I'm not sure how great Saturday night's Moore Inside Out event was as installation/performance art, but it seemed like a fun (and free, if crowded) party. At a little after 9pm, there was a not terrible line to get in. As you entered onto the stage from the backstage door, a crowd gathered to watch a man in a white suit being hoisted up over the seated theater audience on wires; the man was giving a speech inaudible from on the stage while what looked like white confetti fell around him. On the other side of the stage, another crowd gathered waiting to walk Lead Pencil's ramp and scaffolding over the audience up to the first balcony in groups of two or three.

Down in the basement, it was just a crush of people, slow moving and sardined, bottlenecking at the entrances to various rooms. One room had some TVs playing, mic cords hanging from the ceiling, a dormant set of DJ tables, and walls covered in show posters. It looked like it had been hastily fashioned from items already lying around the backstage. Another room was too impossible to get in to and was skipped. Megan Mertaugh's 300 watermelons (pictured above) were long gone—you saw people here and there walking around with one in their arms—but her videos lingered, projected against the bathroom walls; in them, Mertaugh flopped around the bathroom in matching green and red, surrounded by a dozen or so melons, occasionally picking one up, moving it to the sink, or such.

In the bar, Scratchmaster Joe was tirelessly performing an intensive six-minute DJ routine on an endless loop, an experiment in endurance, a DJ set and an installation, and sneakily just great practice for his upcoming DMC competitions. Around the corner was an ultra-bright projection of a cartoon which the animator gleefully observed left a floating, green rectangular after-image on your eyes for minutes.

In the lobby, a chandelier was surrounded by a hollow tower of scaffolding, red rope, and broken up recreated bits of the theater's facade, pieced together out of order. (It should be noted that, whether de- and -reconstructed or just regular, the Moore is a fantastic old building to wander around.) Every once in a while, the pack of muses charged through the room, bumping past people in their game to reinstall the ninth of their number.

Up in the theater, Orkestar Zirconium was onstage, wearing all white, filling the place with slightly circus-y brass band vibes. A few couples in sort of piratey attire tangoed at the foot of the stage. Somehow walking the ramp wasn't as precarious feeling as I'd expected. The night ended with the band circling through the lobby and then proceeding out the front door.

photos by Victor Ng