The Brooklyn Rail

Sometimes performances start with an Instagram post. On May 5, 2025, the Vietnamese choreographer and writer Anh Vo posted a digital flier for “a guerrilla dance” that was to take place outdoors in Brooklyn at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, June 14, 2025. The caption for the post detailed that Vo would be performing alongside collaborators Kristel Baldoz and Justin Cabrillos, with musical accompaniment from Jessica Pavone and gabby fluke-mogul. The piece would begin in Ashland Plaza near the Brooklyn Academy of Music and end in front of the Downtown Brooklyn Apple Store.

In addition to these practical details, Vo also wrote the following in the caption:

If Marx has to ‘take flight into the misty realm of religion’ to flesh out his theory of commodity fetishism, I want to take seriously this religiosity of commodity consumption to develop a worship dance for the temple of Apple Store.

Performances don’t just start for audiences when performers make their first gestures in front of them, they start with the first utterance of invitation, the first conversation about whether to go or not, the first speculation about what the performance might be. In preemptively positioning the performance on social media with a reference to Karl Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism and the site of the Apple Store, Vo set up a conceptual path of arrival for the piece, proposing that attendees show up to the outdoor performance already thinking and talking about Marxist critiques of capitalism, commodities and consumption, fetishism and religiosity, dance and worship, public space and technological dependence.

In the days leading up to the performance, I thought about these things, and I also took Vo at their word in characterizing the piece as a “guerrilla dance,” searching “etymology of guerrilla” on the internet and ending up on a Reddit thread called “Recommendations on books about guerrilla warfare.” A good bibliography on insurgency and counterinsurgency started to emerge: Mao Zedong, On Guerrilla Warfare; Carlos Marighella, Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla; Ho Chi Minh’s essay “Guerrilla Tactics”; Irish Republican Army, Green Book; Robert Taber, War of the Flea; Matt Matthews, We Were Caught Unprepared; Stephen Biddle, Nonstate Warfare; John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.

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The evening of Saturday June 14 was cold, wet, and windy. By 9:30 p.m., a crowd had assembled at Ashland Plaza. Many people had been out in the rainy streets all day at anti-Trump “No Kings” protests. I didn’t have a jacket and I bounced from foot to foot to keep warm (my mom texted me earlier in the day describing the weather as “Junuary”). The performance was already underway by the time I arrived. Vo, Baldoz, and Cabrillos were in a line in the middle of Ashland Plaza, circling backward in unison, on the balls of their feet with arms outstretched, each illuminated by a flashlight held by an audience member. Pavone and fluke-mogul sat off to the side playing slowly morphing cluster chords, sometimes punctuated by the sound of car horns on Flatbush Avenue.

For those in the know, the backward circling motion of the dancers was a direct citation of the choreographer Sarah Michelson’s Devotion Study #1–The American Dancer, an often-referenced piece that took place at the Whitney Museum in 2012 and has become an important flashpoint for discussions of dance’s inclusion in the visual art museum and the often sacrificial, devotional, and underpaid labor of the dancer. Without this frame of reference, an audience member viewing the repetitive circles might just get a sense that something was happening while also not happening. The spectator’s attention could drift and the dancers would still be going, enduring an ongoingness, tiring but continuing. Sometimes, slight changes to the dancers’ movement would occur that I hadn’t noticed occurring, only catching the aftereffects of the changes rather than the change itself. Arms alongside bodies rather than outstretched, a unison bending and flexing, arms framing pelvises.

The city performed around the performance. The surrounding architecture, streets, and people competed with the dancers and musicians for visual and sonic foreground. While this was an extra-institutional performance (no art institution produced, housed, or permitted the performance), it was also an institutionally surrounded performance. Major Brooklyn cultural institutions abut Ashland Plaza on all sides—the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House to one side and the BAM sign and billboard to the other; the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Center for Fiction looming across the street. In a historical conjuncture that has brought the fascist decimation of the already decimated National Endowment for the Arts, all coming when we are acutely aware of how politically and aesthetically disastrous it is for artists and art institutions to be forced to depend on the whims of the philanthropic class or to become desperate entrepreneurs, this performance was without institutional support, but it didn’t just leave the idea of the institution behind. Instead, it took place just outside and alongside multiple cultural institutions as if to point to them and show what they could and couldn’t hold.

