We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
We are celebrating 15 years — and counting — of stories that are deeply researched and deeply felt, that build a historical record of what the city has been.
The first weekend in April, millions took to the streets with signs and chants and custom buttons to demonstrate their disgust with the unchecked rise of authoritarianism in the United States. After the national day of action, the immediate question follows: What now? How does public gathering become political change? That is the question taken up in this essay by Aaron Landsman, a collaborator in Perfect City, who has long been observing the form of the public meeting and rescripting it as an education in civic participation. In that spirit, in the spring of 2024 we asked the theater artist and writer to attend the New York City Housing Authority’s public annual plan meeting and report back from a perspective informed by Erving Goffman, Bertolt Brecht, and Augusto Boal. As national politics took an increasingly darker turn, that review of civic theater became a broader meditation — with stops in a small town in Portugal and downtown Brooklyn — on the question of the moment: “How do we perform power when we are out of practice?”
Here’s how local civic participation often works: A legally mandated government or planning meeting takes place in a space that is severely lit with uncomfortable seating. Officials present information to the public in dry and bureaucratic language, but also attempt to seem upbeat and engaged, which is alienating to constituents (we are often there to complain about what’s wrong, not hear about what’s right). People wait through the official presentation, then give impassioned, time-restricted testimonies. The officials are not able, or not willing, to respond. Repeat next week, month, or year.
The public leaves the experience dissatisfied (“I went to the meeting, and it felt like no one cared or acknowledged me”). The governing body checks off a box (“We had a meeting and people had their usual complaints”). Both sides’ feelings about the process are affirmed (“A waste of time, just like I expected”). Put another way: Structures provoke feelings; feelings lead to behaviors; those behaviors reinforce the structures as they are. Constituents act out in anger; officials dismiss that behavior or enact more restrictive rules for the next meeting without addressing people’s complaints. It is hard to know if showing up at these meetings makes a difference.
We are told these meetings are the best way — sometimes the only way aside from voting once every two or four years — to be civically engaged in our democracy. We are told the system works, even though we experience it as unresponsive. We are asked to maintain our suspension of disbelief, like audiences at a play, but this play often leaves us with an acute cognitive dissonance between what we are told the objective is, and what we experience in our bodies. When we do show up and ask for a problem to be addressed — say, a more equitable set of rent guidelines or mold abatement in our buildings — the meeting ends, we are assured we are heard and the changes don’t happen, or not fast enough.
The people who run the meetings and administer systems may have less power or agency to make change than they appear to onstage. And at a lot of local government meetings the same few constituents tend to show up over and over with the same complaints, making it easier for officials to dismiss them as unrepresentative of the actual city. So, are we seeing democracy in action here, or just a representation of it?
Since 2010, I’ve been visiting meetings like these in cities around the country, looking at them through lenses I bring from experimental theater and design. How do dramaturgy, visual framing, intention, and subtext apply to bureaucracy and planning? How does the time and place of a government meeting impact who is able to come, and what you feel you are entitled to do or say? Is it happening at dinner time? Is it in the same building as the police station and does that affect your sense of safety? What does the layout of the room reinforce about power? What does it make you feel and want to say, and how does that jibe with the formal script or scenario on the agenda?
“Experimental” means the what-if of the work is broad enough to include questions of form, content, and context. In some of my projects this means that a theater piece becomes a record, or a book, or an audio walk. In this civic-focused work, it leads to broad experiments and questions: What if we restage government meetings as performances, as a way to train organizers and students? What if we conduct our civic life in spaces where everyone feels welcomed, where there’s childcare and food? What if we use the maps we all carry inside us to show each other our innate knowledge of place and policy? Is there a way to perform these meetings more impactfully? Could city officials, constituents, and creative organizers encounter each other in a kind of collective training for democratic process?
I’m curious how this reframing can help us make better interventions in civic action and organizing, where showing up means articulating the city we want to make, not just what’s wrong with it now; where it means being taken seriously in an act of power-sharing, rather than written off, or acknowledged with a kind of patronizing lip service.
