Send in the Clowns took place during Performa 15 in November 2015 at The Players Club (The Actors Club), New York, as part of a live, durational programme orchestrated by Raimundas Malašauskas and produced by Mimi Chiahemen. Conceived as a plotless, home-made musical—moving from Sondheim to Satie, Varnelis and Han Gyeol Lie—the event unfolded somewhere between a dream and a rehearsal, between laughter and afterthought. Neither performance nor concert in a conventional sense, it operated as an open, shifting situation that might at any moment go ping or abracadabra.
The gathering brought together Han Gyeol Lie, Alix Eynaudi, Elizabeth Ward, Sandra Straukaite, Keyon Gaskin, SERAFINE1369, Julija Frodina, Marcos Lutyens, and Gabriel Lester, with the space held by Defne Ayas. Within this fluid constellation, Marcos Lutyens participated through a series of live interventions, appearing dressed in clothing by Sandra Straukaite and engaging visitors in inductive journeys and one-to-one interactions. Drawing on techniques of guided attention, suggestion, and embodied imagination, these encounters invited participants into altered perceptual states embedded within the social and psychic fabric of the evening.
Lutyens’s contribution functioned less as a discrete performance than as a sequence of lived exchanges, woven into the collective dramaturgy of the event and resonant with Malašauskas’s orchestration of intimacy, ambiguity, and shared imaginative space. The project was realised in collaboration with Performa NYC and The Players Club, with support from Galerie Alberta Pane.