Welcome to the Lounge

Roneker was at the Bronx Equestrian Center, the temporary home for her sheep and one mischievous rooster, which had stowed away in the truck from the farm. She was preparing for the dress rehearsal, to take place that evening. The sheep, largely a mix of Dorset and Romanov breeds, brought their own costumes: six inches of fleece each. "Anybody that was shedding fleece didn’t come," Roneker said. Her own outfit: insulated Carhartt overalls and a varsity sweatshirt from Cornell, where she threw shot put, weight, discus, and hammer while studying agronomy.

... From the bleachers built at one end of the armory’s vast drill yard turned performance space, only a slight whiff of the barnyard betrayed the ovine presence. Then, just shy of an hour and a half into the piece—which features helium-powered zeppelins, wildly gyrating light installations, and a vast, ingeniously employed scrim—the sheep materialized, drumming hoofs first. They moved as one, in a swirling huddle, like a slow-moving satellite image of a tornado’s path. As a white blimp floated overhead, illuminated from within, an occasional sheep would raise its head to gaze at it in a way that seemed almost visionary.

For twenty minutes, the sheep circulated—an insomniac’s dream sequence—then disappeared as mysteriously as they had arrived. (No rattling bucket this time!) Loaded onto the trucks, they were ferried back to the Bronx."