Between 17 and 21 September 2024, Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) presented NP, an exhibition by Sydney-born, Amsterdam-based artist Ivan Cheng. NP—an abbreviation of North Pole or No Problem—unfolded as three performances, each roughly an hour in duration. Made in collaboration with a group of Year 11 students from the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School (VCASS), the performances took place among an installation of Cheng’s video works, six garment-clad manikins, newly created props and documentation infrastructure (screens, cameras and cords). Curated by Pip Wallis, the performance exhibition continued MUMA’s ongoing inquiry into the role of performance in the gallery, which began in 2023 with Shelley Lasica’s WHEN I AM NOT THERE, and MUMA’s participation in the Precarious Movements research project.

At its most lofty, NP was a complex and layered examination of how much a work of performance can be altered before it becomes something else. It simultaneously interrogated the role that video and photographic documentation, the editing of this footage, and the audience play in the construction, evolution and framing of a performance. NP was also a collaborative adaptation and restaging of the controversial 1891 play Spring Awakening, by German playwright Frank Wedekind, which deals with the emergence of teenage desire and loss of childhood innocence.

Following a letter exchange between Cheng and the Year 11s, NP was developed during a two-week intensive, in which they co-produced props, scenography and medieval-core costumes, and Cheng presented the students with a toolkit for performing his work, inviting their edits and intervention. In this exchange, Cheng says he thought of himself as a Santa Claus-like figure, attempting to fulfill the students’ wishes by incorporating them into the work.

NP actively considered MUMA as a university museum and the gallery as a site for performance-making. It also experimented with conflating a performance’s rehearsal with its presentation. If it sounds like there was a lot going on, that’s because there was. There were even custom-made robots tracking along the floor. NP was overstimulating and intellectually dizzying, and throughout its three performances, I found myself fighting the urge to reduce Cheng to the metonym of genius.

Cheng described each performance as “the first and last time” it would ever be performed. There was no fixed vantage point, the audience roamed freely watching the action unfold. Cheng and the Year 11s moved in choreographed processions, orchestrated light audience participation, performed soliloquies and songs, and delivered lines down the barrel of the many devices documenting the work-in-progress. Throughout, Cheng controlled the performance’s theatrics and dramaturgy, setting up cameras, giving audience instructions and cueing MUMA staff to change the audio and lighting. There was no front and back of house, no delineation between performance and documentation or audience and performer. The lines were blurred and the work was inescapable.

Spring Awakening has been shut down and censored multiple times in its history, due to its traversing teenage sexuality, abuse, mental health, suicide and the imposition of power and control via institutional silencing. Whilst NP’s incarnation was heavily adapted by Cheng and included new texts written and performed by the Year 11s, it still dealt with meaty and at times uncomfortable subject matter that felt particularly apt in 2024.

Although I’m not ignorant to the fact that teenagers have sex and see the world’s atrocities live-streamed on TikTok, it was still unnerving to hear them monologue about their desires, freely use double-entendres, and recount in detail Malachi Ritscher’s 2006 self-immolation. As one student said in the second performance, “there’s supposed to be something sacred about children, you know.” To witness, even in a theatrical context, the quiet rage born of their rescinding innocence, was deeply affecting.

In my notes, I repeatedly referred to Cheng as a pied piper or puppeteer—Cheng prefers Santa—due in part to his grasp of the full arsenal of the work’s theatricality, but mainly due to the confidence and comfort he had imbued in the Year 11s. They moved about the galleries being intensely vulnerable in ways that felt menacing and insouciant at times and tender at others. At one stage a student said, “you love us, you fear us,” and this rang true.

However—and this is something NP’s conceptual logic reinforces—my account, let’s call it ‘Anador’s Edit’, doesn’t necessarily have a great deal of fidelity. It’s what I experienced, a partial document, and thus cannot convey the entirety of what transpired. Much like how an image of a live performance, circulated online, loses some of what it attempts to translate to digital compression, so too does language fail to paint a performance’s full picture. This is the genius of NP, it makes the audience consider their receivership of the work, rather than simply taking the documentary impulse for granted. In the end, I couldn’t help but use the metonym.

NP
Ivan Cheng
Monash University Museum of Art
17—21 September