Will the Revolution Have a 501(c)(3) Status?: Nile Harris and Radical Clowning

Nile Harris is a consummate provocateur. My first engagement with his work, this house is not a home, was filled with reeling excitement and exasperation. I was unmoored, ungrounded, dazzled, amazed, dismayed, challenged mentally and emotionally, and found immediate kinship. As a Queer Black artist, and at one point a radical experimentalist, I too was a bit of a provocateur. His work took me back to my earliest explorations in form and content: my ritualistic, immersive experiments informed and influenced by early ensemble innovators like the Open Theater, the Talking Band, and the Wooster Group. Through Nile’s work, I witnessed a contemporary intellect of a subsequent generation navigating the same landscape of race, identity, and sociopolitical complexities. Harris is engaged in serious matters.

My immediate comparison was the experience I had seeing the work of Reza Abdoh for the first time—Tight White Right, an absurdist minstrel show of contemplation, rage, and protest—and in that moment, I found a kinship as well. The same experience came when I encountered the work of Suzan-Lori Parks, a profound work involving linguistic machinations in a racialized landscape, disrupting icons, and smashing stereotypes entitled Imperceptible Mutabilities of the Third Kingdom at a space known as BACA Downtown. My third comparative touchstone is Kara Walker and her dynamic silhouettes of antebellum misery and mischief, abuse, brutality, and rape. A journey through her work can challenge and offend, inspire protest and disdain as well as enlighten and reflect a profound understanding of history. These three artists come to mind when I think of the work of Nile Harris and his merry band of pseudo-burlesque minstrel tricksters, Crackhead Barney and Malcolm-x Betts. Together as a trio, they poke, prod, insinuate, and instigate in breathtaking and often comedic improvised riffs and banter addressing the most urgent issues of our time, particularly navigating race, radicality, and capital.

The dynamism of the work lives in its use of improvisation and immediacy. Each performance varies from the next. Its prompts and provocations live in time with the current moment, taken from the headlines. And in that way, it can be dangerous. Riding a fine line of sensitivity and insult, it will challenge, like a slap in the face in the guise of a bracing wake-up call, but not woke. It is often quite humorous in the way that slapstick and “Yo Mama” jokes pull no punches. When describing the origins of the work, Harris references a type of liberal Black protest fatigue. His response to the series of George Floyd protests was to consider bringing a bounce house to create what he calls a “fugitive release space.” The response is irreverent but actively engages in the idea of a post response: what is next, what happens when the protests end?

In a New York Times review, Harris describes, “I always say it’s 60 percent set and 40 percent improvised. … It responds to current affairs, it responds to the conditions that it’s put in. And we are in a very different state in the world than we were six months ago.”

The work—now appearing for the first time since its laudatory sellout performances (initially coproduced by Ping Chong and Company, aka Pink Fang, and Abrons Arts Center, and later featured as part of the Under the Radar Festival in 2023)—will introduce a vibrant new voice to the Walker Art Center community, continuing the lineage of avant-radical clowning. Prepare yourself. The initial prompt of contemplation that greets from the outset, “you niggas in trouble,” sets the tone for an in the moment response to our current times. You are seeing these words now, wondering where it will take you, slightly shocked, perhaps offended, hopefully, curious, maybe enraged or amused, in on the “joke that slips the yoke,” or not. It is the first provocation of the evening. Ready, set, go.

To set the tone for this current incarnation, I had the chance to speak with Nile regarding his sense of the work now and the opportunity that presenting it in 2026 provides. Below are a few outtakes from our conversation.

Talvin Wilks

I did want to talk about your history of “clowning” and how that became a form of expression for you. What drew you to this idea of “radical clowning”? That doesn’t mean you call it radical clowning, but you do align yourself with Alex Tatarsky and Crackhead Barney.

Nile Harris

I had a great clowning teacher in college named Robert Francisconi. He taught a very formal, silent red nose clown—that I don’t use anymore—but set a framework for my understanding of how the body could be used to create images onstage, and how the clown could be a bridge between the audience and the performer, the fictional world of the theater and the real world outside of the theater.

Language began to trickle into the work in more recent years. I often cite an encounter I had with the work of Alex Tatarsky on a shared bill we were curated on together in 2018. It was around that time that I started allowing myself to go onstage and not explicitly know what I wanted to say, but figuring it out in real time with an audience. In the work now, I see my voice as more of an instrument part of a musical orchestra, working with musicians and technicians that loop and distort my voice into different sonic gestures. How I engage with the audience to create these utterances feels like the essence of the clown to me. I need the audience to help me figure something out.

