Monica Mirabile and Sigrid Lauren. Photos courtesy of Whitney Mallett.
FlucT is back. After five years off, Monica Mirabile and Sigrid Lauren have resurrected their glitched-out, coochie-forward act, probing the uneasy territory between power and care. Tough on the Tongue , a new show at OCDChinatown running through January 2027, brings the duo back with an ambitious installation of sculpture and video, alongside a series of live performances. On opening night, visitors climbed four flights of stairs to reach OCDChinatown ’s new loft space, just north of Canal Street. The entry opened onto an island countertop turned into a stage with two dancers spotlit on top. One brunette, the other blonde, they were Mirabile and Lauren doppelgängers, thrashing and crashing through choreography the pair first performed a decade ago. Deeper into the venue, a cavernous walk-in shower housed four divas, naked except for thongs and high heels. Performing simple gestures in self-contained loops, they were seemingly oblivious to the eyes on them. Elsewhere, video installations forced you onto your hands and knees to watch. The sensory overload was deliberate, a commentary on scroll culture and part of the pair’s ongoing project to interrupt and expose technocapitalist brainwashing. FlucT’s overarching goal is for the two women to carve out a new way of relating to each other, processing and pushing back against the forces that distort perceptions and lock us into violent, unhealthy dynamics. While the opening’s emotional whirlwind was still fresh, I caught the duo to talk about their psychedelic, cathartic reset.
WHITNEY MALLETT: So how are you feeling since the opening?
MONICA MIRABILE: Well, neither one of us has gotten a chance to breathe really.
SIGRID LAUREN: There’s a big sense of relief just because we’ve been working all day and night for many weeks.
MALLETT: This is a first for you to have other people perform the work? You started just the two of you. Then the performances grew to have these bigger casts but still you were always performing?
MIRABILE: Right. We were always a part of it.
LAUREN: Me and Monica have been on a performance hiatus for five years.
MIRABILE: We couldn’t touch it for a while. The break was emotional. Collaborations are always wild. But part of getting into this show was looking into the archives. And looking into those archives was so exciting and fun and emotional, and gave fodder to the idea of choreographing people other than ourselves. There’s more that goes into that, that has to do with legacy and body acknowledgement. Healing the body. Not wanting to do the same things we did back then because we were just different physically and we cared about different things.
LAUREN: Our collaboration has been almost 15 years. At one point, we almost got married. We have these “paradise” matching tattoos on our wedding ring fingers. So in that deep interpersonal entanglement, FlucT was a passion project and then it became a part-time job, a full-time job. The artists having these administrator roles. Having to create the performance. Do all the things. The dynamics change. The responsibilities change.
MALLETT: Like if you kept taking FlucT commissions, your friendship might not have stayed strong?
LAUREN: And the work wouldn’t be authentic. Authentic is a challenging word, but real, in the sense of diving into power dynamics, care, support.
MIRABILE: The real fruit of the work is relational dynamics that are about reflecting the culture and also supporting each other physically, emotionally, intellectually, and otherwise. That was all being diminished because we were just hitting these deadlines.
LAUREN: And there might have been a little bit of growing insanity in parts of me, or perhaps her. I can’t speak for her.
MIRABILE: Of course! Me too. I got a little crazy.
MALLETT: The soundtrack is a very important part of FlucT. These jarring—
MALLETT: One of the samples Thursday was this audio clip “fetal chair, fetal chair.” But there was another one that was very emotional music.
MIRABILE: When they were slow-motion eating sandwiches?
MALLETT: Yeah! Every time that happened, I was about to cry, and then the shift would kind of save me from getting too sappy. I had a pretty strong emotional reaction watching these younger women who look like you two, with the same hair, perform your choreography. I can’t imagine how emotional it must have been for you.
LAUREN: I could almost tear up and cry now. Also, because there’s a lot of violence in the way we perform, I did try to encourage the performers not to hurt themselves. There were some parts of the choreography I was like, you’re not going to just drop your body from a shoulder stand onto your hip because I know that I now have ongoing physical issues that I need to attend to because I would do that.
MIRABILE: There’s so much more we’re aware of now. We can choreograph them doing what we did safer.
LAUREN: It was very psychedelic to watch them perform us. It’s hard to describe. There was a moment I said to Monica, “Should we just jump in there? Do it behind them?”
MIRABILE: It was the rehearsal for me that got really emotional. The very first time seeing them replicate this thing that felt so personal to us and to the way that we saw the world, because our origin story is really about recognizing that we shared similar values, and that we came from similar backgrounds, and we felt similar ways about the way the world worked. That became what FlucT was. And then to see it replicated with two other people, it was emotional because it was like, oh, I could see all of that history in someone else. And then we were able to teach them what that meant to us at certain parts, and have them relate to it in the way they know.
MALLETT: Was the performance in the kitchen 1:1 of a performance you’d done before?
MIRABILE: It was a mash-up. Highlights from three different performances.
LAUREN: And what’s sustainable when you’re elevated three feet off the ground on this platform countertop.
MALLETT: Right, because everything is site-specific, responding to that space.
MALLETT: I’ll let you see where you go with this. I won’t bring it up if you don’t want to bring it up but was there anything about the history of this space that you were interested in?
MALLETT: I couldn’t help but think of that when the girls were in the shower.
LAUREN: Well, the girls in the shower were actually representing the four phases of the menstrual cycle.
MALLETT: I was looking back at your 2010s press. Some of it is very—
LAUREN: Yeah, that one Artsy article: “Confronting rape culture.”
