HARMATTAN THEATER, 1811 GRID PERFORMANCE

A city has a biological life, Le Corbusier once noted. What is the future of the Grid in Manhattan's imagination? The grid as organizing logic of New York's street flows has influenced how urban movement has been imagined in the modern city. People walk swiftly up Avenues and purposefully across Streets in Manhattan, driven by the linearity of the Grid. Simple lines of transit have opened up dense networks of communicative possibilities. North/South vectors of speed in New York City have replaced older East/West networks of transportation connecting the Hudson River to the East River during the Nineteenth century maritime boom.

Corbusier's "maritime sky of Manhattan" is a reminder of the verticality of the Grid's visual impact. Corbu was moved by the soaring vistas of skyline that arrested the visual plane as one looked uptown towards the modernist horizon of disappearing sky- an impressive man made tableau. Drawing upon Corbu's observation that people traversing a Cartesian city plan may still look up and dream beautiful images, Harmattan Theater investigates what makes dense cities like New York distinctive biological environments.

Through the performance GRID SCENES, a network of sixty people traversing through Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue at Twilight on April 3, holding lamps made from recycled fruit boxes fitted with miniature flashlights, and Nepalese Singing Bowls, Harmattan Theater marks the slowing down of time and the expanding of space as a sensuous experience of the Manhattan Grid. The city drifts by as bodies slow down to imperceptible gestures, a flow of sensation.