The inception point for this body of research came in 2009, when I was dragged to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. When an older man dumped a bag of trash in front of the council as a way of challenging them to clean up the city, it became some of the best theater I’d witnessed that year, and an antidote to the polarization I saw arising in the wake of the 2008 election and economic crash. I got interested in using the practices of theater and ethnographic research to see civic engagement differently.
I worked with director Mallory Catlett to present the show City Council Meeting in five US cities. In the piece, audience members performed transcripts of local government meetings, and local political adversaries met us in the safe space of art to create something about what vexed them. These performances led two participants to run for local office in Phoenix and Houston.
In 2016, I asked a group of young adults at Abrons Art Center on the Lower East Side what they were experts at in the city, and we made maps together. In 2017, Urban Omnibus hosted an encounter between Perfect City and a number of planners and architects, using our activity called “Avoidance Mapping,” and the article we co-authored from that experience has helped anchor our practice ever since, which now includes neighborhood tours, zines, workshops on street harassment and gentrification, and more.
Last summer, Urban Omnibus invited me to attend the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)’s annual public hearing and reflect on it as civic performance. Over the next several months, I had two other encounters where experiences of politics and performance were meshed and tangled. Since then, we’ve been through the November election and the initial onslaught of the new US administration. I feel the intersection of the local and the creative is where we can find ways to connect and resist. Considering our civic participation in part as performance, we can rehearse and refine a pathway to power in this particularly difficult time.
I didn’t know much about what to expect at the NYCHA meeting, just that the agency is legally mandated to offer an annual public meeting where they describe the previous year’s expenditures and successes and introduce the budget for the upcoming fiscal year. I was told that this meeting had become a place where individual complaints could be addressed and even remedied, even if that wasn’t the gathering’s stated intent. Tenants had learned that being face-to-face with NYCHA administrators allowed them to repurpose it for their own needs, in a way they could not via the usual avenues of customer service and complaint. The meeting’s form was for one thing (checking the box that says, “we did that”), which the people made function as something else (“we have to get our elevator fixed”). Whether or not it’s effective, it’s ingenious and borne of necessity.
I live a block from public housing and rarely go inside the buildings or investigate the agency’s power and design contours. Reframing this as my own shortcoming was helpful as I got ready to attend the meeting. NYCHA is often described as a “city within a city”: over 500,000 residents, subject to a set of rules and restrictions all their own. As a politically active citizen, I wanted to see how neighbors I didn’t know well advocated for themselves. As an audience member with a less personal stake, I wanted to know how the action would unfold, and what I could learn from this public gathering about the government’s role in civic performances.
The meeting is in the large auditorium at Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC)’s Tribeca Performing Arts Center; a modern, competently designed 900-seat theater on the west side of Lower Manhattan. In the lobby, tables are set up with information and meeting points for groups from different NYCHA complexes. The lobby is sunlit, and people seem happy to run into friends and colleagues, greeting each other warmly and chatting, gathering information and literature about various issues and policies.
As we wait for the meeting to start, people are speaking multiple languages, translating among generations and neighbors. Some are dressed formally, some in workwear, and some have just come as they are. The feeling is a cross between church, a library, a rally, and a conference. My earlier travels in local government performances helped me see positive pathways at a moment of polarization. I am encouraged that so many people are here today. This lobby is packed!
Inside, the energy that existed when everyone was milling and socializing in a small, sunlit space has changed. The auditorium itself is much bigger, and it makes us seem smaller. The lighting is the same as before any performance: House lights are just bright enough to find your way to your seat, but the level doesn’t encourage gathering or even seeing people’s faces clearly. The stage is brightly lit and, as in many theaters, elevated from the audience by several feet. There’s a long table placed across the width of the stage, set back from the edge closest to us. Along the front of the table is a shiny, sateen table dressing called a skirt, which shields people from having their legs visible, but which also makes everyone look a little like they don’t have bodies.
Ten people sit, costumed in what I’d call “civic casual” (monochrome sport coats and button downs, no ties, name badges on lanyards). A single police officer in a formal uniform is at one end. The officials are chatting with each other and glancing out at the auditorium now and then. A digital countdown clock for when people testify faces us from the front of the stage. We can see the clock from wherever we sit. We can see the people, but we can’t read their names.