MIRABILE: The violence, our relational dynamic, and how FlucT came to be. We often are violent in our performances, but that violence isn’t to each other. It’s to represent or express the violence that we see in the world, and so much of it is about growing up in a rape culture. That’s always in the work. Being in that apartment, being anywhere.
MIRABILE: With the shower scene, you did have to confront, what are these girls doing? From our perspective, it was the four phases of the menstrual cycle. Luteal phase, follicular phase, ovulation, and menstruation.
MALLETT: Which I feel like I just learned.
MALLETT: Everyone on Instagram is like, “Luteal diet.”
MIRABILE: I mean, that’s the thing. We still don’t fucking have the research for what is actually going on. And because the show was about how perception is distorted from internal experience. When you’re in the phase right after menstruation, you’re like, “I’m going to get to work, and now I can do anything, and I will never look like I did when I was in that other phase where I was completely depressed and had anxiety.” So that was what it was supposed to be. But there’s a layer of what you’re observing. You’re observing women in their bodies nude in a bathroom, and there’s a completely separate distorted perception of what that looks like. We even had this experience where there was this man who was standing there for 30 minutes. You shouldn’t be standing there for 30 minutes watching this. Sigrid was like, “I think he needs to get out of here. It’s making me nervous.” I went over there.
MALLETT: I felt like I should get a photo for this interview. And I was very intentional, for the record. I took the pic when one of the girls was turned away from me. Just her back. No breasts. And someone from OCD tapped me. “No pictures.” I felt shame. I felt defensive.
LAUREN: We have some approved versions we can send you.
MALLETT: But you’re very intentional in how you do it. You’re making us crawl on our hands and knees to see certain videos. We become complicit in certain dynamics.
LAUREN: You’re an active participant, which was the point. If you want to get more information, if you want to see more, you need to lay on your back underneath this giant foot.
MALLETT: There’s the vulnerability with the shower performers and other people in the space having their iPhones. But then as a person who’s crawling to see a video, then people are texting photos they took of me in a vulnerable position. It’s very cyclical.
MIRABILE: It’s a commentary about scroll culture. This came up a lot when we were discussing what the show was about. It’s called Tough on the Tongue . It’s about the senses and it’s about it being hard to communicate, but it’s specifically about perception distortion, and how we receive all of this information all the time that’s very much in this attention deficit, which is scrolling. You’re constantly absorbing all this information without consent, really. And then you’re processing it, and this affects your behavior. It affects the way you actively listen or actively participate in the world. And it creates this perception distortion. So having to participate by crawling on your hands and knees or laying under the foot, feeling the pressure of being stepped on, feeling the pressure of this thing we have no control over is definitely a part of that distortion, and it is a cycle. It’s an ongoing cycle.
LAUREN: I really liked to watch people looking under the foot. And then there were these rocking chairs.
MALLETT: I saw those making people have a conversation. People who didn’t know each other.
MIRABILE: That happened with the beds, too, which I was kind of surprised at. They became this social space.
LAUREN: The beds were a reference to when we used to live in Baltimore and we had two queen beds in one room we shared for a while when we were very entangled and beginning to perform a lot.
MALLETT: People really came out of the woodwork. It was very “If you went to high school in Bushwick in 2013.” But then there are also people who you’re very much in the same community and performance worlds as now. Like Tess Dworman told me she’d never seen FlucT live. There was a collision of people who knew you then and people who know you now. And what happens in five years.
LAUREN: The funny thing about mindless scrolling. It’s like no one read the flyer because everyone was texting us right before the show.
LAUREN: And then people at the show were like “Did I miss your performance?” And I was like, “This is all my performance.”
MALLETT: I thought it was very boss that you guys were just walking around in slacks.
LAUREN: My titties aren’t out tonight, baby.
LAUREN: In the video we had tights and no underwear on.
MIRABILE: I am full pussy out. There’s no blurring.
LAUREN: I thought we were giving Barbie and Ken no genitals, but I guess you could see a little more.
MALLETT: How did that farmhouse come to be the location for the video?
LAUREN: Liutas [MvH, the founder of OCDChinatown] was amazing.
MIRABILE: The whole time, just so supportive and inspiring and enthusiastic.
MALLETT: Was it his idea for this show? He came to you about getting the band back together?
LAUREN: People have asked us before, “When do you want to do a thing?” MIRABILE: We were supposed to work with Liutas six years ago, so he returned.
LAUREN: He was really encouraging us to push further and do more. We were like, “Can we knock the wall down and put some holes in it?” He was like, “Yeah!”
MIRABILE: What a dream collaborator really. We had such a nice time filming the video. And it was also our first return to actually making new choreography.
LAUREN: It was much softer, but I think that was because we’ve spent the last five years really fostering and tending to our love and relationship. There are moments that really reflect that. We’ll do a new piece there in January. A new live performance with us.
MALLETT: While the whole show and installation is still up?
LAUREN: Yeah. And in November and December, we will have other dancers doing a retrospective performance, performing a whole FlucT piece.
MALLETT: This moment of art-dance coming out of DIY spaces in Brooklyn. Like Pageant. There’s a lot you guys built.
MALLETT: I don’t know why I’m so emotional [Laughs].
LAUREN: Well, Whitney Mallett, you were starring in some of that work [Laughs].
MIRABILE: [Laughs] You were a part of it!
MALLETT: And so many people from that crew have really popped off.
MIRABILE: You make me emotional. But it’s true. And where will we go next?
Source: Fashion
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