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At the Park Avenue Armory, a Mondrian Becomes the Stage for Radical Expression

Performative and sly, Trajal Harrell’s multidisciplinary work "Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow" is a balm for our turbulent times.

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Sep 14, 2025 - 00:15

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At the Park Avenue Armory, a Mondrian Becomes the Stage for Radical Expression

A performer in a gray ruched dress dances barefoot on a stage painted like a Mondrian grid with red, blue, yellow, and white squares.

It’s rare that a performance and a venue align so seamlessly. I rarely even consider how the two intersect, since they usually emerge from separate worlds—the universe of a show contained within a given space. But the North American premiere of Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, despite being created and first staged in Zürich, Switzerland, in 2021, seems as if it were made for the Park Avenue Armory’s 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall in 2025.

The dance-theater-fashion show, directed and choreographed by U.S.-born and Zurich-based Trajal Harrell, unfolds on a bright 150-foot runway designed by Harrell and Erik Flatmo in the style of a Mondrian grid painting. The audience sits on either side of the runway like A-list celebrities, but with oversized programs in stadium-style seating that is more akin to theater. The Armory, long known for its big unconventional productions, has also hosted fashion shows. Fittingly, the building sits nearly midway between the birthplaces of two movement styles central to Harrell’s choreography—Harlem’s ballroom voguing and Judson Dance Theater’s postmodern dance, both from the 1960s. And even though the piece was made during the COVID pandemic and can be read as a meditation on the human need for communal gathering, its themes speak uncannily to the present: What is freedom? Who gets to express themselves freely? What does it mean to look a stranger in the eye?

Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow begins with Harrell rising from a seat in the audience and introducing himself as Chloé Malle (Anna Wintour’s successor at Vogue). Harrell/Malle welcomes the crowd and recounts her phone conversation with Harrell, who asked her to open the show, sharing the quote “If you live, sometimes you have to dance.” In this way, we are immediately dropped into the show’s tone—performative, sly and deliberately breaking the fourth wall.

Two people then peel back the large plastic sheet covering the set, so carefully that the audience at opening night even applauded their effort. On the Mondrian-like floor are low white nightclub-style couches and a central table beneath which an assortment of toys and household objects—props, perhaps—sit poorly concealed.

Suddenly, music explodes into the vast space. Someone steps onto the red, white, blue and yellow stage, and the show begins again. Performers enter one by one, striding counterclockwise along the perimeter to Samm Bennett & Chunk’s “Part of the Family,” which dissolves into Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.” The so-called fashion show is immediately off-kilter: “models” wear bathrobes over gowns, rollers in their hair, empty sleeves trailing behind them. Soon it veers stranger—performers stumble and dishevel themselves. Across the evening, 60 costumes designed by Harrell appear, mixing labels from Comme des Garçons to Walmart. Some performers wear shoes, some go barefoot, but every catwalk dazzles.

The cast is large—17 dancers plus Harrell, all part of his Zürich Dance Ensemble—and they reappear in bold looks until one finally steps off the grid, a rupture that feels both wrong and exhilarating. Another hikes a skirt above the knees and kicks wildly. A sneakered group forms at one end, shifting arms fluidly as though warming up, or channeling birds, or conducting an unseen orchestra. A performer picks up a mic from the couch and declares, “Section 2, The Tale,” hinting at narrative (spoiler: it never fully arrives, perhaps intentionally).

Much transpires in Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow. The five sections stretch nearly two hours without intermission. The perimeter-walking continues with such persistence that it becomes a heartbeat, only noticeable when it halts. At one point, a woman is carried to a couch and begins reading the Declaration of Independence aloud—radical in its delivery. At another, a man atop a couch performs a Butoh-inspired solo, his body twisting in slow contortions. Later, Harrell dances alone to Imani Uzuri’s “Love Story,” moving like someone tipsy and unguarded at home with a glass of wine. Costumes change relentlessly, poses strike with force and the soundtrack ranges wildly—from Earth, Wind & Fire to Laura Nyro to Steve Reich. Two performers roam in sparkly panda suits.

There is too much to take in; you are always missing something. Afterward, walking downtown, I kept replaying how the acts of watching and being watched felt strangely new. Perhaps it was because the house lights stayed up until the final abstracted folk dance, letting performers gaze directly at the audience. Perhaps it was Harrell’s direction that exposed the human beneath the performance. Would I ever watch a passerby on the street with the same intensity as a dancer on stage? Not usually. At times, I even looked away when a performer neared. But why?

I also thought about freedom. The freedom of expression here—in fashion, in movement—was striking. The performers inhabited the atmospheres of the New York ballroom scene, club culture, lonely apartments, even the subway at 4:00 a.m., each in their own register.

In the program, Debra Levine writes that Harrell wanted to create a work without a preconceived theme. That choice explains the stream-of-consciousness feel and the lack of narrative arc, and I’m grateful for it. It allowed me to recognize my own desire for story, for the hidden props to be used, for a message to land. But that’s not how life works. Life is messy, and art can remind us not to look away.

Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow is showing at the Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall through September 20, 2025.