Nothing Spirit, performance documentation, readers: Elisheva Gavra, Robbie Rogers and Ron Gregg. Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York 2023

A performance work in which I am joined by two other people for a cold reading of a play in front of an audience. The play is an argument between two friends about a third person that one of them is having an intimate relationship with. That third person is a figure that exists only in photographs. And so, the two friends embody a conflict between a photographer and a historian. Their ideological tension is the force of separation between the sacred and the profane, that separation is at stake as they try to convince each other of what this love is about, up to a climactic assimilation expressed in the photographer eating the historian.

The performance may be perceived as a live rehearsal for a future show. The place of rehearsal is where time is a circle and meaning is perpetually revealed as interpretation. Nothing Spirit is an invitation for the readers to provide assurances every time they speak,  to make decisions in uncertain times, due to necessity. It asks for a particular participation of an audience, not only by sympathizing with the readers as interpreters but also, since the photograph they discuss is never shown, to conjure a mental image of it, echoing the constructed circumstances of the "play" itself.