Live at The Met Museum: Beauty, Love, Body

For this episode of Let Me Ascertain You, we bring you back to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where The Civilians are artists in residence. As part of our research, we were wandering through some of the museum's halls like the Petrie Court, looking at nude sculptures that fill that space, like Jacques Sarazin’s gentle Leda and the Swan and Antonio Canova’s indifferent Paris. Surrounded by such a rich history of the representation of the human form, we questioned how the human body and what we find beautiful have changed through time.

In our last podcast, we brought you some of our interviews with Met curators who spoke about these dynamic human representations. For this episode, we've gathered other conversations from the past couple of years that also examine these intertwining themes of beauty, love, and the body. First, Jeanine Serralles brings us to the El Buen Pastor Women’s Prison with Ana Yolanda, a contestant in the prison’s annual beauty pageant. Nedra McClyde performs Pookie, from our investigation into Weddings in America, and Damian Bladet gives us an interview with the founder of NYC’s Hot Nude Yoga. Finally, Alyse Louis closes with a performance of the original song “Pretty Monster,” written by Robin Eaton and Jill Sobule for our new musical “Times Square.”

We’ll be closing out our year as artists-in-residence at the Met with one more cabaret in mid-May. Taking its title — “The Way They Live” — from Thomas Anschutz’s painting, the original play with music will explore concepts of America and how American art reflects those ideas. For more information about the Met residency, please visit The Civilians’ website: www.thecivilians.org