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Mock aerial view of Hut #6, assembled by Anke Stumper.

ANKE STUMPER

paradise declassified

The Hut Project is a nomadic series of site-specific structures made of cast-off materials found on or near each site. In short, they are made of trash. Each hut is different, in part dictated by the materials I find and the places they are built. The Hut Project is also an interconnected set of performances, a contemporary reinvention of ritual, a call to think about pressing things, a statement about consumerism, and a personal practice. This book is about the huts I have built and the life they unexpectedly took on.

Movement artists know that nothing is waste. Every gesture, every action, inside and outside the studio, can become the stuff of a performance. You trip and fall and you say, “Let’s keep that.” A dancer comes into rehearsal and animatedly tells a story and you ask, “Can you repeat that?” You see someone moving on the subway platform and you try the movement on your own body. Everything is material and can be used and re-used, infused and re-infused with significance when placed in a new landscape of meaning.

HUT ∙ Huts are used as temporary shelter by people. Huts are built quickly of available and indigenous materials such as ice, stone, leather, grass, palm leaves, branches, and/or mud and exist in practically all nomadic cultures. “Hut” is also used to market commercial stores, companies, and concepts in an effort to transmit the idea of a cozy place where you can get things, such as Pizza Hut.

I have engaged extensively in this kind of artistic recycling of movement and gesture. But until 2009 I had never quite so radically reinvented the material trappings of my own dance productions. After making a dance called ZsaZsaLand, I was left with a lot of stuff. ZsaZsaLand was a piece about excess and its relation to national mythmaking, and it was performed in an installation environment that was part 99¢ store full of cheap, imported kitsch, part bad natural history museum full of bones and imagined artifacts. It questioned the links between consumer escapism and state-sponsored violence and veered between scenes of revelry and scenes of detainment (both involving lots of tinsel, fake money, plastic flowers, and wax body parts). After the production, I found myself facing the costumes, props, dirty tarps, and bags and boxes I had used to transport all these things, and I was overcome with a desire to consume these materials in a voracious way. This wasn’t just about finding new uses for old things but about a radical reconception of the underbelly of a performance: I wanted the work to eat itself.

Wax and fabric knots in ZsaZsaLand.

LOLLY KOON

With Toby Billowitz in ZsaZsaLand.

LOLLY KOON

I began reconfiguring these materials—vigorously tying and wrapping and dipping them in wax. Making bundles that, like vodou paquet congo, derived their power not from their appearance but from what was inside them and the histories of those contents. In this reinvention of my post-production detritus, the “backstage” became the “onstage,” the inside became the outside, the means became the end. ZsaZsaLand reclaimed.

This process shifted my focus. I saw each object through a new lens. The cardboard box from the cheapo burner I had used to melt the wax for the wax body parts (the one that kept catching on fire) and the tarps I had used to protect the floor became as interesting as the wax legs they had helped to make. The iconic plaid 99¢ store bags that carted the costumes became more significant than the costumes themselves. The history of an object became more important than its appearance in the choice to use it. The scraps and crumbs and broken branches and bubble wrap all became ingredients for conjuring. Everything was something.

I first made a number of sculptural pieces—heavily wrapped, slightly sinister-looking packages. Then I began to turn myself into a package as well, wrapped with wire, clothesline, old pantyhose, and fake moss. I did a performance called Nu-Gro, dressed as a post-apocalyptic concubine refugee. My movement vocabulary (mostly crawling) came from ads in the back of the Village Voice, and I carried soil in an improvised plastic backpack and seeds in my mouth. While Nu-Gro allowed for maximal efficiency (recycling of materials, less waste, less storage) it was not a manifesto for re-use. It was a call to action: Here are the insides, the refuse, the stuff you throw away. You cannot ignore it. How will you transform it? This is the beginning of composting and revolution.

Rehearsing ZsaZsaLand.

JORO BORO

Composting takes what is unwanted, rotting, discarded, and makes it into something valuable, fertile, usable: rich soil. For a long time it’s just a hot mess—ugly, smelly, disgusting, offensive. But prettiness and propriety are overrated. Composting says, embrace the dirt and look at what will happen. Transformation. Alchemy. And maybe eventually vegetables. And revolution? Seeing differently, upending values, re-valuing what has been deemed worthless is the stuff of revolution. But more on that later.