TW

The advantage of this moment is that its origins spring from the first Trump administration and now arrive in the second.

NH

I’m unsure about if it’s an advantage per se, but I am curious as I revisit this piece after nearly three years since its premiere how the world has changed and how the piece fits into the world we find ourselves in now. When I first made the piece, yes, I was responding past tense to the first Trump presidency and more specifically grappling with the loss of my friend and collaborator Trevor Bazile, trying to understand something about his political and creative expression. And now three years later, we find ourselves in an even darker moment and the fascist impulses I was alluding to in the work are no longer speculative. I am curious if I should frame the piece now as a quotation of a past impulse or try to update it in some ways to make it feel more present tense.

TW

How have you begun to explore that question as you prepare the work for the Walker Art Center?

NH

I had a rehearsal period with the ensemble about a month ago, and I feel like much of the material still holds up. The parts of the piece that are improvised, I think there’s space for new ideas and new commentary about current affairs to enter the work. I’m excited to see where my collaborator Crackhead Barney will be at, since her practice is so explicitly about wrestling with current affairs. But the macro-structure of the piece will remain the same.

Also, I think there were certain biographical details and narrative pieces of the story of how I acquired the bounce house in the original production that were obscured, because I was dealing with grief and couldn’t quite explain it at the time. But now I am excited to be a bit more explicit that this piece is inspired by real people, real life events.

TW

Tell me more about your collaboration with Crackhead Barney and what she brings to the work.

NH

Crackhead Barney was someone who I was introduced to by my late collaborator, Trevor. I think I knew her online content a little bit, but I didn’t really know very much about her full practice. Trevor was a big fan of hers as he spent a lot of time online and was really interested in a sort of “belligerent negritude,” my words not his, and how that could be constructed online, and she does that in such a beautiful way. She is an artist I really admire; she is the truest bouffon clown I know. She does something that I am unable to do. That’s what I admire about the sort of trio nature of the work, we each do something unique that speaks to the question of the work. Malcolm also provides something very unique that is irreplaceable. There’s this brilliant researcher and curator Kyla Gordon, who referred to us as the Marx Brothers and I think that observation was very astute [laughs]. Three different approaches to one common goal: to answer “why are the niggas in trouble.”

TW

Tell me about the early origins of this house is not a home …

NH

When Trevor was alive, this is like 2019, I knew that I wanted to make a piece about a bounce castle—like the object was what inspired me. Then during the 2020 pandemic and uprisings for George Floyd and Black liberation, we both were stuck in our homes in Miami and we spent a lot of time talking and we became very obsessed with the bounce castle as a fugitive symbol of the Capitol or of some sort of American institution. And we thought it would be really cool to put a bounce castle at protests or public spaces where people were gathering as a sort of fugitive gesture for something to happen. That was the first image I had, and I knew that I wanted it to be a sonic instrument, that I wanted to make a sound-responsive bounce castle that had microphones in it.

TW

I do remember you talking about a performance where you blew up a bounce castle for like six hours …

NH

Yeah, the last day that I saw Trevor before he passed was that performance. We did two nights of activation for the film festival that he was the creative director of at the time, the New People’s Cinema Club, which was jokingly called the Anti-Woke Film Festival or the Dimes Square Film Festival. One of the nights was a big party, centered around the bounce house, called There’s Some Hoes in This House. Barney was running around being crazy, I was playing the gingerbread man or whatever. And then on the last night of the festival, we performed at a skatepark in Brooklyn. I attempted to inflate a bounce house with my mouth over four hours on an online livestream, and Trevor directed all these happenings around me over the duration. There was a jazz band, Malcolm did dance. And yeah, that was the last day I saw him before he passed away. So the piece that we have now, this house is not a home, is kind of like collapsing and reappropriating these events and maybe trying to make sense of them for myself.

