A Rolling Piece

Angelina Laguna kneels on the sidewalk and places her body perpendicular to the flow of the First Avenue foot traffic. Arms crossing her chest, she begins to roll southbound. On this sunny, late winter day in early March, a row of flags ripple in the breeze over her head, including the flag of Afghanistan, which is her stage mark for the beginning of this performance in front of the United Nations headquarters.

Performance

Angelina Laguna: “Rolling Piece”

Place

United Nations Plaza, Manhattan, NY, April 2025

Words

Candice Thompson

Angelina Laguna performing “Rolling Piece.” Photograph by Alec Hawkins

She rolls slowly up the slight grade, flanked in front and back by two other performers: Lindsay Brents seems to secure the path forward, while Jeff Natt offers the chance, pedestrian audience fliers with a QR code linking to a livestream and credits. Good troublemaker Yoshiko Chuma—the choreographer and activist behind the School of Hard Knocks, whose work over the past several decades, however abstract, has often addressed themes of borders and displacement—hovers nearby in the cameo role of “invited spectator.” A small crew of videographers captures the scene from all angles.

In staging her performance in the busy path of international politics, Laguna’s tumbling body becomes a disturbance that must be physically reckoned with; depending on the passersby, she is alternately an object of intrigue or simply another NYC obstacle to sidestep as quickly as possible to grab lunch.

The cynic in me is surprised that the number of busy, lanyard-wearing professionals who pause to observe Laguna’s movement and consider Natt’s flier well outnumber those who merely slow their pace and take care not to clip her head in their stride.

Though the choreographic score is deceptively simple, the path requires Laguna to tackle a curb without disturbing the methodical pace of her progress down the block. She eventually assumes a child’s pose in front of a security station. Suddenly, the police in charge of guarding this international organization take notice of her.

And this is where the choreography—much of it improvised—becomes more complex, layered, and reactive.

Angelina Laguna performing “Rolling Piece.” Photograph by Alec Hawkins

A few officers come out of their little glass cubicle. One takes a flier, looks at it, and then makes a phone call. Laguna makes the decision to continue, inching ever closer to the plaza in front of the UN. She holds a plank while Natt appears to be explaining something to an officer. I take a seat on a bench as another cop approaches from a mobile police unit on the other side of the sidewalk. He looks at the flier in disbelief as more of his colleagues gather near the police van to gawk at the scene from afar.

But they do not keep their distance, and a dance of accumulation begins. Laguna rolls onto her back and shields her face with her elbows. Three cops are soon seven, and a minute later, they number a dozen. From my seat, they could look to be protecting her, but my sense is that they adamantly want this to end. They suggest alternate locations across the street and admonish Natt that this area is “sensitive and under different rules,” dictated by “court orders.” Many more calls are made by several more officers as she lies meditating on her back for twenty minutes. They come and go, though three stay flanking her the whole time. Just as John Cage’s works with silence bring greater attention to the ambient noise of life, Laguna’s stillness brings their flurry of activity into sharper, and at times, tragicomic, relief.

Were they worried about her safety or simply the idea that this might be some kind of protest? Or are they just profoundly irritated by a gesture they don’t understand? Were they also wondering, as I was, about their priorities, the fact that their job dictated they police a single peaceable woman in front of an institution struggling to address an ongoing genocide in a country led by a convicted criminal? Even in such a benign resting pose, Laguna provoked confusion and consternation as un-credentialed, and perhaps, ungovernable, body.

The absurdity of the situation—so many large men, all of them with guns, swarming such a petite woman—naturally begs these questions and more. Some witnesses may have wondered about what she was doing, laying so still on the sidewalk, or quite possibly they were gripped by that performance art killer, the desire for legibility and to understand what it all must mean. But being in lockstep with the intricacies of Laguna’s intentions was not where my head was at. The visual juxtaposition that her performance created made clear that what we should be wondering about revolved almost completely around the reactions of those men, the institutions and policies that demand that kind of security from them, and our willingness to look away from injustices big and small in service of the perceived order and safety they provide.

Angelina Laguna performing “Rolling Piece.” Photograph by Rosa Allegra Wolff

As I sat there watching them, I was reminded of No Other Land, a film that documents the destruction, displacement, and resilience of the Masafer Yatta communities and tells the story of the friendship between Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist. Despite winning this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary, the film has not been available from streaming services. So I saw the film in person, at Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Friday before I saw “Rolling Piece;” Batsheva Dance Company was performing “Momo” in the other half of the building.

In the film, bulldozers continually rumble on the horizon, rolling toward the communities in an ominous overture. When they arrive and begin tearing apart homes in front of the families that live in them, a chaotic choreography ensues in which mothers, fathers, and children scramble to rescue a few belongings before all is lost. Watching as Laguna’s body rolled toward the UN, it seemed as if the police perceived her as a threat equal to those bulldozers. I wondered if they could still think of her that way if they had seen the film or had experienced a similar, dehumanizing action waged against them. Or perhaps they had, and the lack of rational proportion in their response could be blamed on cycles of trauma perpetuating themselves.

Right now, so many dance artists are trying to combat the senseless violence and dissonance of this moment in time with the beauty inherent in our art form. Several times in the last six months, experiences of dance in the theater have buoyed me with their bold, artistic expressions of humanity and love and joy in the face of so much misanthropy and fear. I have been grateful for every one of them, including most recently the hair raising solos, “Immigrant” and “Revolt,” that Virginie Mécène recreated for Martha Graham Dance Company in April, with incisive performances from Xin Ying and Leslie Williams.

But in pushing outside the more comfortable constraints of the theater, and its often affluent, like-minded audience, “Rolling Piece,” took its embodied provocation out of the echo chamber and into lesser-known territory. Laguna’s audacity to put her body in the way of unchallenged authority and unquestioned order threw me a different kind of life vest that I am clinging to now: courage.

Given that the American president issued an executive order on policing last week, with the header, “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS,” as well as this government’s record thus far for detaining, deporting, and otherwise seeking punitive harm to those protesting anything related to their agenda, Laguna’s performance has continued to speak to me.

In the end, no arrests were made during “Rolling Piece.” Instead, the police gave Laguna a warning after which she graciously thanked them, presumably for playing the unwitting part of “authority intervention,” in her work.

In her own words: “I got up. I walked down to the last flag, the Palestinian flag, and stated the credits of the performers and crew, and Lieutenant Gonzalez.”

Candice Thompson

Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. From 2010-2021 she was editorial director of DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded. Her writing on dance can be found in publications like Andscape, ALL ARTS, ArtsATL, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and The New York Times.

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