Art Happens

World premiere
4 – 6 September 2025
Festival d’Automne à Paris

During the summer of 2025, the project Welcome to Asbestos Hall, hosted by Kunstenfestivaldesarts and Holland Festival, was a way for choreographer Trajal Harrell to end his Hijikata period of works which began in 2013 with Used Abused and Hung Out to Dry at MoMA. This period yielded important works such as The Koln Concert, Monkey off my Back or the Cat’s Meow, Dancer of the Year, Deathbed, Maggie the Cat, and The Romeo among others, but Harrell wanted to make smaller pieces that could fit in different contexts: galleries, off stage rooms, or stage-on-stage situations. “Fast and dirty” as he called it, became an ethos inspired by the legendary studio of Tatsumi Hijikata, ironically named “Asbestos Hall”.

Five pieces varying in length from fifteen to sixty minutes were created alongside a pop-up store, a short film, and various visual material. These pieces and artifacts became the collection.

𝘼𝙧𝙚𝙣𝙖 loosely based on the only two characters, the dealer and the client, in the play In the Solitude of the Cottonfields by Bernard-Marie Koltes.

𝘼 𝙂𝙝𝙤𝙨𝙩 𝘽𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙩 takes a spin with the idea of the modernist black and white ballet as performed by ghosts.

𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙋𝙤𝙬𝙙𝙚𝙧 𝙍𝙤𝙤𝙢𝙨 A series of different soloists each perform a voyeuristic trip through a diptych of light and dark.

𝙁𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝙁𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙙𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙁𝙞𝙫𝙚 𝘼𝙘𝙩𝙨 A duet for three performers – Trajal Harrell, Songhay Toldon, and Perle Palombe – inspired by The Five Friends exhibition of work by Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Merce Cunningham, and John Cage.

𝙀𝙙𝙪𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙞𝙣 𝙏𝙖𝙢𝙗𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨 𝙤𝙧 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝘾𝙚𝙡𝙚𝙗𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙤𝙛 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙂𝙞𝙧𝙡 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙙 A development of Tambourines (2024) which itself was a reaction to the historical novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850) by Nathaniel Hawthorne. A Puritan re-evaluation of passion and the role of women as a contemporary mirror of our own time.