This piece was created for chashama’s 2015 gala at 4 Times Square on June 8, 2015. It took place in a converted conference room for six hours. The impulse to create “THE POST-STRUCTURALIST UTOPIA: NOW, WITH CATS!” was utopia and an escape from our everyday lives and the problems of the world. Here, the life of a cat = perfection. The seed was planted when Dara, Blake, and Mike sat in a diner and Mike pulled up a cat .gif on their phone. Mike made a comment saying that the cat .gif is perfect because it represents post-gender, post-class ideology. We realized that the cat .gif is indeed perfect as an emblem of a post-structuralist utopian ideal. Also, the cat .gif is mesmerizing in its repetition. It is a hallucinogenic escape.

During the performance, human performers were masked as cats, shedding all identifiers that would reflect race, gender and class. The space was soft, filled with fabrics and pillows, low light and the glow of projected cat .gifs on the walls. Audience members were welcomed to enter the space and become cats themselves or act as humans in relation to the cat-performers. The role of the performers was simply to sleep, eat, and play.