Transmodern 2009 was ripe with so much interactive awesomeness that it's rather unfair to single out one element, but Sarada Conaway and Jackie Milad's "Make-Over" was one of the few performances that took the "trans" part of the modern at its literal word. For this piece, the women invited festivalgoers to volunteer themselves for makeovers--the women had a small warehouse of clothing and accessories to facilitate such transformations--which they documented with photographs. The piece was a wily riff on reality-TV fashion/self-improvement programming while introducing a welcome variable into that mix: These makeovers were less about superficial beautification than they were personality readings and improvisations, a performance that they recreated when Baltimore took over New York's Lyons Wier Gallery in July.
