Jennifer Lacey in "Gattica" for American Realness A performance about the future of performance: doesn't sound like something to look forward to, does it? Fortunately, the person assigned the topic for the American Realness festival at the Abrons Arts Center Underground Theater on Friday was Jennifer Lacey, an American artist based in Paris. Her lecture-performance "Gattica" approached the subject semisatirically and had some fun with it. Jennifer Lacey in her own work "Gattica," part of the American Realness festival. Seated on a table, she lighted candles and fanned herself as she dryly read a list of mock predictions. These ranged into general themes. In the future, for example, American men still won't be able to wear skirts without seeming to make a statement, but people will still find "satisfaction in frivolous shoes." In the future all of us "will look on our present hairdo as enormous folly." In the future "some of us will die, and then the rest of us will." That stoic acceptance of human limitations and the cyclical nature of taste also ran through Ms. Lacey's predictions about performance. Dancers might become feared radicals like the Baader-Meinhof gang, but dance would eventually return to being a "minor, suspiciously feminine form." As Ms. Lacey spoke her fanning grew louder, and I thought I heard the flapping wings of the Owl of Minerva. A timer went off and Ms. Lacey switched to dancing. As she might have predicted, this section was harder to grasp. With her eyes closed she walked backward heavily in boots, her arms extended as if she were now dowsing for the future of performance. She pummeled a loudspeaker and beat her chest, very softly, a physical equivalent of her earlier verbal tone. Finding gratification in certain motions, she repeated them, and she often appeared curious about the positions in which she found herself, her body language suggesting, "How did I end up here?" After the timer rang again, Ms. Lacey invited the choreographer Walter Dundervill onstage. Sitting by a piano with glasses of wine they discussed the subject at hand. Mr. Dundervill encapsulated both the charm and frustration of the evening, saying that he didn't care about the future, that it's unpredictable anyway. Ms. Lacey wished for a future in which dance did not have to justify itself and could behave "like a really old lady." As alternatingly illuminating and awkward as the usual cocktail-party chatter between intelligent people, the conversation wended back to the inevitability that all stylistic choices will be cringed at later. Ms. Lacey and Mr. Dundervill found this notion heartening because it "takes the pressure off." One of Ms. Lacey's predictions had been that audience passivity and participation would become like salt and sweet. The audience participation in her final section was indeed sweet, an absurd group chant to ward off procrastination. When the attempt to sing it in round form fell apart, Ms. Lacey could only say, "All together now!" Taking the pressure off seemed to be the point of "Gattica," the goal of its structuring and message. Ms. Lacey created it for a festival in Vienna in 2008, but this version seemed perfectly matched to the family reunion, artists-performing-for-artists atmosphere of American Realness. The work's title comes from an anecdote about the choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, who was in the front row on Friday. The other artists in the audience could take courage from Ms. Lacey's show. Everyone else could take pleasure in her company.