"the gift of the body that I have"
I first met the anonymous performance artist known as Narcissister in 2010, when I was trying to get back into dancing after a flirtation with giving it up. Feeling stifled by my years of Irish dance training, I thought the antidote might be to try something radically new. And so I found myself at PMT House of Dance one day, auditioning to be part of a small army of masked backup dancers, or Sisters, in Narcissister’s new neo-burlesque production, This Masquerade.
As a performer in that work, in two runs at different venues, I got to see Narcissister’s singular world up close: the feats of homespun engineering that are her costumes, designed to come off in elaborate stripteases; her precise and acrobatic choreography, which often incorporates, mind-bendingly, the birthing of objects from her vagina; her transformation into, and dismantling of, archetypal female characters, always anchored by the wardrobe staples of a mannequin mask and a merkin (a wig for pubic hair). Throughout her body of work, eroticism, humor, and a love for low-fi spectacle underpin sharp and subversive commentaries on gender, race, sexuality, domesticity, and capitalist consumption. It is always a thrill to see what she’ll dream up next.
For two nights in September, her latest large-scale performance commission (and her first in over a decade), Voyage Into Infinity, packed the house at the cavernous Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Featuring a trio of doll-like Narcissisters (with Effie Bowen and Jessica Emmanuel joining the lead artist), the show takes inspiration from the 1987 video The Way Things Go, which documents the workings of a Rube Goldberg-esque machine made from simple materials like tires, trash bags, wooden planks, and liquids set aflame. Narcissister first saw the video, by the Swiss artist duo Peter Fischli and David Weiss, as a young dancer in New York, before she had invented the Narcissister character, and she reencountered it years later during the pandemic. “It struck me that this could easily be reconsidered, remounted, as a contemporary feminist work,” she told me when we caught up on Zoom the week after the show.
With pyrotechnics by the fire artist Alex Podger and a surprise punk band fronted by Holland Andrews, Voyage unfolds as a series of chain reactions across an orchestra of machines, as precisely rigged as they are rudimentary-looking. Wearing pastel frocks (until they undress, that is) and bows in their hair, the Narcissisters could be plucked from a storybook, their girlish daintiness contrasting with the hulking contraptions around them. But as they buzz about the gaping industrial space, they are in full control, setting off cascades of events through actions like riding a seesaw, stacking buckets, or lighting a rope on fire. Between these explosive moments, whimsical interludes, like a synchronized dance with balloons, add an extra touch of the surreal.
In a nearly two-hour conversation that ranged from topics of fire safety to pelvic floor agility, Narcissister and I spoke about the making of Voyage — its potent imagery and intricate logistics — and how she meets the physical demands of her work. (One of her fitness hacks: an in-home mini trampoline, which she recommends to everyone.)