Full Cast And Creative Team Set For SCARECROW At The Tank

The Tank has announced the complete cast and creative team for Scarecrow. Scarecrow, an unsettling new work by choreographer Mark Bankin, unfolds as a deathbed hallucination where mind and body stand in open confrontation and memory dissolves into subliminal sensation.

Set in an ambiguous suburban interior that is also a wheatfield, Scarecrow is a quiet psychodrama in which the unseen insists on being felt and the body returns to its limits. Scarecrow will begin previews on Thursday February 12, 2026, with an opening night set for Saturday, February 14th at 7:00 PM for a limited run through Sunday March 1st, 2026, at The Tank's 98 Seat Theater (312 West 36th Street).

Bankin's work has been marked by an ongoing exploration of liminality-between stillness and motion, text and physical form, cognition and affect. His previous choreographic works, most notably Disputation Between the Body and the Worms (Westbeth Artist Housing), have been praised for their rigorous attention to physical presence and their refusal of easy narrative. Through fragmented gestures, radical pauses, and staged silences, Bankin dismantles familiar relationships between performers and spectators, asking audiences to witness not just movement, but the thresholds between perception and feeling.

"This work is dedicated to my immigrant grandmother, who, while in Hospice with dementia, was isolated from her family and elder-abused by her caretaker," says Bankin. "Scarecrow aims to hold mind and body in open confrontation; when what is said and what is done tell different stories, a truth arises from the doubled narrative which neither story can articulate on its own." This narrative framework is loosely inspired by Marina Carr's play, "Woman and Scarecrow," about a morphine-hazed woman on her deathbed who hallucinates a Scarecrow, and stylistically influenced by Peter Greenaway's Drowning by Numbers, E. Elias Merhige's Begotten.

Scarecrow is an experimental psychodrama of disjointed dance-theater vignettes that repeat like a fever dream. Actors assemble in portrait tableaux and cry on cue; gestures are precise, bodies strained, meaning flickers but never settles. Featuring scenic design by Josh Oberlander and lighting design by Cheyenne Sykes, whose work transforms The Tank into a liminal interior, domestic, agricultural, and psychological at once.

Through its restrained intensity and unsettling imagery, Scarecrow invites audiences into a space where the body is both witness and evidence, and where meaning is felt before it is understood-a continuation of Bankin's ongoing inquiry into the edges of perception and performance.