Trajal Harrell Breaks the Catwalk
Perle Palombe in Trajal Harrell’s Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
In Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, Trajal Harrell brings us to a runway fashion show that tries, across its 120-minute run time, to emancipate itself. With pieces of tulle bulging out from under skirts and struts that dissolve into limps, Harrell cuts underneath the convention of the runway, and its symbolism of authority and order, to strive for freedom. Monkey Off My Back asks us to think about performance in all of its forms, and how utopian it can be to seize control of the show.
It’s hard to imagine Monkey Off My Back in any other space than the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. The cavernous performance space at Park Avenue Armory is transformed: a long horseshoe runway with Mondrian’s signature blocks lines the floor with seating on either side. Harrell, founder and artistic director of the Zürich Dance Ensemble, acts as the emcee for the ensemble of seventeen dancers and actors. He introduces himself as the “Vogue US Director of Editorial Content,” his character for the performance, who, importantly, is not a dancer. He spends a large part of the performance seated in the middle of the front row, glasses perched on his nose and notebook in hand, as if he were writing for next month’s Vogue edition. We get to watch him act as the distinguished audience member.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
The runway walk propels the performance forward. It’s beyond utilitarian or pedestrian—it is the dance, reflecting Harrell’s ongoing exploration of postmodern and voguing dance traditions. Models strut, stumble, and limp across the space in costumes designed by Harrell. Some walk on tiptoe, hips bouncing and shoulders jaunting back and forth, half-dressed and disheveled in bathrobes like they came straight out of the dressing room. Someone looks off balance in their dove-grey tulle dress, moments from teetering over. Each performer’s walk seems idiosyncratically different, hyperbolized, and contrived from the idea that the individual cannot be ignored.
Dancers bleed in and out of the runway walking pattern throughout the performance. When the performers clump at the start of the runway, the show comes to a pause, and Harrell joins them on stage. They follow as he flicks his wrists, watching his hands turn, and it’s a quieter, softer feeling than the strutting. They trickle across the runway, forming pairs, trios, and we see the collective become a virtue, too.
Monkey Off My Back has a lot to say about freedom, and what it looks like when weight is shaken off and people are allowed to exist on their terms: perform as they want, walk as they want, dance as they want. Vulnerability slips through the cracks in breathtaking moments, like when a dancer, perched on tiptoes as he struts across the stage, looks into the audience and unravels a scarf from around his head. He continues forward with that supermodel sense of untouchability, but there’s a moment when it looks like he’s searching for something, seeking.
Trajal Harrell’s Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
When the runway walk is completely broken and it feels like we see people be people, well, that is the cat’s meow. At the start of the section called “The Tale,” Harrell makes sure that the terms of freedom, as they exist in the US, are placed right in front of us. A few dancers take turns reading aloud the Declaration of Independence while paper copies are passed out to the audience. The other dancers continue to strut the runway, pinning eighteenth-century dresses, skirts, and bodices to their hips and shoulders instead of wearing them.
Droning electronic sound swells over the voices reading the Declaration. The dancers walking the runway begin to break out of their pattern, switching directions, swinging the historical garments around their heads. The structure dissolves completely as they break into a line dance, facing toward each other and grabbing hands, calling out to one another as partners come together and apart out of seemingly spur-of-the-moment decisions. It’s so far departed from the strut, it makes the fashion show, like the Declaration, feel ironic and ill-fitting. Disruption and chaos become a form of love—a celebration of what community can be when the individuals decide what kind of show is being performed.
Trajal Harrell in Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow, 2025, at Park Avenue Armory. Photo: Stephanie Berger.
This ideal of freedom crystallizes in a quieter, yet undeniable way during Harrell’s solo. In the “Listening Party” section, backed by soulful tracks of Joan Armatrading, Laura Nyro, and Nina Simone, Harrell kicks off his metallic slide sandals and dances like we’re witnessing him alone in his bedroom. “You’re in my house now,” he purrs, smiling. Instead of Harrell dancing for us, the audience, we get a glimpse of the way he experiences his own movement, and the transformation that comes with it. Movement drips from the tips of his fingers, skimming the air above him, into his feet that glide across the Mondrian floor. His eyes stay closed. Its intimacy is striking, a murmur that rings through the space like a shout.
At the beginning of the show, Harrell tells us: “If you live, sometimes you have to dance.” Maybe that’s how to get the monkey off your back.
Trajal Harrell: Monkey Off My Back or The Cat’s Meow runs from September 9 through 20, 2025.
