Outings

An artist in Bushwick will date you, if you can wake him with true love’s kiss

Scears is just your modern-day Sleeping Beauty
Scears is just your modern-day Sleeping Beauty. Photos by Anna Martynushkina

Dating apps just not cutting it for you? Having trouble meeting “the one” organically? Well, this isn’t exactly a solution, but it’s another option: on Saturday, August 22, Bushwick-based performer Scears Lee will go to sleep on the floor of the Glasshouse Gallery, and go on a date with anyone who can wake him up. That person could be you.

“I have created this piece to find a spiritual companion,” writes Lee, 25. “All participants who view the performance must kiss me.”

“I’m not going to sleep for 24 hours leading up to the show,” Lee tells us. “There’ll be sleep sounds in the gallery to help me fall asleep, and I’ll be wearing a blindfold over my eyes. If I wake up after I am kissed, there is an agreement that the participant and I go on a date.”

The performance won’t end with the first waking kiss, though: Lee fully intends to go back to sleep if he’s woken up. “I won’t be able to see the people who wake me because I’ll be blindfolded, so I won’t discover until after the performance who it was,” Lee says. “I’m hoping to get a couple of dates out of it.”

“Beauty Sleep” takes place on August 22 from 4-10pm, at the Glasshouse Gallery (246 Union Avenue). You can read more on Lee’s website about his past work, which also includes the short film “OKCupid Graveyard,” a collection of old dating profiles performed in a cemetery.

If you’re skittish about kissing a stranger—though, if you’ve used any kind of dating app, you probably aren’t—then this isn’t the performance to attend. But if you’ve been looking for love in all the wrong places, then this might just be your ticket to a meaningful connection—with an artist, no less.

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