TW

In a direct way, how would you describe your work? Meaning, there is something that I am collecting and something that I’m working on writing about, this intriguing language or terms that frame the work, Belligerent Negritude, Ironic Blackness, that also live inside of the dynamic idea of Afro-pessimism. It is quite a specific language inside of a post-Black, post-liberal, or anti-woke landscape. And it is the terrain that you’re navigating, and Trevor was navigating, which is quite wonderfully challenging and exciting for, shall we say, liberal white folks and liberal Black folks inside of what one can say and what we cannot say. So, I’m curious about how you think about that intentionally or do you think of about those things intentionally, or is that just the oeuvre that you are inside of, and it just comes out of you in a natural way? It is your “clowning” edge beyond language and beyond description.

NH

I think of myself as a site-responsive artist making responses to institutional and architectural conditions, and trying to make a really smart, densely layered, collaborative ensemble happenings inside of these containers. I think everything is political, I don’t think we have the privilege for it to not be. I found myself making these images that disrupted space—rather it be in high school, when I was like in my underwear with a noose around my neck doing an adaptation of Waiting for Godot in the streets of Miami (I played the character Lucky that I always related to) or painting myself red the first time Trump got elected and laying down on my college campus with an outline around my body.

But in this piece in particular, if there is any thesis to the play, it is my investigation of this particular object that Trevor made. A red baseball cap that reads “you niggas in trouble.” The hat could be read multiple ways; it could be seen as a mock MAGA cap or the comic sans font can be read as the font traditionally found in online memes. The play to me is an investigation of this statement as a question “why are the niggas in trouble?” along some other sentiments about how Black artists are used inside of vaguely liberal infrastructures and institutions ultimately to exploit them. But again, I try my hardest to not answer this question: what is the work about? The work is the work. If I knew how to answer that question, I would’ve written an essay and not the play I look forward to sharing with the Walker Art Center in the weeks to come.

TW

I don’t know if this is a quote or something I read, “Take the money, get into the house, and then disrupt.” It’s sort of this, not necessarily an exchange of capital, but it has its own irony to it. Like the statement that you posted on Instagram alongside an image of you and Trevor in 2021 that read, “Peter Thiel bought this house, but this house is not a home.” There is just something irreverent, it challenges that idea of revolution and …

NH

Will the revolution have a 501(c)(3) status? Which it won’t, and I guess if I am forced to get to a thesis inside of thinah, I don’t think you can escape the funding matrix and the energetic karma that comes with money. I don’t think you should take any money and try to get into that house and disrupt it. What is that Audre Lorde quote? “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” I guess that’s what I’m trying to say in the work. Karmically, there were consequences for dancing with the devil. In this case, it was my collaborator choosing to work with the allegedly Peter Thiel–funded film festival that he saw as an opportunity to make transgressive work. I don’t know. … This stuff is hard to talk about, but yeah. I don’t think that you should take any money and try to disrupt the framework.

We all are navigating certain risks in different ways. We all have something very different to lose, the stakes are just different. The rich white people will always have the last laugh. I just don’t know, I think Trevor thought he was going to get the last laugh. I don’t think I’ve seen that in my life, I don’t think that that’s how power works. I don’t know if you can ironically subvert power, particularly via art, enough in order to like actually “win.” You might win a temporary something, but structurally, I don’t know if these things can actually be changed. Or actually you’re not winning, you’re being puppeteered, you’re being used. You might feel as if you are winning but that’s not the truth of the matter. I don’t know, Black people will always be tools for capital in these structures for these people in a certain way. And I don’t know how to really usurp that without going back to the motherland and making truly your own situation? But that’s not my priority at this time.

TW

Can you talk about something that you are working on currently?

NH

I’m making an adaptation of Huckleberry Finn with Kate Valk and the Wooster Group. I’m playing the character of Huck. I don’t know what the piece will be yet, but as always, I am thinking about racial configuration and power. It’s really interesting to me how this novel has kept such a firm grip on the American imagination. In an early rehearsal draft of the play, it ends with a projection of my face on the back of the TV monitor, winking to the audience. What I’m winking about, I can’t quite put my finger on yet, but with my work, there’s always a wink to something.

Talvin Wilks is a playwright, director, and dramaturg based in Minneapolis and New York City. He is a recipient of the 2020 McKnight Theater Artist Fellowship and a 2022 McKnight Presidential Fellow. Wilks a member of the Ping Chong + Co. (recently renamed Pink Fang) Artistic Leadership Team and an associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

Part of the Walker’s celebrated Out There series, Nile Harris’s this house is not a home will be presented in the McGuire Theater January 22–24, 2026.