A projection screen above the table is giant and imposing. It has the following words on it in big Arial lettering, below the NYCHA Logo:
NYCHA Public Hearing
FY 2025 Annual Plan and Significant
Amendment to the FY 2024 Annual Plan
While working on this article, I had to look at a photo of this slide several times as I typed it out, because it is the least catchy presentation slide phrasing I have maybe ever seen; except at other public meetings for other bureaucracies. It’s almost like it’s meant to be a counter-imaginary.
In theater, the way it is most often practiced in the US, we are meant to be quiet recipients of a unifying experience, derived from a single story that carries a specifically calibrated emotional weight. The space, staging picture, and design tell us how to behave: pay attention, don’t speak, and don’t move.
This play is not following those rules. Before the meeting even starts someone is already complaining. In the dark it’s hard to tell where the voice is coming from, until it turns out to be a woman moving along the aisle from the entrance to the front rows, talking loudly with people she knows, already lining up frustrations and problems she wants to address having to do with her apartment and her building. She can’t get anyone on the phone; she’s tried so many times.
“This whole thing is bullshit!” she says. “Nobody cares about us.”
The session begins with some ground rules, with a microphoned official drowning out the complaining tenant. The NYCHA representative tells us NYCHA is legally required to hold this meeting once per year and that public comments will come at the end, when the timer will allow three minutes per resident. We learn that this meeting is “not intended as a forum for verbal exchange.” The tenant who’d made her audible entrance a few minutes ago shouts, “Why!?”
As if to demonstrate the form, although I think I see her body brace a little, the official does not answer, instead continuing to introduce translators, rules and protocols for Zoom, and instructions for where to find the annual report online. The same resident continues, undeterred: “Lies,” she says. “A total waste of money!”
Someone is cheering for her. Someone else is trying to calm her down. As much as attendees may agree, some know her outbursts don’t necessarily help, and might reinscribe an unfair stereotype of public housing residents as out-of-control and perhaps unfit to take care of where they live. In other words, part of the problem.
The machine of the meeting proceeds like a slow bulldozer over the tenant’s voice, as if the woman and the ongoing, low chorus of murmured support for her are not even real. If you watch the recording of the meeting, her voice does not even show up, because the testimony microphones were off and the cameras pointed at the stage alone.
In the auditorium today, there’s not even a pretense of listening. It feels like this meeting is intended, despite a rhetoric of “publicness,” to remind us that the people who govern don’t actually want to engage with us. Or is it that they don’t know how to do anything else, just playing the roles in which they’ve been cast? If they did try and respond to the issues that tenants brought up, how would that change the power dynamic entrenched in NYCHA every other day of the year? Are the people who make the rules even here?
The video of the event is available online as is the 80-page plan itself. The document is impossible to follow. It is not just in the language of bureaucracy, but the language itself is bureaucracy. Or, it is what we complain about when we complain about bureaucracy. It reinforces an uncrossable distance between power and subject by being impenetrable unless you have specialized knowledge.
Onstage, the highlights presented by the panel assert confidently that everything is getting better and certain large-seeming dollar amounts have been invested in improving what was causing problems. People at the table speak with a genuine positive affect as they showcase specific successes: the number of mold remediation requests honored, the collaborations in specific buildings, the sense of relief tenants in these specific improving complexes report. In all, this lasts about 20 minutes.
I cannot tell if the presenters are genuinely enthusiastic or are simply playing their parts as required. Sociologist Erving Goffman described the ways people perform versions of themselves in different situations to get their needs met, and how physical structures and implicit rules impact behavior. The success of the performance depends both on the level of a performer’s commitment and the level of the listeners’ trust and belief. In the auditorium today, the objective of the performers onstage seems intended to project confident authority.
After the formal report, it’s time for public comment. The performers in the audience are trying to rise past the protocols in order to be heard. As at many public meetings, the residents and supporters who speak here are eloquent, poised, and passionate; despite the fact that there will be no response from the stage, and despite that the problems they speak to are intense and daily, with impacts for resident families’ health and safety. They address policy, personal experience, and neighborhood change, often in tones that are by turns precise (“NYCHA’s emotional support policy is in direct conflict with HUD’s policy”) and poetic (“Everything that’s in this plan, it’s just an Orwellian type of plan from 1984”).
