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The Whitney Embraces Dancenoise, a Brash ’80s Performance Duo

Lucy Sexton, left, and Anne Iobst in the late 1980sCredit...Dona Ann McAdams

Combat boots and nudity, fake blood and a barrage of props. Dancenoise was feminism and showbiz rolled into one.

The brash and transgressive post-punk performance duo of Anne Iobst and Lucy Sexton was a staple of the East Village nightclub scene beginning in 1983. After the critic C. Carr saw her first Dancenoise show two years later, she used the word “uncivilized” in a most admiring way and wrote, “I knew I’d have to follow these girls to the ends of the earth if they ever got a gig there.”

In “Dancenoise: Don’t Look Back,” Wednesday through Sunday, the Whitney Museum of American Art celebrates these two collaborators with programming that includes a new performance, an installation, film screenings and a reimagining of King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut, the East Village bar where Dancenoise organized a weekly performance series. Tom Berry, who originally designed the Wah Wah Hut’s ever-changing décor, will construct it in the lobby of the Whitney’s theater. The exhibition begins Wednesday night with a traditional Wah Wah Hut evening, including performances by Julie Atlas Muz, Stanley Love and Carmelita Tropicana, among others, followed by a Dancenoise premiere on Thursday. James Vance, who created many sets for the duo, has made a sign that will look out over the West Side Highway: “Honk if you love DANCENOISE.”

Sound those horns.

Jay Sanders, the Whitney’s curator of performance, said Dancenoise became an obsession after he organized the museum’s 2013 exhibition “Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama — Manhattan, 1970-1980.” In that show, he explored how New York performance art emerged from dance, music, theater and visual art.

“In all the work I did there, Dancenoise was sort of pushing at the door,” Mr. Sanders said. Unruly on the surface yet deeply structured, Dancenoise’s performances skewered, even eviscerated popular and media culture, with feminist fury, wicked humor and a good measure of gore. (Fake blood was a common prop, along with knives and masks.)

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Shooting a film at the Whitney last month.Credit...Heidi Dorow

The duo’s intense performances were a highly choreographed whirlwind of unison dancing to pop music and brutal slapstick. In “All the Rage” (1989), they leapt onto the stage with nooses around their necks and shouted: “You know what we’re going to do after we jump off of that bridge? We’re going shopping! Yeah! All right!” (Their shopping list consisted of all things “lite”: cereal, skinny milk, toast and margarine.)

“It’s entertainment, but it’s critiquing entertainment at the same time,” Mr. Sanders said. While Dancenoise never disbanded, the frequency of its performances changed 16 years ago when Ms. Iobst relocated to San Francisco. Ms. Sexton, born in Brooklyn, stayed in New York. (She is the associate artistic director of the planned Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center.) Each developed a new onstage persona: Ms. Iobst became the Naked Lady, and Ms. Sexton created the Factress, a talk-show host that has morphed into a “free-ranging performance persona” outfitted in a variety of surreal ensembles, including smoke-detector pasties.

For “Don’t Look Back” — slightly misleading, since that’s just what they’re doing — Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton have designed programming that switches from day (a retrospective, featuring an installation of slides, videos, photographs and props) to night (live performances). The Wah Wah Hut evening pays homage to the space that informed their artistic development; as hosts of the Wednesday night series there, they learned how to talk.

“We were really dancers,” Ms. Iobst said. “We weren’t that verbal. We would blurt out things, and then that turned into, let’s make this little skit and we’ll change costumes and introduce the next act and keep it flowing. From there, little skits expanded out to larger vignettes and longer dances, and that started to become part of a Dancenoise show.”

Ms. Sexton, sitting in her West Village apartment recently with Ms. Iobst on speakerphone, had just returned from a working session in San Francisco, where they had watched videos looking for rare past material — say, a little-seen segment from a performance in Germany — to incorporate into their new piece. But what exactly is Dancenoise upset about now?

“That’s the question,” Ms. Sexton said. “There are some bits of dialogue that hold up, but so often the shows were made in reaction to what was happening. I can’t say what we’re taking on, but it’s a different storm than it was in the 1980s and 1990s.”

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During a show at La MaMa in 1988.

Watching their past performances, they said, has been both inspiring and daunting. “That energy!” Ms. Iobst said. “I just felt I was on a roller coaster. How are we going to get back to that feel of a roller coaster?”

Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton, now both in their 50s, met at Ohio University, where they studied dance under Gladys Bailin, a former Alwin Nikolais company member. It’s not such a stretch that Nikolais, who blended light, sound, color, objects and bodies to create fantastical worlds, is part of Dancenoise’s lineage. “There’s some kind of tendency toward props and costumes and visuals that is part of how we start making dance,” Ms. Sexton said. “It’s putting on a show.”

The way they created their masterly shows was more casual than it seemed. “People would say, ‘You should go away and do a residency,’ and I was always like, but the way we rehearse is we shop on 14th Street, go to my house and watch ‘The Guiding Light’ and make some material,” Ms. Sexton said. “I don’t know how you do that elsewhere.”

Tom Murrin, the performance artist and playwright also known as the Alien Comic, was a mentor whose rules were simple: Keep it short, keep the audience wanting more and never say no to a gig. Ms. Iobst and Ms. Sexton, eager to avoid the usual path for dancers in New York — joining a traditional company — complied. “We hit it coming right out of the gate,” Ms. Iobst said. “It was very much what the scene was at that time. You walked around at night in the East Village, and you would see people performing.”

At the Whitney, the new Dancenoise performance includes a cast recognizable to longtime fans: Mike Iveson, Ishmael Houston-Jones (on Friday and Saturday only), Hapi Phace, Tony Stinkmetal, Richard Move and Ken Bullock. Important to the two collaborators is that “Don’t Look Back” be an inclusive experience. “There were so many people involved,” Ms. Iobst said. “I don’t want to say that they helped us make our work, but there was an energy that propelled it forward.”

But the connection between the women — their strength, their wild intelligence — is the heart and guts of Dancenoise. Ms. Iobst said they make a pact before each show. “Lucy and I have to look each other in the eyes and be sort of like, O.K., whatever our fears are or however angry I am that you’re making me do this part, the minute that we actually decide to do it in front of people, there’s no disclaimer,” Ms. Iobst said. “We’re going to hang on together for the amount of time this show exists.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 9 of the New York edition with the headline: Homage to an Unruly Duo. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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