Collapsing Cinema and Stage: Autumn Knight Live at the Walker
In Autumn Knight Live at the Walker, 2025, the artist collapses the distance between the McGuire Stage and the Walker Cinema in an improvisational work that blurs live performance and film. In advance of its premiere, the artist chatted with Jenny Schlenzka, director of the Gropius Bau, Berlin, about Knight’s history with drama therapy, the power of group dynamics, improvisation, and nothingness.
Jenny Schlenzka
I’m very excited to do this interview with you. You are one of my favorite artists, and what you do in your performances, especially when you improvise with an audience, is transformational. It’s everything I want from a good performance. How did you become an artist? Were you born an artist?
Autumn Knight
I did not necessarily super identify internally as an artist growing up, but I was always in educational situations that had art programs, so I was put into that environment very early on. I just experienced life as an artist very early in multiple different ways. And then those grooves narrowed, and it became about theater and visual art back and forth over the years.
JS
Was there a moment where you thought, “Oh, I want to make art. I’m an artist.”?
AK
Not really, I have been doing it since I started school. So the experience has been similar to having a trade.
JS
Then you always were an artist, you just didn’t think about it.
AK
Exactly.
JS
How did you come to make the work you’re making today? I understand that wasn’t a clear path.
AK
The improvisation aspect of the work came from a background in theater. But theater is not directly linked to improv necessarily, or being good at improv. I had a hard time going from theatrical training, interpreting someone’s words, being told what to do, given direction, to being able to do improv. It was very hard to do improv. But once I broke through, it was just like a well opened. It was transformational-being able to rely on my imagination and my ability to quickly adapt and respond to information, to people, to environments. That’s my journey to improv. I took an improv class in Houston, and I joined an improv troupe. And so I got a lot of experience in long-form improvisation, which is important because it’s the format that teaches you to extend the narrative, let it evolve and go on and on until someone stops you. I also went to school for Drama Therapy, and studied Group Dynamics with Dr. Mary McRae, who’s still in my life. It was very, very important to understand the position of a person in authority in a room.
I went to drama therapy school as an artist. I recognized the performative dynamic-this is the performer and that is the audience, but together they’re a group. Later, in the middle of a performance, it dawned on me: this is a group dynamic. It taught me how to observe the entire group and be in the group at the same time. Those are the structural pieces or moments that get us to what you’ve seen.
JS
For me, therapy means there’s a hope of healing or transformation. We never really healed, but we’re getting better. Are you still after that?
AK
Am I after healing? I’m not a licensed therapist, I’m a person who went to school to learn how to be a therapist. From that perspective, healing is not my purpose inside of the performance because I’m not a clinician. But I do recognize that there probably is an impact to the way I am employing the technique that is beneficial to people, in terms of learning about how to see the group dynamic in a compassionate way, learning how to see the moment of public performance in a way that is a bit less confrontational and combative. The performance encounter can be very pleasant, but it can also feel like Spartacus, the thunderdome, lions in a cage. Show us.
JS
Or even the classic, cliché performance art of someone cutting themselves or a lot of violence. I think there’s a difference between healing and therapy, but therapy for me is actually both. It’s violent and combative, full of conflict. But you break through to gain a different perspective. Which brings me to your work Sanity TV. That’s the first performance I saw you in. It was at the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Was it something that came out of your background in drama therapy?
AK
Sanity TV is an open-format performance. The structure of Sanity TV uses the milieu of a TV talk show: the way the audience is scattered and the host or the performer walks among them. I started thinking about the format of the milieu when I was in grad school at an internship where unhoused people in New York City would come for the day, hang out, have food, play games, and use computers. My role as an intern was to be amongst the clients in the milieu. And sometimes I did groups, but mostly I sat down and talked to people at a table all day.
This way of working, mapping things from your life onto other experiences, developed when I was at a residency at Skowhegan. I mostly do performance and I was at a loss about what to do in a studio alone. It’s still a conundrum, a mystery to me, what one does inside of a room. So I started talking to myself and recording it.I had camera equipment, and I started interviewing a chair very deeply, a yellow chair.