The comments continue for nearly two hours.
“Take this from a place of love,” a young organizer says, as he proceeds to list the problems in his specific NYCHA complex.
“I love my community,” says another as she begins.
Countering the narrative that living in Section 9 housing is a low rung on a downward spiral of poverty, two residents talk about how public housing was a way out of unsafe or unlivable domestic situations. Both have raised kids in the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses, and both describe what tearing down buildings in their complex — to be replaced by what the City calls “mixed-income housing” — will do to their economic opportunity, safety, and the vital, informal community networks on which they depend.
State Assemblymember Harvey Epstein, one of several elected officials who has come in support of tenants, speaks about the way surveys were conducted by the developers to justify their new plan to raze buildings in the complexes. He engages a kind of call-and-response: “Are Section 9 tenants being offered a fully renovated Section 9 building?”
“No’s” echo throughout the room.
“Then what kind of choice are they really being offered?”
The experience is cathartic: People are celebrating and supporting each other, angrily and joyously in communion. Likely it does not do residents much good in terms of concrete results. The whole thing is broadcast online for anyone to see and will happen again next year in the same way. If the goal is taking action to remedy the problems of residents, to actually serve the constituency the housing authority is tasked with serving, it is not clear if this meeting was a successful play or not.
What would it have felt like to walk into the BMCC auditorium last July, and see something on the screen like this:
“Welcome! Your Home is Important to Us.”
Of course, if residents came into a room and saw that, and then the dramaturgy of the meeting continued as it normally would, without a real chance for mutual understanding, or even real accountability from people with access to power, it would backfire.
I try to imagine that NYCHA put that on a slide and meant it. And imagine further that a group of facilitators, maybe cultural organizers and artists, were there, perhaps offering food and a set of tables where you could learn in an accessible way, in multiple languages, about the changes to the plan and what kinds of impacts those changes might have on your life in public housing. And if the lights were up enough for all of us to see each other, and maybe we were in a room that wasn’t so imposing in how it architects power.
And what if this meeting were part of a larger matrix of collaborations between residents and people in power on how ground-up design, planning, and even theories of change could help the city as a whole navigate everything from global warming to housing prices to authoritarian momentum here and in Washington?
Soon after the NYCHA meeting, I decide to take the ferry to an appointment in Long Island City. Even though I know they are a political and financial boondoggle, I love a boat, and if I time it right, it’s faster than the subway. I notice on the map at the dock near my house that Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town are labeled, but not the Wald Houses nor any other NYCHA complex, even though the buildings were constructed around the same time and arguably carry equal historical importance. What if the city deemed these buildings their own historic districts, showcasing the idealism and design that went into their realization? And what if “historic district” meant more resources rather than restrictions?
I often find myself stuck at this level of what-if. Meaning, as an artist I am pretty good at what many in the culture sector like to call “re-imagining” what agencies or bureaucracies might be and do. We reimagine public space, public discourse, food justice, and climate change, along with any number of issues. At the time of this writing, I feel further than ever from knowing how to get from the actual meeting I attended to the world I’m describing above. It does not seem like organizing at either the margins of civic life or at the center of political performances like this has been enough. Our best efforts at what-if have led us to make our own version of design charettes: an event that promotes the semblance of community input, with very little outcome, rather than welcoming citizen creativity and responsiveness.
Many of us have had our work instrumentalized to some degree by our funders and curators and the larger project of neoliberalism; we are told we are separate from the world as it actually is, including the world of local politics. And funding cycles tend to work in two-year increments, which are good to getting at the what-if but not the then-what or the how-to.
Knowingly or not, many artists and venues embrace the idea of being in a special class — the creative class — that has kept many of us away from meetings and processes where our tools are at least as helpful as they are in galleries and performances. Time constraints and rhetorics of exceptionalism put us in a bind: we’re supposed to justify the “impact” of our work in order to get more funding, and at the same time we’re told the rules don’t apply to us. With brilliant and notable exceptions, many artists have internalized the idea that these meetings aren’t ours, or that the skills we have aren’t part of what the city needs. Some of us stay away from the meetings, write them off, or only go when we are told to advocate for more arts funding.
