What makes a house a home? And what is an American home? Planted dead center on the stage in “This House Is Not a Home,” a slippery, ever-changing work by Nile Harris, is a house — a bounce house. But it’s more than just a bouncy toy.
It’s at the heart of a web of ideas that touch national politics, arts funding and New York’s local scene—the tiny slice of Lower Manhattan known as Dimes Square. You get a sense of where Harris stands on this piece of geography: In “This House,” there’s a battle. Over a vapor.
Opening on Saturday as part of the Under the Radar festival, “This House” – sad and noisy, dark but sometimes extremely funny – will be repeats at Abrons Arts Center, where he first performed with Ping Chong and Company last summer. (Harris is a member of Ping Chong’s artistic leadership team.)
A provocative look at politics and race, “This House” is a critique of the American experience that explores the intersections of modern liberalism, the attack on the US Capitol, and benevolent nonprofit arts institutions. It gets hectic. Will the bounce house survive this uprising?
The idea for what became the project began in the summer of 2020 when Harris, 28, and his friend, interdisciplinary artist Trevor Bazile, began fantasizing about a bounce house. It reminded them of the Capitol Building, Harris said, but it could also represent any institution — and then morph back into “a pre-adolescent meme.”
Harris began envisioning a series of events that could incorporate a bounce house: “We should go to a George Floyd protest with a bouncy castle,” he said of one idea, “and have people jump for Black Lives ?”
The bounce house idea was put on the back burner until 2021, when Bazile became director of the New People’s Cinema Club, a New York film festival funded in part by venture capitalist Peter Thiel, a financial backer of Trump-aligned candidates. . “Trevor had a very clear view all around, like, it doesn’t matter what hand feeds you – everything is bad,” Harris recalled. “There is no clean money.”
“With that Peter Thiel money,” he added, “we bought a bouncy castle because it’s been on our bucket list forever.”
As part of that year’s film festival, Harris and Basile threw a bounce house party in a Dimes Square loft. But just two days after the festival closed, Bazile, who was 25, died suddenly. (Harris declined to elaborate on why.) While “This House” is a running commentary — aural, spoken, choreographic — on many issues, it is, at its core, a meditation on grief.
It is also an extension of a manifesto, released by Harris and Bazile as a Google Doc, about an imaginary board meeting. The manifesto, a maze of hyperlinks, asks questions like: “Do you like black voices or just voices that say what you want to hear?” “Will you wear your Telfar bag to the race?”
Throughout “This House,” Harris appears in disguises, including Woody from “Toy Story” and a gingerbread character he calls Timmy, whose face is fixed in a smile. “Maybe there’s some commentary there about Blackness and Black life, but it’s a smiley face,” he said. “It’s affordable.”
Dyer Rhoads, the production’s dramaturg and Scene designer, has created a vibrant ensemble that brings to life a universe of primary colors, where paintings, plastic and, of course, the bounce house, act as a larger-than-life diorama. But because “This House” reacts to the events of the moment, it won’t be the same show it was last summer.
“I always say it’s 60 percent set and 40 percent improv,” Harris said of the show, which is informed by world events and uses improvisation, including audience interactions. “It’s responsive to current affairs, it’s responsive to the circumstances that have been set. And we’re in a very different situation in the world than we were six months ago.”
Improvisation means everything to Harris, who added: “How I understand it is a body moving and playing in response to what’s happening in the room at the moment.”
“This House” features the performance artist Crackhead Barney employs bold crowd of work; and the dancer Malcolm-x Betts, whose unfolding, out-of-body improvisations lend a vivid vulnerability to an increasingly twitchy stage world. For Harris, the play is a play. But the “theatrical,” he said, “is people. The play is about me, Malcolm and Barney and our thoughts on the world.”
Born and raised in Miami, Harris was a serious theater student growing up. She attended the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, along with Rhoads, and graduated with a BFA in acting. “I’m an actor for better or for worse,” he said. “I don’t know what I am.”
In fact, you get the feeling that he knows — or at least that through the art, he understands. Harris has been creating shows since his teenage years. After moving to New York in 2017, he discovered the experimental dance world downtown and began to shape workshop with choreographer Sidra Bell. “It really opened my brain,” she said of her improvisational approach. “If I have any dance training, that’s a benchmark.”
He also studied clowning: “A lot of how I understand my relationship with the audience is through the concept of the clown,” he said. “There can be laughter, there can be costume, there can be physicality.”
Creating the physical approach to Betts’ movement in “This House” began when the pair talked about childhood memories. Betts said it was like the bounce house represented the children’s ghosts.
Betts’ improvisations are rooted in his movement backgrounds – Black club house dance, fashion, West African dance. “Dance is very physical,” she said. “Memories move within me, and memory can also cause you to go to a place you don’t expect to go. It is activated in a way that allows it to unlock something new.”
Even as Harris calls “This House” a play or even an opera — the sound design is an important element, especially the way vocal amplification is incorporated — he’s thinking a lot about body language. He doesn’t consider himself a dancer, though he has performed as a dancer, and dance is an ongoing practice for him, he said, “within my larger theatrical concerns and beliefs.”
“I love dancers,” she said. “I hang out with dancers, I’m in this community of people. There’s just something about this community of artists that really just excites. If you can commit to appreciating impenetrable things that barely exist and pour your whole heart into it? Of So it doesn’t shine, it is So not sexy. Simply put, commitment is work. And that is very important.”
This also relates to something Rhoads, the playwright, said about “This House”: “In a lot of ways, it ends up being about the risks we take for art.”
And Harris is open to risk. Big. “Do you want to know my dream?” he said. “I really want to create and direct a pop star concert. It’s not narrative – it’s associative, sound-based, image-based and dance-based.”
He said he was thinking of a Doja Cat – someone who would own him, someone who would appreciate his affinity for creating interludes with weird little funny memes. “I want to work with scale,” Harris said. “There are no opportunities for emerging artists or artists in New York to work with scale. By hell or high water, I I will.”