I arrive just after the performance’s official start time, 5 p.m., at the abandoned movie theater on East 86th Street. (City Cinemas on the Upper East Side, defunct since 2019, will next year become New York’s second Happier Grocery, sometimes referred to as “our own Erewhon,” a “wellness destination” known for its almost comically high prices.) In its state of frozen-in-time neglect or post-apocalyptic flux, the theater is perhaps ideal for the debut of Miles Greenberg’s stark, transcendent/dystopian durational work WAR, his most ambitious—and most cinematic—endeavor to date. Presented by Performa and curated by Zoe Lukov, it’s the first New York performance in three years by the Canadian artist, an acolyte of Marina Abramović, who works with “the body as sculptural material,” per his website, and is known for poetic, physically grueling vignettes. In Sebastian, for example, at the 2024 Venice Biennale, he stood on a stone for eight hours, pierced by five arrows.
I stand outside, fifth in line, as two gay guys in front of me talk about a meeting one of them had with a literary agent. When we enter, from the lobby, I can hear music from the speakers, a score by the electronic composer Chino Amobi, who founded NON Worldwide, a record label and network of artists and DJs from the African diaspora. Best known for his 2016 EP Airport Music for Black Folk (a critique of ambient music’s presumed white-cultural context implicit in its title alone), Amobi has created a sonic accompaniment to Greenberg’s six-hour work. A sweeping choir soars over clashes of electronic synths and drums and sirens, an operatic evolution of the deconstructed club music I used to hear during the 2010s at underground queer parties in Brooklyn and Berlin, where durational raving was treated as a ritual.
Up a short flight of stairs, ushered into the cavernous dark-walled space, I see some 44 Black performers, dressed in earth-tone trousers, and occasionally tube tops, each with an opaque white contact lens in one eye only, walking, affectless, on treadmill pads. (Greenberg refers to these as “conveyor belts,” presumably hoping to evoke the factory assembly line rather than Planet Fitness.) The participants are split into two phalanxes facing each other, leaving an aisle—or catwalk—down the center for audience members to walk down, single file. Large mirrors at the far end seem to extend the battle formation. Greenberg himself, shirtless on a pad near the front, holds a lit thurible, an incense burner hanging from chains, like those used in Catholic liturgies. He juts out his lower jaw and licks the gum beneath his lower lip.
“Do you think it’s just going to be this?” my editor, Johanna, who I meet up with early on in the evening, asks, wondering if there will be any other choreographed action over the course of the evening, or if the walkers, going nowhere, are the entirety of the spectacle. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure this is it,” I say, wondering if I will endure the whole six hours. (Johanna lasts about 90 minutes.)
In one sense, WAR is an expanded iteration of Greenberg’s 2020 live-streamed performance Oysterknife, first performed in Montreal and presented by the Marina Abramović Institute. For it, he walked on a treadmill—conveyor belt, rather—for 24 hours, from 4 p.m. to 4 p.m. (At around hour 18, the security guards found that he’d fainted. They called Abramović, who said, “If he’s out for an hour, then do something.” He came to in 23 minutes.) But it seems like quite another thing entirely to enlist others to engage in an activity according to rules they didn’t come up with. And it’s a sharp departure from the solo endurance tradition Greenberg cites and participates in, from the work of precursors like Pope.L (particularly the late artist’s epic street crawls) and Abramović herself to contemporaries like EJ Hill, whose solitary kneeling performance at 52 Walker last year likewise evoked devotional suffering.
Tonight, Greenberg periodically steps off the treadmill and approaches performers on either side of the central divide, giving them orders like a general. But the score (resembling Gregorian chanting at times), the occasional flashes of red light, the burning incense, and the somber slow-moving figures, give the performance a religious, masochistic aura—as much as a sadistic military one—alluding to the depiction of suffering martyrs through Western art history.
Runners often talk about marathons as a durational ritual of masochism that, after several hours, can reach the heights of spiritual ecstasy. The brain eventually releases happy hormones, washing exhaustion away mid-run, as well as producing euphoria at the end, when crossing the finish line. But what to say about the audience gathered to watch a performance of other people’s pain? Fans watching a marathon get a high of inspiration, in part because they find pleasure in watching other people overcome their pain. The same principle applies to, and is dramatized by, body-art performances of the 1970s, which ran on a current of sadism from the audience. Chris Burden slithered, in his underwear, across broken glass; Stuart Brisley lay in a bath of black water as long as he could stand it every day for two weeks. But for Greenberg, suffering seems essential to spiritual discipline, independent of the viewer.
