The Reception

Six guests talk, joke, dance, drink, and eat. Sometimes they hold still, and sometimes they move about. There is music; there is silence; there is chatter. Old friends mingle with new acquaintances. Slowly the guests warp and rewind their actions as the celebration’s mundaneness gives way to something more ominous. No one can leave. No one else arrives.

The Reception is a performance that exists at the border of theater and installation. Drawing inspiration from Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, which explores physical entrapment and the breakdown of bourgeois behavior, The Reception situates itself in modern-day New York City. In this setting it contends with bourgeois values and the surreal decadence of the 21st century in a new way.