140 People Will Crawl Through The Village In Performance Piece

GREENWICH VILLAGE, NY — A performance piece in which 140 people will crawl through Greenwich Village is set for Saturday — recreating the artist Pope.L's iconic crawling pieces in New York City.

The performance piece, called "Conquest," forces hand-selected volunteers from a variety of professional backgrounds to crawl through Manhattan's sidewalks, "abandoning their physical privilege, embracing their vulnerability, and expressing the power of collective expression."

Pope.L chose the crawlers himself to participate in the 1.5-mile crawl — recreating his famous solo crawls. His work has been exploring race, class, privilege, and through his group crawls, collective struggle for decades.

"People who are forced to give up their verticality are prey to all kinds of dangers," Pope.L said in a statement. "But, let us imagine a person who has a job, possesses the means to remain vertical, but chooses to momentarily give up that verticality? To undergo that threat to his/her bodily/spiritual categories — would that person learn something?"

The crawling performers will be organized into groups of five and each group will crawl one of the segments of the whole route. When one person of a group reaches the next checkpoint, the first artist in the next group begins, making it a relay race.

They will crawl in different ways, some with blindfolds or a flashlight or with just one shoe. Others will perfume the sidewalks with teakwood and tobacco, "adding to the absurdity and theatricality of the performance," the Public Art Fund that's hosting the performance piece says.

The event kicks-off at 9:45 a.m. Saturday with an event at Seravalli Playground in West Village. They'll finish the relay in front of the bronze statue of George Washington in Union Square. At the end, Pope.L will be dunked with pretend water from Flint, Michigan, referencing clean water struggles across the nation.

Here's a map of the route, courtesy of the Public Art Fund:

This article has been updated to clarify Pope.L will be doused with water at the end of the relay and that crawlers come form a variety of professional backgrounds.