Tickets to Critique Cabaret (Performance + Holiday Party)
 
Critique Cabaret, organized and performed by Mandy Harris Williams, is a performance-lecture and live inquiry examining what it means to think, feel, and perform in a world where attention has become both currency and trap. Moving between critical theory, cabaret glamour, and digital intimacy, Williams stages a space where scholarship becomes spectacle and spectacle becomes survival. Through live writing, original music, improvisation, and audience participation, she invites us into the unstable terrain where intellectual responsibility meets the pressures of marketability, desire, and public expectation.
 
Critique Cabaret extends into Performance Space New York’s Annual Holiday Party presented by HOLE PICS, dissolving seamlessly into a night of DJs, experimental drag, and communal release, where the performance’s questions will continue to echo in the room.
 
Across a series of vignettes that unfold like lucid dreams, Williams shifts between the persona of a pop idol, the rigor of a theorist, and the vulnerability of someone trying to hold onto integrity in a time of intense political fatigue. Screens flicker with online fragments, music builds and dissolves, as the performer toggles between her physical audience and her parasocial one — revealing how digital presence distorts, amplifies, and sometimes eclipses the bodies producing it. Critique Cabaret becomes a live examination of influence, exhaustion, and erotic knowledge: a remembrance that thinking can be felt, and feeling can be an act of resistance.
 
The performance culminates with a final sequence that blurs the line between confession and confrontation, asking who is permitted to step back from the struggle for justice, who is expected to keep performing care, and what it costs to be perceived as politically coherent in public.
 
Critique Cabaret is creatively produced by Family Affairs Studio, led by Michael R. Speciàle.