Pageant Brings a Seven-Hour Performance Marathon to MoMA

Twenty-five ten-minute performances filled seven hours at the Museum of Modern Art in late August, staged by Pageant, an artist-run Brooklyn performance space founded in 2022.

The marathon, titled Pageant Presents Pageant, capped a month-long MoMA residency. Choreographer, director and writer Isa Spector opened it with "MoMAlogue #1," a commissioned attempt to make "a painting of dance" in 10 minutes before a packed auditorium.

Spector writhed on a red-painted platform, dropped to all fours, and called out to a "mom" whose name became "MoMA" and a "dad" who became "Dada." Then came the epiphany. Five performers in red gloves emerged from backstage, joined hands, and twirled in a circle — a living parody of Matisse's 1909 modernist masterpiece Dance (I), displayed one floor above.

Who is behind Pageant?

The five red-gloved performers — Sharleen Chidiac, Lili Dekker, Jade Manns, Owen Prum and Alexa West — are the co-founders of Pageant. The group established the space in 2022 in a third-story loft on Graham Avenue in East Williamsburg. A predecessor space was run by Manns and Chidiac out of their apartment.

West said there was initially "no clear marketing vision" for Pageant. The space answered the group's shared desire "to provide context to our practices in a post-COVID landscape in which there were very few opportunities to show work at our stage of artmaking."

"We didn't set out with the intention for it to be like an institution," Chidiac said. "We just needed a space to work, to show our work, and to show other people's work."

What drove the MoMA program?

The marathon's 25 performances repeatedly meditated on dance's relationship to its own history and to visual art. Spector's opening was, according to the source, the first but not the only such meditation.

"I think the history of dance, coming from a ballet proscenium stage into modernism, then into postmodernism, started with a pictorial form," West said in a group interview after the marathon. "And it's slowly been breaking away from that over time."

That claim grounded the day's central gesture: dance quoting painting, live, inside a museum whose galleries hold the original. In plain words, a loft collective from East Williamsburg turned MoMA's own collection into its stage set.