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Eventually Vo, Baldoz, and Cabrillos broke the spell of the reversing circle, splintering off to other parts of the plaza and embarking on disunison phrases in a new movement vocabulary—arms and legs as sharp line-makers, pelvises pumping. They uttered aphoristic riddles together as they moved through the cold night. “It’s hard to not know that tomorrow I will not wake up to the certainty of my non-existence.” “The religiosity of the dancing activity.” As a sense of urgency built, the dancers started running through the assembled crowd handing out pieces of paper. I thought the paper might hold a copy of an essay by Vo or some kind of political pamphlet, but when Baldoz handed me my own copy, I saw that it was a hand-drawn sketch of the Downtown Brooklyn Apple Store facade, located just a block away, with the words “Follow Us to The Apple Store” on it, surrounded by the word “please” scrawled over and over. Once most of the audience had a copy of the flier, Vo, Baldoz, and Cabrillos broke into a sprint toward the Apple Store. To my surprise, about a third of the audience, around twenty people, took off in a run alongside them, an unruly assembly rushing through the street, a spontaneous collective kinetic energy that seemed to point toward a group capacity that exceeded the frame of a performance. As I watched the group take off down the street, I thought for a moment that perhaps the performance was indeed about to become a moment of riotous guerrilla action, perhaps this group was going to step beyond the position of spectator, grab the nearest trash can and smash the Apple Store windows, throwing iPads into the street, handing MacBook Pros to passersby. I thought of the beautiful images that had been coming out of the anti-ICE actions in Los Angeles just a few days earlier in which protesters were tagging, smashing, and burning Waymo robotaxi driverless cars, making clear that the antagonisms they were articulating went beyond the Trump regime’s extra-judicial arrests and radiated toward the intensifying brutality of the techno-capitalist regime itself.

But this didn’t happen. Instead, the group ran after the performers in order to assume a new spectatorial configuration, assembling around the perimeter of the Apple Store entrance, the vaulted overhang almost like a cathedral, taking out their Apple iPhones to record as the trio of dancers began a new repetitive phrase, this time facing the entrance of the store with the two musicians just behind them. To be clear, I am saying “the group” and “them” as if I wasn’t a part of this audience or this impulse, but I was right there with them, finding a new position for myself in front of the store that also felt like a good place to photograph, in some ways already imagining the Instagram story I might post. Vo and their dancers performed a kind of detourned box step, arms framing their bodies, heads and torsos spiraling between looking up at the giant glowing apple hovering above the entrance and looking down at the ground, repeating spoken phrases such as, “I am open to ideology.” Rather than pushing the audience toward some sort of scene of rupture (i.e. smashing the store windows or throwing our phones into a pile and jumping on them), the performance became a kind of critical inhabitation of our techno-capitalist enthrallment. I didn’t read this move cynically or nihilistically, but instead saw it as a kind of generatively negative enactment, an encounter with what didn’t happen that night, with what this assembly didn’t do, pointing us instead toward the trance-like ideological engrossment that motored our relationships to our devices and each other.

As the performance ended and the audience clapped, passersby heading to trains at Atlantic Terminal became more and more confused by what was and wasn’t happening, and I thought back to Vo’s reference to Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism in the initial Instagram announcement for the performance. Perhaps the commodities in question in Vo’s Possessed by Capital were not the Apple laptops and phones gleaming in the technological temple that rose before us, but instead all the dancing, watching, recording, phone-using, and social media posting that was happening during the show itself. Perhaps what the performance was really offering us was a moment to confront our own alienated labor as social media and smartphone users and the commodification of experience itself under what Jodi Dean might call “communicative capitalism.”

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A few days after the performance, I started to write this essay and I texted Vo (we are friends and we have collaborated on performances in the past) to see if they could send me the language that the dancers spoke during the piece so that I could see if I had heard everything correctly. They sent me a copy of the script and told me that they extrapolated the opening section from Ho Chi Minh’s five teachings. I turned to the internet to find an English translation of Ho Chi Minh’s lessons: “1. Love the Fatherland, love the compatriots. 2. Study well, work well. 3. Good solidarity, good discipline. 4. Maintain good hygiene. 5. Humility, honesty, courage.” I “heart”-ed Vo’s message.