- Venue
- Artist's apartment
- Location
- United States
10 am on a chilly Saturday morning, and thirty or forty people are gathered at the top of a building on the Lower East side. We rub our hands together and pull our scarves round our necks to keep ourselves warm.
All at once it starts – the view comes alive with hula hoopers. Thirty men, women and one child are dotted around the rooftops that surround our gathering place, the roof of artist Christian Jankowski’s apartment. They bob and twist in unison, lacing together the disparate buildings that make up the New York skyline.
The troupe is lead by Suat Ling Chua, a beacon of scarlet on the top of an apartment block. The other hula hoopers follow her, keeping up through a sight line of at least one other dancer, although they can’t all see each other at once. It was Ling’s daily hula hoop routine, spied on by Jankowski, that inspired this event. Having watched her hula hoop for exercise, Jankowski asked her to collaborate on this one-morning only display.
Rooftop Routine is unashamedly silly and joyful – an act of casual voyeurism transformed into a communal dance. But it’s also a celebration of city living. The dancers animate a view of New York that would be otherwise anonymous – the outsides of buildings in which lives are carried out. They tie together different kinds of architecture (the derelict blocks, the neon-fronted buildings, the shiny new apartments) to temporarily stitch over the division lines that are felt more keenly on the street. In doing so, the performance both pays tribute to the vastness and diversity of the city and celebrates the human element that is its reason and its life. Like the tiny figures included in nineteenth century paintings of the sublime (by JMW Turner, for example, or Caspar David Freidrich), the hula hoop dancers encourage those of us watching to identify with the cityscape as well as wonder at its scale.
And those of us watching aren’t just the ones who have read the Performa programme and booked a place. Other New York residents peer out of their windows, climb onto their balconies or gaze up from the street. Some even become unwitting participants as they carry out their own rooftop exercises or hang out their washing. For someone who doesn’t live in the city, Rooftop Routine feels like a privileged glimpse into the semi-private space above street level, where the hustle of busy sidewalks gives way to a rolling landscape of domestic vignettes. Making use of this space, Jankowski has permitted us all to belong, however fleetingly.
It is fittingly bitter-sweet that Rooftop Routine is not a regular event. It ends, and the hula hoopers dissolve into the activity of New York. Later I see a boy hula hooping in Washington Square, oblivious to the performance that happened earlier in the day. The city has returned to a society of individuals.
