MANHATTAN 1811 GRID /FOURTEENTH STREET

Manhattan's Grid plan has been both celebrated and critiqued. The relentless mercantile repetition of predictable blocks to enable commerce, real estate efficiency, and utilitarian urban planning has had its adherents and detractors. The idea of the Grid has been a space of both avant garde experimentation as Rosalind Krauss has observed in her writings, and a place of limitation in its rigid spatialization. The grid, Krauss points out, is a space of immeasurable experimentation within its codified vectors. This space of delirium, Rem Koolhaas demonstrates, is the space of an infinite possibility of verticalities.

On 1811, a group of city planners laid forth a utopian project, an artificial environment mapped onto an undulating terrain of forests, streams, farmland- a dream scape of wood, brick, and eventually steel and concrete. In 2011, Harmattan Theater probes the originary site of Manhattan's Grid space, 14th Street, as a conflicted space of both utopian efficiency and discontinuous sensations. Fourteenth Street is a place of perpetual interruptions - a theater of deferred arrivals. Harmattan's GRID SCENES captures an hour of this spatial improvisation in its stylistically slowed down state- a somnambulist's Fourteenth Street where a large group of people barely move at all, traverse a diagonal trajectory. For Harmattan, this space of the urban grid is a performance space of repetitions, of duration, of daily detours. It is a place of return and reinvention, as people commute day in and day out on the same routes, stopping at the same points of encounter, reenacting familiar rituals of transit. This repetition is the space of the grid's improvisations with its infinitely varied gestures.