The Performance Has Already Begun: Yoshiko Chuma’s FLASH! at PS122
At 5:45 p.m., there was no announcement that Yoshiko Chuma’s five-minute FLASH! had begun. No gathering of attention, no formal transition from waiting to watching, no indication that the audience had crossed from ordinary time into performance time. Chuma simply started.
The effect was immediate because there had been no chance to prepare for it. We were still standing in the gallery as visitors when her actions had already begun to alter the room. No one had been told where to look, where to stand, or when attention should become concentrated. By the time the audience recognized a performance taking place, the usual distinction between waiting and watching had already become difficult to recover.
Chuma moved among the works already occupying the gallery. Her movement was spare. Nothing depended on virtuosity, extension, speed, or the display of physical difficulty. The attention instead fell on where an action occurred and what changed around it. A turn toward a wall, a pause beside an object, the decision to enter a narrow passage between architectural elements, a finger directed toward a nearly invisible mark: these actions accumulated without announcing themselves as choreography, although their consequences for the room were precise.
At several moments, Chuma pointed toward faint pencil text and drawn forms on the gallery wall. From a distance they were nearly impossible to read. The gesture forced a practical decision. If we wanted to know what she was indicating, we had to come closer. People moved. The distance between viewer and wall contracted, and with it the arrangement of the audience changed.
That small action says a great deal about how Chuma handled spectatorship in these five minutes. She never needed to instruct the audience to participate. The work made our existing positions inadequate. Seeing required relocation. The body of the spectator entered the event through the simple difficulty of remaining where it had been.
The gallery architecture kept producing similar pressures. Columns, corners, walls, pedestals, and the narrow passages between displayed works became available to her. At one point Chuma compressed herself into a corner broken up by columns and exhibition structures, then moved through the gaps between them. From several positions in the room she became partially obscured or disappeared altogether. The audience had to adjust again, sometimes following her, sometimes leaning, sometimes accepting that the body had slipped out of view.
The choreography was often improvised, or at least carried the live responsiveness of improvisation. Yet the decisions did not feel casual. Chuma seemed unusually alert to the consequences of small actions: how pointing could move a group of people, how a column could interrupt sight, how a few steps could change who occupied the center of a room. Improvisation gave the work its volatility, while her choices kept testing the habits through which spectators normally secure a view.
This became even more apparent when Chuma abandoned the gallery altogether.
She walked out.
The gallery was at street level, so there was almost no transitional space between the institution and the city outside it. One moment Chuma was moving among artworks and exhibition furniture; the next she was on the pavement, among pedestrians who had no reason to understand themselves as part of a performance. The audience followed, although following now meant crossing a threshold whose theatrical status had never been formally declared.
Outside, the work became more exposed to accident. A passerby could enter its field without knowing that anything was happening. Chuma could approach or respond to someone who had never agreed to become a spectator. The street supplied its own rhythms, interruptions, and competing claims on attention. The performance did not absorb these conditions into a seamless theatrical world. They remained visibly uncontrolled.
That looseness matters. Chuma’s work does not seem anxious to protect itself from contingency. It permits circumstance to press back against intention. The gallery had already made us move in order to keep seeing; the street made even the status of seeing uncertain. Were we still watching a performance, following a person, moving through public space, or doing all three at once? Chuma left those categories unsettled.
The title The School of Hard Knocks becomes especially suggestive here. A “school” usually promises some transfer of knowledge, some movement from ignorance toward understanding. Chuma’s work offers no such clean progression. Her directions, actions, and later conversation make clear that she has an exacting way of thinking about movement, authority, space, and encounter, yet she rarely turns that thinking into a lesson delivered intact to the audience. One learns by being displaced, by missing something, by having to move closer, by discovering that the position from which one expected to see is no longer sufficient.
The conversation after FLASH! made this quality of the performance easier to recognize. What had seemed spontaneous in the gallery belonged to a much larger worldview. Chuma’s ideas do not sit behind the work as explanations waiting to be revealed afterward. They are already present in the way she organizes relations: between performer and spectator, body and architecture, attention and distance, intention and accident. Her ideology is compelling precisely because it is allowed to remain active inside these relations before it becomes verbal.
The five-minute duration of FLASH! made this especially sharp. There was barely enough time for one spatial arrangement to become familiar before Chuma unsettled it. The gallery narrowed into a corner, opened onto a wall, and then gave way to the street. An artwork became something we had to approach. A blocked sightline became a reason to move. The distinction between audience and passerby weakened as soon as the performance crossed the door.
Nothing announced itself as a major gesture.
And yet the work steadily dismantled many of the quiet agreements through which performance normally becomes recognizable.
Chuma’s refusal of spectacle is crucial here. Had the work depended on technical display, the performer could easily have returned to the center while the audience resumed the familiar position of admiration. Instead, the force of an action lay in what it did to the relations around it. A point toward the wall altered distance. A body wedged between columns altered sight. A walk through the door altered the boundary of the event itself.
She points, and the audience moves closer.
She disappears behind a column, and the sightline collapses.
She walks outside, and the gallery follows her.
By the end of FLASH!, choreography no longer seemed confined to the sequence of Chuma’s own movements. It had spread into the changing distances among bodies, drawings, columns, artworks, doors, pedestrians, and the street. The audience had been moving all along, sometimes consciously and sometimes simply because remaining still had ceased to make sense.
Perhaps this is the most demanding proposition in those five minutes. Chuma never tells the spectator what to know. She changes the conditions under which knowing, seeing, and following take place, then leaves us to notice that our own bodies have already been implicated.
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