“Are You Buying?” is a new theatrical dance performance by Somerville-based artist Catherine Siller. A fashion mannequin in a Downtown Boston storefront dreams she has it all, traveling back in time through fashion and beauty advertisements from the 1920s to today. Initially thrilled to constantly reinvent herself, she ultimately realizes she’s caught in a loop of desire and dissatisfaction, chasing an ever-shifting beauty ideal.

Siller combines live performance and real-time video with pre-recorded animations, activating layers of characters and objects that appear and dissolve, creating a dreamlike environment projected larger than life in the storefront window. With movement inspired by gestures in the advertisements, Siller inserts her body into this imagined world, transforming herself into a 1920s ingenue, a 1950s housewife, and a 1990s sex object. A humorous and ironic score, mashing up clips from radio and TV commercials, accompanies the performance.