Evan Shinners is one of six pianists who are performing Allora & Calzadilla’s moving “Stop, Repair, Prepare” in the MoMA atrium through January 10 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
PERFORMANCE 9: ALLORA & CALZADILLA
Museum of Modern Art
The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor
Hourly starting at 10:30 or 11:30 am
Through January 10 (closed Tuesdays; Fridays free from 4:00 to 8:00)
Admission: $20 (includes same-day film screening)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org
performance 9 slideshow
Philadelphia native Jennifer Allora and Havana-born Guillermo Calzadilla have been collaborating since 1993 on multidisciplinary conceptual installations that question the very nature of art and authorship. For their latest piece, “Stop, Repair, Prepare,” the ninth in MoMA’s ongoing Performance Exhibition Series, which has previously featured such artists as Yvonne Rainer, Roman Ondák, Fischerspooner, Joan Jonas, and William Kentridge, Allora & Calzadilla have built a rather unique piano that will reside in the second-floor Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium through January 10. The piano has a hole in its center (with two octaves removed), where one of six pianists, every hour on the half hour, will enter from below and then play the Fourth Movement of Beethoven’s 1824 Ninth Symphony by leaning out over the keyboard, which they approach backward. In addition, the piano is on wheels, so the performer will also push the instrument around the atrium while playing the familiar piece, bearing the heavy weight of a work that comes with quite a history: The Fourth Movement, better known as “Ode to Joy” and based on a 1785 German poem written by Friedrich Schiller, has served as the national anthem for the European Union and Rhodesia, has been featured in such films as CLOCKWORK ORANGE and DIE HARD, was conducted by Leonard Bernstein at the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, was appropriated by the Nazis in concentration camps during WWII, and has been a longtime staple of New Year’s day concerts. In fact, on New Year’s Day, three of the six pianists — Jun Sun, Amir Khosrowpour, and Evan Shinners — performed the piece (the other three are Midori Yamamura, Mia Elezovic, and Terezija Cukrov), each following a different arrangement chosen especially for them. Juilliard graduate Shinners, who is the host of the online radio show “This Is E.S.,” a published poet, cofounder of the artists collective known as the New Cull, and leader of the band the Suits!, played a kind of classical punk version, banging at the keyboard while the audience surrounded him, taking photos and following him around the space. Afterward he gushed to twi-ny about how excited he is to be part of the project and how he feeds off the adrenaline rush of the crowd. Calzadilla, who with Allora will represent the United States at the fifty-fourth annual Venice Biennale later this year, has called “Stop, Repair, Prepare” a “moving experience,” and indeed it is, on several levels. Don’t get too caught up in trying to capture the performance with your camera; just get lost in the uniqueness of the event and try not to get hit by the piano as it heads right at you.