“Nicole Wermers: Marathon Dance Relief,” Lismore Castle Arts, 2025

Located within St. Carthage Hall, an unassuming Victorian chapel turned gallery, nestled in the town of Lismore, Ireland, is a new installation by Nicole Wermers. Entitled Marathon Dance Relief, a chorus line of eight mass-produced stainless steel bistro tables diagonally bisects the venue’s oblong, pitch-roofed space. The tables’ round tops are folded forward, in storage position, to create a frontal plane, and fixed to this wall of tabletops, 10 untreated air-dry clay panels form a horizontal frieze. Each panel presents one or two dancing couples with billowing clothing, tousled hair, and reaching hands rendered with sketchy provisionality. Diamond shards of light scatter across the matte clay and smooth metal, then onto the floor – a rotating LED disco effect created by a triptych of stained glass windows at the far end of the hall.

The “marathon” in Wermers’s title refers to the dance marathon phenomenon that began in the United States in the 1920s. This popular entertainment event observed the simple gladiatorial premise of “last one standing,” with competing couples dancing for hours and even days to claim anything from glory and discovery to, by the time of the Great Depression, money and meals. [1] In a 1923 Manhattan ballroom, Alma ­Cummings clocked a record 27 hours on the dance floor, quickly surpassed by 56, then 69 and 82. After 87 hours, contestant Homer Morehouse collapsed and died. “Our degradation was complete; ­sadism was sexy; masochism was talent,” reflected ­ex-contestant June Havoc decades later. [2] A form of endurance warfare, the dance marathons tested and exposed the human body’s physical potential and limitations.

The couples in Wermers’s frieze appear swept up in a current of movement – recalling Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) – but in contrast to this advancing figure, their dynamism does not drive them forward; rather, the clay, seemingly still damp and vulnerable to gravity, drags them downward. I say they are dancing, but really they are momentarily stilled expressions of energy draining from bodies: bodies collapsing and tumbling out of frame (out of the game), bodies that show what they can do through destitution and sleeplessness – what a body will do for a cash prize.

Wermers first encountered these marathons through the prism of pop culture. In 1935, Horace McCoy, a bouncer at several of them, wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which inspired Sydney Pollack’s equally brutal 1969 film of the same name. The film, in turn, inspired a (­fashionably brutal) 1997 Vogue shoot by Steven Meisel and, later, Alexander McQueen’s 2004 runway show Deliverance. Some of Wermers’s clay couples ­assume poses from the film’s theatrical release poster – an exhausted Michael Sarrazin supported by Jane Fonda – and others directly reference a plethora of public domain imagery. While ­Wermers no doubt enjoys the successive ­layering and cross-media translation of pop culture references, the sculptural concerns of the work emerge first and foremost from classical precedents: contrapposto and the frieze. Contrapposto is an antique scheme for bestowing dynamism to a human figure through a natural serpentine curve. Its genius lies in the orchestration of balance: Weight is directed onto one leg, while the other is relieved of its supportive function. Wermers translates this formula from two legs to two bodies. Gathering images of women ­carrying men – from the Pietà to Catherine Deneuve ­cradling David Bowie in The Hunger (1983) – the artist considers the corresponding axes, gradients, and implications of weight-bearing.

In the Depression-era dance marathons, couples alternated between supporter/supported or awake/sleeping to maintain momentum while conserving energy, shuffling like automata in battery-saver mode. [3] Notably, a decade before the marathons took off, in 1913, Henry Ford had opened his first mass-production assembly line in Detroit, catalyzing managers (and choreographers) to study economies of effort – minimizing superfluous movements to maximize productivity. [4] Many chorus dances began to mirror Fordist formations and machine precision (stand behind Wermers’s installation, and the café tables look like turning cogs), and in The Mass Ornament (1963), Siegfried Kracauer noted that “the hands in the factory correspond to the legs of the Tiller Girls.” [5] But far from emulating machine movement, the marathons embodied the logic of the machine: As Peter Sloterdijk explains, “Ontologically, ­modernity is a pure ‘being-toward-movement,’” and the promise of the machine is pure movement without pause. [6]

Alongside contrapposto, Wermers explores the potentiality of the frieze – the proto–assembly line – an antique device for creating dynamic progression through the distribution of bodies at various “timestamps” of action. Traditionally, friezes depicted figures in battle, heroic scenes of human endeavor. Modernity’s flush facades did away with ornament, but the frieze was revived by socialist realist artists depicting the honor of labor. While the figures in Wermers’s frieze are “dancing,” we find their (terms and) conditions indistinguishable from those of workers’. As dance historian Susanne Franco states, “There cannot be a history of modern dance without both a cultural history of energy as a social construction, as well as a cultural history of work.” [7]

