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Liz Laurie
March 9, 2015
Performance Sensorium: Touch
Review: Cross-Contamination, Jonathan Magat

The sounds of a chaotic hospital waiting room fill the performance space, setting the scene for
Jonathan Magats Cross-Contamination. Occasionally, we can hear someone mention the front desk, in
between noisy, tense, and indistinguishable voices, sirens, and coughing. Magat, in sterile plastic gloves,
hovers by the door with a bottle of spray cleaner, repeatedly spraying the doorknob and unleashing the
strong smell of disinfectant into the air. Once the doorknob has passed inspection, Magat takes out a
skein of red yarn and ties one end to the knob, stretching the yarn out behind him as he leaves the door
and walks out among the audience members seated haphazardly across the performance space.
Holding the yarn and a small red case with cleaning supplies, Magat approaches audience
members seemingly at random in order to disinfect small portions of their person by spraying them with
cleaner and then wiping them down. After each disinfection, he wrapps the red yarn around the sterile
area, connecting the participants. Approaching me, Magat sanitized the pen I was holding in my hand
and then wrapped the pen in red yarn, before he approached another audience member in order to
sterilize a section of her shoe. As he moved from one audience member to another, the red yarn crossed
itself, creating a visible web of points of contact in the color associated with emergencies.
Magats Cross-Contamination was one of the performances at Touchy Topics: Stay in Touch,
an afternoon of pieces focusing on touch held on March 2nd, in the Alvina Krause Studio at
Northwestern University. According to Magats artist statement, Cross-Contaminations central focus is
human skin and touch in medicalized spaces, such as hospitals, clinics, and waiting rooms. These are
familiar topics for Magats work and in this piece, his summoning of the tense, medical environment
through the smell of disinfectant and the soundtrack of the hospital environment were put to use

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examining the way that medicalized spaces aspire toward sanitation and cleanliness but are bound to
fail, in much the same way that our skin provides a boundary to the outside world, and yet is vulnerable
to injury and abrasion. In his commentary after the piece, Magat talked about the paradox of skin as
both a protection from and often the entrance to disease.
Magat is certainly successful at summoning the tension of medicalized environments. His work,
by including audience participation in what is not a determined, announced order or action, always
includes a sense of waiting with purpose. In this piece, we knew Magat would probably reach us, but not
when, while in previous pieces, it wasnt clear who would participate at all. This creates the sense of
waiting with anticipation and without limit that dominates a place like the hospital waiting room.
Magats methodical spraying and wiping brought attention to each spot he disinfected and the creation
of the red web of yarn brought the associations of emergency care and danger. The red web also
emphasized the haphazard and unpredictable spread of disease, as well as how easily connected human
beings are through contagious disease. At the same time, Magats disinfecting such small areas allowed
the audience to ruminate on the often futile nature of disinfection in containing disease. The rigorous
disinfection of a hospital space cant contain disease out in the everyday world.
Where Magat was less successful was in using the elements of his performance to determine a
narrative. In discussions after the piece, audience members had a myriad of interpretations as to what
Magats role was in the piece. I was under the impression that, sitting on the floor and with Magat
dealing with some of the objects on our person, audience members represented dead bodies and Magat
was pointing out sites of possible contagion for workers approaching the area. Others thought we were
in quarantine or sitting in a waiting room or that Magat was mapping the path of a disease through a
community. It was unclear if Magats role was that of a doctor or a first responder or a researcher. For
future performances, this element of the piece would need to be adjusted so that the audience could
fully engage with Magats work.