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.
Archives: Shows
We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers
We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers departs from the mainstream commemoration and reflection by Vietnam and the United States of the 50th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. While the injuries of the past remain present decades later and have been well-examined by Vietnamese-American artists, the history of experimental performance in Vietnam has emerged amidst a negotiation of ambivalence and resistance to government interference. To instigate a global conversation around art-making and censorship, the program provides self-determined Vietnamese-centered environments and contexts within which audiences may engage with contemporary Vietnamese practitioners. Supported by long-term residencies, conversations, and provocations in Performance Space New York’s theaters over the course of a month, the program will culminate in debut performances by four intergenerational artists, and conversations with the program’s instigators and co-organizers Anh Vo, maura nguyễn donohue, and Lumi Tan.
The title of the project comes from unreleased lyrics by Ngoc Dai, a former soldier turned avant-garde composer, inferring that a radical existence can be both a refusal of the ambivalence of those in power, and enabled by that same ambivalence.
We Exist in the Ambivalence of Those Motherfuckers is a part of a broader series of events featuring talks, screenings, publications, and more, collaboratively organized between organizations during the fall and winter seasons. Movement Research Performance Journal Issue #62 will be entirely dedicated to experimental Vietnamese performance, featuring reflections from 15 Vietnamese artists and curators including Tuong Linh Do, Vu Duc Toan, Viet Le, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Phuong Linh Nguyen, Nhung Dinh, and Tra Nguyen. Public programs include a virtual engagement with artists ahead of their residency as presented in partnership with the Center for the Arts at Wesleyan University; a conversation between Lumi Tan, maura nguyễn donohue, Anh Vo, and Do Tuong Linh around the origins of the project at Asia Art Archive in America; and a series of screenings and discussions exploring select key foundational figures of experimental performance in Vietnam including Truong Tan, Vu Dan Tan, Dai Lam Linh, and Kim Ngoc.
Aguas Frescas
On the heels of the 10th year anniversary of his cross-disciplinary fashion label, Sánchez-Kane, artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s Aguas Frescas creates a collective and sensorial experience, inviting the audience into a performance drawing on Mexican street culture and the communal ritual of drinking horchatas.
Across two evenings of performances, Sánchez-Kane’s collaborators share their work through varied mediums inside the installation which consists of traditional Mexican Malinche chairs called with glass containers of fresh horchata. A metallic spoon stirs the liquid, providing a steady rhythm as audience members are invited to indulge in the aguas frescas before and after the performance, highlighting its metaphor of shared experience and collective engagement.
Aguas Frescas is co-commissioned by Mudam and TONO Festival and presented by Performance Space New York.
Mister Cobra
Mister Cobra, a semi-autobiographical solo theater-music performance by Lucy Liyou, combines free-jazz, korean folk opera, musique-concrète, 2000s era pop, text-to-speech recordings, film, comedy, and drag-inspired performance techniques to confront and dematerialize the boundaries of their transition, and reconsider her transition and personhood as inevitably intertwined with public spectatorship.
Liyou looks at Mister Cobra as a humiliation ritual that confronts and dematerializes the embarrassment one has regarding the traumas that inform the boundaries of one’s transition. It raises questions about the role that desire plays in one’s transition, how abuse can distort motivations to transition, and where transitioning “begins” and “ends” (assuming that these points even exist).
In Residence
Leslie Cuyjet, during a season-long residency with Performance Space New York, will further research and develop her project For All Your Life, a performance and social experiment that examines the value of Black life and Black death. Weaving the historical context of life insurance with real current day financial structures, she aims to pay dividends to investors after her passing. At Performance Space New York, Cuyjet will further develop this project, examining ideas of cultural and institutional legibility and how to value a life’s worth, seeding new vehicles of performance.
In collaboration with the 2025 Performa Biennial, Cuyjet will have a consistent presence at the Performa Hub, designed by multi-disciplinary agency, Clocks.