For a highly-limited run during the Chicago Architecture Biennial's opening weekend, Mies van der Rohe's federal plaza became the stage for a performance foreign to most central business districts: a drill team exercise. Conceived by Bryony Roberts (of the Oslo and Los Angeles-based Bryony Roberts Studio) and choreographed by Asher Waldron (of the South Shore Drill Team in Chicago), the drill team's performance is an extension of Roberts' practice in the emerging architecture discipline of experimental preservation.

Titled "We Know How to Order," the performance elaborates and re-contextualizes the idea of "ordered" space within the public realm, showing how the concept of rigid structures  – including both the imposing facades of Mies' plaza buildings and the tight coordination of the drill team's movements – may become elastic within a given space. Scored by a mixture of Philip Glass and House music, and followed by the undeniable intoxication of watching impressive displays of precise visual harmony, "We Know How to Order" solicits excitement, adrenaline, and motion from structural rigor. The imposing shadows of Mies' buildings suggest the opposite – harmony in stillness.

The South Shore Drill Team warming up before a October 2 performance:

That same elasticity of what can constitute "order" is present in the syntactical ambiguity of the word in the title – the "we" subject could either be doing the ordering, or being ordered. This brings a distinction between subject and object to the performers in the drill team, and as a team composed mostly of young, black Chicagoans in the literal shadows of federal institutions, comparisons arise to discourses around the policing of black people in public, urban spaces, and movements such as #blacklivesmatter.

To casual observers (who, by nature of the performances happening in downtown during rush hour, made up the majority of the audience), "We Know How to Order" would not clearly appear to be challenging, say: the limits of public space, or architectural authority, or whose rights within that public sphere are upheld. On its face, the performance is highly palatable – it's an impressive piece of choreography set to awesome music, after all. But start poking around, and things quickly become more complicated, and the stakes get higher.

More on "We Know How to Order" can be found in Sylvia Lavin's interview with Bryony Roberts for the Chicago Architecture Biennial.