If the NYCHA tenants, who bent the meeting to their own needs and voices, could be a guide, what if we just showed up more, in solidarity, and started performing the paths we want to make? In New York City, I see a lot of organizing that amounts to trolling elected officials through small loud protests. More recently, many of us on the left are phone blitzing our elected representatives to get them to push back harder on the encroaching oligarchy. All of these modes address power where power decides to locate. I am wondering how else to show up.
Three months after the NYCHA annual meeting, I co-led a workshop for bureaucrats with Katy Rubin. Working in the UK and Europe, Rubin’s new hub called The People Act uses Legislative Theater to bring artists, community members, and policymakers together to make pathways between big what-ifs and local policy change. Building on the decades-long work of Brazilian theater artist, legislator, and dissident Augusto Boal, Legislative Theater uses a toolkit of performance and improv techniques to get elected officials, organizers, and community members into not just a dialogue but a co-authored promise for new policy. The People Act is currently collaborating with unhoused people and elected representatives in Greater Manchester to change transit and housing in their region.
The conference in Valongo was titled Populist Threats: Building Democratic Resilience with Participatory Communities. We asked people to draw Avoidance Maps, and then talked about how we might connect our personal cartography to policy. And then we asked them to think about what their maps would look like if policies or structures changed to make the avoidance unnecessary. Sometimes we call those “Belonging Maps.” Rubin led an exercise that got people on their feet to try and illustrate how power structures operate by changing rules and language to destabilize people, and how we are capable of improvising through a challenge.
After the workshop, I talked with a city manager from a small Portuguese town. We touched on our upcoming elections and our different health care systems. He said, “You know, compared to some European Union (EU) countries, Portugal’s health care is pretty crappy. Sometimes you wait a long time for a doctor, and there are prescriptions that you would have an easier time getting in the US.” He paused, “But it’s still so much better than what you have. And that is why I worry about the US. Because you can’t build what you can’t see. You can’t imagine that a shitty health care system is better than what you have there.” This was two weeks before the November 2024 election.
Rubin, a longtime colleague, and I have talked about this a lot. When she first moved from New York to the UK, she said, “Aaron, the hospitals don’t have billing departments,” which shocked me. I have problems reconciling my own lived experience with what I know to be true because someone I trust has told me. I think about how in this country, depending on your healthcare, you can literally be born into debt.
Another difference that the conference in Valongo rendered for me was how other countries have pathways between envisioning and legitimizing new possible ways for marginalized people to play civic roles. NGOs and associations fill the gaps to allow those who would otherwise have no voice to begin to make their needs understood. I got to know some of the staff at the European Association for Local Democracy, which, among other activities, helps migrants from the Middle East and Africa make inroads toward citizenship and public services in the EU. Equivalent organizations do exist in the US, but in a more constant state of acute emergency.
The comparison can easily lead to despair, or a less encouraging kind of what-if. What if, without a commitment to basic services like health care, free education, and housing, people don’t even know what we are making pathways toward? What if, in the spring of 2025, the concept of a pathway is too abstract, with so many people’s safety, resources, and lives so threatened?
The week after the election, I teaching my freshman seminar at Princeton called Is Politics a Performance? which uses the process of the City Council Meeting theater project to help students understand local politics in Mercer County, New Jersey. We visit meetings, interview local political figures, and make a short performance together. In class I mentioned the health care conversation I’d had in Portugal, and we started talking about what else our own experiences would not let us imagine. A Hungarian student talked about how Viktor Orbán winnowed away at institutions designed to protect free speech and inquiry, beginning with artists in theater and other forms. For the US-born students in class, that still seemed implausible here.
One student tried to comprehend that theater could be a threat, to anything, anywhere, since most of their experience had been productions of commercial musicals. I described my collaboration with Belarus Free Theatre in Minsk, where we were told to bring our passports to the safe house that functioned as their performance space, because a few months prior the KGB had arrested the entire audience, along with the cast, of one of their shows.
