COVID Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco

We are pleased to welcome renowned performance artist, painter, author, activist, educator, and long-time friend of Hallwalls Karen Finley back to Buffalo after an absence of seven years, performing her hit Off Off Broadway show Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco, which has been extended several times since it opened in midtown Manhattan early last spring. Not only has Hallwalls presented practically every one of Karen’s shows of the past four decades (most recently her 2016 Unicorn Gratitude Mystery), but it was at Hallwalls on November 10, 1982 that she made her world professional debut after graduating from art school, thanks to the invitation of Hallwalls then performance art curator Tony Billoni. That first show held the record for longest title (I Like the Dwarf on the Table When I Give Him Head), until the new one, which beats it by a few letters!

Here's what critic Elizabeth Vincentelli of the New York Times wrote in her review of the show back on April 11, 2023): “Restlessness, fear, despair, loneliness, exhaustion, worry, anomie: Remembering the peak of the pandemic in NYC, performance artist Karen Finley takes the audience through a maelstrom of feelings in her new solo show, Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco. That, of course, is after her grand entrance: wearing a white hazmat jumpsuit and a surgical mask zhuzhed-up with sequined fringe, she sashayed through the Laurie Beechman Theater to a mix of the disco classic ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’ and a chorus of pot-banging like the one that cheered frontline workers in 2020. Yep, she’s still got it.

“Even though she has long ago abandoned the shock tactics that made her a habituée in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Finley, who is also a poet and visual artist, remains as unwieldy and messy as ever. A scene in which she enacts a vintage Betty Crocker commercial by trying out a ‘recipe’ onstage, mixing it in a plastic bucket, has an old-school sloppy, feral energy. At a time when the tiniest Off Off Broadway shows can have a soulless professionalism, this rawness feels like a jolt.

“Also unchanged are Finley’s obsessions: with art as salvation, with the incantatory power of words, with the issue of agency over our bodies, and with our often misguided, often awkward attempts to communicate with other humans. You can see how she would have a field day tackling an epidemic that kept New York residents at home and allowed communication only through masks or video calls.…

“The show is not as corrosive as Unicorn Gratitude Mystery, in which Finley covered politics a few months before the 2016 presidential election, but it is just as angry. Because if one thing has not dulled over the years, it’s her rage—at all those deaths in the early days of the pandemic, a city in agony, the breakdown of social rules and responsibilities. In a hallucinatory segment, Finley instructs people to put on a mask or, if they have one on, to at least wear it correctly. ‘I’m saying it nicely,’ she insists. Sure, if ‘nicely’ means exuding furor. A few beats later, Finley boogies to ‘Disco Inferno’ while a video of men dancing in a club plays behind her. In one canny move, she ties together generations of deaths in New York caused by AIDS and the coronavirus, with a reference to the falling twin towers quick enough that it doesn’t feel exploitative but still pierces the heart. Like the most inspiring religious services, Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco ends on an optimistic note, with Finley pivoting from shock and horror at the lost lives, access, and control over one’s body into hope—for change, peace, courage, love. And art. Always art.”


Karen Finley at Hallwalls, 1982–2016.