Helen Shaw

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  performance January 24, 2019

  American Heroine

  TINA SATTER/HALF STRADDLE'S IS THIS A ROOM is a verbatim enactment of an audio recording made by Special Agent Justin G. Garrick, the FBI officer who arrested Reality Winner for releasing classified information. You remember that, right? The world has been remade a thousand times since then, but we shouldn’t forget that we only know the Russians tried to hack our voting machines because a twenty-five-year-old intelligence specialist mailed reports (circulated internally at the NSA) to The Intercept in 2017.

  The show stages Winner’s encounter with the FBI team the day they show up—presumably with

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  performance September 18, 2018

  And What of the Night?

  SHE HAS A BEAUTIFUL CAT FACE—incredible feline cheekbones and a smile that reveals strangely changing teeth, sometimes fierce and snaggled and gold, sometimes smooth. She flirts with the camera as she sits at an outdoor café somewhere. The footage is casual. A voice asks, “Irene, does the camera make you uncomfortable?” She laughs.

  No! I love it!
  Don’t you understand?
  The camera to me is my beloved
  The one who understands me
  The one who wants me always
  and I give everything I have to the camera
  
  

  If you’ve ever been cornered by a Maria Irene Fornes¹ obsessive, you’ve heard her described as “

  
  
  
  

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  performance June 20, 2018

  Of Goddesses and Monsters

  AT THE MOMENT OF THE SPRING EQUINOX on March 21st, I was standing in the basement coat check room of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The place was closed—it was 12:15pm on a Tuesday—so there weren’t any coats, but there was a little line of toaster-sized “dirt” clod sculptures sitting on the counter. A crowd of vernal worshippers and theater-fans had followed a team of celebrants here from the massive glass-and-concrete lobby upstairs, where a gaggle of women dressed like Russian space peasants had oriented us according to civil time, nautical time, and astronomical time. We had been admonished

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  performance March 07, 2018

  Forever Young

  THE LEGENDARY VENUE P.S. 122—rechristened Performance Space New York—finally reopened in January. It’s hard to encompass the tangled mare’s nest of this building’s cultural associations: the place is like an archaeological site, with layers of civilization and history piled up higgledy-piggledy. Occupied originally in the late 1970s by a group of squatter-artists, the repurposed school building and its two theaters were at the center of New York’s experimental scene for nearly four decades. Spalding Gray spoke his monologues there. Philip Glass played a battered piano. Ron Athey literally bled