Old socks, t-shirts, baby blankets and garbage-bound curtains are not the usual stuff of art. But reconstituted in the hands of multidisciplinary artist MK Guth, such castoffs became the makings of an exhibition last month, and the props for three performances at the World Financial Center’s Winter Garden.

Ensconced in a makeshift studio at 1 New York Plaza beginning last November, Guth collected donations of fabric, piles of it. She and volunteer helpers sorted the materials, cut them into strips and sewed them, then wove them into wildly colorful braids, each one 66 feet long and surprisingly beautiful.

“Every once in a while you’d hear one of the volunteers go, ‘Wow, this one’s great,’” recalled Guth. “‘I would have never thought this bath towel would look good!’”

The complex process of collecting and braiding the materials was just the first phase of Guth’s piece, called “This Fable Is Intended for You, A Work Energy Principle.” The braids hung as art in a World Financial Center gallery. And with the Winter Garden as her stage, she choreographed the slow movements of 24 volunteers through the space as they intermittently dragged and wound their long braids, frequently using the objects as a means to join with and separate from  one another.

Pages of diagrams that served as  directions for moving from one station to the next hung from the participants’ necks, freeing their hands for whatever they were doing with their braids.

The piece’s intent, said the Oregon-based artist, was to capture the rhythm of the city, “a place where energy is constantly converted into something new.”

Volunteer Heather Acs had never been to the Winter Garden before performing there (“I would never come here. I’m an artist, I’m not hanging out in the Financial District.”), but she found Guth’s piece a perfect way to take it in.

“It’s like this beautiful, magical land that you burst forward into,” she said. “I look at this as a journey through the space. It is absolutely a meditation.”
During a lunch hour performance, many workers happened by and at least momentarily stopped to watch, often quizzically.

“I like it when there are more people walking through the space,” said Warren  Barlowe, a behavior therapist and another of the volunteer performers. “We are the audience, they are the show.”