Three years ago, early in the pandemic, housebound New Yorkers adopted an odd but endearing behavior. We went to our windows or out on our balconies to cheer the essential workers who were required to keep going out while we stayed in, the folks who staffed the hospitals and markets, who drove the buses and kept the subways running, who labored so that at some level the city could continue to function. We and our neighbors banged on pots and blew whistles and clapped and sang.
Performance artist Karen Finley opens her new show, extravagantly but accurately titled COVID VORTEX ANXIETY OPERA KITTY KALEIDOSCOPE DISCO, with a video of this ritual as it took place in one of the towers at Manhattan Plaza, a development on far-west 42nd Street largely inhabited by performing artists. The Laurie Beechman Theater, where Finley is in residence through May 6, sits in the basement of the easternmost tower; it’s a cabaret space where you can watch and listen as you nosh on fabulous food, including a superb but expensive shrimp cocktail ($5 per crustacean!). The small elevated stage at one end of the room is backed with a video screen and crowded with a clothes rack holding a row of glittery outfits as well as a table covered with a leopard-print plastic shower curtain. Finley stands stage left, clutching a microphone, in front of a screen now displaying ephemera collected during those years of confinement and isolation. She hovers behind a music stand holding her manuscript, struggling with the masks she wants to wear but that cause her glasses to fog up. Limp blue masks adorn the walls of the stage, along with lengths of shiny fabric flashing paillettes; she wears stoles made of masks and pleads with people to wear them. Projected on the screen are pages of journals and sketchbooks Finley’s adorned with butterflies and flowers.
This is Karen Finley not as the crafty femme fatale who took off her clothes and smeared her naked flesh with symbolic solids and liquids but as pastor to a flock of exhausted New Yorkers, theater-district habitués with a taste for exotic costumes.
A Chicago native and multi-hyphenate artist, Finley is now a professor in the Department of Art and Public Policy at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. She’s old enough to collect Social Security, and here tries to bring to life the long, peculiar period of isolation we’ve just been through, to help us laugh through our tears at phenomena like mask stores, Zoom family reunions, Zoom discos (there’s a disco ball on the ceiling in the center of the room, and part of the time we’re bathed in its pulsing reflections), and pet videos.
Her new “anxiety opera” is a spoken-word performance: a rant, a plea, a eulogy, a tribute to the thousands lost. The 80-minute piece is a curiosity — in many ways, the opposite of the several shows that, in the 1980s, cemented her reputation as the “chocolate-smeared woman,” one of the “NEA Four” who, in the early 1990s, refused to abide by an anti-obscenity pledge foisted on them by right-wingers in Congress and so were denied promised grants; their suit to reclaim the funds went all the way to the Supreme Court. (Eight years later, the justices ruled against her, a decision that upended her life in a number of ways, but she persisted.) The product of California art schools and the mother of a 30-year-old daughter who was in the house last Saturday night, Finley has fused the personal with the political in numerous performances, recordings, books, and museum installations. A line in this show acknowledges her “white cis body named Karen.”
The structure here is a series of poems, their inspiration bards such as Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg. For each poem, she dons a different sparkly outfit, sometimes one atop the other, while slides and videos march across the screen. There’s almost too much to listen to, too much to see, especially when she shows us videos of commercials for special cake pans, the sort of material that fills late-night television, presumably keeping insomniacs company during the long periods of isolation the pandemic enforced. We suddenly realize that she’s up to her elbows in cake mix, kneading it with her bare hands, wearing the leopard shower curtain like an apron around her neck. “Let me make for you a hummingbird cake, with a waterlily marshmallow glaze,” one slide reads.
Even as our world has opened up again, Finley reminds us of our longueurs athwart Zoom — of the Zoom funerals and the Zoom weddings and the Zoom memorials. These reflections thrust her back into other crises, other griefs: the era of AIDS, the poisoned air post-9/11, the racism and homophobia, and the economic unbalance that preceded and accompanied and continues to haunt the age of the pandemic. “Can I fuck this grief away?” she wonders. “Can I make friends with this grief?”
There’s an irony in Finley’s show emerging at this particular moment. Most pandemic restrictions have been lifted, while roadblocks to abortion access are going up and drag queens are being terrorized.
This is Karen Finley not as the crafty femme fatale who took off her clothes and smeared her naked flesh with symbolic solids and liquids but as pastor to a flock of exhausted New Yorkers, theater-district habitués with a taste for exotic costumes. She covers herself in outfits decorated with spangles and huge rhinestone-studded flowers, in silver lamé and fuzzy hats and magenta rubber gloves that exactly match the garish colors of her robes and wraps and shawls. She reminds us of the absurd lengths to which we went to avoid recontaminating our hands, and of all the people we’ve lost. “I have never spent so much time at the faucet,” she murmurs.
She leads the enthusiastic crowd at the Beechman’s tables in recitations of the subjects of animal videos, real and invented, that have helped to soothe us during the past thousand days. We read aloud from a list she provides: “Angel fish + unicorn … Ox + hugs … Virgin + apothecary … Archer + tornado … Escaped Owls And Coyotes in town squares … ” — fanciful mixes with circumstances ripped from the headlines. Even in her struggles with despair she’s attending to the world outside. “Maybe my life will be better if I get up and dance. It will.”
There’s an irony in Finley’s show emerging at this particular moment. Most pandemic restrictions have been lifted, while roadblocks to abortion access are going up and drag queens are being terrorized. Obviously, her work is never done, and the culture will keep throwing situations her way, to be met by her unrestrained talent. Her intention here is to heal herself and us, to help us see ourselves, feel our fellowship, and be able to say, “Look, we’ve come through!” In this, she succeeds. ❖
COVID VORTEX ANXIETY OPERA KITTY KALEIDOSCOPE DISCO
Laurie Beechman Theatre
407 West 42nd Street
April 22, 29, and May 6 at 7 pm
Elizabeth Zimmer has written about dance, theater, and books for the Village Voice and other publications since 1983. She runs writing workshops for students and professionals across the country, has studied many forms of dance, and has taught in the Hollins University MFA dance program.