From Debbie Harry's duet with Kelsey Lu as Kermit the Frog to bloodletting performances and duct tape couture, this year's experimental arts party celebrated New York's most iconic provocateurs

This past Friday, Document attended the 2025 Performance Space Gala, which celebrated 45 years of experimental programming and honored three New York titans: Yoko Ono, Fran Lebowitz, and Adrienne Edwards, plus a surprise guest. Here were some highlights from the riotous night:

After checking in at the East Village venue, I peered through a trio of mimes to spy performance artist Kuby Lin wearing his signature sauna-couture. He was vlogging the cocktail hour for Performance Space’s Instagram. Guests stood like deer caught in the flashlight of Kuby’s iPhone camera as he yelled his notoriously absurd questions at them. His most outrageous video was his Instagram story of New York icon, gala honoree, and known technophobe, Fran Lebowitz, when he handed her his phone mid interview and asked her to critique his look. “Is it art?” Kuby asked “It’s whatever you want it to be,” she replied, surprisingly bemused.

Entering the dining hall, we were welcomed by the vision of model, sex icon, and doll supreme Amari Diosa in a quilted trench coat draped over her semi-naked body. She was standing in a spotlight under softly falling snow, as though waiting for an Uber that never arrives, a bouquet of crimson red roses arranged behind her. A poem by legendary Japanese multimedia artist and gala honoree Yoko Ono was displayed on a screen above Amari.

SNOW PIECE by YOKO ONO:

Think that snow is falling.
Think that snow is falling everywhere all the time.
When you talk with a person, think that snow is falling between you and on the person.
Stop conversing when you think the person is covered by snow.
1963 summer
2025 spring

As I was taking in the details of Amari’s fake-snow-capped-eyelashes, visual artist and sex symbol Martine Gutierrez seemingly appeared out of thin air, towering over my friends and me, a half eaten red apple in her hand. She was wearing a sheath dress made entirely out of duct tape, perfectly adhering to the year’s “PERFORM HOMOSEXUALITY” dress code. As I stood there, torn between two bombshells, I prodded Martine for her thoughts on Amari’s performance. “I felt a flirty energy with her when I arrived. We made eye contact and approached each other… woah.” She jokes that she has no idea how she’ll sit on a chair in her dress, let alone perform her hosting duties alongside filmmaker Julio Torres.

Performance artist and ambush interviewer Crackhead Barney was in attendance, shrieking from the back of the room, as she is wont to do. At one point in the bathroom, I overheard her taking a video call at full volume from a stall. “I’m at the Gala. It’s cute, everyone is very nice,” she yelled. “Do you want to come over after?” the person asked from the other end of the phone. “No. Shut up. I don’t like you. You’re weird today.”

The most New York of moments coalesced as two stars collided when New York icon Martin Scorsese presented his friend, equally New-York-Iconic author Fran Lebowitz, with her New York Icon award. The audience, which until now wasn’t paying much attention to the host or speakers, went entirely silent, hanging on Scorsese’s every word. “Fran is a writer. A brilliant, celebrated writer,” he lauded in his introduction. “She’s a reader… She doesn’t throw a book away, She can’t do it… She is the greatest gifter of books that I know. For my birthday once she gave me (and it was so sweet), The History of God, and she inscribed it, ‘Marty I hope you haven’t read this yet.’”

Trans icon and MTA subway announcer extraordinaire Bernie Wagenblast was surprised with an award of her own. She received an almost two-minute long standing ovation from the entire house, (and the only one of the night) for her acceptance speech: “The T train is now arriving. Please stand away from the platform edge.”

Gala attendees were treated to yet another enormously New York moment when Debbie Harry, the lead vocalist of the band Blondie, performed a duet with singer Kelsey Lu dressed as Kermit the frog. They sang “The Rainbow Connection” from the 1979 film The Muppet Movie while slinking down the center catwalk that doubled as the central table of the gala.

“Watch out for that salad, it looks vicious,” Debbie warned Kelsey, as they tiptoed around the Indochine appetizers.

Once the gala wrapped up, attendees nabbed their gift bags full of cannabis goods, weaved through the decorative NYC wire mesh garbage cans filled with baby’s breath flowers, and made their way to the backroom for the afterparty. “Someone’s about to cut themselves onstage,” a passerby yelped. I weaseled through the crowd to find performer Mars Hobrecker on a little stage at the back of the afterparty dancefloor, dressed in lace white panties, attaching bloodsucking leeches to his body. He then took a scalpel and sliced a short gooey red line across his sternum. A stranger tapped my shoulder my shoulder; “Will you catch me if I faint?” he asked.