A Lineage of Antagonism

A Lineage of Antagonism

Sam Max 

When performance artist Ann Liv Young was an Artist-In-Residence at Amsterdam’s School for New Dance Development (SNDO) in 2011, a clique of five undergraduate dance students attempted to abduct Young while she was performing onstage. A disoriented audience watched from their seats as the students took Young’s mic, restrained her, carried her toward a table, pinned her down, and tried to tape her body to the surface. Young bucked against her students for several moments before freeing herself, ultimately scrambling away. She then tossed the table across the performance space, locked eyes with her students, and said to them with a threatening and raw resolve, “You’ll not ever take me.” Footage of this incident can be found thirty-one minutes into Kathryn Karwat’s and George Pitts’s documentary on the artist, I Don’t Exist If You Don’t (2016). (1)

The students’ insurrection took place during 37 Sherrys (2011), a performance Young staged with the undergrads who signed up for her five-week workshop. The title of the performance refers to the number of students registered for the course, as well as the moniker of Young’s frequently revisited performance persona “Sherry” — a crackling, brash, uninhibited white Southern therapist-cum-antagonist known for her intense, relentless audience work, and whose pseudo-clinical practice she refers to as “Sherapy.” Young’s idea was to spend her five weeks training the SNDO students in the basic elements of Sherapy in order to create one giant Sherry: a super-organism that would collectively enact Young’s perspective that antagonism toward the audience is the most efficient route toward revealing subtextual truths in the room. 

Young, like Sherry, is an antagonist insofar as her primary tactic is to set the stage for danger to occur. She takes interest in a theater that uses artificial elements (her drag personae, among other strategies) as a mask behind which she can incite confrontational or accusatory audience interactions that tend to bewilder at worst, and drive unsuspecting audience members into frenzied states of undress at best (as was the case at 2010’s Bastard Festival in Trondheim, in which a man was moved, in response to Sherry’s provocations, to join the character onstage, pull down his pants, and shake his penis at her). (2) Much of these interactions begin with Sherry prodding an audience member with the therapist’s own antagonistic assumptions about them, effectively putting them on the spot, and then proceeding with a dramatic line of questioning that forces the audience member to either succumb to Sherry’s force or try to undermine her authority. The latter, of course, almost never successfully occurs, both because of how Young has designed the character’s logic (Sherry would never claim to be wrong) and due to the fact that this is a premeditated performance, after all, wherein Young and her team physically and atmospherically control the theatrical settings in which Sherapy is conducted.

“I think at one point they said they were trying to teach Sherry about force,” says Young’s videographer, production assistant, and partner at the time, Michael Guerrero, regarding the students’ physical attack on Young at SNDO in 2011. (3) After taking a post-attack breather offstage, Young comes back to lecture the performance students who staged the coup mid-show, shouting on the mic that she would “never ever force any of [them] to do anything, ever,” which she says would be “disgusting.” (4) Young grabs her things and leaves, refusing applause. The show is over. The lights stay on. 

More than an amateurish assault gone wrong, the scene is emblematic of the slippery relationship between Young and her antagonistic alter-ego, as well as her students’ clear inability to tell the difference between the two. That inability to decipher whether Young is Young or her characters extends to audience interactions beyond SNDO as well, as Young has been frequently physically assaulted while in character, not only as Sherry but also as the rabid Mermaid in her Mermaid Show (2012), a half-aquatic embodiment of chaotic evil who spits raw fish guts at the audience.  

One of Sherry’s mantras, invoked at many of her performances (including when she performed in blackface as “Sheriqua” at Black Dance in 2012, in an evening curated by Dean Moss) is that “I’m a character! I’m not a real person! This is theater! If you don’t like it leave! Leave!” (5) Despite the fact that it’s a worthy sentiment which seeks to liberate artistic antagonism from the moral codes of society, it’s an unconvincing principle coming from a performance artist who creates work on and with her own body — who isn’t an actor playing out someone else’s script — and who also seems consistently fixated on disturbance over resolution. In the eyes of a contemporary audience, with whom artifice continues to fall increasingly out of favor, the employment of a constructed persona cannot convincingly render the artist behind the character unaccountable, nor could the character absolve the artist.  