The first hut, built at the end of 2009, was an impulse. I wanted a place in my studio to take refuge. A lair. It was also a place to contain things. After doing a multi-week outdoor performance project, in parks, under highways, and in big public spaces where the energy dissipates, I realized that, despite its potential elitism, a theater contains the energy of a performance and allows magic to happen. It holds us all together in the same space at the same time. In doing so, it is a kind of container. The first hut was a way of creating such a container on a primitive scale. A charged space that could function like a theater without the exclusivity of one. What would it be like to be inside an empowered object? I expanded package into structure.

Over five years, I built ten more huts. These containers became meaningful to me in ways I couldn’t have imagined. I danced in them, slept in them, ate in them, hosted discussions about housing, water, sustainability, and permaculture, gave workshops, talked to countless strangers, served lots of tea, made videos, told stories, showed films, invited people to make music, hosted a dance party, prepared reclaimed food from supermarkets and dumpsters, and grew micro-greens.

Performing in Nu-Gro.

JORO BORO

Performing in Nu-Gro.

JORO BORO

Packages in Nu-Gro.

JORO BORO

The huts are simultaneously stages, sculptures, and dwellings. Like ritual spaces, they are places where someone might have an experience they wouldn’t have in daily life, and where that experience can be contained and understood through a special space created to hold it. Perhaps because they are made of waste, they are spaces outside of the consumer world and off the map of “normal” social transactions. For example, strangers might watch a performance in a hut and then eat food I prepared for them—sautéed mushrooms grown in a permacultural system on and around the hut, salad made of sprouts growing in a split drainpipe, tea brewed from herbs planted on the hut sipped from a found teacup. Eating in this way is weird; it’s magical; it’s like being on the edge of the universe. Apocalypse light: there’s no central heating, but there’s hot chocolate. In the unfamiliar but intimate context of the huts, I witnessed people talking to others they didn’t know, tasting things they wouldn’t normally eat, and thinking thoughts they wouldn’t often think.

Cooking mushrooms and herbs at Hut #5.

LINDSAY COMSTOCK

For each hut, I created a specific set of activities that responded to that hut, that population, and that site. With some huts there were many hours of activities (like the three months of events at Hut #7) and with others there were just one or two events (like the performance and community conversation at Hut #8). But what was most important to me was the creation of a kind of microculture with practices indigenous to each hut. Things like planting seeds, having tea, taking a tchotchke from the “hut grotto,” or drawing your own home’s floor plan.

The huts are a come-as-you-are affair. Reality show meets church bazaar meets postmodern dance. I am me and people are who they are. Visitors of all sorts participate as themselves, watch performances, eat reclaimed food, learn about composting or permaculture. And through their being there, each hut becomes fully what it is.

When I was working on Hut #6, I made friends with a woman named Makka. She was from Somalia, living in Norway, and working as a janitor at the Norwegian Opera. Every night during her shift she would come by and visit as I built the hut, and we would talk about huts in Somalia and emigration in Norway and food and life. One night she helped me drape plastic on the frame I had built, like we were hanging out laundry together in an opera house lobby. Another night, we chatted with a young female guard about cooking and food waste; they had never talked even though they both worked the night shift. Finally, when the hut was finished, Makka was my first guest for tea. And when she came by during a performance, she was herself. And so were all the other people who had been part of this unlikely process—guards and volunteers and ballet dancers and tourists and students from the language school for immigrants and the young woman who sat on the bridge every day asking for money. Like the end of The Wizard of Oz, “You were there, and you, and you …”

With Makka Ahmed at Hut #6.

ODA EGJAR STARHEIM

Why bother to create such a grassroots potluck of personalities and experiences? Because this mash-up of people and cultures and characters is beautiful. Young Norwegian soldiers having tea with Turkish immigrants and Brazilian tourists on a hot pink fake fur. Elderly Italian-American Brooklynites making music with contemporary musicians and twenty-something hipsters. An African American carpenter who disassembles Fashion Week runways teaching a young Polish woman how to make a shelf. These things happened at the huts. Because art should be for everyone. The guards and the janitors and the neighbors and the gallery goers and the little boy who saw Hut #10 the first time he ever entered a museum. Because at some point it’s not even about art anymore; it’s about us all being human together.

