One week before the election, on a crisp evening amid a stretch of disconcertingly warm fall days, I met up in Riverside Park with the choreographer Gillian Walsh. We happened to find a bench overlooking an athletic field at dusk, a tranquil setting not unlike the one where her latest project, Friday Night Lights, will unfold this weekend.
Gillian is careful not to refer to Friday Night Lights, which will take place at the Chelsea Park soccer field on Nov. 16, as “a show.” It is, rather, the culminating public event of a workshop she’s been offering at the Chelsea Recreation Center over the past six weeks, for around 50 participants from many walks of life. Part of Dia Art Foundation’s Activations program, in which artists design workshops in response to civic spaces in New York, the series of classes began with an open call from Dia and the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation; anyone could take part. The group that’s come together includes mostly people with no performing experience. But the drive — or the dream — to perform, and how that varies from person to person, has been an animating theme of the workshop: What’s behind the desire to be seen?