Inside-Out Theater

Look at the photo above.

What do you see?

You're looking at the audience for "One Million Forgotten Moments," spectators in a storefront theater in New York City watching the show (photos of which appear below) being performed in the street outside.

What will they think of next?

Here's Melena Ryzik's front page story from this past Sunday's New York Times Arts section.

Taking It to the Street

Among the clichés of New York life is that the city’s streets are their own kind of theater, that there is a certain visual poetry in the millions of iPod wearers, cellphone talkers, street hawkers, office workers, tourist gawkers and other pedestrians making their way somewhere each and every minute of every day.

But this week, on a block in front of City Hall, the theater of the streets became quite literal for a few hundred uncynical customers and those gawking passers-by who happened past.



As performers playing all those urban types assembled on the pavement in front of 38 Park Row — accompanied by dancers, singers and fighting chorus girls — an audience of a few dozen watched from behind a storefront window in a makeshift theater inside the building.

It is all part of “One Million Forgotten Moments,” an art installation-street theater hybrid created by Yehuda Duenyas. Mr. Duenyas, an artist and director associated with Chashama and a founder of the Brooklyn-based National Theater of the United States, envisioned the piece as a kind of valentine to New York.

“What I wanted to do was create something where you could watch the anonymity of life, a venue where you could see life just passing you by, framed in a particular way,” Mr. Duenyas said. “The window becomes a frame around the city. Every mundane gesture of someone looking at a cellphone or getting on a bus suddenly becomes very monumental and beautiful.”

The project was about a year in the planning and just over a month in the rehearsing. (It continues through Sunday; the performances, at 7 and 9 p.m., are free, but all the seats inside are already reserved. There will be a standby list, and street spectators are encouraged.) Mr. Duenyas was commissioned by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which gave him a $6,000 grant to create the piece. The building that houses the audience, a former video store, is now available for artists and installations.

Mr. Duenyas, the set designer Brett Windham and several carpenters spent about a month transforming the room into a semblance of a Baroque-looking jewel-box theater, complete with velvet curtains, chandeliers and a concession stand offering free candy and opera glasses. The theater itself is a small platform; eight wooden benches, which seat about 30 people, angle toward the window.



When Mr. Duenyas received his commission, he put out a call to all the artists he knew, and he did not turn anyone away. The result: 40 groups, more than 100 people in total, are participating, mostly without being paid. They include established downtown performers, like Kate Valentine and Chelsea Bacon, known for their work in the burlesque world, as well as many small theater troupes, recent N.Y.U. graduates, a skateboarding team, a magician and Jonathan Jacobs, billed as the Vintage DJ, who plays old records on period turntables. Marshaling that many people was tough, Mr. Duenyas said: “I should have had a megaphone.”

On Wednesday, opening night, the performance had the extemporaneous feel of a happening. Actors in costumes — a 1920s-style bathing suit here, a bearded man wearing a single in-line skate there — wandered in and out. (The staging area and dressing rooms are at Pace University, a block and a half away.) Technical problems with the lights and sound (there are microphones on the street and speakers in the theater) were still being worked out.

Eventually the curtain rose on a man in a suit and a horse-head mask. He blew an air horn. A few passers-by covered their ears.

In the next scene Johnnie Moore, wearing a cowboy hat and accompanied by a guitarist, sang Cole Porter’s “Night and Day.”

There is no narrative structure. Some scenes last a few seconds, others a few minutes. Famous New York City characters — Jacqueline Onassis, Spider-Man, “On the Town” sailors, the couple from the Times Square V-Day kiss photograph — make appearances. The acrobatic dancers make especially good use of the space, clambering on the scaffolding in front of the building.



Perhaps the most visually arresting moments came when there were performers on the sidewalk in front of the space, on the median in the middle of the street and in front of City Hall Park across the street. As they wove their way to the theater, dancing and singing through traffic and pedestrians, it did look like a kind of poetry.

“It went from Ionesco to Broadway to school skits to profane art with a little Dada thrown in,” said Dana Seman, 54, a personal trainer and theater buff from TriBeCa who watched from inside.

As the hourlong show progressed, more and more people stopped to look. Even a pizza delivery man on a bike briefly pulled over.

Teodora Petkova, 29, a photographer from Midtown, was returning from the Brooklyn Bridge with her sister, Katya, 22, a visitor from Luxembourg, when they happened on the show. “I didn’t know what it was all about,” the elder Ms. Petkova said, “but we loved it. This is why I live in New York.”

At one point a double-decker tourist bus passed by, as a woman in a skimpy mermaid costume holding a lighted-up parasol began dancing by herself across the street. All heads and cameras on the upper deck turned to face her.



“There’s a camaraderie that is completely bone-felt, among the performers and even the people on the street,” Mr. Moore, the singer, said. “It’s seems like we’re all in the middle of making more moments.”