Performance Space New York Will Host Elliot Reed's YOU CAN HEAR FOOTSTEPS

Performance Space New York (150 1st Ave. 4th floor) will present Elliot Reed’s You can hear footsteps (May 30, 31, & June 1, 7pm). This choreographic and theatrical new solo work plays with the contradictions inherent to authorship in performance, considering the performer both as agent and object.

Reconceiving Performance Space’s Keith Haring Theater as a colosseum-in-miniature, the work draws on the audience’s relationship to the performer: from the presentation of grief in performance, to perceptions of Blackness and otherness and the ways artists navigate and consent to the consumption and objectification of their bodies. Reed structures this work around the cornerstone of solo personal onstage storytelling–the monologue–and also deconstructs it. Recordings on LCD monitors around the space multiply the artist’s voice over itself, creating discrepancies, contradictions, and complications of the presentational form.

Says Reed, “There's something really fascinating about the ritualized consumption between viewer and performer. That tension is something the dance and theater-going public just accept—we sit with a performer’s story, we’re transported, and then we leave. I’m drawing attention to that relationship, doing something in this work I haven’t done before in my performance practice, which is using a big, scripted monologue. I’m telling a story directly to the audience, but oftentimes what the text is saying [about the performer in front of them] isn’t exactly what they're watching. As I ask how I want to be seen in this work, I offload that vulnerability into the walls of the theater, and the ‘I’ becomes a little bit flexible.”

The black box—so often the vessel of stripped down, solo performance and a so-called “blank” framework for the performer’s visibility and self-presentation—likewise becomes a centerpiece in and of itself, its architectural and functional features coalescing into a distinct character. Reed considers the theater’s structures and functions as they position their body both in theatricalized action and installation-like stillness within it. 

Reed regularly works with ensembles of performers, and seldom onstage. Past works have instilled theatricality and movement into gallery spaces, hidden musicians in the thicket of Central Park’s The Ramble, traversed Los Angeles’ Union Station and the edges of the Getty Museum, and, previously at Performance Space New York (in Dozie Kanu’s installation for Open Room), fractured experience and reified distance across virtual and live platforms. In You can hear footsteps, Reed turns to the black box, blurring distinctions between their performing self and the performative space.