A performance by Mayfield Brooks with cellist Dorothy Carlos inside the Wavertree at South Street Seaport. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima.
LIVING TWENTY YEARS IN NEW YORK, I visited the South Street Seaport exactly once, for a friend’s book launch at a posh McNally Jackson on Fulton Street. I was late and it was dark so didn’t get a chance to fully enjoy the surroundings. But two doors down one can find the South Street Seaport Museum, if they are interested in New York’s history as a port city. It was here, on a very sunny Sunday afternoon at the beginning of the month, that I was asked to pick up the first of my two tickets for “Loto Royale”— a performance lottery presented as part of the LMCC’s annual River to River festival which offers a range of free programming. The project was conceived in Berlin by artist Camila Malenchini in response to the Covid restrictions in 2020: a group of forty artists – the Club for Performance Art Gallery – came together to do individual performances for each other in public spaces to maintain their practice and sense of community. In 2021, the Club partnered with the TENT collective (Layton Lachman, Caroline Neill Alexander and Ivanka Tramp) to invite a general audience to have fun via the lottery. The following year, “Lotto Royale” took on its current nickname. The form so excited New York dancer and producer John Hoobyar that he persuaded Malenchini and Lachman to hold the competition in the United States. Surveying the lineup of “Lotto Royale” in early April, I recognized the seventeen participating performers as forming a familiar constellation of dancer-poets who share friendship and arrange bills with some regularity.
Inside the museum, I pass signs depicting ships and the waterfront to arrive in a faux kitsch lobby, where I’m greeted by four guides who each introduce themselves as Tiffany. I sit down with a handful of other guests, and when my name is called, I roll a set of oversized inflatable dice against a wall to determine which performance artist I’ll be paired with. Rolling a ten, I hear the sound of canned applause, the cheese of it all amplified by the proximity of the museum toilets. One of the Tiffanys brings me a silver suitcase and inside I discover a small folded card with a card directing me to meet dancer Mayfield Brooks at New York Central No. 31.
Ivanka Tramp and Camila Malenchini. Photo: Juliette Cervantes.
Together we rise to the prow of the Wavertree, an 1885 freighter that received a $13 million restoration in 2016 funded by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Two large anchors are imprinted on the deck and together we salute them, streams showing me how I could lay my stomach on the ground in a warm literalization of “anchoring”. Next, we visit the ship’s cabin, where I sit at a long wooden table. They proceed to offer me a jar containing a handful of dried rose and butterfly pea flower tea. I’m encouraged to put a message in the bottle to a spirit I’d like to connect with, so I write a note to my dead dog asking for a sign. Then we draw a card from Brooks’ tarot deck, and of course it’s my number, ten. Water: I am going through a change.
In the hold of the ship, brooks sets the alarm on his phone for twenty minutes and orders me to find a place to stand on this lowest deck. My only job is to report when the time is up. A musician (Dorothy Carlos) cradling an electric cello begins playing as stream-goers and partners in a duet of frequent slumps with the wrought-iron hulls that make up the ship’s ballast. A photographer hovers in the distance. Mentally, I try to block out their presence, though I’m aware that my back is being captured for posterity. The magnificence of space is humbling, and the fact that I am one of the few who can experience this communion amplifies my gratitude for Brooks’ work, romanticizing me with his mysterious lack of resolve. . Later, I am better able to contextualize this work as an extension of Brooks Improvising While Black’s continuing practice, described on their website as one that “uses dance improvisation. . . to create atmospheres of care and inquiry while listening to the ancestral whisperings of the Middle Passage. As I read more about their work, I learn that they have long been preoccupied with stories of racial violence and the poetic possibilities of the ocean. But for now, the alarm goes off and brooks slowly walks over to me to pick up his phone. I step out of the ship with watery eyes, a mixture of embarrassment and disorientation.
A few hours later, royally rewarded with a reporter’s chance for a second experience, it looks like I’ll be visiting Amelia Bande, an artist I recently shared a cake with at the outdoor birthday party. from a mutual friend. (It’s not lost on me that the origin of this project is clubbiness.) Hoobyar helps me find Amelia, stationed at a nearby LMCC office. She waits inside a booth in a waiting area that doubles as a green room for “Lotto Royale” performers. Choreographer Niall Jones is curled up inside a window and at one point I see streams coming in. I want to wave, but the gesture seems oddly intrusive, because our sixty minutes are officially over.
In this first presentation of Were you here or was it me who left, Amelia reminds me that the Covid is not dead and that she is vulnerable to it. She asks if she can take off her mask while mine stays on. She tells me I can consider this a “hospital visit,” a riff on cult performance masochist Bob Flanagan’s 1994 installation. Visiting hours. Bob had pulmonary fibrosis and Amelia has cystic fibrosis. She describes the sad relief of surviving him as a preface to a varied institutional critique that takes on New York City and the art world she allows to berate for their myriad barriers that normalize and legalize inaccessibility itself. I quote this laundry list from the performance script that Amelia gives me to keep: “Permits, IDs, credit cards, insurance, leases, walk-in apartments. Housing lotteries, green card lotteries. . . The lottery you played today. Following this final thought, Amelia turns her attention to the very institution that was originally meant to house the day’s activities, OCD Chinatown, in an effort to consider her own role as a gentrifying artist. She draws a stark contrast between the fruit vendors in the streets outside the Chinatown Mall on East Broadway which houses the gallery and the $200 t-shirts on sale in the posh boutiques that rock her, but then admits that she’s a lot closer to getting one of those tees than selling products on the sidewalk. Takeaway caveat: Privilege is slippery. More persuasively, she directs my attention to that sleeping space just outside our booth. She wonders aloud how there can be so many homeless people spending nights under the Manhattan Bridge who could never get to this building, subsidized by city funds, when I just fought my way upstairs for an artistic encounter. She also sings.
Niall Jones. Photo: Juliette Cervantes.
On the way back, I bump into the aforementioned Niall waiting for his last appointment of the day outside the museum. We exchange a friendly hug. For the first time that day, I feel like the fourth wall has been broken. I turn my face and there’s Nile Harris, another “Lotto performer.” I give him a hug as he embarks on a hilarious, neurotic, and chilling relay of the experience of the past few days on the streets. The cops, he reports, were called. Late for dinner, I turn to say goodbye to Niall to find he’s back on the clock: A woman is supporting his weight, her arms hooked under her armpits. Straddling two representations, one of friendship and the other of duty, he bids me good-bye good-naturedly. Against the backdrop of man-made cobblestones, pricey food pavilions and crowds dressed in preppy outerwear, I can’t say I envy it. In the reduction of an artist’s vision to the conscription of a gig – a group of intelligent artists agree to deliver their services in store – I understand that intimacy cannot be forced, but transactions can be laid bare.
The “Lotto Royale” took place on June 10 and 11.