The huts have blurred a lot of boundaries for me—between life and art, between process and product, between object and practice. What is the artwork? It is all these things—hanging laundry with Makka and my dance and the structure I built and the unlikely conversations over fenugreek sprouts. They have been a total experience. Sweeping up dirt and watering plants, building, sleeping, discussions, dancing, and maintenance mingle into one “way of life” rather than the museum of bell jars they are usually kept in. Even to say that the art swallows all these things feels wrong because it still assumes a neat distinction between art and non-art. When I build a hut, I wear clothes that I found and I eat bread from the dumpster. At that moment, it’s not “art” or “life,” it’s just what I am doing. It’s like being a child and decorating mud pies. It’s just what you are doing before you get up and run around some more.

APOCALYPSE ∙ An apocalypse is any universal or widespread destruction or disaster. Translated literally from Greek, a disclosure of knowledge, i.e., a lifting of the veil or revelation. Today, it is used to refer to any prophetic revelation or to the end of the world in general.

Work clothes acquired and worn while building various huts.

RAFAEL GAMO

Plastic tampon applicators over the doorway of Hut #4.

RACHEL EISLEY

In the 1990s I lived in Belgium, and was impressed by the preponderance of holy relics, dusted off annually and carted around for religious processions. A fingernail, a splinter of bone, a vial of holy blood. Seeing what we preserve and give value, I couldn’t help but wonder, what relics will we offer (consciously or unwittingly) for the future to know us by? Five hundred years from now, what will find its way into an overcrowded tourist Schatzkammer or a local parade or an archaeological museum? An ornately stamped plastic tampon applicator? A foil packet of emergency water? An Apple mouse box? And what will people make of these things?

The huts allow us to imagine a future that is looking back at our present as its past. An imagined reconstruction of our life and values (where, for example, tampon applicators are construed as good luck charms or door fetishes). I love projecting possible misinterpretations, the wonky telephone tag of time and apocalypse. And at the same time, the huts are an inkling of challenges the future may in fact hold. The condo of the future: fossil fuelless, built of waste, situated on the polderland of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Bundles for Hut #7.

ELISABETH FÆRØY LUND

While the huts are not meant to be didactic—neither a direct reprimand for our consumer habits nor an arts & crafts apologia for our addictions—they do inevitably raise some questions about where we’re headed. Rafael was a member of the maintenance staff at the site of Hut #7. He teased me for weeks, watching me haul in garbage and laboriously tie up bundles, and quipping about whether it would all stand up. But when the structure finally took form, he exclaimed, “Girl, when the shit goes down, I wanna be on your team! I’ll kill and you build.” It was the best reaction I had ever received to a hut. He got it: hut as dress rehearsal for the future.

Most people want to go inside my huts. I like that. I want them to be appealing spaces. But they’re a little sinister as well. In the artist statement for Hut #9 (which was made of 175 pieces of found electronics), I wrote, “This hut is a failure. It is not a proper house. It is not even a proper hut made out of electronic waste. It could poke your eye out. It could fall down. It is quite literally a house of cards, tied together with discarded clothing and straps—as precarious as our very practices of consumption, disposal, and planned obsolescence. Enter at your own risk.”¹ A reminder. A warning. But also a reconception; the huts are more than just a novel way to ask ourselves difficult questions about the future.

REVISION ∙ A revision is a change or set of changes that corrects or improves something. Something (such as a piece of writing or a song) that has been corrected or changed. An update such as a modification in software or a database.

I have long been fascinated by borders. For years I’ve called my studio “The Border” with a little sign in burgundy Copperplate Gothic in the corner of the window. I love crossing borders on trains, watching one culture and landscape and language melt into another, in the same way that I love the permacultural concept of ecotones or border zones as places of increased richness and biodiversity. And I love the cusp between works of art and what Arthur Danto calls “mere real things.”²

The border between art and objects is not just about function (whether we choose to use the canvas as a lampshade or hang it in the museum), and it’s not just about the sanction of the art world as Danto’s account suggests. It’s about seeing differently, creating a mini-paradigm shift within one’s own vision. It is also about moving from a dead utilitarian seeing to a seeing that is charged with significance—maybe even beyond that, to a way of being that is charged with significance where meaning is not just created by net worth.

