Show Response: This House is Not a Home
by Patrick Denney
An artfully noodling dance sequence performed in a pair of viral red boots. Two Dimes Square denizens feeding off each other in a vape-fueled Meisner exercise that ends in violent scuffle. A Times Square gingerbread man thrashes across the stage, accompanied by a relentless torrent of harsh noise and crackling voiceover. The performance artist Crackhead Barney sparks an N-word-fueled back-and-forth between herself and an ASL interpreter. And, of course, a full-sized bouncy castle, blown up in real time. Comedy club crowd work careens into the fraught dynamics of interracial relationships. Consensual joy comes up against thrumming, cultivated discomfort. If, per Nicole Kidman’s dictum, heartbreak is supposed to feel good in a place like this, what if it just doesn’t? The actions of Nile Harris’s This House is Not a Home feels almost like scrolling through the hyper-niche TikTok feed of a performance studies grad student. Some moments whiz by with the high-speed passivity of the swipe. Others linger, stuck fast, layer upon layer of rich data seeping into the viewer, altering the increasingly complex algorithms of our brains. This House beautifully stages these blunt force logics of online life and the death-by-a-thousand-cuts demise that these economies of attention can inflict on the real-world bodies. Borne out of the memories and material legacy of Harris’s late friend and collaborator Trevor Bazile, an artist and filmmaker known for his beguiling and befuddling online output and the clout-fueled, shock-stock New People’s Cinema Club. Bazile’s sudden death in October 2021 in a sense spawned the performance. The bouncy house at the heart of the dramatic action was acquired by Bazile for NPCC with funds reportedly from controversial tech titan Peter Thiel. Harris plumbs the tension ardently online strain of afro-pessimism, and fundamental flaws of combining capital and art.
The sputtering combustion engine of Harris’s piece is a dramaturgy of failure. Failure to produce prefab artistic deliverables. Failure to create a legible lingua franca of Black joy for largely white institutional funders. Failure to grieve in a way that sprouts the proper form of feathers and flies away. “I’m Smiling, you just can’t see it,” Harris reminds us throughout the piece. As performance scholars Margaret Werry and Róisín O'Gorman remind us, failure “points beyond, by marking the limit of what is possible at a particular time and place. It historicizes, denaturalizes, helps us reflexively see the orders in which we are embedded. (If we look).” Indeed, the titular house of the piece can be seen as a laboratory for Black failure. After inflation, dancer Malcom X. Bett’s enters the castle, careening around the inflatable structure, puzzling through the recurring mantras of the piece. He flies. He jukes. Every time the house holds him. As Betts’ thoughts spin out, the space allows the ideas to bounce and ricochet alongside him. They almost become atoms, with each barreling collision creating the possibility of new elements— or perhaps blow up the world. Rather than a bang, though, the scene ends with a carefully calculated whimper. The Dimes Square girls spring to life and intervene into Bett’s kinetic reverie. They come charging into the castle, whipping out their phones, inevitably trilling “WorldStar” again and again. Almost immediately, the walls come down and air seeps out. Collected air simply can not hold the weight of appropriation. The flopping skeleton of the house consumes the performers as they continue to shout and writhe from inside.
WorldStar.
WorldStar.
WorldStar