The interview went on for quite some time. I was really quite surprised that I was able to provide this back and forth, listen, and respond, so long in the one-person improvisational space. Then my studio mate popped her head in at the end of the interview, and I was like, “Hey, can you sit in this chair and can I interview you?” And she did. I immediately said, “OK, you are a flower. What has your experience been as a flower? What is your world as a flower? What are the difficulties? What kind of racism, sexism, dysphoria, do you experience?” And she went along with it, and it was great. And it was the beginning of the use of absurdism, projecting it onto a person. "OK, when you pick your kids up from school, what is it about the threat of being plucked and killed for the sake of beauty?”
Eventually this became an actual live performance
JS
What struck me most about Sanity TV was how the interaction with the audience, the back and forth, was almost like an instrument. I only can think of one other artist where I’ve ever seen someone playing the audience, moving the conversation forward.
It’s the way you listen to the audience, the way you almost anticipate what’s coming next, but then how you react in a very honest, truthful way that people respond to. You ask the difficult questions, but it’s very generous and open and truthful, and maybe there you differ from Ann Liv Young; you’re also vulnerable at the same time. So it doesn’t feel like you are in control. You play the whole audience like an instrument.
We worked together at Performance Space in New York, and I invited you to do a commission, and you came back and said, “I’m going to do three.” It would be too long to speak about all of them, but NOTHING #22: a bluff, that was the last one. It was called
a “bluff.”
AK
Yes.
JS
It’s where you stripped down everything; there was no set, no script, no instructions. It was just you and the microphone and the audience around you in a somewhat dark space. The whole set of three performances were all around nothingness. Again, therapy is also around ultimately the nothingness that’s inside us, around us, and that we always run away from. And it’s also a church. When I moved to the U.S., I went to a church with a mother of a friend, and the priest started talking about death. And it struck me: this is the first time someone talked about that we’re all going to die.
Talk about the bluff and where it comes from because I hear you’re still working with that concept.
AK
I chose the word “bluff” because I needed a performance that started with a B, and I thought that “bluff” was a great word to embody a thing that may or may not happen, - a possibility, a failure, a nothing. You could call someone’s bluff or not call someone’s bluff, and nothing will happen. It fell into the idea of what nothing can be, the activity of doing nothing. It is very difficult to do nothing.
So in that performance, I wanted to, in the environment, strip it down to almost nothing but some very simple instruments and tools and not give myself anything to work with. And to call my own bluff. Can you actually not prepare for this and do nothing? And if nothing comes of it, then you didn’t prepare anything. But of course, it’s that fight against nothingness that life is. I had to do everything. I gave myself the prompt to do nothing, but I talked, I engaged with everyone. I made the most out of this air, trying to make meaning, making something out of air.
The nothingness is from an interest in dolce far niente—“the sweetness of doing nothing”—which I found in a magazine. I’m still interested in it as a mechanism for allowing oneself to not have too many expectations. The heaviness, the weight of it, moving beyond the shame of finding yourself doing nothing or opening up the possibility that doing nothing could be the answer. And I’m drawn to that because of improvisation, which just evaporates. There’s no way to prepare for it, and there’s no way to hold onto it once it’s done. I would say that’s my container for nothingness, and the weight of trying to make something very meaningful as an artist is exhausting.
JS
I’m not an artist, but I can imagine. Let’s talk a little bit about what you’re going to do at the Walker in February. What can you tell us about it?
AK
This also could be about nothing. It’s the creation of a live film. I am working in the theater with a table and a camera crew and lots of objects. I’m creating a stream of consciousness of images and sound for as long as I can. And so everybody in the room is working improvisationally: the camera operators are working improvisationally as they’re filming me, the sound designer is designing the sound in real time, the camera director is editing in real time, and the feed from all the cameras and editing is output to the Walker Cinema. An audience will be watching the live film take shape. But here we will try to experiment with bringing the audience from the cinema to the theater to introduce them into the visual narrative, to introduce them into the frame and spin them back out again.
