Melting Point by NON GRATA + GUERRILLA THEATER + ANARKOARTLAB
Washington Square Park - NY 2025 - January
Melting Point
The performance reflects on the growing divide between ideologies, drawing attention to how the conflict between these two sides may seem glaring but ultimately leads to similar outcomes—consolidation of power, corruption, and institutional control. The notion that both sides “play the same game” is symbolized through mirrored elements that highlight their shared complicity in maintaining an authoritarian structure, despite their apparent differences.
The act of proposing the beheading of all authorities becomes a metaphor for rejecting all hierarchical systems, particularly political figures and structures that perpetuate division. The beheading of authority questions the very essence of power and control.
The president’s head on a soccer ball, being tossed around by performers and audience members, creates an act of “playing” with this head that serves as both a liberation and a critique, where figures of power are reduced to powerless objects. This challenges the audience to rethink their notions of authority, power, and respect. Participants’ interactions with the heads range from mockery to destruction, symbolizing the act of dismantling systems of power Playing soccer with the head of "authority" during the performance symbolizes the impermanence of power and the eventual collapse of oppressive political ideologies.
Audience participation is the key element in this performance. Each person is given the opportunity to interact with and “break” the head, symbolizing a collective rejection of authoritarianism. In this case, the audience is not merely a passive observer but an active participant in the political commentary of the performance.
The title Melting Point also suggests a metaphor for the collapse of structures. In chemistry, a melting point refers to the temperature at which a substance changes from solid to liquid. This may symbolize the transformation of hardened political ideologies into something more fluid, more dynamic, and possibly more cooperative. It may reflect the idea that the tensions politics have reached a boiling point, where something must give way to a new form or reality.
This physical transformation serves as a visual metaphor for the transient and decaying nature of power structures. The performance includes discordant sounds—such as loud, aggressive political speeches or chaotic, fragmented noises—playing in the background, heightening the sense of tension and conflict. The performers move in exaggerated, almost grotesque ways, playing on the absurdity of political systems. Their movements are ceremonial, perhaps suggesting both violence and the ritual of overthrowing power.
At its core, Melting Point critiques the two sides of American politics, presenting both sides as equally complicit in the larger system of oppression.
Empowerment through the dismantling of authority: By proposing the decapitation of all authority figures and allowing the audience to physically interact with these symbols, the performance seeks to empower the audience to take control of the narrative and dismantle authoritarian structures.
Ultimately, Melting Point is an intense and visceral commentary on the dangers of control, hierarchy, and the need for collective transformation. It is a call to question authority, break down power structures, and reclaim agency.
Soccer with the President’s Head
A performance-ritual of profanation and freedom
At sunset on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro, the ball rolls lightly beneath the open sky. Flip-flops become goalposts, sand transforms into a field, and time seems suspended between laughter, bare footsteps, and the sound of the sea. Improvisation becomes rule; the body finds breath in the dance of the game. The Brazilian pelada — an impromptu, joyous soccer match without referees or formal rules — emerges as an act of communion. Meanwhile, on the opposite hemisphere, a starkly different game unfolds — one devoid of lightness. With Trump’s return to the presidency, the world’s political landscape appears hardened. Borders solidify into walls, and the rhetoric of difference escalates into exclusion.
In response to the monstrous spectacle of necropolitical tyranny, the New York–based art collective AnarkoArtLab enacts a radical performance where the severed head of the president becomes the ball — transforming a game of soccer into a rite of subversion. This performance-ritual unfolds at the liminal space between play and brutality, laughter and revolt — a moment where the “soccer field” is reimagined as a liberated territory. The decapitated trophy is the symbolic crown of a system that, under Trump, unabashedly exposed its most violent features: the glorification of toxic masculinity, the official legitimization of white supremacy, the systematic assault on immigrants, Indigenous peoples, women, and LGBTQIA+ communities, alongside the fetishization of guns and barriers.
Kicking this head becomes a ritual of exorcism and mockery aimed at a sovereignty that survives incarnated in grotesque figures. Far from a mere rejection of the American state, the act transcends into devouring — a radical, anthropophagic rite of irreverence. Trump’s rhetoric, steeped in hatred, celebration of brute force, institutionalized racism, and predatory capitalism, does not simply personify a disconnected tyrant; he embodies the very structures that wound and shape us. Consuming the enemy means incorporating it to disarm; disfiguring it to reconfigure.
On the other hand, mockery desecrates the image of domination and rejects its governing logic. This radical act affirms the communal body, the ludic impulse, desire, and dissidence as valid forms of political life. Humor emerges as strategy, disarming authority by exposing its absurdities and contradictions, transforming fear into laughter and silencing silence through speech. People move, dance, and laugh. In its liberating function, laughter reveals the potential for an embodied liberty, free from repression — a space where there is a fleeting sensation of a new mode of existence grounded in emancipation and the affirmation of life. Joy, in this context, is insurrection with responsibility: the responsibility to not perpetuate pain, to avoid replicating the violences resisted, and to foster spaces where life becomes livable for all. There is no future in reliving suffering, but there is one in celebrating togetherness. Thus, through this healing movement, the head that once symbolized power now rolls across the ground like a toy — returned to the earth, spinning beneath the feet of those who never ceased to dance.
By Natasha Marzliak