She also acknowledges more personal layers of inspiration. I felt freer to take things much further when it was an artistic choice of how to tell a story.” As much as that is a conceit, that really ignited me. Like, I’m just having people participate because it’s art! I remember having the idea for New Society and loving that there was a utilitarian reason why people were asked to participate.

“I’ve been doing audience participation things for years, but I’d never come up with a narrative reason for why people were participating,” says July over the phone. The performance is reframed as a shared situation, each audience member bringing their own set of expectations for a theatrical experience, and from July’s free-range genre output. The show hinges upon the idea of creating a literal New Society within the immersive bubble of the theatre space. And for the most part, the audiences of 250 per show abided. To see the piece was to abide by a firm but gentle request to refrain from social mediation to maintain the sense of surprise. This is the effect in her recent performance, New Society, which just concluded a small tour of cities to which July feels an affinity: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, and London, where she’s at work on a still developing commission for art producers Artangel.

To experience July’s work is to feel like you’ve had an encounter with her. It’s evident in her uncommonly revealing recent interview with Rhianna in the New York Times, a conversation that pops the various bubbles of celebrity and human interaction. She does it in her two feature films, which focus on the hermetic zones of romantic and interpersonal relationships, and it happens in her poignant, peculiar novel, The First Bad Man. M iranda July has forged a large artistic presence working in small spaces: in other words, in intimate emotional terrain.

The first bad man by miranda july