The huts are about this way of re-seeing, or re-visioning. When I spoke with anthropologist of waste Thomas Hylland Eriksen, he talked about rescuing objects that were considered waste and re-elevating them back into the realm of value.³ The huts do this. They lead us to re-see objects that we normally perceive as dead, ugly, unuseful, or don’t perceive at all, in new ways that are more alive. They help us notice their physical properties, think about their histories, and wonder where they are headed (landfill? ocean?). And sometimes they help us see their beauty or utility or that of the other objects we have forgotten.

This is where revolution comes in. Re-seeing is not just about sleight of eye, not just the old Wittgensteinian flipflopping duck/rabbit. Re-visioning is a fine-grained form of resistance. This gestalt shift has ramifications. This action is subversive. It might change you.

The potential consequences of re-visioning trash include:

THE (QUIET) MANIFESTO

That we find beauty everywhere

That material wealth and the constant upgrading of our material lives become less necessary than we think

That tastemakers and arbiters of value (corporations, governments, social heavies) lose the power to judge for us

That nothing is seen as waste (it may no longer be what it was; it may become scrap metal or firewood or compost, but it’s not “waste”)

That we notice our connectedness to all objects and beings—manufactured, natural, human, animal, plant—and maybe we think twice about our actions

That we remember the polyvalence of all things (a fishball can may be a fishball can and it may also be a planter and a table)

That we refuse to accept the radical devaluing of people and things that leads to genocide, ecological destruction, and systemic abuse; that we assert value according to different perspectives and systems

Fishball can tea tables at Hut #6.

ODA EGJAR STARHEIM

Working with cast-off objects led me to many places and people who have also been “cast off” or rendered invisible in various ways. In collecting waste, I found myself in toxic industrial areas, back alleys, loading docks, abandoned lots, and dealing with spaces and bodies of water that are at least temporarily discarded. I saw and met people who also deal with waste, much more extensively than myself: homeless people, nomadic people, professional trash pickers and recyclers, dumpster divers, janitors, maintenance workers, guards, facilities personnel, and sanitation workers. It’s often not a coincidence who is economically driven to take these jobs or live in these ways, and I was aware of my privilege in choosing to work with waste. It’s also not surprising which places are “discarded”—whose homes and neighborhoods have been deemed disposable. Immigrants, people of color, the poor, and the otherwise marginalized have a much higher probability of living with toxicity and dealing with waste.

Even more disturbing is the fact that there is a slippery slope from people working with waste to people being seen as waste. In a disposability culture, marginalized people not only contend with proximity to waste and toxicity but they are themselves often identified or treated as waste by those with the power to do so. I recently saw an exhibition of artworks made by men on death row in Tennessee. Dennis Suttles makes dough roses out of the leftover bread on inmates’ meal trays. In an artist statement he writes:

As a memorial, I would like to see one or more roses like these built out of scrap material which would otherwise have been sent to a landfill or destroyed.

These roses would be larger, with stems at least 20’ long. They would be placed in parks or town squares around the country.

They would represent all the lives of people in prison. While the world may look at someone in prison as trash, only to be thrown away, there is still a lot that we could offer to society if people would just take a moment to look.⁴

In his essay dwelling object hut thing (which appears later in this book), André Lepecki writes about how re-seeing in a negative direction, a kind of ontological demotion, happens not only to objects but to human populations as well. He cites the Nazi devaluing of European Jews, Roma, and other “outsiders.” Perhaps it is no coincidence that I am descended from this population that has felt the effects of this demotion all too viscerally. Perhaps re-seeing in the other direction is a form of mending. Early on in the project I inherited some plastic bags full of hundreds of unwanted Ace bandages. I used them to hold the huts together until I ran out after Hut #6. A futile attempt at bandaging our future. Tikkun: to mend the world.

CAPITALISM ∙ Capitalism is an economic system in which trade, industries, and the means of production are largely or entirely privately owned. Private firms and proprietorships operate in order to generate profit. Central characteristics of capitalism include private property, capital accumulation, wage labor, and, in some situations, fully competitive markets.