In an essay titled “Neutrality is not an option,” originally featured in a publication on the Artists-in-Residence at Amsterdam University of the Arts, Ibrahim Quraishi writes that the announcement of Ann Liv Young’s invitation to be in residence at SNDO in 2011 “caused a buzz of excitement in the school” and that the coup staged in 37 Sherrys certainly lived up to the expectations around Young’s invitation to campus. (6) In the piece, Quraishi interviews four students who participated in Young’s workshop, one of whom was a young Florentina Holzinger, the Austrian choreographer who at the moment is continually selling out the Volksbühne in Berlin with her vivid, haunting, high-intensity, feminist work, and who — not unlike Young — has achieved in her moment a kind of celebrity status as a show pony of the European dance theater. Quoted in Quraishi’s essay, Holzinger (then a fourth-year student at SNDO) recalls of Young’s methodology, “the call for participation was very open,” further identifying that, “[w]e were clearly put into the position of students who needed the judgment of an authority to be able to define their value.” (7)

Holzinger and Young both share in a post-dramatic feminist lineage, wherein the martyrdom of self-identified female bodies comments on the complications and risks of what it might mean to do such a thing (martyr themselves) while actively doing it. In their works, the choreographers frequently grapple with the boundary of agency and complicity. Both Holzinger and Young return to the disciplinary nature of the dance studio as a textual element, meant to indicate unresolved antagonistic power relations between instructor and student. Some of Holzinger’s work comments explicitly on her own experience of a dance education, wherein she constructs scenes of female instructors barking corrections at barre-bound students. Similarly, an early choreographic motif in Ann Liv Young’s work (for instance, in her 2005 breakthrough dance Michael), features Young playing herself as a choreographer, shouting prompts like “GO!” at her dancers from the audience, while they exhaust themselves in taxing marathon sequences. (8)

Holzinger’s idea of antagonizing the audience also shares Young’s aesthetic interest in aggressive visual imagery, much of which features her performers in high-wire situations that seem to set the stage for actual danger to occur. Such is the case in Holzinger’s Tanz (2019), admirably a Harley Davidson balletic freak show, and A Divine Comedy (2022), which (also admirably) feels like a parking garage overrun by panicked axe-wielding LARPers. In these works, women get battered around in a car suspended midair, tremoring on aircraft cable. Others hang by tight harnesses, careening around the stage, maneuvered by an unseen hand, repeatedly getting slammed into walls like retired crash dummies. Holzinger’s body of work demonstrates what it would be like if Cirque du Soleil and Wes Craven were asked to collaborate on the Olympic Games opening ceremony. She makes a spectacle out of the potential for onstage danger to occur, but ultimately, the threat of danger, while pervasive, is too premeditated to feel real. While the level of artifice in her work, matched by the high production value, is awe-inspiring, it does create a kind of programmed, animatronic Haunted Mansion ride effect. 

Holzinger’s brand of antagonism importantly differs from Young’s by largely removing audience participation from the equation, treating them mostly as voyeurs behind the fourth wall. Her audiences passively witness an onslaught of jarring and violent extremities that sometimes seem to include actual torture of the women who make up her ensemble. Fitting for the context of the German Stadttheater, Holzinger’s antagonism is more of an intellectual approach: ideological and sensorial, but not implicating her audience in any meaningful way. Infrequently the audience might be directly addressed with a rhetorical question, but such a gesture is hardly sustained with the same intensity of Young’s interrogation room. It’s more like hearing your ketamine dealer wax philosophical to herself while pissing on a wall at 3 A.M. 

That removal of audience interaction does a lot to shield Holzinger’s antagonism from personal criticism—even in the more evolved and self-critical approach of her new piece Ophelia’s Got Talent (just invited to the 2023 Theatertreffen). The work begins with a warped staging of a popular TV competition (America’s Got Talent), as Holzinger’s ensemble performs for the audience shocking or disgusting sideshow talents. One performer swings a five-gallon water jug from her nipple piercings, and then the judges tersely critique her. At first, Ophelia winks at the audience, reminding them of their entitlement in the enjoyment of an experience of aggression wherein women’s bodies are physically on the line. But what feels most moving about Ophelia as an installment for this choreographer — who to date has made post-dramatic hostility her praxis — is actually its palpable dissatisfaction with and commentary on her past work’s sense of antagonism. Once a lap pool is revealed on the Volksbühne stage, and the performers move beyond the narrative container of the competition show, one can feel Holzinger sliding back and forth between her artificial antagonism and a more personal and sensitive version of reality. What’s tangible and moving is how she starts to question her role as an adversary within the context of her own show.

Following an uncharacteristically soft sequence in which the ensemble swims laps onstage — their movements gently underscored by a lifeguard performing an ASMR-style reading of cryptic lines from metaphysical texts — a floating cast member softly recites an autobiographical monologue about how all she wanted after she was raped was to walk into a bakery and get a cupcake, because while being assaulted, she thought she was going to die and never have a cupcake again. In a dreamlike sequence that immediately follows, the speaker is joined by a parallel cast of young girls dressed like pirates, who hold large circular mirrors up to the physical forms of their battered and exposed older counterparts. Framed in a more antagonistic way, the account of assault could easily create a feeling of buzzy and exploitative trauma porn, but instead the audience is held by a tone of genuine vulnerability and grief about such a loss of innocence. Ophelia, undulating with these kinds of contradictions, is the work of an antagonist-choreographer who has tasked herself with holding both confrontation and reflection in the same hand. In this way, Holzinger’s approach diverges from Young’s tactics around making the audience vulnerable, favoring a chasm of mournful reflection over repetitive prodding. 

