THEM
Made at and for Performance Space 122, premiered in 1986, now revived for Performance Space New York
“THEM is a way of remembering the AIDS epidemic and the lives downtown artists led and lost. With Chris Cochrane’s electric guitar—caustic shredding, blurting, pounding dissonance. With Dennis Cooper’s text—direct and revealing, vulnerable, delivered from off to one side, with isolating distance and longing observation. With dancers, led and gathered by Ishmael Houston-Jones, who toss themselves across the space and at each other with fiery abandon, who occupy the expanse, crafting a world necessary for themselves and their kind. With rites of gesture and behavior. With exploration through touch. With play. With aggression. With a visceral sense of the overpowering, inescapable presence of death... and Death.”
Photos by Rachel Papo