In WAR, pain and gloom are somewhat displaced by the aspirational flair of the performers, who look like Telfar models on the runway. Greenberg’s casting call had requested “Black performers/people across the gender spectrum and with a range of body types who are able to walk continuously at a slow pace for 4 hours,” but the group trended quite fit, their appearance inescapably conjuring the gym. As an activity, walking on a treadmill is neither production nor leisure, it’s a kind of “work” that exists outside of economic forces, and in some field of self-discipline and transformation of the body. Yet, Greenberg also evokes the drudgery of physical labor and the doomed march of soldiers onward in an unnamed, unending war.
We really didn’t want to walk down the central runway, lit by a towering light box. “I’ll go with you,” I say to Johanna, who expresses discomfort about moving so invasively through bodies that are mute and captive per the terms of the performance, as well as under some physical duress. For us, the dynamic is dramatized, racialized, by the all-Black cast. (Johanna is white and I am Asian American.) Greenberg has not, in the past, shied away from arguably “abject” or “negative” depictions of the Black figure, like when he stood for seven hours in shibari rope-bondage in The Flaying of Marsyas at the Stedelijk Museum last year. But is this a display of abjection?
Ultimately, reluctantly, we do walk down the aisle, becoming part of the performance for a moment, playing our role, experiencing the intensity of the treadmill-walkers, avoiding eye contact, but seeing them in more detail, as individuals. I wonder if everyone locked in endless work in their atomized treadmill-pods, not interacting with each other, is not a metaphor for neoliberalism.
To my friend Slant, who is Black (they arrive later), the sweating formation looks like a group of attractive, young Black people in an act of self-improvement. “This looks like Black exceptionalism,” they say to me. Perhaps it’s all meant to be inspiring, like watching people train for the New York marathon (which happened three days after the performance). A performer with curls looks almost tearful at some dreaded fate that has not yet arrived, though she can see it coming. A massive man with albinism yawns. Another in long dreads looks withdrawn and concerned, his furrowed brows, full of pity perhaps, for someone—or some country—he is thinking of, who he knows he cannot save.
When Greenberg is on his treadmill, he sometimes mirrors the movements of a performer he faces, in some kind of communion, or as though they are communicating in secret code. At one point, he places his hands on his heart, caressing his torso, and the opposite performer raises his hands as if in celebration. Their affect reads as victorious. To me, the performers—with snake tattoos, or hair dyed white, and all with one eye whited-out—look somewhat alien, like the vanguard of an Afrofuturist army. (There are 44 soldiers; Obama was the 44th President—maybe this is me spinning out in numerological speculation.) I start to feel the momentum and suspense, wondering who will last the longest.
Some performers walk off partway through the performance, replaced by new ones. In the bathroom, I see one, who has covered up with an oversized gray T-shirt, squeezing eye drops into his eyes. By the sixth hour, the room is muggy with burning calories. The staff, in black T-shirts, hands out more smoking thuribles to performers. I stand behind one of them, watching sweat form in the shapes of tiny continents across the skin of his back. Some of the performers look noticeably changed. One, who looked distraught earlier, now hunches her back, looking to the future in a menacing posture. Another reaches out his arms, fists clenched, locked in. Yet another man moves his lips in a silent incantation. If they are preparing for battle, I wonder, which one?
During the last half-hour, an audience member approaches Slant, asking what they think of the performance. “I feel like I’m also a part of it, we’re doing this together,” they answer. “I don’t like it,” the guy grunts. “Does that mean you don’t like me?” Slant jokes. He says he doesn’t want to see the performers locked in endless work; it’s like they’re doomscrolling. He wants to see them rise up and revolt: “People are so over the work that they’re doing, they want to be a part of something else.” He starts booing. Slant winces and tries to distance themself. Security arrives to pull the man out of the theater as he continues yelling.
I understand the heckler’s critique. To what extent are we watching a disturbing pantomime of forced labor by Black people, in a country still grappling with unfreedom in slavery’s wake? But WAR, in spite of these unavoidable associations, seems to express faith in a practice of spiritual labor, in suffering as an active state with some kind of liberatory potential, not as an opiate for the masses.
WAR doesn’t reference Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, or Lebanon explicitly, but invokes a spiritual or metaphysical war, ancient and futuristic, eternal. The performance does, finally, end, though. As Amobi’s score comes to its conclusion, Greenberg steps off his treadmill and walks down the center aisle to stand silhouetted by a column of white light, which then turns red. He stands with his arms out, in a cruciform stance, and then brings them together in the orans posture of prayer. The audience applauds; someone hands him flowers. I’m so elated and overwhelmed that I dry-heave by the stairwell.
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