PHOTOS: Inside Performa’s ‘Live on Broadway’ Benefit

There was a certain New York magic last Wednesday night—an unknown and unexpected thrill in the air. Knicks fans held their breath for Game 4, and a few blocks away, at the Town Hall theater near Times Square, Performa: Live on Broadway—a one-night-only, vaudeville-inspired benefit—brought together 14 acts and more than 50 artists, spanning music, theater, dance, comedy and visual art.

The not-for-profit behind the evening, Performa, was established in 2004 by art historian and professor RoseLee Goldberg, now the organization’s founding director and chief curator. It commissions artists from around the world—many of them visual artists who’ve never made live works before—to create new performances staged throughout New York City. Its sprawling three-week November biennial has become an art-world fixture and favorite.

Town Hall has its own history of unexpected nights, uncannily relevant. It was built in 1921 by suffragists who designed it with democratic seating (literally coining the term “no bad seats”). On a November night, one of its founders, Margaret Sanger, was arrested onstage for speaking about birth control. Her supporters followed her into the street, singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

More than a century later, the venue was crowded with anticipation. Notable guests included solange and Tina Knowles, the actress Alia Shawkat and MoMA’s head of performance Lizzie Gorfaine and former New York Times chief art critic Roberta Smith. Artist Laurie Simmons was also in attendance, there to see Music of Regret—a three-act film first screened at Performa’s inaugural biennial in 2005—presented with live singers and musicians for the first time. Meryl Streep, who stars in it, once told Simmons it belonged on Broadway. Twenty years later, Simmons told Observer, “it sort of is.”

Winding lines climbed the staircase as people waited for refreshments. Nearby, others ran their hands along Barbara Kruger’s red-block-lettered hoodies: “Want it, buy it, forget it.”

Amid the pre-show buzz, Observer caught up with Ernestine White-Mifetu, the Sills Foundation Curator of African Art at the Brooklyn Museum. Performa, she said, has “really been impactful to the ecosystem of New York,” creating spaces where you see “a diverse range of artists and visitors, whether they’re young children or adults.” The proof was in the room: “The six-year-old in a fabulous silver dress with her mom, to the granny—they’re all here.”

The show opened with a restaging of Chair/Pillow, a 1969 work by the legendary choreographer Yvonne Rainer. Dancers moved white bed pillows, circled metal folding chairs, sat and stood with deliberate, expressionless precision. As longtime Performa affiliate Sozita Goudouna told Observer, one of the organization’s gifts is the chance to experience historic performances “that our generation didn’t have the possibility to see.”

Next up, comedian and late-night comedy writer Casey Jost joked that he’d found old Yelp reviews from the 1920s backstage. “These are all real,” he deadpanned. “Five stars. I saw a small, yet-to-be-established basketball team, the Knickerbockers, playing down the street. And they were on a winning streak until President Harding came to Game 3. Warren G. Harding, you tyrant.” Later, he left the audience stumped on whether his shock of white hair was dyed or au naturel.

A few spellbinding acts followed: the multidisciplinary artist and musician Lonnie Holley, whom the Guardian named one of “30 acts to see before you die,” belting at the piano; and a sequence from Marcel Dzama’s To Live on the Moon (For Lorca), his 2023 Performa commission, featuring a live dancer as a glinting gold moth, slightly frightening, against a projected black-and-white film.

Award-winning SNL writer and comedian Julio Torres took the stage next, wandering on with a curved metal rod strapped to his chest, a Diet Coke dangling from the end. As he grabbed for it, he missed, and failed again. He explained, matter-of-fact: “I went to a Barry’s Bootcamp, and they install these on us to… run faster. It’s a great workout, I’m not gonna lie. It’s to keep you always striving towards a goal that is just out of reach.” Throughout the act, he swiped at his precious soda. When he finally struggled across the stage floor and managed to secure his Diet Coke, it was empty. “Now, what did we learn today?”

Anne Imhof brought a tender ache with a piece drawn from DOOM: House of Hope, her 2025 work for the Park Avenue Armory; Goldberg, a longtime friend and now collaborator, had asked for this love song specifically. “You have to do this one,” Imhof recalled her saying. It opened with red lights blinking and a loudspeaker intoning numbers—hours, minutes, seconds—as a lone ballerina, en pointe, swept the stage. Between arabesques and pliés, she paced, hands on hips, and looked into the audience as if it were a studio mirror. It was the kind of performance that makes you put your hand to your heart. “Live performance is a vulnerable field,” Imhof reflected. “It doesn’t produce objects. It’s like the ephemeral, it’s like these beautiful, magical moments. You have to protect them.”

The lights came up. Red signs with white lettering had been passed out to the orchestra seats, and Jost instructed wavering arms to lift them overhead, each tilted just so. From the balcony, the words assembled, some crooked, some slanting, the whole thing gloriously imperfect. On cue, Jost photographed it. People got out of their seats to look: the message was fragments of Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Questions), asking, “Who is beyond the law? Who is silenced? Who is bought and sold? Who dies first?”

Another favorite, serpentwithfeet, entered the stage in fog. He wore a black boxing glove on one fist and a red glove on the other and sang “Wander.” He’d been interested that night, he told Observer, in “suspending disbelief, and inviting others to suspend disbelief.”

Live performance has a way of doing that. Simmons told Observer that she’d found the night beyond her wildest expectations and reflected on what live performance stirred in her. “That sort of immediate, unexpected, it-can-all-go-wrong thing is so much more like what making art feels like. I’m not talking about having a polished show… I’m talking about what goes on in the studio when you’re actually making things. That unexpected part, at least for me, for an artist, is what’s really exciting.” Watching her own piece performed live, she thought everything could go wrong. “But you know what? None of it matters. It’s all okay in the moment.”

There was a melancholy underneath her delight. “RoseLee’s keeping the idea of performance art alive,” Simmons said. She’d arrived in New York at the height of it. “Believe it or not, there was a point where the market wasn’t ruled by money. It was ruled by ideas about the avant-garde. I would sit in a gallery on the floor and listen to Laurie Anderson play her violin. There was so much to see, and you didn’t have to pay a penny.” Goldberg, she said, is “keeping something alive that could so easily die with everything else that’s dying now.”

Goldberg knows that fragility. In an age when, as she put it, “nobody has time to read or look or see,” she prizes the chance for audiences to sit for an hour, their attention “riveted on new ideas.” Someone had recently come up to her about a piece they’d seen and said, “I’ll never forget it.” She loved that. “That’s a good housekeeping seal of approval, that you’ll see things in performance you’ll never forget.”

And just like that, in an unexpected twist of its own, the Knicks completed a historic comeback, winning by one point with one second left. A New York miracle. The city roared, still in disbelief, full of hope. The unexpected, it turns out, can be very sweet.