Dennis Suttles’ Artist Statement in Life After Death and Elsewhere, 2015.

COURTESY OF DENNIS SUTTLES

The huts are a labor of love, perhaps a seemingly hopeless one, and that is part of their nature. The search for materials—in dumpsters, garbage cans, on street corners, under overpasses, at waste transfer stations—is part of them. The many hours of piling, wrapping, tying, weaving, and balancing of objects are part of them. The undoing knots, sorting materials, and giving away objects at the end of each hut are part of them. I make them with my own hands. They could not be made by machine, outsourced to fabricators, or exist only in concept and still be what they are. They are labor intensive. They are not sold. They are ephemeral, like mandalas. But the time, effort, and physical act of working these materials are important to me. All of these actions conspire to create a space where there was no space before.

This labor also matters because it is about synching means of production with materials. Art and other consumer products made with found materials can, and often do, aim for a slickness worthy of the capitalist world, and can thereby undermine the values of working in this way. They can ride consumer trends, assuaging our guilt-ridden desire to “recycle and reuse” while leaving us complicit in large corporate structures that don’t really take those values to heart. We’ve all seen items made for the market and looking just that—marketable—with slickness and gloss masquerading as professionalism, hip, and intellect. But it’s important to remember what waste is and that there’s a reason we have it. These objects may be fun, but in our consumer orgy, these are the pasties of capitalism the morning after … when the magic is gone and the adhesive is dirty.

According to cultural anthropologist Robin Nagle, whose fieldwork involved a decade with New York City’s sanitation workers,

Material consumption always includes, though seldom acknowledges, the necessity of disposal. If consumed goods can’t be discarded, the space they occupy remains full, and new goods can’t become part of a household. Because sanitation workers take away household trash, the engines of our consumption-based economy don’t sputter. Though this is a simplistic description of a dense and complex set of processes, the fundamental reality is straightforward: used up stuff must be thrown out for new stuff to have a place.⁵

And new stuff must have its place. Capitalism has clear financial goals, a profit model, a bottom line. It is incompatible with re-seeing (unless re-seeing makes a profit). And it is incompatible with wonder, unknowing, the value of the intangible and ineffable. The deregulated capitalism we have become accustomed to in the United States is especially uninterested in these things, does not make space for them. But these found objects live on the outskirts of capitalism in a zone of failure. They have all been cast off by someone in some way. The world of the huts is no longer a consumer paradise. This is paradise declassified.

So, why is this a better crucible? And for what? In a space built out of found materials, full of object histories, and worked by hand, there is room for new kinds of connection because connection is not mediated by profit and product. There is room for unknowing. There is room on the edge of apocalypse. It’s like the heart-to-heart talk you have with a stranger while waiting for the last night bus, or breakfast the morning after you’ve stayed up all night, or confessions around a campfire. Without slickness, market value, and status symbols, new values can emerge. And it’s about time because we, as a society, have a lot of stuff. But we are spiritually poor.

Found materials connect us to their histories and to the other people who have touched or made them. These chains of connection affect what the huts become, how they feel, what issues they raise. Hut #10 contained toys that I found on a curb in Sarasota, Florida. Some of the musical ones were playing as I went through the trash. The woman putting out the garbage bags told me they belonged to her young daughter who had died; her house was being foreclosed. The huts would not be the same if the objects were new. This is not a showroom. Object histories converge with my own history and the histories of others in each hut to make these spaces ripe for experience.

Toy from curbside garbage on Hut #10.

DANIEL PERALES

New values emerge from new experiences. At the huts, these often involve dancing, planting, having tea, community discussions, workshops, freegan cooking, and other ways for people to interact. These activities form the temporary microculture of each hut. This is why the huts are not simply objets d’art. They cannot become what they are without being animated (literally, invested with spirit).

After building Hut #10 at The Ringling, I created an event in which I served tea made with herbs from three local gardens and danced while Kristin Norderval sang. It was a way to greet the public, activate the hut, and make it fully a space of its own. Many of the people there had watched or participated in the creative process—curators, conservators, museum guards, their families, students who helped me build, people who offered things they wanted to throw away, and others who took home things I found and didn’t use. Many had had conversations with me, watched the hut come into being, or seen their cast-off objects become part of it.