Looking at the evolution of antagonism in Holzinger’s work — tactilely manifest in lap pools and mermaids replacing chainsaws and motorbikes — one might begin to wonder about the new quieter or subtler approaches to antagonism that have developed in recent memory. Once a perverse transgression in perhaps the mid-1900’s, the bluntness of trying to take a shit onstage (a key element of Young’s 2010 work Cinderella) today starts to feel contrived or even boring. Exposing one’s own genitalia to the audience is hardly a confrontation in and of itself any longer, and most literal simulations of interpersonal assault or violence feel numbing alongside the increasingly accessible and pervasive documentation of war, hate crimes, and genocide in the media. While antagonism continues to occupy an important dramaturgical position for performance artists amidst a world that seems increasingly broken, there is also a palpable shift in the antagonist’s strategies for engaging that overwhelming brokenness. Her tools may no longer be weapons of mass destruction. A new sort of antagonist begins to confront the audience with a threat of unexpected intimacy, rather than the threat of distance or alienation. 

Through discombobulated scenes that depict young people engaged in intimacy to the point of probable injury, Young Boy Dancing Group exemplifies a version of antagonism toward the audience that’s built on closeness rather than a sense of distancing shock. Maria Metsalu, a virtuosically embodied performer, is one of the performance art collective’s leaders. Also a graduate of SNDO, her work bares traces of Holzinger’s, both in her look and in her aesthetic values, which foreground intimacy and shun spectacle. In practically spare settings, Metsalu and her co-conspirators Manuel Scheiwiller and Nica Roses work with a rotating cast of local performers who are sourced from wherever the core group is currently touring. The dances they build collectively are defined by task-based prompts with a casual, nearly pedestrian sensibility, which are loosely guided by shifts in ambient techno music. These tasks are often performed with facial expressions characterized by desperation and mourning — which can make the dancers seem catatonic, tweaked, or working through a particularly strenuous comedown.

Tests around intimacy and proximity, not only among their ensemble members, but also between the performers and their audiences, comprise Young Boy Dancing Group’s specific relationship to antagonism. One of the more compelling aspects of their work is how they physically implicate the audience by imposing uncomfortable spatial relations between performer and audience, sometimes through the use of materials like fluids (including bodily fluids). A performance at O’Flaherty’s outpost on Avenue A in New York City earlier this year focused on an unwieldy use of open flames and hot wax. On an unfussy plywood platform covered in black trash bags and an inch of murky water, one performer assumed a headstand split while Metsalu penetrated him with a phallic ready-made topped with a long rotating wire propeller, about six feet in diameter. From the propeller, the crew suspended about a dozen lit candles held in place by wire. The ignited anal sculpture helicoptered slowly, designed to careen the open flames within inches of the surrounding audience’s faces, testing their resistance to the proximity of danger. It’s an image that embodies the essential ultimatum of the antagonist — provoking the audience to choose whether they’ll publicly endure discomfort, or retreat to some familiar version of safety.  

Young Boy Dancing Group’s recent New York collaboration with OCD Chinatown included the fearless New York-based performance artist Crackhead Barney, who essentially pissed all over herself and her fellow dancers during her solo, mere inches away from spectators seated on the floor. Known for her uninhibited interview performances that target anti-abortion protestors, Trump rallies, or homophobic demonstrations by Hasidic Jews, Crackhead Barney has created a body of work that solidly overlaps with Young Boy Dancing Group’s confrontational sensibility, but her work departs from abstract antagonism, transgressing toward a more extreme version of antagonism rooted in reality, one that also very much puts her body entirely on the line.  

Most closely approaching Ann Liv Young’s interview tactics as Sherry, Crackhead Barney’s method of antagonism is characterized by punchy interrogations — live broadcast or edited for consumption on her (frequently shadowbanned) Instagram account @crackheadbarneyandfriends — that directly confront her chosen subjects. In one particular video, she has slathered herself in white clown paint and dressed herself in a fried platinum blonde wig to attend a MAGA rally. There, she asks Trumpers why she should or shouldn’t be considered a “white lady,” and then later gets on the ground in front of the attendant police force and begs them to kick her. (9) They don’t, which is also somehow a part of Crackhead Barney’s point. Her antagonism plays on the nightmarish funhouse of racist media tropes by absurdly purging that rhetoric of its purported meaning, and baffling the right-wingers or transphobes who comprise her audience. 

