Green Light

Will Rawls makes boundaries visible by defying them. Known for the disciplinary and topical range of his projects, the choreographer, director, and performer approaches issues of representation in “[siccer],” a multi-part, multi-site work co-presented by L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival. A live performance at Performance Space New York accompanies a multimedia installation at the Kitchen, a book published by Wendy’s Subway, and an album published by the artist. With a creative process reaching back to 2018, the work delves explicitly into pandemic-era energies and inertias with focused intimacy and a pervasive sense of instability.

Performance

Will Rawls's “[siccer]”

Place

Performance Space New York and L’Alliance New York as part of Crossing the Line Festival, November 20, 2025

Words

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Will Rawls's “[siccer].” Photograph by Whitney Browne

Over a time-bending 90 minutes, “[siccer]’s” live performance slides deftly along a spectrum of drama and comedy with a wily sense of control. Rawls’s opening monologue establishes a central premise of the work: toggling between “interior” and “exterior,” spoken as framing devices for scenes in a film script. A stop-motion film shoot serves as setting, with stylized green screen curtains containing one corner of green floor activated by mobile green rectangular frames of varying sizes and degrees of transparency. Two soundboard stations stand in the opposite corner at something of a visual remove, yet still in dynamic interplay as they are activated by performers and sound designers Holland Andrews and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste. Open yet contained, this arena hosts vulnerabilities and desires to navigate tensions and confrontations that challenge given dualities at telescoping scales: self/other, director/performer, individual/community, humanity/ecology.

Confluences of sound, light, and movement clarify and confuse boundaries between “interior” and “exterior,” jostling these seemingly bounded dimensions into an unstable emulsion. The iterative layers, loops, and distortions in Andrews and Toussaint-Baptiste's live vocal and electronic score contrast with a metronomic click track that evolves with each recurrence from mechanical to organic sounds. Ecological soundscapes bloom to evoke a swamp among scattered sprigs of cattails and ferns, giving way to the throbbing bass and driving pulse of an underground dance club. Space is further destabilized by color as Maggie Heath’s masterful lighting casts unsettling tones—a diffuse wash of pink, a vibrant red-orange blaze, directional color beams aimed from mobile multicolor LEDs—over the lurid green-screen neons of the set and the variable greens of Saša Kovačević and Dana Doughty’s stylishly idiosyncratic costumes. Slowly morphing landscapes of movement and shadow reflect oscillations between sonic saturation and tense silence; sudden shifts between color cues, murky darks, and frank brightness delineate or blur changes in scene and tone to establish or defy palettes of legibility and estrangement.

Will Rawls's “[siccer].” Photograph by Whitney Browne

Stop-motion choreographies begin the action and become a touchpoint in the ensuing chaos. Minute shifts of limbs and exaggerated facial expressions in crisp staccatos and fleeting fluidities arise from and resolve to perfect stillness as spiky whispers and sly looks ricochet among the cast. Andrews’s passage of stop-motion laughter rings eerily in the air, smoothed in turn by jess pretty's meandering narrations. The performers move between hesitance, vigilance, and resistance with growing urgency and awareness as they are tossed and spun into a sonic and scenic storm that gathers, rages, and subsides with howling force. Katrina Reid and keyon gaskin trade off moving and speaking in ventriloquized duet-monologues—a feat of synchronicity as each word, gesture, breath, and stutter is honed to razor-sharp precision and searing comic effect.

Resonant voices and thick movements emerge from churning depths of physical joy, pathos, and absurdity as the cast insistently circles and recircles the subject of “genre.” Through quotes and interjections from pop culture—music, film and TV, the shadowed presences of Kermit (here “Germit”) T. Frog and the great and powerful Wizard of Oz—Rawls and the cast attempt to locate genre in an increasingly desperate and parodic search for ever-elusive definition and categorization.

With “[siccer],” Rawls purposefully scrambles genre as a concept—the word itself is a scrambling of the work’s thematic green—with the green screen as a backdrop of possibility and projection. These artists make visible genre’s authoritative power to confer value and circumscribe bodies, particularly Black bodies, in media and creative production. Yet the imposed confines of genre—its boxes and frames, its sets and stagings and scriptings—are no match for the uncontainable potency of spirit poured out in the mutually-compelling interiors and exteriors of the work. If anything, “[siccer]” is an ode: a defiant song of wandering and wondering in the swampy slippages between life and art.

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

Sarah Cecilia Bukowski is a New York-based dancer, writer, and labor organizer. Her writing on dance has appeared in Dance Magazine, The Dance Enthusiast, Time Out New York, Danspace Journal, AGMAzine, and the Merce Cunningham Trust, among others. Sarah performs with the Metropolitan Opera and the Merce Cunningham Trust and serves as a Governor of the Board of the American Guild of Musical Artists.