After that, the video switches off and Jones dances alone in silence. A different video then shows an artful black and white image of a horse and Lemon delivers a moving literary monologue, “To kill a horse or not to kill a horse . . . he’s going to die anyway. It’s war—or something worse.” The text includes quotes from Josephine Baker and choreographer Simone Forti. Lemon whips out a harmonica that he plays while jumping and turning like a pogo-stick.

Whereas Jones moves seemingly without regard to the audience or to the video behind him, Lemon’s role is more outwardly performative—he’s speaking to the audience. Even so, his delivery is less presentational than say a theater monologue, or a singer performing a song. The video dancers are clearly not performing for us. It makes me wonder about the role of witness in this work. Does it matter that the audience is present? Despite the AirPods and internal gaze, Jones surely can’t tune out the audience completely. We’re breathing and reacting mere feet away. “I still have questions about it being seen,” Jones ends his program note. “I’m edging more towards observers being complicit in our time together—a little more weight on our shared presence, over the ocular.”

The video returns with a close-up of Gesel Mason’s face. Meanwhile, Lemon has dragged a large wood panel to the front of the stage. Jones contorts himself into a pretzel shape, resting the crown of his head on the floor, breathing hard. Lemon, in a wide-legged kind of push-up, straddles a print from his geometric series of drawings that I recognize from the exhibit, then crumples the paper onto the stage. It sits there like a cartoon bubble. Jones is now talking to himself in an obsessive manner. Occasionally I hear the sound of crickets—a timing signal for the performers? On video, Okwui Okpokwasili sobs loudly. Lemon sings into the mic to loud recorded music, then closes his eyes and sways. It’s a lot of seemingly disconnected activity. I find it riveting, even though I don’t always know where to look.