We also talked about the House Un-American Affairs Commission and COINTELPRO, which happened to have surveilled my father for his campus political activities in the 1960s. Almost no one in class knew about either of those entities. I covered my mild internal shock and we talked about how the erasure of specific historical knowledge, along with the erasure of imaginative potential, is linked to how power moves. What future can we make if we don’t know the past?
Theater and democracy are embodied systems that, on a good day, invite us to be both participant and witness, and in the process reveal to us something about ourselves. We move through a meeting, demonstration, or a performance, and in the time we spend with each other, we feel and/or realize something. How we are invited into and perform ourselves within these systems, how we respond and build on each other within them, is where the potential for transformation lies. The passions on display can be tools, they can be problems, or they can be both.
Sometimes in our reactions to a performance (civic or artistic) we reveal something unexpected, even uncomfortable, about ourselves. Right now, I wonder what kind of tool that could be. A week after the election in November, I went to see a play by Portuguese writer and director Tiago Rodrigues called Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists. The piece staged one of the few truly palpable dialectics that I’d seen live.
Brecht’s approach to theater-making can ignite a challenge for viewers to consider and wrestle with. It situates us between two impossible choices, at first faced by a character, and then with an explicit invitation to consider our own predicaments and decisions. This is in contrast to how a lot of contemporary US theater operates, often offering a story in a representational mode of performance and mise-en-scene that suggests a single, unifying conclusion for an audience to arrive at together.
I saw Catarina from the nosebleed balcony of the BAM Harvey Theater’s 837-seat auditorium. When I got there, another audience member was informally holding court with a few people in our section. First, she complained about the cramped seating and the excessive warmth in our section.
And then she moved to a different topic seemingly out of the blue.
“I think he stole the election,” she said loudly but also conspiratorially. “He must have stolen it. Don’t you think he stole it?”
The rest of us smiled politely but did not quite know how to respond. The French couple next to me was chatting quietly, which the woman heard and declaimed: “You’re French?! I want to go to France. I want to move to France! Can I move there?!?!”
The man in the couple said, “Well it’s a bit complicated there, too, right now, you know.”
“I don’t care about that,” the woman said. “That’s not my problem, that’s your problem. I just want to live there!”
At that point the house lights began to dim, and she looked at her program as she turned to sit. “Two and a half hours, no intermission!” she said. “That’s a little presumptuous, isn’t it?”
Rodrigues’ play shows us an extended family gathering at their compound in the woods. This is an annual feast in which the youngest adult descendant of the family matriarch named Catarina, is called on to assassinate a fascist, who her cousins and siblings have kidnapped and brought to her. In the days of Portugal’s dictatorship, Catarina witnessed an officer’s brutality toward a young woman she knew, and in retaliation she killed the bystanding soldier because, for her, the worst crime was to be a bystander. When Catarina died, she asked her family to always fight against the passivity of bystanders. Her descendants have interpreted this to mean that they should capture and kill one fascist every year.
But this year, the great-granddaughter cannot bring herself to pull the trigger. The proposed victim, a handsome, youthful man in a stylish suit, who is mute for the first two hours of the play, is spared, while the family destroys itself by infighting. After they’ve all symbolically fallen to the ground, the man stands and gives a fiery and rambling speech directly to the audience, and the family reassembles to the side of the stage as his silent witnesses. As the speech progresses, it clearly reflects the anti-immigrant, isolationist, and misogynist nostalgia that fuels the current rise of autocracy in many countries. He is charismatic in the way that a young Bill Clinton was, like a young Tony Blair, even as the speech is more and more unnerving. You can’t take your eyes off him, even if you want to.
After a few minutes, there were murmurs of dissatisfaction from several people in the audience. Then, a more vocal rumble of protest built. How long would this speech last? The tension spurred by the prescience of this speech, and the play more generally, plus the fact that this was not a typical play meant to unify an audience around a sentiment or a lesson, was electrifying and uncomfortable.
