Rashid Johnson On His Bathhouse Performance of ‘The Dutchman’

The Dutchman, written by Baraka when he was still known as Leroi Jones, was originally staged in Greenwich Village in 1964. Its plot is seemingly simple: a white woman (Lula) approaches a Black man (Clay) on an empty New York City subway. Their interaction, filled with a toxic mix of flirtation and racial animus from Lula, unfurls over the course of the one act play. And in Johnson’s bathhouse rendition, the rising heat and terror of the plot mirrors the increasing brutality of the environment.

Johnson originally staged the play at the Bathhouse in 2013. Now, with a sprawling 9 month mid-career retrospective at The Guggenheim, Johnson had the opportunity to restage the performance for Performa over 5 nights (September 24-25) for small groups of attendees due to the Bathhouse's limited capacity.

“I really liked the idea that I could expose the audience to a position of comfort and discomfort simultaneously,” Rashid Johnson said over the phone the day following the run’s second performance. “[The bathhouse is] a place that people go to be comforted to some degree, but based on the amount of time that you spend [there] that comfort can become discomfort quite quickly. I wanted the audience to have that visceral experience.”

Beyond that, he frequents the Bathhouse often, telling PAPER that he regards it as “a place of prayer” and “sanctuary,” his words mirroring the title of his Guggenheim exhibition, A Poem for Deep Thinkers (named after a poem by Baraka of the same title).

The play’s restaging comes at a time when its themes of racism, political violence, and the politics of public space are taking on renewed resonance. Johnson, though, is clear that its relevance transcends our fraught and ever-fracturing politics. “The human condition and its complexity if interpreted well is timeless,” he says.

The sentiment is echoed by RoseLee Goldberg, Founder and Chief Curator of Performa: “Rashid Johnson’s Dutchman was disturbing and unforgettable when first produced by Performa in the heat of the Russian & Turkish baths for the Performa 2013 Biennial,” she says. “With its heightened sexuality, race baiting, and senseless violence, its restaging, almost twelve years later, is as powerful, and sadly, as relevant, as it ever was."

Of particular interest to Johnson is the demand the performance in the bathhouse places on the audience. “People are going to feel a certain amount of agency [watching the show,] because what they're being exposed to is so different from what they're accustomed to as [audience members],” he says. Indeed, people were leaving the sauna in the last act for both physical reasons and their visceral reaction to the text.

The play takes place in the context of this expansive period in Johnson’s career, with activations happening around his retrospective which is on view until January.

“I’m considering this time in my life with the retrospective as a way of unpacking all of my creative history. I'm just excited to unfurl for all these different ideas at the same time,” he says. On the question of how he’s balancing his many co-current artistic explorations during this hectic time, his response is clear: “Maybe it's the thing I've learned from the Trump administration: I'm just gonna flood the zone.”

Photography: Walter Wlodarczyk