It’s all new. It’s something about a fracturing of realities. No narrative. Nothing is happening, but many things are happening at the same time.
JS
It takes place in the cinema space, not on the stage?
AK
It takes place in both spaces at the same time.
JS
The Walker is a museum with an art collection, but it has a fantastic history with showing performance and art and being very multidisciplinary. How is it for you working in a museum? You’re working with the performance department. You’re working with the film department. How is that?
AK
It’s great. I was also told by Philip Bither, the performance curator, that it’s an art center and not a museum.
JS
Oh, sorry.
AK
Which was an interesting distinction for me because, obviously, the Walker, that’s a huge museum. They have a collection. But I think there’s something about it having multiple highly functioning independent departments that does push it beyond the scope of what a museum is or can do. The performance department is robust. They have a full-on actual theater inside this museum. So that feels natural to me, to work across different departments in an institution, because that is what my work often is. So it’s exciting to work with two curators, two producers, two art workers that want to be in conversation with each other and want to be in conversation with me. There are two departments that have to produce and not just install.
Responding to your interest in the therapy aspect of my work, it occurred to me that, in this new performance, I use this light box, and I move images around. It’s a technique that can be used for anybody, but is used a lot with children-there’s a sandbox filled with objects, and the therapist or the clinician watches the client move objects around in the sandbox and make worlds. The sandbox represents a mind. This process creates a million different images or image associations for the viewer, and there is something similar to this concept of a sandbox happening in this work.
JS
You have another relationship with the museum, the Studio Museum in New York, in Harlem. I believe the first acquisition of a performance for the Studio Museum was your piece. Do I have that right?
AK
Yes.
JS
How did they collect your performance? You did a residency there, I assume. Do you want to talk about that, and how the process of acquiring a performance for a museum collection needs to be able to exist past your lifetime?
AK
Yes. The Studio Museum collects a work by each of the three artists every year at the end of the residency program. That’s part of their mission: for the artist's work to be collected and also to build their collection. When I was there, only a few performance artists had done this residency. I thought let’s collect a performance. Let’s be the one. Let’s enter into this journey. Funnily enough, Jenny, they wanted to buy Sanity TV.
JS
But Sanity TV without you does not work.
AK
No, because I made Sanity TV so that I could have a performance where I walked in a room and was myself, or a version of myself; where I could speak how I wanted to speak, what was on my mind, and be a bit free. Instead, I proposed a different performance, one they had never seen. I had done an iteration before, and the process took a while because we needed to restage it so that the acquisition committee could see what it was.
I chose a work that could be interpreted a million different ways. A work about Black people, Black femmes, in line with the institutional mandate and mission. I worked with Cori Olinghouse, who had worked with dance companies as an archivist and dramaturg. We mapped out the core components and the plan for this piece in perpetuity. Now, the thing about collecting a live work is, you need to have the piece borrowed again to complete the process. It's not ephemera from performances, it’s not the video, it’s not the images-the work is a set of conditions. The piece needs to be borrowed by another institution.
JS
So maybe they stage it in their galleries, the Studio Museum, or you think another institution has to borrow it from the Studio Museum?
AK
Yes.
JS
Then it would be complete.
AK
Yes. That is what I learned about the relationship between an institution and its collection and another institution. You have it and you stage it. You could pull it out, but it’s also very open to other institutions.
JS
So then maybe.
AK
Yeah.
JS
This interview is a call. If someone is reading this, please call up the Studio Museum and send a request for Autumn Knight’s Wall.
AK
OK.
JS
When you improvise, how do you prepare? Is there anything you think the audience should prepare for seeing your work?
AK
No.
JS
Why not?
AK
I need to prepare you to be alive?
JS
Great answer.▪︎
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