GET YOUR GOAT The performance group takes the stage at P.S. 122.

Photograph: Gugo Glendinning

Endings aren’t always terrible things, and they don’t have to be dramatic. When Lin Hixson decided it was time to pull the plug on Goat Island, the Chicago performance group she’s directed for 21 years, it wasn’t a messy, internal struggle. As she puts it: “This is in the spirit of wanting to take on an end before an end takes on you.”

Every resolution reached in Goat Island is a collaborative one, and the group’s final work, The Lastmaker, to be performed at P.S. 122 beginning Thursday 6, is no exception. Inspired by both the history of the Hagia Sophia, a museum in Istanbul, and Martin Scorsese’s 1978 film The Last Waltz, which documents the Band’s farewell concert, The Lastmaker is a way for Goat Island to creatively wrap things up. The first half of the piece is a dance; the second is made up of a series of vignettes, which the performers refer to as songs.

“We looked at people’s last words or last performances,” Hixson says. Included are short scenes chronicling final moments—onstage, in life or in writing—by performers who channel figures like Lenny Bruce, Emily Brontë, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Creeley and Saint Francis. The soundtrack of Robert Bresson’s 1974 film, Lancelot du Lac, is also incorporated, but stripped of all sound except birds and horses.

The Lastmaker, like all of Goat Island’s projects, features multiple layers of influence and information. It took about two years to create—and midway through, Hixson made the decision to disband the company. (She has since formed a new group, Every House Has a Door, with partner and longtime Goat Island member Matthew Goulish; it will operate on a project-by-project basis and focus on international collaborations.) “To me, pretty late in making the piece, I felt that we were talking about building,” Hixson says. “There are lot of references to building a performance—that we’re building an ending and a goodbye.”

While the members of Goat Island never actually spent time at the Hagia Sophia due to financial reasons, when on a company tour of Zagreb, Croatia, they did visit a similarly inspiring structure that was formerly a mosque during World War II and is now a museum. “Both of these buildings were double buildings, and in the case of the Hagia Sophia, a triple building, because it was once a church and then a mosque and it’s now a museum,” Hixson explains. “We were interested in looking at architecture to understand living with diversity and with different functions.”

The first chunk of The Lastmaker is an intricate dance that abides by a mathematical structure reflected in the pattern the building’s dome. “It’s complicated; each performer has different sequences of movements at different counts for the entire 26 minutes,” Hixson says. “Some people have described it as being a spatial experience, and in watching it, I have that experience. So it is this sense of expansion and contraction. That was given to us by the architecture and by the dome in Zagreb.”

At the start, Mark Jeffery—in a hilarious portrayal of Saint Francis by way of the British comedian Larry Grayson—introduces the premise: to rebuild the Hagia Sophia “with what we have in front of us.” (In this case, the performers’ bodies.) For Jeffery, a member of the group since 1996, this part is about the endurance of the mind. “Each of the five performers are literally counting every second so you’re watching focus and commitment,” he says. “It’s almost like dance as work.”

Bryan Saner, who has been in the company since 1995, has relished his time with Goat Island but recalls being inspired when learning that The Lastmaker would be the group’s final production. “I think we recognized the possibility that we could all have another body of work, and what would that be like?” he says. “That felt exciting. But this has been good. We’ve learned how to resolve differences and how to transform conflict, and when you think about having to rebuild that with another group of people or as a soloist, there’s a feeling of sadness and fear. But there’s no reason why the next thing can’t be good also.” During his time with Goat Island, Saner has learned to thrive under collaboration, growing into, as he puts it, the notion of “our” work instead of “my” work. “That’s a real gift,” he says. “In a way, the self is gone, but it’s always tempered by what the work needs. It becomes less about who we are as people and more about what the performance is, which is a being, in and of itself. That’s the most important thing. There are five performers, and Lin as the director; the other major collaborator is the performance itself.”

Goat Island is at P.S. 122 Thu 6–Nov 16.