How Do We Keep Secret(s) in Public?
About this Event
How Do We Keep Secret(s) in Public?
Sunday, September 20, 2026 at 6pm and 8pm Green Lung Studio
Organized by Jacquelyn Marie Shannon and inspired by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s framing of magic as “a skilled revelation of skilled concealment,” this immersive event explores secrecy as a social practice. Drawing on research with occult communities, the event features artist-practitioners who employ relational forms of concealment, including magicians, mediums, witches, hypnotists, death doulas, sex workers, dream workers, and more. Across two floors, participants are invited to rehearse secrecy as a shared skill, a means of building trust, sustaining connection, and preparing for moments that demand hiding, signaling, and collective commitment.
Tickets & Timed Entry:
Tickets are free, but capacity is very limited. Please only reserve a ticket if you are able to commit to attending. (If your plans change, please cancel your ticket so it can be released to someone else.)
There are two timed entry sessions: 6 PM and 8 PM. Each ticket grants access to one 1 hour and 45 minute experience window. During your session, you are invited to roam freely across two floors, discovering performances, installations, and intimate encounters with 15+ featured artist-practitioners.
There is no single path through the event, and not every experience will be encountered by every one. Your path through secrecy will be your own. Arrive promptly for your selected entry time and trust that you’ll find what you’re meant to find.
Content & Age Guidance:
This event is intended for mature audiences. Individual works and encounters may engage with themes including sexuality and eroticism, death and violence, religion and spirituality, the occult, and other potentially sensitive subject matter. Some experiences may include suggestive content or moments of intensity.
Young people are welcome at the discretion of a parent or guardian; we encourage adults to consider the nature of the event when deciding whether it is appropriate for younger attendees.
Sensory & Participation Notes:
This is a roaming event featuring intimate, participatory, and installation-based works. Some experiences may invite direct interaction with performers, and some artists may invite consensual touch or physical contact. You are always welcome to decline an interaction or leave an experience at any time.
Accessibility:
Green Lung Studio is located across two levels and is not wheelchair accessible. Entry to the venue requires the use of stairs, and an additional staircase connects the two levels of the event. Because this is a roaming event, guests may move throughout the space and between floors during their visit. Limited seating will be available throughout the space.
If you have specific accessibility questions or would like more information about the physical or sensory experience of the event, please contact Jacquelyn at [email protected].
About the Series: How Do We ______ in Public?
Produced by Social Practice CUNY (SPCUNY), How Do We ______ in Public?, is a new, free public programming series of four experimental events taking place across New York City throughout 2026. Organized by the SPCUNY core team of artists, educators, and scholars (Chloë Bass, Tom Finkelpearl, Catherine LaSota, Nicolás Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ovalles Morel, Jacquelyn Marie Shannon, Gregory Sholette, and Cory Tamler), the series expands SPCUNY’s existing work and reaffirms its commitment to strengthening socially engaged artistic practice, especially at a moment when culture faces sustained attacks and freedom of expression is increasingly constrained.
Since its founding, SPCUNY has centered artist-led research and projects and supported individual artists who teach, study, or work at City University of New York (CUNY) campuses through its Fellowships. Building on this foundation while making a deliberate shift, How Do We ______ in Public? is designed intentionally to engage a broader, non-CUNY public through the SPCUNY team’s collective years of producing, experiencing, researching, and teaching social practice within a public university. Framed as an open-ended, collective experiment, each program is a participatory proposition exploring methods of being, thinking, and enduring together in today’s complex sociopolitical landscape.
How Do We ______ in Public? responds to contemporary crises shaping the cultural field, including the defunding and targeting of public institutions and the erosion of shared civic space. Rather than offering prescriptive solutions, the series tests new forms of social practice in real time, foregrounding experimentation, solidarity, and public accountability.
Across four interconnected programs, How Do We ______ in Public? asks how we study, move, keep secret(s), and continue together in public when the infrastructures that once supported those actions are fraying. As SPCUNY assesses its organizational moment and contemplates its evolving legacy, the series will culminate in early 2027 with a reconvening of participants to reflect on the insight, tensions, and possibilities surfaced through these programs.
About the Organizer:
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon
Jacquelyn Marie Shannon is a ritual artist, occult scholar-educator, and PhD candidate in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY in New York City whose work explores dramaturgies of magic, witchcraft, haunting, and the supernatural. She is especially interested in ritual and artistic processes that engage spirit(s), alternative temporalities, liminal and altered states, synesthesia, hypnosis, visions and dreams.
Jacquelyn has performed, presented research, taught, designed and facilitated ritual experiences across the US and internationally, heavily informed by 20+ years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre, ritual practice, and contemporary performance. Her dissertation research investigates the relationship between theatricality, embodied technique, and ritual efficacy towards producing experiences of magic and transformation in The Witch’s Dance. Jacquelyn holds an MA from Indiana University in Communication and Culture (2011), an MA from New York University in Educational Theatre (2014), and an MPhil from CUNY Graduate Center in Theatre and Performance (2023). Her writing appears in published articles and edited volumes, including The Witch Studies Reader (Duke University Press, 2025) and The Routledge Companion to Butoh Performance (2020). Jacquelyn (not-so-secretly) weaves her research and practice into every event she produces, taking exquisite care to craft collective experiences that genuinely affect those who take part and leave them a little haunted.
https://jacquelynmarieshannon.com/
Where is it happening?
USD 0.00
