A performance by mayfield brooks with cellist Dorothy Carlos inside the Wavertree at South Street Seaport. Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima.
TWENTY YEARS LIVING IN NEW YORK, I’ve visited the South Street Seaport exactly once, for a friend’s book launch at a swank McNally Jackson on Fulton Street. I was late and it was dark, so I didn’t get a chance to fully take in the surroundings. But two doors down, one can find the South Street Seaport Museum, if they’re interested in New York’s history as a harbor town. It was here, on a very sunny Sunday afternoon earlier this month, that I was instructed to pick up the first of my two tickets for “Lotto Royale”—a performance lottery featured in LMCC’s annual River to River Festival which features an array of free programming. The project was conceived in Berlin by artist Camila Malenchini as a response to Covid strictures in 2020: A group of forty artists—the Club for Performance Art Gallery—gathered to make one-on-one performances for each other in public spaces to maintain their practice and a sense of community. In 2021, the Club partnered with the collective T.E.N.T. (Layton Lachman, Caroline Neill Alexander, and Ivanka Tramp) to invite a general audience in on the fun via lottery. The following year, “Lotto Royale” took its current moniker. The form so excited New York–based dancer and producer John Hoobyar that he persuaded Malenchini and Lachman to bring the sweepstakes stateside. Surveying the line-up for “Lotto Royale,” in early April, I recognized the seventeen participating artists as forming a familiar constellation of dancer-poets who share friendship and curated bills with some regularity.
Inside the museum, I pass placards featuring ships and waterfront to arrive at a kitschy faux -lobby, where I’m greeted by four docents who each introduce themselves as Tiffany. I take a seat with a handful of other guests, and when my name is called, I throw a set of oversized inflatable dice at a wall to determine the performance artist with whom I’ll be paired. Rolling a ten, I hear the sound of canned clapping, the cheese of it all amplified by proximity to the museum’s toilets. One of the Tiffanys brings me a silver suitcase and inside I discover a small, folded card with a map instructing me to meet dancer mayfield brooks at New York Central No. 31.
Ivanka Tramp and Camila Malenchini. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
Together, we climb up to the prow of the Wavertree, an 1885 cargo ship that received a $13 million restoration in 2016 funded by New York City’s Department of Cultural Affairs. Two large anchors are impressed upon the deck and together we salute them, brooks showing me how I might lay my stomach on the ground in a warm literalization of “anchoring.” Next, we visit the ship’s cabin, where I sit at a long wooden table. They proceed to gift me a jar containing a smattering of dried rose and butterfly pea flower tea. I’m encouraged to put a message in the bottle to a spirit with whom I’d like to connect, so I write a note to my dead dog asking for a sign. Then, we pull a card from brooks’s tarot deck, and of course it’s my number, ten. Water: I’m going through a change.
In the hold of the ship, brooks sets the alarm on their phone for twenty minutes and instructs me to find a place to stand on this lowest deck. My only job is to signal when the time is up. A musician (Dorothy Carlos) cradling an electric cello begins to play as brooks keens and partners in a duet of frequent collapse with the wrought-iron hulls that compose the ship’s ballast. A photographer hovers in the distance. Mentally I attempt to block out their presence, though I am aware my back is being captured for posterity. The magnificence of the space is humbling, and that I am one of just a few who get to experience this communion amplifies my gratitude for brooks’s labor, romancing me with its mysterious lack of resolution. Later, I am better able to contextualize this work as an extension of brooks’s ongoing practice Improvising While Black, described on their website as that “which uses dance improvisation . . . to create atmospheres of care and inquiry while listening to ancestral whispers of the middle passage.” Reading more about their work, I learn that they have a longstanding preoccupation with the ocean’s histories of racialized violence and poetic possibilities. But for now, the alarm goes off and brooks gently approaches me to take their phone back. I exit the ship with wet eyes, a mixture of embarrassment and disorientation.
Couple hours later, royally bestowed with a journalist’s chance for a second experience, it appears I’ll be visiting Amelia Bande, an artist I recently shared cake with at a mutual friend’s outdoor birthday soiree. (It’s not lost on me that the origin of this project is clubbiness.) Hoobyar helps me find Amelia, posted up at a nearby LMCC office. She is waiting inside a booth in a holding area that is also doubling as a green room for “Lotto Royale” artists. Choreographer Niall Jones is curled up inside a window and at some point I see brooks enter. I want to wave, yet the gesture feels bizarrely intrusive, as our sixty minutes are officially up.
Inside this debut presentation of you used to be here or was it me who left, Amelia reminds me that Covid is not dead and she is vulnerable to it. She asks if she might remove her mask while mine remains on. She tells me I can think of this as a “hospital visit,” a riff on cult performance masochist Bob Flanagan’s 1994 installation Visiting Hours. Bob had cystic fibrosis and Amelia has pulmonary fibrosis. She describes the sad relief at outliving him as preface to a ranging institutional critique that takes New York City and the art world it enables to task for their myriad barriers that normalize and legalize inaccessibility itself. I quote this laundry list from the performance script that Amelia gives me to keep: “Permits, IDs, Credit Cards, Insurances, Leases, Walk-up apartments. Housing lotteries, Green Card lotteries . . . The lottery that you played today.” Following that last thought, Amelia turns her attention to the very institution that was originally meant to harbor the days’ activities, OCD Chinatown, in an effort to consider her own role as a gentrifying artist. She draws a stark contrast between the fruit vendors on the streets outside the Chinatown Mall on East Broadway that houses the gallery and the $200 T-shirts for sale in the fancy shops that cradle it, but then admits she is much closer to procuring one of those tees than selling produce on the sidewalk. Takeaway cautionary tale: Privilege is slippery. More persuasively, she directs my attention toward that dormant space just outside our booth. She wonders aloud how there can be so many unhoused people spending nights under the Manhattan Bridge who could never gain access to this building, subsidized by city funds, while I just breezed my way upstairs for an art encounter. She sings too.
Niall Jones. Photo: Julieta Cervantes.
On my way home, I run into the aforementioned Niall waiting for his last appointment of the day outside the museum. We exchange a friendly embrace. For the first time that day, I feel as though the fourth wall has actually been broken. I turn my face and there is Nile Harris, another “Lotto performer.’ I give him a hug as he launches into a hilariously neurotic and scary relay of the last few days’ experience performing on the streets. Cops, he reports, were called. Late for dinner, I turn to say goodbye to Niall to find that he’s back on the clock: A woman is supporting his weight, her arms hooked under his armpits. Straddling two performances, one of friendship and the other duty, he good-naturedly bids me farewell. Taking in the full backdrop of contrived cobbles, pricy food pavilions, and droves costumed in preppy outerwear, I can’t say I envy him. In the reduction of an artist’s vision to a gig’s conscription—a bunch of smart artists agree to boutique-deliver their services—I glean that intimacy can’t be forced, but transactions can be laid bare.
“Lotto Royale” took place on June 10 and June 11.
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