American Idle (2025)
live public performance (48:56) 
choreographed by Lena Engelstein

Times Square Arts

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American Idle is an hour-long, live performance that examines public behavior in one of the world’s most iconic, and most photographed, urban spaces—Times Square. It draws its choreography from the everyday movements of NYC tourists and the looping gestures of 3D figures animated in crowd simulation software, which is used to model, manage, and control the flow of human movement through public space. Presenting a world of loops and copies, the performance explores how this spectacle-driven environment homogenizes collective behavior, and compels the constant performance of the self for the ever-present camera. American Idle meditates on the beauty and suffering of our contemporary condition—fractured attention, techno-mediation, sensory overload, and excess—magnified by the hyperreality of Times Square.

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This performance work emerged from Chao's two years as Public Artist in Residence with Times Square Arts.

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Press

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→ "In American Idle, An Urban Aorta Dramatized" Brooklyn Rail 

→ "Maia Chao and Lena Engelstein in conversation with Nora Raine Thompson" Culturebot

→ "Noa Weiss on American Idle" Culturebot

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