House of Harrell

How nice to get let into a performance space well before a show begins and be able to enjoy the quietly cheerful presence of its star-to-be as he greets friends. Last night at the New Museum, the stellar soloist in question--Trajal Harrell—started the show by handing out impeccably-printed cards with the lineup of twenty voguing “looks” to be performed over fifty minutes in the museum’s intimate theater space, surrounded on three sides by audience.


The piece is called Twenty Looks or Paris is Burning at the Judson Church (S)—the S representing “small”; reportedly, there are XS, M, L and XL versions. Besides the museum, Harrell’s savvy co-presenters include Danspace Project and French Institute Alliance Française’s Crossing the Line festival. You have one more chance to see the exquisitely-performed (S): Go tonight!

Using a sextet of metal folding chairs—draped in pieces of clothing--as his dressing room, Harrell dons a changing, mix-match array. From Preppy Schoolboy (West and East Coast versions) to Legendary Face and Basquiat Realness, Harrell walks, embodying his long-imagined collision of Judsonian postmodernism (the party of NO!) and the aesthetics of the Harlem ball scene (YES! to glamour, YES! to theatricality, YES! to seduction). In fact, it is a big YES! to the importance of surface impressions and a hearty embrace of making magic (and magick) theatricality in postmodern dance.

For the most part, Harrell avoids the gleaming runway, created by artist Franklin Evans, taped over the theater’s floor. It’s there, but he’s elsewhere, breaking up not only the way we can look at him but the way he looks at everything with a gaze that sometimes draws the watcher in and sometimes evades or wards off the watcher, but is always pulled together and deployed like a serious and irreversible hoodoo spell.

This performance—a pleasure to witness--combines wit, patience, subtlety, awesome fluidity and grace and even some room for amusingly tacky effects (kitchen apron turned superhero’s cape with the help of an electric fan, for instance). The man’s keen taste in music and sure application of it for color and atmosphere are simply delectable. Harrell has always been an interesting thinker and creator. This piece, though, should make him legendary.

Tonight, 7pm, at New Museum, 235 Bowery, at Prince Street between Stanton & Rivington. 212-219-1222. Information also at Danspace Project.