“Restagings No. 3: Fall (C.A.)” is a collective ritual—a ten-and-a-half hour performance—for a community of performers, writers, and their witnesses. Carl Andre’s 1968 sculpture Fall is the work’s source. In Andre’s work, steel plates remain unmoving on the ground. In “Fall (C.A.),” performers slip beneath the plates, raising them again and again. Andre liked to say, “My work doesn’t mean a damn thing. There’s nothing hiding under those plates.” This work responds, “Lift them up. Let’s see.”

Andre is a troubling figure, linked for many to the untimely death of his wife artist Ana Mendieta, for which Andre was tried and ultimately—though controversially— acquitted. I felt there were two choices, either side-step Andre’s work—leave it undisturbed on its ground—or challenge it, look underneath, unbury what it tries to bury. This second path is the one taken by this work.

“Fall (C.A.)” is the third work in the Restagings series, which re-reads minimalist and conceptual artworks as works of performance. The Restagings have in them a willful desire to take and to take back—if the visual arts increases its relevance and profits by importing dance and its history, I want their works in return, to use them as I like. If these visual artists (men) got their ideas from the work and discoveries of these performance artists and dancers (women), and made small fortunes off them, I want this to come back to us. What happens in the art world is metaphor and microcosm of larger patterns. So sue me runs through my head. What does a dancer have for you to take away?