The Unspecified Event

The Unspecified Event is the name given to the extraordinary, contested climax of Nightbitch's final stage performance, a sequence so strange that it defies easy categorization and becomes the subject of intense public speculation, psychiatric study, and critical debate. It is the moment when the boundary between performance and reality, between the artist and her audience, collapses entirely, and the theater itself seems to give way to something else entirely. The event is so named because no single account can fully capture what happened, and the experience varies wildly from person to person, making it a kind of collective hallucination that is both deeply personal and strangely shared.

The Performance and Its Prelude

The Unspecified Event occurs at the climax of Nightbitch's final stage show, a performance that has already been written about, reported on, critiqued, analyzed, and condemned from every possible angle by critics, writers, animal-rights activists, and the public at large. The show is best known for Nightbitch's real-time slaughter of bunnies onstage, though many consider this the least interesting aspect of the performance. Before the event itself, Nightbitch performs an uncanny choreography with the gold-plated bone sculptures, an "enchanted hunt" as critics call it, moving in time with and then in pursuit of the gilded skeletons to the throb of low, dark music. The audience is rapt, stupefied, and perplexed, unable to separate reality from artistry, and they all wait for what comes next, having heard what is to happen by that point.

The Hunt and the Chaos

After her dance with the bones, Nightbitch stalks the bunnies, now hidden in the shadows, the hunt itself strangely lovely and intoxicating. She pounces, takes a creature in her mouth, and shakes it until it hangs limp. The theater falls dead quiet, and she lays the unmoving animal on the stage and looks at the audience. She growls, and they grow uneasy, sensing that she is now stalking them. A few folks at the back rise slowly and edge from the room, and then, in a moment of stillness, pandemonium breaks out as Nightbitch springs from the stage and the audience members burst from their seats to scream and scatter.

The Unspecified Event Itself

Some audience members report that they were chased into an inexplicable forest area, so thick with leaves and vines that it was hard to decipher whether this was something the artist herself had constructed or in fact a space-time anomaly that emerged just for the performance, only to disappear after that night. During the unspecified event, as it came to be known, they came upon a den of WereMothers, who took them in and gave them delicious soup. Others report that they encountered marvelous bird women with extravagantly feathered wings who taught them how to fly, and it was in this way that they exited the theater. Still others speak of women who appeared and disappeared at will during their unspecified event, goddess-type apparitions who conjured in viewers the most profound feeling of goodwill and unity, to the point where they wept in their presence and fell at their feet.

Psychiatric and Public Response

The collective mania and alleged hallucinations commonly experienced at the show were studied at length by psychiatrists, who concluded there must have been a large-scale drugging. Each audience member was given a small packet of pills, labeled Howl, upon entering the theater, as well as a little paper cup of water, and encouraged strongly to quickly swallow them down so as to challenge notions of wellness and perception in addition to experiencing the most immersive effects of the performance. Or perhaps the drugs had been administered surreptitiously, pumped through the vents via the heating and cooling systems at each venue. If not drugged, the audience must, then, have been hypnotized, the psychiatrists reasoned, and led into an imagining by the artist, though Nightbitch reported she had not studied hypnosis, nor was she a licensed practitioner. If they had been hypnotized, she said, it was inadvertent, and a testament to the mesmerizing nature of the art itself.

Defense and Meaning

Jen, who has proved herself a PR genius, offered an official statement to the media to counter the doubters and naysayers, responding to those who would say of the show that it was nothing more than "druggie left-wing poppycock," not "real art," nor "serious art," but, rather, a "common sideshow" meant to titillate and wow the dumb masses. "The intoxicating effect of the show only underscores Nightbitch's artistry," Jen offered. "The effects experienced at the end of the show represent the culmination of over two decades of rigorous artistic practice. The sometimes extreme experiences that audience members have at Nightbitch's show only underscore the heightened level at which this artist is working and the transformative capacities of art." In response to those who called her show "needlessly brutal" and "the worst of performance art" and "an abomination that conjures the basest element of humanity and puts it on exhibit for all to see," Nightbitch herself explained that her work was meant to underscore the brutality of motherhood, how a child's first act is violence against the woman who created it. Yet the mother loves the child with the most powerful love known in this universe. "This thing comes from us," she would explain in interviews. "It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If the child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at base animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash, for they are right to fear these forces."

Aftermath and Legacy

Her most devout fans wear pins that ask where do you go at night? with the image of a ferocious dog, mouth open, about to attack. The pins and other merchandise are the work of Jen, who has created the most dazzling of campaigns, with bunnies showing up in high-profile and peculiar locales, mysterious social-media blitzes, a masterfully concocted and exquisitely executed "mystery" her crowning professional achievement. Sales of the once-out-of-print A Field Guide to Magical Women skyrocket, though no one, absolutely no one, can track down Wanda White. When researched by reporters, the University of Sacramento proves to be a short-lived institution no longer in operation and White herself a persona which exists only as an online profile at a defunct school. Those few audience members at the theater who manage neither to panic nor to flee, who harbor a most resilient and imperturbable disposition—an engineer's evenness, one might say—these folks bear witness to the very end of the show, Nightbitch there onstage, with a small boy—her son—to whom she delivers the limp body of the bunny, for him to sniff and then caress. As the curtains creep closed, this is what those few brave folks see: a feral woman and her offspring with the still-warm body of a rabbit in his hands. They will report that the duo emanated a beauty they had not seen before, despite the protestations of some that exposing a child to such a thing was abuse. No, those who had seen it would argue.