As Laurie Anderson has wittily demonstrated, the lecture format is ripe for performance art under the guise of instruction. Suzanne Bocanegra, the multimedia artist, costume and set designer, and author (her Broken Costumes will be published this August), takes a different tack. She subverts and elevates the lecture form by splitting the address into a double act. In Honor, performed at the Met Museum in 2022, the actress Lili Taylor recited Bocanegra’s examination of a large, teeming 16th-century tapestry as the text (spoken by Bocanegra herself) was transmitted into her earpiece, with cues as to when to click to the next slide. The effect was not alienating, Brechtian, but engrossing and curiously beguiling. On January 29, NYU Skirball Center will present a more personal monologue from Bocanegra, Bodycast, the account of the two years she spent as a teenager in a body cast due to scoliosis. (And you thought your adolescence was rough.) Bodycast will be ventriloquized by Ruth Negga, the star of Loving and Passing and a sexy, comic knockout in Daniel Levy’s Netflix film Good Grief. In April, also at the Skirball, Lili Taylor (no slouch herself!) will reprise her lecturer role in Honor. —James Wolcott