I was wearing a pin with red satin lips given to me by one of the museum guards because it was Valentine’s Day, and I had a handkerchief that an audience member brought me attached to my belt loop; it had been her grandmother’s. Tying it to the hut was the last impromptu gesture of my dance and the last addition to the structure. When I danced, the space was focused; people were very present. Some cried. Unstated, we were launching this gathering space and this hut together, and they were not just “audience”; they were the people who would continue to keep it alive when I left Sarasota. By having had a meaningful experience, it became theirs in a way. Their relation to the hut and the gallery space was changed.

Perhaps we might compare the huts to altars. What makes an altar an altar is not only its form or the symbolism of its objects but the organic working of these objects in space and the physical interactions they engender. An altar, when effective, entails a kind of choreography, and the repeated motions and actions of that choreography are an important part of what it is.

I am a choreographer. For me, creating this web of actions and relationships is choreography. First, I am choreographing the materials that I find, gathering them from different places, bringing them together in a precise nonentropic way, and later guiding them back out into the world on different paths to potentially different futures. A large dance. Second, I am choreographing the movement of my own (and sometimes other trained) bodies—developing the movement palettes that arise through my work researching and building each hut and dancing at its site. Finally, and most importantly, I am choreographing experience—the experience of people who visit the hut in all different capacities.

For years I have experimented with ways to combine my dance practice with social practice (more typical in the visual arts) in which the public’s actions and experiences complete the identity of the work. The idea that we have to choose between these two ways of working has always felt like a false dichotomy. If we look at the history of ritual we find a history of examples involving trained officiants often with particular physical skills (sometimes called shamans or priests) and a participatory public. In fact, these two complementary components are fully in dialogue and equally necessary to the success of a ritual. Ritual practice needs both skill and participation.

Performing at Hut #10.

DANIEL PERALES

But what do the huts have to do with ritual? Ritual reconnects us—to place, objects, the natural world, each other. It turns our attention, reminds us of things that are important, even when we have forgotten that they are important. It helps us rewire lost connections culturally, like a stroke patient relearning neural pathways. It is a time out of time, a chance to refocus through simple but salient actions.

The huts might remind us of some very basic things like what we throw away, how long we’ve had it (one hut included fancy plastic spoons that were used at a reception—each spoon had been used to serve one bite of food), where our food comes from, what happens to a plastic bottle when we don’t see it any more, or what is our wish for our home or neighborhood. Beyond that, we might also remember (re-member in a very physical way through watching dance, crawling through the door, eating) our connections to the beginnings of agriculture, property, real estate, architecture, to the ideas of food and nature and home. At the performances of I set off to seek my fortune and I got a little lost and then I remembered what you said at Hut #5, I typed definitions of these key words on my laptop in the hut and performed physical tasks related to them. I was interested in the questions: What provides shelter? What makes this feel like home? What is my connection to the food I eat? How is power inevitably involved in the concept of property? How does ownership create a perceived sense of needing to protect what we own? What happened when we went from commons to private property? I chose to address these questions physically through my performance.

The term “reality” first appeared in the English language in 1550, originally a legal term in the sense of “fixed property.”

But ritual is more than just an intellectual exercise, a list of stats about non-biodegradable products or facts about the way that real estate is related to reality. With ritual, we remember to feel, and perhaps we also feel to remember. There are many different scholarly accounts of ritual and its function. But at bottom, we strive for a moment of realness, a time out of time when things do not seem the way they do in ordinary life, when we are charged, present, connected.

RITUAL ∙ A ritual is a set of actions, performed mainly for their symbolic value. A ritual may be performed on specific occasions, or at the discretion of individuals or communities. Rituals include not only the worship rites of organized religions and cults, but also rites of passage of certain societies, atonement and purification rites, dedication ceremonies, coronations and presidential inaugurations, marriages and funerals, sports events, Halloween parties, and Christmas shopping.

Performing in TILL at Hut #7.

