Performa celebrated its 20th anniversary on Wednesday night in a room packed with artists, musicians, curators, and downtown devotees gathered for an evening befittingly named A Variety Show. The lineup moved from Yvonne Rainer’s Chair/Pillow, 1969/2026, and Lonnie Holley’s collaboration with Shahzad Ismaily, to Marcel Dzama’s Moth Dance, Laurie Simmons and Michael Rohatyn’s Music of Regret, and a performance of Mary Lou Williams’s A Fungus Amungus, enacted by Artina McCain, and directed by Solange Knowles and Carlos Soto for Saint Heron. By the time Alexa West appeared to close the show, the audience was already in a trance.
The Scene: For 90 minutes, more than 50 artists transformed Town Hall into a living archive of the organization’s history, moving between music, dance, comedy, film, theater, and performance art.
The Locale: The historic Town Hall theater has spent nearly a century hosting everyone from musicians and politicians to cultural provocateurs. Opened in 1921, the landmark venue was designed with a radically democratic principle in mind: There are no private boxes and no elite sightlines. Every seat is equal.
The MC: Actor and Upright Citizens Brigade member Casey Jost was enlisted to host the festivities, entertaining the crowd between acts with a live Yelp review reading (from the 1920s no less!) and a meditation on the art of deleting an app from your phone.
The Crowd: Seated among the audience were musician Solange Knowles; actor Alia Shawkat; artists Marika Thunder, Martine Gutierrez, Marcus Jahmal, and Jean-Pierre Villafane; writers Matt Starr, Barbara Graustark, and Michael Bullock; and editor Alexander Provan.
What You Missed: Barbara Kruger brought a piece 10 years in the making to the showcase, employing the audience to work together to produce the final image packed with timely social commentary. Questions including “Who is silenced?” and “Who speaks?” were spread across the orchestra section with dramatic poise.
Memorable Moment: The night’s biggest laugh belonged to Julio Torres. Emerging onstage with a body-fastened metal apparatus holding a Diet Coke can just beyond reach, Torres delivered a deadpan meditation on discipline, temptation, and self-improvement. As the struggle intensified, the can became an object of almost mythological desire. The punchline arrived only after victory: The can had been empty all along.
Cause for FOMO: After the on-stage festivities closed, RoseLee Goldberg and the Performa team popped in to the SeventyFour Films and the Tribeca Festival world premiere party of MUTTER: The Diary of a Mother, where guests including Natasha Lyonne, Gina Gershon, James Frey, and Waris Ahluwalia rang in the premiere as an impromptu Performa afterparty.
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