The Angel Project (review)

The Angel Project is a solitary journey undertaken in silence, following a guidebook. Deborah Warner initially created this multisite installation as a vertical journey through the Euston Tower for the London International Festival of Theatre in 1999, and then spread it out over thirteen sites for the Perth International Festival of the Arts in 2000. The New York version began on Roosevelt Island, moved to a series of buildings around Times Square, and finished high up in the Chrysler Building. I took the journey accompanied by the ghosts of other site-specific performances, visual artists' installations, and Warner's theatrical collaborations with actor Fiona Shaw.

Angel Project sojourners were fetched by golf cart from the Roosevelt Island tram station and taken to a briefing trailer at the island's southern tip. Periods of waiting at both locations gave ample time for gazing at the East River and Manhattan. On my only previous visit, in 1994, Meredith Monk's American Archeology #1: Roosevelt Island taught me the island's history as host to a penitentiary, various hospitals, a lunatic asylum, and a workhouse. My encounter with Warner's angels was colored both by looking at the physical remnants of the island's history and my memory of Monk's site-specific performance. Other sites summoned different aesthetic ghosts, such as Ann Hamilton's pelt-covered floors and beeswax-covered walls: the floor at one Angel Project site was covered a foot deep with white feathers; another, with white sand or salt. Many sites included actor-angels. Some had wings; others did not. Some slept on floors; others kept watch. The Chrysler Building had two actor-angels in black overcoats reminiscent of Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire. The festival's program book reported that the angels were difficult to cast: "It is hard to find actors who can hold another being's gaze benignly." These actors all returned my gaze. With some, this silent exchange was benign but indifferent; with others (a man in the Chrysler building and a woman at the Liberty Theatre), dynamic and enlivening. These moments took me back again and again to Marina Abramovic's recent experiments with audience energy. In November 2002, she lived and fasted for twelve days in a three-box set mounted on the wall of the Sean Kelly Gallery. Three ladders led up to her environment, their rungs butcher knives, sharp edge up. Many visitors stayed for a long time, and many returned again and again. Significantly, the Yugoslavian-born artist conceived of The House with the Ocean View as a gift to New York City in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. The Angel Project, however, failed to connect to its locale except in one respect: in 1996, Fiona Shaw performed Warner's interpretation of The Waste Land in the derelict Liberty Theatre, which was this project's penultimate site.