Nicole Wermers, “Marathon Dance Relief,” 2025

Marathon Dance Relief attends to what dancers and workers share: their being-unto-exhaustion, the ultimate limit to modernity’s being-toward-movement. Heinrich von Kleist’s parable of the inexhaustible and weightless marionette captivated 19th- and 20th-century imaginaries, from dramaturges to dictators, but unlike marionettes, dancers “need the ground to rest upon and recover from the exertion of the dance.” [8] Anson ­Rabinbach observed in his survey of labor studies and Taylorist “scientific” management that “fatigue appeared to be the last obstacle for progress in modern times,” for it limited the harnessing of energy, “the body’s unique capital.” [9] Advocating an economy of energy, Arbeitswissenschaft (the science of work) – an adaptation of Taylorist principles combined with physiological studies – synchronized bodily rhythms to those of industrial life and introduced strategically timed pauses for rest. [10] The “relief” in Wermers’s title is a double entendre, literally a relief sculpture; it nods to the intermittent “relief” – announced by a Klaxon – granting marathon contestants 15 minutes pause (beds would be wheeled onstage), before they got to their feet again. Such measured recovery breaks mirrored the relentless structure of factory work, anticipating contemporary time-sheet surveillance.

Much of Wermers’s practice attends to the body politics of invisible labor and support work that occurs after-hours and outside nine-to-five white-collar work. The artist’s earlier ­Reclining ­Females series (2022–24) – both a formal and conceptual antecedent to this new work – sees weighty, languid clay figures, rendered with similar intuitive tactility, rest on repurposed cleaning carts. That series also began with a classical reference, the canonical reclining nude: The (­horizontal) axis of the resting body served to affront expectations of productivity and hierarchies of value. And although bodies are absent from Wermers’s Untitled Chairs series (2014–15), they are implied through the presence of coats hung on chair backs, a coded gesture of ­claiming space, echoed by Marathon Dance Relief’s bistro tables. The loaded symbolism of such material culture – ­designating a boundary between public and private space, between leisure and work time – encapsulates Wermers’s interest in who can claim space, under what circumstances they are allowed to do so, and how much they pay, or get paid, for it. (I’m writing this text from a café table on a weekend, outside my nine-to-five employment hours.) The work’s presentation in remote and rural Lismore, Ireland, by an arts initiative established by the (English) Duke of Devonshire and Countess of Burlington, with an Arts Council–funded exhibition program, exists in the charged threshold between public and private money, land and access: all contradictions and transgressions that the art-world ecosystem carefully plays and necessarily maintains. The diagonal installation appears to acknowledge this obliquely, since it intentionally destabilizes the sanctity of the former church hall’s ­symmetrical axis, in an arrangement that allows visitors to peek behind the facade. [11] Returning to those tragic contrapposto figures stumbling across the frieze – like the somnambulist who crashes into café tables in Pina Bausch’s Cafe Müller (1985) [12] – I can’t help but think that sleep, not (outer) space, is what the tech demagogues seek to vanquish and that the dance marathon was an early training site for bio(de)regulation.

We need only look at what bodies do (and are deprived of) to find a diagnostic of the times. Sydney Pollack, director of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, later said of the film: “There is a poverty of spirit today as well as a poverty of body. […] The elements in human nature that produced the dance marathon still exist. […] But today it isn’t expressed in the form of a dance marathon.” [13] ­Today it is expressed, among other things, through the colonization of sleep. In ­Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), Crary notes that a century ago, adults slept ten hours a day, while the average now is six and a half; we live in “low-power readiness […] ­nothing is ever fundamentally ‘off’ and there is never an actual state of rest.” [14] Entertainment, food, ­markets, and workforces can reach and serve us 24/7, just as we can be reached and serve 24/7.

In today’s high-performance culture, it is only through the complete exhaustion of your ability to perform that you can exit the game (e.g., get signed off on “burnout leave”). There is, however, potential in this now-endemic state of burnout; as Jan Verwoert suggests, exhaustion is the one thing we can all share, and embracing it as that which limits vampiric capital extraction can make us “an inoperable community.” [15] Crary, for his part, sees a means of forging community in the universality of sleep. Sleep is a site of both resistance and ethics; when we sleep, we are vulnerable and require others to support us – like Wermers’s dancers do – thus preserving the “­durability of the social.” [16]

If 1920s and ’30s dance marathons exposed the violence of what a body can do and will do, Wermers’s Dance Marathon Relief contributes an ethics of what a body should do. Should a sleep-deprived body work itself to the point of collapse, or should one body facilitate the conditions for another to rest and, in their very state of inoperability, resist?

“Nicole Wermers: Marathon Dance Relief,” Lismore Castle Arts, March 22–May 25, 2025.

Isabelle Bucklow is a London-based writer and cultural critic.

Image credit: Courtesy Nicole Wermers and ­Herald St, London, photos Jed Niezgoda