Karen Finley Performs ‘COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco’
In her recent show at Columbia, the artist issued a cry for help and a call for action.
Renowned visual and performance artist Karen Finley took the stage at the Lenfest Center for the Arts on a recent evening, for a rendition of her COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco. The one-night-only event was timed to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, and the release of Finley’s accompanying book of poems.
The book’s publication is something of a full circle moment for Finley. Originally performed in 2023 at the Laurie Beechman Theatre in Manhattan, Finley’s pandemic manifesto actually began on the page. “It started as writing rather than the performance,” said Finley, “a series of poems.”
Since moving to New York in the early 1980s, Finley’s art has spanned several mediums, and been celebrated at such venues as Lincoln Center, Art Basel Miami Beach, the Barbican in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her work made national headlines in the 1990s as part of the NEA Four, the named plaintiff in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court (National Endowment for the Arts v. Finley). The court ruled in favor of the NEA’s decision-making process. Finley is now a professor of arts at New York University, and COVID Vortex is her tenth book.
Gauzy Curtains, Chaos, and Glitter
Wearing a full hazmat suit, Finley entered the Lenfest theater behind a sold-out audience, descending from the wings onto a stage framed by gauzy curtains. A wardrobe of glitter and chaos featured prominently stage right, promising the many moods and costume changes to come in the taut, 90-minute solo show. With an all-or-nothing fervor, Finley began rattling off poems in a manic monologue, reading from a music stand in another nod to the DIY aesthetic adopted out of necessity during the pandemic.
Backed by a screen projecting everything from dance parties to (the titular) kittens, plus a series of visual art pieces decrying pandemic life, Finley’s tour de force delivered on every promise of its seven-word title. The rapidly evolving video display became another way to revisit lockdown culture. “It was such a screen situation,” Finley recalled. “We were watching everything all the time.” The projected art images were also made by Finley, many of them originally uploaded to social media during the pandemic.
Key in crafting the environment of outward introspection was set designer Violet Overn, who built on Finley’s poetry and performance in a seamless confluence of visions. In addition to masterminding the audience-facing wardrobe and spectral curtains, Overn edited the videos that played during the show. Among them was footage of New Yorkers banging pots and making noise outside their apartments at 7 pm, a daily ritual during the pandemic in appreciation of front-line workers. Before Finley even made her entrance at Lenfest, the clips played onto the transparent curtains like an eerie overture. “It just kind of added another element,” said Finley of the final staging. “It felt haunted, there's a feeling of a memory.”
For all of the show’s designed disarray, Finley’s command of the room was never in question. Presence was her superpower, and the audience was under her spell. This was perhaps most apparent during a lengthy read-along, in which Finley led attendees in a chorus of idiosyncratic pairings printed on colorful bulletins. Imagine 99 people dead-toning “piggy + kitty” or “squirrel + peacock.” Moving from playful to prophetic with the ease of an unapologetic costume change—“almost too many costume changes,” said Finley—the night unfurled like a one-woman doomscroll with a deadly sense of humor.
Hope and Grief at the Same Time
For Finley, the production is as relevant today as it was when she began crafting it during the heart of lockdown, a connection that carries over not only to the present moment, but also reaches into the past. “We all have our own connections to illness, to the body, to vulnerability,” she said. “One grief is connected to another grief.”
A cry for help and a call for action, the performance and poems transitioned deftly from darkest hour to an ingrained sense of hope and renewal. “That's part of the artist’s job,” said Finley. “That's not to be denying that lives are ruined. Horrors happen.”
“It's holding these multiple perspectives at once,” she continued. “You can [have] hope and sorrow, hope and grief at the same time. And that's what I invite.”
Her invitation was present from the moment she entered the theater—in every dance, every cry, every costume change—right up to the final bow. The removing of a barrier between audience and art-maker. A commitment to moving forward. Where do we go from here? Unclear, but we’ll do it together, she says.
Andrew Bryan Scott is graduating from School of the Arts in 2025 with an MFA in fiction writing.