By Guilherme Meletti Yazbek
Ten minutes before eleven, I was already sitting on my folding stool, in the place where I was told the performance would begin. At eleven, five performers—Anya Clarke-Verdery, Anya Susan Collins, Cory Seals, Donovan Reed, and Jasmine Hearn—approached the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Museum of Art at an almost everyday walking pace. Their clothing suggested a casual, unmistakably American wardrobe—denim, sturdy fabrics, and workwear-like textures such as twill—without announcing them immediately as performers. They climbed the staircase from the first to the second floor, leaving their shoes behind at different points along the second flight. Near the top, they turned around and descended again, in quotidian tempo, returning to the base of the staircase. There, the five bodies came together in a tight cluster, eyes closed. It was only then that I registered that all five performers were Black.
The first movement unfolds at an almost impossibly slow pace. The cluster begins less than a foot from the first step, yet thirteen minutes pass before one of the performers finally places a foot on the staircase. That duration is not simply a feature of the choreography; it reorganizes perception. A shift of weight, a hand slowly escaping a pocket, a body lowering toward the floor, an eyelid opening and closing—each minor alteration becomes an event because there is suddenly enough time to notice it. My own breathing began to change in response. I found myself slowing down, listening more carefully, and matching the performers’ sustained attention with my own. Their movement demands a different temporal contract with the spectator: nothing needs to happen quickly for something to happen intensely. Throughout this opening movement, the performers’ eyes remain closed, further intensifying the sense that they are navigating the space through touch, weight, and collective awareness. At one point, their bodies briefly align in something resembling a single file, an image that brought to mind Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Parable of the Blind. Yet there is little sense of helplessness here. Their slow progression repeatedly evokes both challenge and resistance—a collective obstacle to be negotiated—and care. Bodies lean into bodies, support one another, and remain in almost constant contact. The image is often remarkably tender. Very quickly, that physical connectedness begins to feel less like an incidental feature of the choreography than one of its central premises.
As the first movement unfolds, the task of moving upward gradually becomes inseparable from the task of sustaining one another. The performers rarely move as isolated individuals; instead, weight is continually transferred, received, and redistributed across the group. A body leans, another braces; one begins to lower toward the floor while another remains close enough to offer support. The effect is not simply one of endurance, but of collective effort shaped by care. Their bodies remain connected even as the cluster slowly changes its configuration, suggesting a form of labor that is measured less by productivity than by the ongoing work of maintaining a relation. Against the monumental imagery of labor and progress surrounding the staircase, The Strikebreakers offers a different proposition: labor as care, effort as interdependence, exhaustion alongside rest. The performers do not simply endure the staircase; they negotiate it together.
It is difficult to watch these five Black bodies without also seeing the architecture—and the history—against which they move. Their warm, living bodies appear against the cold expanses of the museum’s pale marble and the monumental murals that surround the staircase, where allegorical white figures transform labor, industry, and upward movement into images of prosperity and progress. The contrast is striking: five Black artists now occupy, move through, and transform a space historically shaped by white cultural power and by a Western art institution whose histories of exclusion have only relatively recently begun to be challenged from within. This presence is therefore not merely visual. It carries the weight of a much longer struggle over who gets to enter museums not as an object of representation, but as an artist, a maker, and an author of the space itself. Choreographed by Jonathan González, The Strikebreakers does not reenact the history of labor surrounding the Carnegie legacy; instead, it places five Black bodies within a monument built to celebrate a particular vision of labor and asks what other forms of work, relation, and collective life might become visible there.
The performance’s occupation of the museum becomes increasingly unruly as the hours pass. Bodies sit on steps, lie across the marble, and at one point even climb onto a narrow ledge—gestures that feel almost shockingly out of place within an institution where visitors are carefully instructed how to move, where to stand, and what not to touch. The transgression is neither spectacular nor exaggerated; instead, it emerges through an investigation of how each body might inhabit and dance with the architecture. A person lying on a museum staircase is doing something that most of us instinctively recognize as forbidden, precisely because museums choreograph their visitors through a network of spatial and behavioral permissions. The Strikebreakers quietly disrupt that choreography. The performers do not merely dance in the museum; they expose the museum as a space that is already choreographing bodies. What kinds of movement become possible when those rules are suspended—and for whom does that freedom become available?
