The Brooklyn Rail

A nineteenth-century mansion owned by an anonymous foreign magnate—a Georgian hotelier, according to gossip and the New York Post¹—is a perfect setting for a mystery. On Sunday, September 3, a crowd presses itself against the walls of a long, wallpapered parlor in The Hancock, an ornate ten-room brownstone in Bed-Stuy open for parties and performances. On one end the room features cardboard boxes piled high in front of a picture window, and on the other a brocade couch where audience members sit. Lightbulbs flickering on wall sconces mimic candlelight. Speaking in hushed tones and sipping orange wine, the crowd grows silent as the lights fall for the second night of Sharleen Chidiac’s Charade.

Ambient white noise, like wind over a vast plain, rolls in from an adjacent red-walled library where the band Voyeur, made up of Jakob Lazovick, Joe Kerwin, and Max Freedberg, plays a live score. The actor Joel Watson enters wearing a slightly oversized brown suit and holding a newspaper, followed by dancer Angelina Hoffman in a blue-sequined minidress, her face hidden by the bangs of a brown wig. She carries a whitewashed American flag and seems to sway in the breeze. Watson’s expression is perplexed, but his body is robotic and halting as he drops his paper, yells out, “Typical!” and falls to the ground, prostrate. He performs spasmodic poses before settling into stillness and repeating his exclamation as a mutter. Hoffman animates into a forlorn yet militant floor routine. She waves her flag in a semaphore that isn’t entirely legible, cheerleading without cheer; is it a show of strength or of surrender?

In the hallway, Chidiac prances, dressed as a bunny. She beckons her players into oblivion, inevitably evoking Alice’s rabbit hole and the psychedelic chaos that ensues in the other realm.

Watson exits jerkily through the boxes, toppling them to reveal dancers Tim Bendernagel in the window and Owen Prum underneath the debris. They have been here all along, wearing dress shirts and pants; Prum’s button-up features a hand-drawn, handless clock face. With staccato movements, the two dancers duet commandingly to the distant sound of syncopated drums. Hoffman slips in through the crowded doorway, now wearing a one-sleeved black lace minidress and orange tights, her natural red hair loose down her back. As a swing beat comes in on the drums, she lures the duo into a muted “Rich Man’s Frug,” making them accomplices as an electric guitar plays seductively. When Bendernagel glitches in place, Hoffman pulls him into formation, like one of Jerome Robbins’s Jets. In turn, they traverse the hallway, descending into wonderland; when Prum leaves and re-enters he is shirtless, now with the clock face drawn on his torso.

Hoffman dances a triumphant solo to music that evokes Angelo Badalamenti’s scores. She is a femme fatale in crisis, pointing a finger gun as she thrusts, shimmies, and creeps her way around the room. She covers her face in horror when Watson enters with a wooden bow and arrow, the bunny by his side egging him on. He aims, shoots, falls short. Hoffman exits, laughing.

Lazovick appears on stage to deliver Watson a guitar solo and a message on a slip of paper, never to be read aloud. “Hit it, boys!” he yells, ushering in the grand finale. The trio returns to tempt and trick Watson as the music explodes into rock and roll. If he can’t beat them, should he join them? He doesn’t have time to answer; just as soon as he joins the quartet, he is left alone to scramble through debris while the bunny watches.

Psychosexual and villainous relationships play against Watson’s unsettled incredulity. He seems to be a pawn in the fantasy of the other players, a simple man, or a detective, or a victim, or an anti-hero, sucked into an erotic thriller and spat back out.

* * *

The piece ends and some of us gather to watch Voyeur play a set in the library. I speak to audience members who were there the night before and learn a key detail: the dance has changed slightly since its first performance.

Chidiac’s piece is a pastiche of a crime thriller, narrative yet fragmented, using motifs from jazz dance and character types that could be drawn from the anxiety-riddled neo-noir comedy After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985). She creates precise and theatrical choreography out of familiar movement vernaculars—her previous works have evoked fashion shows, cheerleading, and cartoons—which allows for audience identification and interpretation.

The pretense behind a charade is not always self-evident. The piece is evocative and heavily symbolic. An American flag. A timeless clock. A bow and arrow. A gun. Chidiac and I have worked together before, and we spoke candidly about the performance a few days after the show. She intended viewers to read a variety of meanings into the work, she said, while the making of it was largely intuitive. However, on night one, feedback from a few audience members caused some ambivalence for the players: that the piece read as an allegory for race in America, given that Joel Watson is a Black actor and the three other dancers are white. Chidiac told me that, in the hours before the second performance, the cast conferred to make new choices that would give Watson’s character more agency and make her intentions as a choreographer a little clearer.

Chidiac’s ambiguous symbols are discombobulating and surreal. As viewers, we search for referents in abstraction; but what of the literal reading of Black and white people on stage as natural antagonists? It is difficult to articulate what exactly makes this piece about race, beyond differences in skin color between the performers. It can feel like searching for signs of conspiracy in album cover art or numerology; connections are drawn between this moment and that, but as an overall theory it comes up short.

When we argue that Charade is a piece about race because we see race on stage, we project our associations onto the players and reinforce their identities as fixed and ontological. Underneath the meaning we draw from the appearance of the performer is our propensity to distinguish between individuals by phenotype, based on our upbringing in a highly racialized society. We do a disservice to artists of all races when we perceive them first by the color of their skin and second by the quality of their performance.

The piece remains a mystery, though we try to find a deeper truth under the pantomimes and illusions Chidiac set up for us. The revelation might lie in the steps we take to expose the charade.

1. Hannah Frishberg, “These Lucky Artists Live Rent-free in a $6M Brooklyn Mansion,” New York Post (New York), January 13, 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/01/13/these-lucky-artists-live-rent-free-in-a-6m-brooklyn-mansion/.