A Pilgrim's Progress through the Angel Project

Abstract

The car deposited me on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island near a crumbling gothic castle suffocated by ivy; it could have been Miss Havisham’s house but was in fact a smallpox hospital. This is where the Angel Project, the centerpiece of Lincoln Center Festival 2003, began. It was a suitably ghostly and serene beginning, just a tiny sidestep from normal New York life but one that took the audience into an unfamiliar, plaintive parallel city. Warner has done something like this before, in a derelict hotel in London in 1999 and in various buildings in Perth, Australia, a year later. Audience members become participants in a performance that uses all the city as a stage. Warner sketches a trail between abandoned buildings and intervenes in those empty, yet pregnant spaces to suggest a recent angelic presence. Occasionally visitors may encounter an angel directly. There were reports from Perth of solitary pilgrims taking 12 hours to complete the trail; along the way they were apparently provoked to contemplate their own divinity—or otherwise—and the fallen state of the city.