The Gates: liminality and grief tourism in New York city, post 9/11 — and — The Lives of Animals: A play based on the novella by J. M. Coetzee

The simple act of walking Central Park, Ground Zero, and the city streets between in February, 2005, links the public spaces both discursively and performatively during the sixteen days that Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s installation The Gates held sway over New York City. The nature of public space, public art, the public sphere and the politics of mourning are examined through various theoretical lenses, and through the ways we perform and are performed for in public. “The Lives of Animals” is a script for a performance based on a Tanners Lecture given at Princeton University in 1997 by J.M. Coetzee on the subject of animal rights. The theatrical form, like the allegorical content of the lecture itself, problematizes the divide between man and animal, reason and passion