The performance also gradually transforms the spectator into part of its spatial composition. There is no single vantage point from which the work can be fully apprehended: some visitors watch from movable stools on the surrounding floors, others remain standing at different elevations, and still others encounter the performers as they pass through the museum. Each position produces a different image, and each decision to remain, move, or look from another angle becomes a small act of composition. The work is not interactive in any conventional sense, but it is participatory at the level of spectatorship. We become responsible for framing the performance through our own bodies. At the same time, other visitors continue to inhabit the museum according to entirely different rhythms, sometimes passing through the performance without acknowledging it at all. At one point, a visitor stood only a few feet from the dancers and began having her photos taken by a friend positioned farther away, apparently treating the performers as simply other people inhabiting the same space at the same time. There was something strange, even uncomfortable, about the proximity and apparent indifference of the gesture, but she was not, in any obvious sense, violating the rules of the museum. What struck me instead was how ordinary this choreography of photography in the museum has become—and how much rarer the choreography of simply stopping to watch seems to be. A family emerging from the elevator offered another version of the same encounter: an elderly woman exclaimed, “Oh, look!” at the sight of the slow-moving bodies, before the group continued on its way without even stopping. The performance does not suspend the museum’s everyday life; it exposes the different temporalities already competing within it.
As the hours pass, the collective body gradually disperses. The performers begin to occupy different levels and corners of the staircase and the second floor, and the choreography shifts from the formation of a single image toward a more fragmented composition in which each body develops its own relationship to the architecture. Some movements become more expansive; others remain close to the floor or wall. One performer produces long vocal tones that reverberate through the vast stairwell, while another experiments with the metallic resonance of a small bell worn around the neck. The shifts are often abrupt: an action begins, settles into a sustained state, and then disappears in a clean cut. By this point, the physical duration of the work has also begun to register on the bodies themselves. Layers of clothing have come off, sweat darkens the fabric, and the visible effort of endurance becomes part of the performance’s changing texture. Less concentrated than in the opening movement, the choreography now seems to ask a different question: not how five bodies can become one, but how five distinct bodies might inhabit the same architecture differently without losing their connection to one another.
The fourth and last movement brings the performance back to a logic similar to that with which it began. The performers gather again and return to the extreme slowness of the opening, their eyes mostly closed once more as they begin to ascend another section of the staircase. At this point, however, the image carries the weight of everything that has happened before. The cluster has become a line; the shared mass has stretched into a procession. Now and then, one performer breaks from the line before returning to it, briefly altering the collective pattern. Above and below them, spectators occupy the surrounding floors and landings, watching from different distances and elevations. In contrast, the performers continue their slow ascent.
As they progress upward, the movement remains slow, but the bodies now bear visible traces of the hours that have passed. Clothing has shifted, sweat has accumulated, and the sustained physical effort of the performance has become increasingly legible on the bodies themselves. At one point, midway up the staircase, one performer is slowly undressed by another: first a vest, then a button-down shirt, revealing yet another layer underneath. The gesture is intimate and strangely ceremonial, but its meaning remains open. Is he shedding a social role, a uniform, a particular kind of laboring identity? The work does not answer. Like so many of its images, it leaves the gesture suspended between effort, care, and interpretation.
The ascent continues until the performers, one by one, reach the landing and leave the performance space in ordinary walking time. There is no final tableau, no curtain call, no return. The last two remain together, eventually leaving hand in hand. Only then does the audience applaud, their applause directed toward an already empty staircase. After four hours of sustained attention, effort, care, fatigue, and collective movement, The Strikebreakers offers no triumphant arrival—only departure. The staircase has carried these bodies upward, but it has not been conquered; it has been traversed. What remains is the memory of five bodies that spent hours making weight, relation, and time visible, and then quietly walked away.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
The performance continues through Tuesday , August 18, 2026 and is free for museum visitors with admission to the Carnegie Museum of Art, whose tickets vary in price. https://carnegieart.org/events/format/performance
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater and dance critic, practitioner, and scholar whose work spans criticism, performance studies, and contemporary artistic practices. He is a PhD student in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Arts Education, Reviews
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