On Saturday evening, an actor took the hay-strewn stage at the 159 Bleecker Street, site of the 2012 Brucennial, the regular alternative to the Whitney Biennial run by the Brooklyn artists’ collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. “I wanna thank all the artists for participating in the most important group show ever in history,” he told the hundred or so audience members gathered for the event. What followed was not exactly a very important work of theater, but it was a very funny and surprisingly catchy 45-minute attack on the corporatization of the art world — specifically art education — and a barely disguised allegory of the Cooper Union’s current financial turmoil, which has the East Village college contemplating charging tuition for the first time in its 150 year history.
In its essence, the piece was a burlesque of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." The scrappy production, with clunky props made out of foam and a modular set design composed of rectangular bales of hay, had a cast of five actors alternately playing pigs, chickens, and dogs.
As the house lights went down the only remaining light came from a giant foam pig head hung above the stage, its DIY-Tony Oursler-esque video face staring down ominously at the audience as it narrated the musical’s first two scenes in a computer-generated voice. The setting, we were told, was Bruce High Quality Foundation University (a stand-in for Cooper Union), and the action centered on the school's board of directors — represented by chickens — and its graduating class of students, represented by pigs. While the latter optimistically set off to make it in the art world, the former grappled with their tuition-free school’s faltering finances.
Amid musical numbers like "It's Not Easy Being Pink" and flurries of quick-fire animal puns, the remedy to save the once-independent school from corporate takeover — by a group of money-hungry dogs introduced to the tune of Snoop Dogg's "What’s My Name?" — was to start a brand new institution. Like the real-life BHQF, which famously has founded a free alternative university, the play's artist-pigs launched their own university, "Pigs Organized 'Round Kunst,'" or PORKU. The whole spectacle concluded with the student-professors of PORKU singing in a rousing chorus: "We only want to free your mind!"
What it (deliberately) lacked in polish, the Brucennial's "Animal Farm" compensated for with good humor and a handful of great, Christopher Guest-meets-William Powhida musical numbers, making it a slacker art-school work of political performance. You couldn't help but think that the message was a bit muddled though: The production posited founders of a new non-traditional school as its heroes, a post-show announcement reiterated the urgency of keeping the Cooper Union free. The man who had the production’s two light switches urged spectators to visit FreeCooperUnion.com and do everything in their power to keep the school from following the example of the onstage BHQFU.