Stop or I’ll Shoot

Facilitated by Teaching Artist Rebecca Goyette | Teen and Community Programs, Central Park Activation

Stop or I’ll Shoot! is a youth-led performance initiative developed within the Museum's Teen and Community Programs, culminating in a site-specific intervention in Central Park. Under the guidance of artist-educator Rebecca Goyette, the teen cohort evolved into a fully-functioning performance collective, using their own bodies as instruments to explore presence, perception, vulnerability, and disruption in public space.

This immersive workshop series invited participants to investigate the porous boundary between performance and reality. Drawing inspiration from the durational practices of Marina Abramović, the collective questioned: Can authentic emotional states be intentionally accessed and shared through performance? The teens experimented with physical provocations—taste, dizziness, laughter, and sound—to generate unfiltered emotional responses, which were documented and transformed into photo masks. These raw facial impressions, printed without eyeholes, later became their performative identities.

In their culminating action, the collective staged an unscripted procession through the snowy terrain of Central Park. Dressed in white Tyvek suits and linked by industrial glow sticks, they moved blindly through the landscape—disoriented, awkward, yet bound by sound, sensation, and trust. The group’s shifting formation from linear to circular, often fractured and reassembled, mirrored the experimental nature of building shared awareness in real time. With senses altered and visibility removed, participants had to rely on non-verbal communication, deep listening, and spatial intuition to move as one.

The performance challenged the rhythm of the park’s daily life, inviting passersby to witness a moment of collective transformation. Through gesture and interdependence, Stop or I’ll Shoot! transformed a group of individuals into a living organism—one that confronted discomfort and uncertainty as a mode of creative expression.

At once a meditation on bodily autonomy and a disruption of routine social behaviors, this project speaks to the transformative potential of performance for young artists. It foregrounds play as pedagogy, collaboration as survival, and collective risk-taking as a generative act.