The Let Go
Nick Cave’s The Let Go, nominally a dance party modeled on the late seventies and early eighties club scene, installed in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall of New York’s Park Avenue Armory, tested the analytical purchase of recent critical accounts of participatory art. At once sociable, ludic, and ameliorative—terms indicating approbation in the influential analyses of Hal Foster and Claire Bishop—at the same time The Let Go self-identified as a political work which, to borrow from Bishop, understood the dance floor’s sensuous immediacy as a site of disalienation.1
Cave is an Alvin Ailey trained dancer and choreographer with a background in textile design and fashion. His work frequently incorporates all of these disciplines. In the Drill Hall’s almost football field-sized space, Cave’s ‘chase’, two 40 x 100 foot kinetic curtains of coloured Mylar strips, snaked through the darkened, barrel vaulted hall on overhead tracks. Choreographed professional dancers—‘instigators’—activated the space with moving bodies, working in unison and singly, engaging visitors as participants to a soundtrack of danceable, clubby music. Periodically the instigators disappeared, returning to the hall wearing Soundsuits, Cave’s signature body coverings devised in the wake of Rodney King’s 1991 beating, to conceal all markers of identity. Embodied and danced in, the Soundsuits evoke Dogon ceremonial garments, elements of Noh costume, and funk, at once shamanistic, transfigurative, and fabulous.
In addition to the daytime performances of the instigators, in and out of Soundsuits, and some ninety community groups who availed themselves of the space—on my early afternoon visit a contingent of women hula hoopers took to the floor—The Let Go also included a variety of evening performances, among them choirs, operatic performances and the Freedom Ball, a... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
The Let Go. An immersive performance and installation by Nick Cave at Park Avenue Armory. Photograph James Ewing.
