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By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on September 17, 2025
Trajal Harrell. Photo: Stephanie Berger
Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow
Running through September 20 at the Park Avenue Armory
Creation, Choreography & Direction: Trajal Harrel
Company: Frances Chiaverini, Sultan Çoban, Vânia Doutel Vaz, Maria Ferreira Silva, Marie Goyette, Challenge Gumbodete, Trajal Harrell, Tabita Johannes, New Kyd, Thibault Lac, Christopher Matthews, Jeremy Nedd, Nasheeka Nedsreal, Perle Palombe, Maximilian Reichert, Stephen Thompson, Songhay Toldon, Ondrej Vidlar
Costume Design: Trajal Harrell
Lighting Design: Stéfane Perraud
Scenic Design: Trajal Harrell, Erik Flatmo
Sound Design: Trajal Harrell, Asma Maroof
Dramaturgy: Laura Paetau, Tobias Staab
Trajal Harrell is a master of layers. In the North American premiere of his Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at the Park Avenue Armory, the choreographer and director wields unruly assemblages of movement, sound, design, and concept with a deft and daring hand. Created in 2021 during his five-year tenure as artistic director of Schauspielhaus Zürich, the work voices the generative confluences and frictions among Harrell’s wide-ranging catalog of cultural and historical influences. In the destabilized world of “Monkey,” nothing is singular and everything is contingent; the double idiom of its title points to the throwing off of burdens to revel in the sublime.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
Over nearly two hours, a meandering playlist activates sensitive, boisterous bodies draped in an ever-changing array of garments (in addition to choreography and direction, Harrell is co-credited for costume, scenic, and sound design). The work’s exhaustive intent verges on exhausting, but for its measured dramatic pacing and the exhilarating humanity of its performers.
Harrell’s storytelling speculates, reimagines, and confabulates across a dizzying array of formal and aesthetic archives, which each body — Harrell’s included — metabolizes into a consummate offering of self with the twofold potential to particularize and universalize the experience of a world made of countless self-contained yet infinitely permeable worlds.
Nasheeka Nedsreal in Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
Modeled on a high-fashion runway show, Harrell transforms the cavernous Armory Drill Hall into a space at once monumental and intimate, with seating risers running the length of the performance arena on opposite sides — we face each other as we face the stage, our faces lit from below by the reflection of the often starkly uniform flood of light. The huge rectangle of Mondrian-inspired floor serves as a centerpiece, its sleek lines and geometric blocks of primary colors set with symmetrical banks of chunky white couches and interrupted at its center by a domestic tableau: organic fiber floor, carpet runner, and large marble table perched atop a spill of children’s toys. A small balloon in the shape of a horse floats on dangling legs made of streamers, reined to the table by a thin ribbon. These touches serve as a visual reminder: don’t take the mess too seriously, and remember always what it means to play.
Jeremy Nedd in Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
And oh, what reckless, delectable play ensues. By way of introduction, Harrell addresses the audience in a fictionalized conversation with Vogue editor Chloe Malle, musing on belonging in the worlds of fashion and performance; he concludes frankly, ”If you live, sometimes you have to dance.”
And oh, what dancing. Vogue, butoh, and postmodern dance ground “Monkey”’s movement language as clear yet inseparable influences, woven together by the simplest (and richest) of motifs: walking. Activated by a constant stream of walkers, the stage perimeter sustains an elastic visual thread strung with an infinite variety of glittering baubles and beads. Walkers bounce and glide as our eyes scan and rescan their circulating trajectories (this constant, active looking unconsciously eases the work’s durational demand). Hips jaunt and shoulders roll, chins high and eyes forward: the rhythmic catwalk strut in high heels and elegant dress, the swagger in exaggerated angles perched on eloquent bare feet on high demi-pointe (the high heel remains an invariable presence, even when invisible), the vertiginous stumble of a determined drunk in a crooked dress, the self-conscious shuffle of a homebody in robe and slippers. As the performers stride in and out of our visual field, the limitless language of walking points to limitless ways of being.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
With the perimeter firmly established, the center’s activation feels like a transgression. Walkers pivot at right angles to face us in turn, meeting our eyes to close the surprisingly scant distance between us. A walk morphs into a float, a drop, a boogie, a crisis. Groups periodically coalesce in communal rituals: rotating leaders orchestrate gestural phrases of frank, almost balletic grace, edged with the ornate cursives of vogue and punctuated by the visceral distortions of butoh. Mirrorings traverse telescoping distances and take on a life of their own, spectacular and authentic, beautiful and strange. Each in their own dream, the eighteen performers venture deeply into worlds of interiority and sustain moments of intimate recognition and raucous collectivity. Their constant costume changes evoke growth through the passage of time in an ever-present process of layering and shedding and rearranging disparate elements of color, texture, style, era, form, and function. They are bolstered by an equally dynamic sonic panoply: the iconic voices of Nina Simone, Joan Armatrading, and Earth, Wind & Fire interspersed with Steve Reich’s hypnotic looping minimalism, acoustic singer-songwriter confessions from Imani Uzuri, Laura Nyro, and Mia Doi Todd, and open, picturesque fields of melodic piano by Debussy and Chabrier.
Harrell’s larger message is baked into his material — it’s impossible to discuss any element in isolation — such that any overt gesture becomes subsumed into the power of his multivalent swirl. One such gesture is a live reading of the Declaration of Independence by several performers (printed copies were distributed among the audience during the reading). This charged and politically timely act becomes literally and figuratively swept up in the larger action: an industrial fan blows a chaos of papers through a chaos of bodies amid a rising chaos of sound, such that the Declaration’s words just barely breach the surface as desperate punctuation. By its end, we find the bodies before us striding and abiding in rhythmic joy, their grounded feet, restless torsos, and freewheeling arms uncontained and uncontainably liberated.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
They continue their journey unabated, focusing into slow and sinuous passages, eyes beckoning us to look. Frances Chiaverini’s articulate fingers pluck at the air and at the heart, Stephen Thompson’s face expresses a world of experiences, Jeremy Nedd twists and floats his agile form through subtle syncopations, and Harrell dips in and out of the action with resplendently self-contained solos. The central table becomes perch, pedestal, soapbox, and vantage point as each performer mounts the rarefied expanse to pose and preen, draped in enormous plush stoles in abstractly organic shapes. As the lights begin to dim, they erupt into a cacophonous unison as mirrored pairs traverse the stage in a folk dance of their own making, a ritual both ancient and contemporary. Even as they retreat from our vision, their images remain, burned brightly into our retinal and sensory memories.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey off My Back or The Cat’s Meow at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger
All through this epic journey, each performer evolves as an individual, though they are never alone: perennially circled by the world at their periphery, by the ever-shifting constancy of the walk, the rhythm, the pulse of life. Inked in florid script or stamped in block letters, their bodies spell out the trappings of a rebellious, resolute modernity. Swathed in a rainbow of bathrobes, they pace the perimeter in a slow and methodical series of individual bows. In this, their final lap of the evening, we see them each in all their defiant constancy, transformed.
