It was 9 p.m. on Saturday, and Lián Amaris Sifuentes was taking her time getting ready for a date, doing the usual things: looking in the mirror, taking a disco nap, drinking a glass of wine.

Sure, as Yeats said, women must labor to be beautiful, but you would think Ms. Sifuentes would labor a little more quickly, considering that she was doing all of this on a traffic island at the southeast corner of Union Square. Ms. Sifuentes, a performance artist and professor at Colorado College, said that was one of the ideas behind this piece, “Fashionably Late for the Relationship”: drawing attention to the private feminine ritual not only by performing it in full view of the Manhattan public, but also by performing it deliberately.

Very deliberately.

On a set resembling an old-fashioned boudoir, containing a chaise and a vanity and strewn with dresses and shoes, Ms. Sifuentes is going through the predate exercises, only she is stretching them out, by moving very, very slowly, which is to say not moving much at all. To prepare for a date it will take her 72 hours, from midnight Friday to midnight tonight. On Saturday afternoon she had a single glass of wine. It took seven hours.

All this is being filmed by R. Luke DuBois, who teaches interactive sound and video performance at Columbia and New York University. He will compress his film into 72 minutes, compression being a digital process that is neither simply speeding up the images nor jittery time-lapse photography. (Mr. DuBois, 31, did that with “Academy,” a 76-minute piece in which each movie that has won the Academy Award for best picture is squeezed down to a minute; it was shown at Sundance this year and excerpts can be seen at music.columbia.edu/~luke/artwork/academy.html)