As Americans, as New Yorkers, we are surrounded by a rapidly enclosing homogeneity. Storefronts are redesigned into mall-like quiescence. The public outcry against controversial or dissenting art keeps our public displays as homogenous as possible. Our society encourages us to consume homogenous objects, to discourse about them, which is to say about the nothingness we all share. As malls replace public space with private, our civil rights disappear. In the mall, we are bound to mall logic, mall laws. Distribution of any text or use of cameras is illegal; stores may distribute perfume samples and play candid camera but shoppers must simply shop. The lights are florescent. Mirrors reflect. We look at our selves and one another to confirm that we fit into attractive patterns. We buy.

As artists, we have always known that this homogeneity is stifling in all its forms, and affects the way we live no matter how hard we steel ourselves against it. What is our response? Theatre Homogenous, a theatre that explodes this homogeneity into a new, dissenting space and paints it in a full-spectrum light that exposes it for the sham that it is.



Theatre Homogenous uses the laws of the homogenous space against its wishes and attempts to draw the people in that space into a new frame of mind, revealing the mutability of reality and the strangeness of consumerism.

On the evening of December 20, 2000, we brought the Theatre Homogenous to the Manhattan Mall. Dressed as homogenous consumers, we swung our shopping bags back and forth as we walked through identical hallways. People scurried back and forth around us, fulfilling their last-minute Christmas mandate. We reached the top of the Mall, fanned out in a circle in the atrium where Santa Claus had bestowed his eight dollar an hour wishes on budding consumers not an hour before, and began to sing our Christmas Carol:

Silent Night
Android Night
We just buy, and buy, and buy
Forget debt and poverty
Babes and hunks we strive to be
So we'd better consume
It's our job to consume


Silent Night
Android Night
Hug the arms of corporate might
Who cares if a child made these?
I'm in consumer ecstasy
Don't ask me what it means
Please just hand me those jeans




We then handed out cards detailing our message and the lyrics to the songs. Within five minutes we were escorted out of the mall by security guards. When approached by the guards, we asked them "Where's the Gap?" They answered, "On 34th street."

The Gap is a perfectly ironic symbol of consumerism: both the pinnacle of consumer homogeneity and (more literally) the space between: the space between being a consumer and being a citizen [HUMAN]. On the way down the stairs, the plainclothes (suit and tie) head of security insisted on singing the real lyrics to Silent Night along with our own. In some further GAP of understanding between him and us, he did not sing along with the second verse, as he did not know the lyrics. We wondered if he had the ability to listen to the words at all, to even realize that we were not singing the song he sang automatically. This gap was further clarified by the fact that we were thrown out for "soliciting," while our propaganda solicited 'buy nothing'.



It is still legal to pantomime actions in malls, and it is legal to sing in them. Theatre Homogenous proposes a nationwide movement to perform insta-opera in these purchase palaces. Using our last remaining freedoms, we will act out and solicitously sing a plea not to buy. What better backdrop for a populist opera then a mall's fountains, marble turrets and grand ceilings? America's homogenous spaces offer us a uniform set; the songs are sung to [equally homogenous I LIKE THIS] tunes. Imagine groups, 60 android strong, from Manhattan Mall to the Red Wood Forest Mall bellowing new anti-consumerist anthems, distributed via the Internet. Theatre Homogenous pleads for abstinence from consumption, turning the laws of homogenous spaces against themselves.