Soon, someone, somewhere in the audience shouted, “You should have killed him!” Another person yelled “Fuck you!” at the stage. A third, the woman in our section who’d been holding forth before, shouted, “Kill him!” This continued to build. One of the most powerful things about Brechtian work, when it’s successful, is that it acknowledges both the artifice of theater and the real-life correlations it asks us to contemplate and act on.
I shared a glance with a friend sitting down the aisle from me. On one hand, it was remarkable to get a well-heeled New York City audience to call for the death of a character (or the performer playing him) onstage, to engage on that visceral level with what we all knew to be a made-up event.
On the other hand, it was unsettling to see an audience clearly missing what seemed to be Rodrigues’ point. As another friend put it, the play was saying, “organize or die,” but the audience called for blood, for revenge. Surely that had something to do with the timing of the piece, the startling way it tied us to here-and-now. But ultimately this production pushed people to reflect on aspects of themselves, communally and fractiously, whether or not those aspects were favorable, whether or not they knew.
The curtain call was a bit tumultuous, with some viewers continuing to harangue the performers, and others cheering them (and then perhaps looking at the viewers whose response was the opposite and wondering about them). A slightly harried and semi-apologetic theater administrator came out and announced that BAM would be doing a 15-minute talk-back, for “anyone who might talk about what just happened.” No mention was made of what we should do with our feelings or responses.
I didn’t stay, because I wanted to decompress from the prickly, powerful, and unsettled feeling Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists brought up in me. And my experience of post-show discussions is that, like many public meetings, it’s a way for a venue to tick a box required by a funder. I ran into friends on the street and we talked for a long time, wondering what this energy could do for our theater-making.
As with the NYCHA meeting last summer, I wished for a way to use what the event sparked in us. Because, as brilliant, provocative, and revealing as it was, Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists was still a very well-executed what-if. What if, instead of a 15-minute talk-back from the stage, an audience took the energy we had and made a commitment to each other to organize?
I am wondering, in April 2025, how we realize our potential, our what-ifs, as we face a fascist takeover of a system whose democratic core has been weakening for decades. Four months ago, it would have been comparatively easier to write a positive-feeling ending, full of interesting things to consider and envision. I’ve been channeling a little Beckett, another artist who made theater through a long and profoundly difficult historical moment, and his sentences, “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”
There is no simple path. The question is less “what if” than “what now?” I am thinking about the opportunity to do our imaginative and active work alongside everyone who’s been a target all along; from NYCHA residents and migrants, to trans people and organizers, to librarians and teachers, to medical practitioners and scientists. With so much coming at us, it is easy to be immobilized by the sheer power grab.
There have always been individual artists and groups doing the work of the moment, even if small scale, and often ahead of its time. The Chinatown Art Brigade are adept at both building solidarity and community and reminding a broader public of ongoing systemic inequities through their projections and other public works. Small and mighty organizations like Culture Push, with their Fellowship for Utopian Practice, continue to connect idealism, experimentation, and tactical intervention. Some of this work also works from a departure point of contemplation and reframing. Chloë Bass’ work with text, public sculpture, and other media turns everyday travels through urban space into poetic meditations on belonging, communion, and identity. Former Bogotá Mayor Antanas Mockus cut down on traffic fatalities and gender-based violence through artistic interventions. These are all examples of radical visions of community: some from the margins, and some from an infiltration of a city’s political center.
Now in the eighth of what we consider a 20-year project, Perfect City is beginning to build a network of sites that deploy artistic tools in local civic life, in partnership with Rubin’s The People Act and The National Civic League’s Better Public Meetings program. Our mapping work is a way to uplift residents’ existing, embodied intelligence about how policy intersects with their lives daily. If you can draw a map of how you choose to go or not go on your way from home to school or work, you can understand your own navigation skills have as much to do with policy as they do personal choice. The knowledge of systems that we carry inside us becomes evident when we write, draw, or say them out loud.
Maybe what artistic interventions can offer now is an attention to the how of participation. How do we perform the street together? How do we perform power when we are out of practice, when we feel we have less or none? How do we begin to break a frame that’s been created around us, even as it is shrinking?
The views expressed here are those of the authors only and do not reflect the position of The Architectural League of New York.
