Abrons Arts Center Presents Narcissister: Organ Player, 3/15-23

The Abrons Arts Center will present Narcissister and the premiere of Organ Player, a large-scale performance that stretches the limits of spectatorship. While her recent solo exhibition at envoy enterprises, Narcissister is You, placed us in proximity to surfaces and mirrors, Organ Player lures us into a body that threatens to eject its contents. Her mobile hinges cast an eerie humor throughout this episodic performance, which abounds with dance, striptease, music, and vaudevillian trickery.

Organ Player runs March 15, 16, 22, and 23, 2013 at 8pm in the Abrons Experimental Theater, 466 Grand Street, New York, NY 10002. Tickets are $15 and available at www.abronsartscenter.org or by calling 212-352-3101. This production is for mature audiences.

Narcissister is a doll, a puppet, a bodybuilder. She stages an uncanny scene of reanimation, enveloping us in the cushiony folds of bodily organs, impossibly housed in the flat brittleness of a paper doll. By turns evoking the spectral scene of Heinrich Von Kleist's marionette theatre and confronting what Tavia Nyong'o refers to as the "failed humor" of the ceramic figurine's "racist kitsch," Organ Player aestheticizes the intertwined relationship between race, subjectivity, and grace. As the body composes itself, at what point does the inanimate become animate?

Never appearing without her mask and merkin, Narcissister's nudity is at once a spectacle of unveiling and concealment. Her work rests at the intersection of performance art, burlesque, and choreography. By embracing a practice of feminist craft by constructing her own sets and costumes, while including masked doubles of herself onstage, Narcissister is at once singularly self-sufficient and ever-multiplying. In her insistence on ambiguity, she keeps us asking, what is behind the mask?

Performing reverse striptease by dressing in stockings and sequined dresses pulled from orifices, then layering and removing hijabs, wigs, and plastic bangles, much of her work has reminded us that the body is never bare. In creating an excess of artifice, on the one hand, and revealing the nude yet trained body, on the other, Narcissister implicitly questions the relationship between feminist practice, commodity fetishism, and bodily technique, reframing assumptions of blackness and feminism in contemporary performance.

Click here to read the New York Times feature on the exhibition Narcissister is You, recently on view at envoy enterprises: http://nyti.ms/SLBp1G