Pageant Brings Grit to New York Performance

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 255, ‘Performance’

Friday night in East Williamsburg. Young people line up on the pavement, waiting to get into Pageant. The crowd is not just young, it’s very young, with wardrobes ranging from medieval frocks to Y2K jeans. Once inside, they line up along the walls or squat down on the wooden floor. Pageant, a scrappy new space on the top floor of an inconspicuous building, has no lobby, no curtains to draw, no fancy lighting grid. The stage is often nothing more than a patch of floor, the performers closely surrounded by an audience consisting of their friends, colleagues and the performance-curious.

Founded by Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, Owen Prum and Alexa West in 2022, in the wake of the COVID-19 lockdowns, Pageant was conceived as a much-needed community and artist-run haven for performance. It is as much a community as it is a venue: the programming responds directly to the people who show up to the events. ‘It’s hard to programme someone who hasn’t been in the space,’ West tells me this August, ‘Not in a gatekeep-y way, but because we have so few resources. You need artists who understand the limitations of the space and who can tailor their work to it. And these limitations breed exciting work.’

Pageant’s line-up falls somewhere between odes to traditional postmodern repertory and pure experiment. If historic New York venues such as Danspace Project, Judson Memorial Church and The Kitchen still seem immersed in the legacy of 1970s performance, Pageant feels different. For one, it’s not in downtown Manhattan. But it’s also plugged into the internet generation’s particular sense for image and mediatization – most of its performances seem equally aimed at the algorithm and a packed brick-and-mortar room. The work reflects how today’s avant-garde is negotiating a cultural landscape saturated, and influenced, by digital media.

Where, historically, new generations of artists have often defined themselves through a refusal of the values and expectations of public consensus, the artists at Pageant fully integrate the reality that their audience move through contemporary experience phone in hand. The attendance of established choreographers such as Sarah Michelson, who rose to prominence in the late 1990s and is known for banning photography during her performances, feels poignant. For many younger artists her work exists only through text, yet they increasingly invoke it in theirs, further complicating this generation’s relationship to image and aestheticization.

What is proposed is a new aesthetic and production paradigm. The artists aren’t asked to codify their work in writing or within institutional language. ‘Performance exists between an audience and a work,’ West says. ‘Without the attention of an audience, it doesn’t come alive. We’re here to provide that space without all the administrative hoops.’ In a city where institutions tend to demand polished work and a fluency in art-speak, Pageant’s informality feels radical.

Its range is wide: one week might feature a rigorously rehearsed, highly technical dance work; the next, a deconstructionist magic show. When I last visited, the piece The Line is a Labyrinth (Mickey Reimagined) (2025) by artist Brooke Stamps embraced improvisation with a looseness and vulnerability rarely seen in the city’s tightly choreographed, mediated performance culture. I was reminded how the high level of mediatization in the New York art world often means that performers establish conditions to avoid failing or embarrassing themselves, leaning on a degree of polish, stylization and image-readiness. Stamps’s performance reflected Pageant’s willingness to act as a platform, rather than implementing a curatorial rigidity. One outcome of this generosity and insistence on community-building is the cross-pollination it seems to encourage: often, its performers will turn up in other artists’ pieces elsewhere in the city. Nor is its location arbitrary: as rents across Manhattan soar, and young, ambitious artists move into neighbourhoods like Bushwick and East Williamsburg, it’s not surprising that the gravitational centre for experimental dance is shifting.

But what stands out most is how the artists at Pageant absorb these conditions into their work. Visibility isn’t about having one’s image circulate as online spectacle; rather, this mode of being together, online and off, becomes an invitation. It offers a place for others to recognize themselves, expanding the community – a survival strategy in a city where economic pressures make this nearly impossible. If the Judson generation’s radicality lay in refusal, the radicality of Pageant’s artists – devoted to their work, showing up for each other, building a scene that insists on togetherness – lies in their persistence.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Consider the Algorithm’

^{Main image: Neva Guido, Generator (detail), 2025, performance documentation. Courtesy: PAGEANT, New York; videographer: Evan Ray Suzuki}