ARTnews Intern Ayeshia Brown reports from a van someplace in Brooklyn, where she and five other teens participated in an Oliver Herring performance:
To be quite honest going into this I had no idea what I was in for–I just knew that wearing any clothing item that I really valued was not an option. From seeing Oliver’s past work I figured it was gonna be an extremely messy day. But my experience was nothing of the sort. It was still pretty wild though! Not to mention that on the actual day of filming it was probably the rainiest day in that entire week. If you could’ve seen what I looked like trying to get to the location I swear any person in their right mind would have just turned back around. But instead I battled the wind and rain with my umbrella, and there were even moments where I was battling the wind and rain for my umbrella. So when I say I risked my life for this I really mean it, but in the end it was totally all worth it.
Once I got there it was like a sigh of relief and then it was straight to work. For the entire day Oliver shot and filmed me along with six other individuals in the tiniest van ever. Shooting was like creating our very own thunderstorm, Oliver had us smashing and bumping into each other and most of the times the windows. There was even a point where I had to make use of what was left of my acrobatic skills–most of which were still lost in my seven-year-old experiences–to climb over the human bridges that my cast members had to transform into, on the account that Oliver (along with them) thought that it would make for an interesting shot. Which left me with the most aches and bruises from that day being that my only support were the back and hands of these five young men. That was probably the closest I would ever get to crowd surfing. Click here to read more from Niborama.
