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That the avant-garde emerged alongside a wave of nationalism at the dawn of the 20th century is an irony that few can reconcile. In The Color Scheme, Aria Dean’s new commission for Performa 2025, a meet-cute in the park becomes a stage to revisit these same historical ironies—exposing their relevance to our current moment.

The Poet and the Philosopher—two expatriates wandering old Europe in search of Black America’s future—cross paths in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1923. Do the newly erected statues of Kant and Goethe offer them a glimpse of utopia, or will they leave their date at odds and unsatisfied—each seeking new forms that reveal a center that cannot hold?

At Abrons Arts Center, the theater stage doubles as a film set where two actors circle a virtual recreation of the Tiergarten. Cameras capture and recombine their movements in real time across screens. These projections bind the present to a historical frame until the “truth” of the encounter resolves as an image. Far from a picture-perfect representation, The Color Scheme explodes history, its debris cluttering up the here-and-now. Through it all, monuments take to motion through language.

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