ERIC BREITBART

At Hut #7, I performed TILL, a two-hour movement ritual in which I circled the hut relentlessly, tilling the metaphorical soil of the space (a hospital turned homeless shelter turned arts center with a fraught history and a creepy vibe). I felt like a divining rod, using my movement to reveal a kind of murky energetic history of the space, to aerate that toxic history and make room for something new to grow. The circling was grueling and grotesque, morphing and monotonous. People sat and stood on all sides of the basement and watched me sweat in the summer heat. When the circling wound down with my crawling on the cement floor, I led the audience out to the adjacent abandoned lot, a stretch of weedy broken cement which functioned as a moat between the current day men’s homeless shelter and a newish luxury condo. I slowly walked the perimeter of the lot, carrying a light attached to a long stick. Musicians played percussion on glass vessels from different corners of the lot. And to my great shock, the audience followed me closely, processing around the site at a snail’s pace, watched by curious faces from the shelter fence and the luxury balconies on either side. Together we reclaimed this abandoned non-place as a place—a place where we all were, hot and breathing together in the New York City summer dark. Body, movement, reality, fragility—people connecting to each other by witnessing the human condition together. Shared presence.

This kind of experience of shared presence can lead down an array of unmarked roads: to compassion, to a recognition of our own embodiment, to a sense of connectedness to others. For me, choreographing is the skill of creating opportunities for these experiences, either through the movement (or stillness or exhaustion or pathos) of my own body, or through the movement and assemblage of objects, or through the interactions of social processes like serving tea or preparing food. The huts provide a space for this shared presence. With this opening we can be reminded of the things we need to remember. We can refocus.

Performing at Hut #5.

LINDSAY COMSTOCK

At Hut #5, I was standing at the top of a ladder, holding an old car antenna and one of the “packages” I had made that I called The Sheep (remember the remains of ZsaZsaLand?). I stood for a long time, without moving or lowering my arm. It was simultaneously a feat of physical endurance, an internal focusing, and a way of being connected to the viewers in a space that had the hut at its epicenter. I remember distinctly the feeling of standing on that ladder, of being an antenna, and of a palpable connection to the people there. After the three-hour performance, I spoke with a young man who had volunteered to run the bar. I didn’t know him; he had seen my call for volunteers online. He told me that during that part of the piece he found himself overwhelmed by emotion and had the urge to cry. I could feel that charge when I was performing. But there’s a point where words fail to describe exactly what is happening, where live performance is ineffable. And that is in part why I do it. And that is why it is like ritual.

There is a cool wind that has pervaded some regions of postmodern performance where irony has been equated with intelligence and distance seen as a measure of professionalism. The fear of wearing one’s heart on one’s sleeve. In her op-ed “How to Live Without Irony” in the New York Times, Christy Wampole writes about irony as a pervasive cultural phenomenon, one that offers the safety of noncommitment. “To live ironically is to hide in public…. Somehow, directness has become unbearable to us.”⁶

Irony and ritual cannot coexist. You cannot be laughing at and trying to mend the world. (I mean, you can laugh as you try to mend the world, but that’s different.) You cannot be detached and also engaged. Lately, we have been mostly detached. As Wampole writes, “a function of fear and pre-emptive shame, ironic living bespeaks cultural numbness, resignation and defeat. If life has become merely a clutter of kitsch objects, an endless series of sarcastic jokes and pop references, a competition to see who can care the least (or, at minimum, a performance of such a competition), it seems we’ve made a collective misstep. Could this be the cause of our emptiness and existential malaise? Or a symptom?”⁷

IRONY ∙ A manner of organizing a work so as to give full expression to contradictory or complementary impulses, attitudes, etc., especially as a means of indicating detachment from a subject, theme, or emotion; an objectively sardonic style of speech or writing.

But perhaps this is not a new struggle. In fact, it may be that the very origins of performance hold something of this tension. Way back before performance was what we now think of as performance, performance was more like ritual, ritual was a staple of communal life, and communal life was something everyone participated in. People danced on a regular basis in public ceremonies; no one sat it out to watch. In her Ancient Art and Ritual, Jane Harrison chronicles the birth of Greek drama, explaining how this practice of embodied participation eventually morphed into drama as spectator sport, theater as we now know it.⁸ She describes the population’s gradual disillusionment with ritual, the appearance of Homeric stories to replace it as public entertainment, and the creation of distance when not everyone participates in the ritual any more.

