The xx has just finished a ten-day run, at the Park Avenue Armory, of a show with no name but a very specific purpose: to disorient you, bring you close, and then throw you back into the void.
I wrote about the first version of this half-hour show when it débuted, in 2013, at the Manchester International Festival. After being led underground in downtown Manchester for what felt like several blocks, sixty other audience members and I were deposited in a tiny room. We formed a single-file perimeter around a sunken stage so that every person was as close as possible to the band. The trio played on a lit stage that was divided into squares, a sort of melancholy remapping of the 2001 Odyssey club in “Saturday Night Fever.” The payoff moment was when the white fabric ceiling—a detail that you could easily miss and, wait, hang on, the walls were made of fabric, too—was sucked upward, revealing that we were in the shell of a concrete building that was being renovated. As the covering rose, bits of daylight poked down, and then the ceiling descended, resting lower than it had before and brushing the head of anyone six feet or taller. The xx’s eternal night resumed.
At the Armory, the band didn’t have the luxury of luring us to an unknown spot. We knew that we were in the Armory. But the director, Molly Hawkins, the creative designer, Tobias Rylander, and the lighting director, Michael Straun, pulled off a remarkable version of the Manchester show, with horizontal magic replacing the vertical. Led in through a side door, forty-five audience members were taken into the building through the basement. The stage was black this time, as the xx’s clothing always is. I guessed that we’d been funnelled into one of the small side rooms off the main space, Wade Thompson Drill Hall, which takes up fifty-five thousand square feet and seems (you’d think) like the inverse of the intimacy that the xx both summons and seeks.
As the show progressed, differences between the first and second versions emerged. Jamie xx was working with his hands and mallets in a large square of keyboards, samplers, and triggers. The singers, Romy Croft and Oliver Sims, were slightly less interactive, though Sims still uses one uncanny stage move, dragging the toe of his shoe behind him as he pivots, as if trawling a river for a lost item.
At the Armory, the creative team opted to add rather than to reduce, turning the fabric walls into screens. One moment, we were inside a series of nested boxes, like a lost piece of sixties Op art. Then the sides would flame with color. Instead of being pushed toward the xx’s private conversations, we were pulled between their world and something else, a space that was changing temperature rapidly. The serenity from Manchester had bled out, and dizziness had taken hold.
The big reveal was achieved by simply directing the lights outward, through the fabric. We were in Drill Hall, after all. Space spilled out around us, on every side, to the curved edges of walls hundreds of feet away. The Manchester version of the show left the audience at the bottom of an elevator shaft. At the Armory, we were hostages dropped into the dry expanse of a field, feeling smaller but entirely alert.
Photograph by Stephanie Berger.
