and. If you didn’t think the avant garde could be fun, they prove the two are one and the same.
Photo by Maria Baranova.
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