Her whiteface performance — Young’s “Sheriqua” in relief — showcases a critical difference between Young’s and Crackhead Barney’s antagonists, which might also elucidate how the role of adversarial performance artist has changed through time. While Young’s Sherry constructs an artificial theatrical setting wherein she can control the conditions for her personal vision of danger to occur, Crackhead Barney goes completely rogue, preferring to visit the site of literal nontheatrical danger, imposing herself on that extant reality. Her work inverts a lineage of theatrical antagonism: rather than using a fictional character to set the stage for danger, she visits the site of literal danger and allows it to set the stage for her. 

Tucker Carlson, formerly of Fox News, excerpted a video of the aforementioned Crackhead Barney performance in his reporting on Trump’s arraignment in April, contextualizing the clip as representative of the “scene outside the courthouse today.” (10) In the video, a separate reporter from the network asks Crackhead Barney why she’s “trying to instigate violence right now” to which Crackhead Barney responds with Dada-esque irony “because I’m Black and I like violence […] I’m an animal! I’m a Black animal! Blehhhhhh!” (11) It’s essential Crackhead Barney, her antagonism fueled by a mission to deflate hegemonic sentiments by knowingly and ironically beating them to the punch. Carlson smugly follows up the clip by calling Crackhead Barney “one of the few news anchors we trust in this country.” While the clip was met on Instagram with excited support from Crackhead Barney stans, who were mostly just happy with Crackhead Barney’s appearance on such a large platform, Carlson’s removal of the work from its context, and his remark, seem like an insidious attempt on his part to undermine the artist — and her transgressive oppositional views — by flatly, smugly condoning her words. In Fox News’s reframing of Crackhead Barney, suddenly she is no longer a performance artist, but rather a sensational pawn who can be used to boost the ratings of a news station that is, like Crackhead Barney, more performance art than it is actual news. 

In contemporary culture’s hall of distorted mirrors, wherein it feels increasingly difficult to differentiate truth from fiction, it also becomes increasingly easy to confuse an artist’s antagonistic tendencies for an actual threat to public safety. Ann Liv Young seems to have fallen out of favor in the eyes of presenters for a variety of reasons that aren’t worth attempting to comprehensively unpack here, but certainly a takeaway is that audiences, critics, and presenters have lost patience with the assignment of trying to parse Young as a person in contrast to her fictional characters’ antics. Young’s students mauling her during the performance of 37 Sherrys feels like one example that embodies a continually ballooning public tendency to use an artwork for the purposes of assigning moral value to the personal life of its author. Seeing Young as the engineer of disturbance, confusion, and disarray, the students feel moved to teach her a lesson. They stage an insurrection that conflates Young with her Sherry character by punishing the physical body that houses both. An easy narrative is that an antagonist, no matter how purportedly fictional, deserves to be punished or shunned for the chaos they’ve inflicted on their audiences. Presenters, programmers, producers, and festival curators are in a position to easily dismiss many of the more prominent antagonists and provocateurs, allowing issues of institutional liability or post-pandemic financial insecurity to trump these artists’ ideological or aesthetic contributions. Young will offend. Holzinger’s images will corrupt the children, and it’ll be harder to get money from their parents in the future. Young Boy Dancing Group is a touring fire hazard. Crackhead Barney doesn’t care about the venue’s sacrosanctity.

For gatekeepers, the question seems to be whether antagonists are worth the trouble they cause, when in reality their worth is—precisely—the trouble they cause. In a landscape that increasingly asks performing artists to clearly state a firm, unchanging, and acceptable moral outlook before being allowed access to an institution’s resources, antagonism as a practice remains an important counterpoint to the wealth of performance work that seeks mostly to corroborate a general audience’s preconceived views about society. The hope of many, understandably, is to train an audience by making them feel good about having exposed themselves to culture, but giving that sentiment too much power dismisses the potent value of performances that gravitate toward disruption. 

While it may alienate audiences who prefer work that explicitly centers the trendy conceits of care and healing, antagonism can be profoundly transformative, prompting the public to engage with an experience of deep discomfort or uncertainty, framing the task of insisting on one’s vulnerability in a public setting as a courageous personal practice for surviving the mess of contemporary life. In this way, antagonistic performances become like a vaccine, introducing a simulation of disruption into the bloodstream, so that one is better primed to observantly navigate the ongoing disruptions to life that one will inevitably face in the future. The experience of being publicly vulnerable in the face of an aggressor won’t feel immediately good to everyone, but dealing with the antagonistic event can be personally transformative, even enlightening, in the reverberations and memories of the experience. Causing trouble is not only the antagonist’s immediate point, but also her lasting power.