What fascinates me about this narrative is how the waning of ritual heralds a shift in the architecture of performance. The orchestra, which used to be the place for dancing, shrinks, and the theater, or the place for spectators, is added. Over time, the orchestra shrinks still further, and the theater grows to the proportions we now recognize. The “stage” was originally a place in which the dancers could dress for the ritual (an “Ur dressing room”), but it grew and eclipsed the sacred area of ritual dancing and eventually became the platform we now know.

My “aha” moment came when Harrison described the original stage: “It was simply a tent, or rude hut, in which the players, or rather dancers, could put on their ritual dresses.”⁹ So, a stage was once a hut … back when everyone used to dance. A stage was a hut in a different time, in a different place, with a different view of the world.

I began my training in classical ballet—a world of proscenium stages—and I circuitously found my way to building huts. As a culture, we have gone in the opposite direction: from huts to stages, from ritual to drama, from participants to spectators, from hot to cool. What happens when we lose our memory of participation, of ritual, of connectedness and investment? What happens when irony and distance lead to apathy and compliance? Wampole wrote in 2012:

The ironic life is certainly a provisional answer to the problems of too much comfort, too much history and too many choices, but it is my firm conviction that this mode of living is not viable and conceals within it many social and political risks. For such a large segment of the population to forfeit its civic voice through the pattern of negation I’ve described is to siphon energy from the cultural reserves of the community at large. People may choose to continue hiding behind the ironic mantle, but this choice equals a surrender to commercial and political entities more than happy to act as parents for a self-infantilizing citizenry.¹⁰

There are things that are urgently calling us to pay attention—the way we treat the one planet we have; the way we act as if it is infinitely resilient and immune to our incursions; the destruction of pure seeds, healthy food sources, and clean water; the manipulation of real estate with no connection to the lived experience of actual people; the perceived disposability of workers, immigrants, people of color, and lower-income citizens; the way our climate is changing. Remember the Lorax? Everything is connected. If you throw something away in one place it impinges on another. If you destroy plants, habitats, people, it has an effect on others. If you abuse people, you create a web of violence that shifts its focus when power changes. Perhaps it’s time to rewind from stage to hut—to return to the “Ur-dressing room” where we all prepare to engage together. The huts are a quiet but clarion call to show up.

March for Science. New York City, April 22, 2017.

JILL SIGMAN

And more people have been showing up … speaking about climate change, clean water, environmental racism, Black lives, white supremacy, women’s bodies, the rights of trans people, Islamophobia, immigration, health care, minimum wage, and many other issues. Some people are newly “woke.” Some have been working for decades. As more and more people show up and engage, where will we go from here? What will we build—transforming what we find, working without a blueprint? The improvisation is vast.

Pen America, Writers Resist rally for free speech. New York City, January 15, 2017.

JILL SIGMAN

Searching for fossilized shark teeth.

MATTHEW MCLENDON

NOTES

1 In thinking about failure, I have been influenced by Judith Halberstam’s notion of failure as noncompliance with social mandates to certain capitalist and reproductive behaviors. For more on her use of “failure,” see Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011).

2 Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

3 Thomas and I met to talk in September 2011 at The Hotel Bristol in Oslo on the occasion of my building Hut #6 at The Norwegian Opera. He participated in the performance at Hut #6.

4 Dennis Suttles’ Artist Statement for the exhibition Life After Death and Elsewhere, organized by Robin Paris and Tom Williams. Apex Art, New York City, September 10–October 24, 2015. The men who participated in this exhibition are facing execution at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, Tennessee. They were asked to design their own memorials.

5 Robin Nagle, Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 24–25.

6 Christy Wampole, “How to Live Without Irony,” New York Times, 17 Nov. 2012: SR1.

7 Wampole, SR1.

8 Jane Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual (London: Oxford University Press, 1948).

9 Harrison, 143.

10 Wampole, SR1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Danto, Arthur C. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981.

Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011.

Harrison, Jane. Ancient Art and Ritual. London: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Nagle, Robin. Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of New York City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.

Wampole, Christy. “How to Live Without Irony.” New York Times. 17 Nov. 2012: SR1.