Three Surrenders

As a McDonald’s on 57th Street and 5th Avenue is being gutted and cleaned out in preparation for a new retail incarnation, a performance by dancer Erin Ellen Kelly is sited and filmed in the charged space and maze-like perspectives of the half-finished demolition, while the everyday movements of the renovation process continue around her.

The surrender of her body to the space is amplified and complicated by a sound track made up of whispered and sung vocals that layer words and phrases in several languages, associated directly or elusively with the idea of surrender, into a kind of canon. The vocals include a fragment of an aria from the Gluck opera Paride ed Elena.