Collaborative Performance: A Way to Escape the Narrow Places

In the spirit of down-home happenings, I humbly present a preview of the Knish Color Guard. Thanks Lee and Natasha.

All hail the underbelly.

Last week I went to two most amazing performances:

Commemoration of the 99th Anniversary of Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Great Small Works’ most fantabulous Spaghetti Dinner

Great to be around old-time New York types who challenge the establishment and invite people of different ages, backgrounds, cultures, and money levels to share space and food. Bravo! Proof that New York is not just about glitz and glam but also about coming together and making a difference for people of all walks of life.

I like to think about this, especially on the eve of Passover, which is all about challenging the confines, structures and strictures we set for ourselves.

Pretty great how a bowl of popcorn or a plate of spaghetti can unite a crowd, spark a conversation, create commonality. I cleaned my plate at Great Small Works’ Spring Spaghetti and took in a smorgasbord of entertainment: a quartet of tiger puppets, a face-changing Peking opera performer, a story about the history of oil, an excerpt from a novel about online dating for the uber-hairy, and a sultry singer with a southern twang. But wait, I’m forgetting an important thing — the presentation by independent relief workers in Haiti and reports of their new projects.

At the commemoration of the 99th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, Annie Lanzilatto placed a phantom shirtwaist on a stick in my hand when I walked in and urged me into the procession with a one-ply specter of a shirt dangling three feet above my head. All of them had names. Mine said: unidentified woman. Annie is Bronx-born Italian with the accent and heart to prove it. “What do you want to change?’ she thundered to the crowd. “Do something.”

What does all this have to do with knish culture? I love these events for bringing people together with a focus on what’s inside on a person. Spectacle is about surfaces and what we perceive, but both of these shindigs also gave light to the invisible — heartbreak, injustice, people and perspectives that can be tough to find in the hullabaloo of the big city.