NEXT CANDIDATE

NEXT CANDIDATE

A review by Suchu Tanyetz

I arrived not knowing exactly what I was walking into. That, I later understood, was the point.

The waiting room is pink. The chairs are beautiful — molded plastic in mint, yellow, dusty blue, the kind of chairs that appear in design retrospectives. There are balloons. There are sculptures that resemble balloons but aren't quite. Everything is pastel. Everything is slightly wrong.

It occurs to me later that it resembles a child's birthday party — the colors, the balloons, the sense of occasion. But a birthday party where the games have been replaced with something else, and the children have grown up without anyone adjusting the decor to match.

You are told you are here for an interview. You are not told what the job is.

The other people in the room may be waiting like you, or they may not be. You cannot tell. This is also the point.

The monster heads are mounted on the walls. They are stuffed, cartoonish, toothy — the kind of thing that should be funny. They are not funny. They issue directives in the tone of someone who expects compliance and has never been surprised by receiving it. Between directives they report the news. Real news. Current projections. The things happening now, in the world, that we have all agreed to manage by not looking directly at them. Here you cannot look away. The mouth that tells you to stand on one leg is the same mouth that tells you about the water levels.

Some people obey immediately. You can see the moment it happens — the slight straightening, the attempt at competence, the performance of being someone who can handle this. Years of being evaluated rising to the surface without permission.

Some people freeze.

In other rooms, things are happening that should not be possible in a job interview. Someone leaps clean over a row of chairs. Someone runs at full speed toward a wall and doesn't stop until the last possible moment. Someone jumps — not tentatively, but with the full commitment of a body that knows exactly what it's doing. No one explains this. The effect is destabilizing in a specific way — not chaos, but a sudden uncertainty about what the rules actually are, and whether you ever knew.

Throughout, arms reach into the frame — not quite fists, something softer than that. Open enough to suggest offering. Closed enough to suggest withholding. You see them at the edges of rooms, extending from doorways, appearing beside you without a body attached. They do not grab. They simply appear, and wait, and withdraw.

The chairs accumulate. The monster heads multiply. The screens on the wall show you what you were doing minutes ago, which is somehow worse than being watched in real time. You watch yourself comply. Or hesitate. The record exists now.

At some point, one person is handed an envelope. The mouth on the wall says nothing. No criteria are announced, no performance singled out. The person opens it. They are congratulated — by whom is unclear — and guided through a door at the back of the room. They do not return. The remaining participants absorb this without comment, which is its own kind of data. What happens on the other side of that door is not documented here. Those who have been inside are not available for comment. They seem, from a distance, to be fine.

The piece does not explain the criteria. It simply ends, the way these things end — without ceremony, without acknowledgment of what just happened to you.

You leave the way you came in. The hallway looks the same.

You are not the same.

Filed under: Presence / Performance Art

All performances are documented. Attendance is noted.