Björk’s Cornucopia is a stunning world premiere commission at the Shed (photo by Santiago Felipe)
The McCourt at the Shed
The Bloomberg Building
545 West 30th St. at Eleventh Ave.
May 22, 25, 28, and June 1
646-455-3494
theshed.org
www.bjork.com
In 2012, Icelandic musician, actress, and international fashion plate Björk presented Biophilia at Roseland, a multimedia performance based on her 2011 app album, an exploration of the relationship between nature, music, and technology. In 2015, her Vulnicura tour opened at Carnegie Hall, an emotional and personal examination of her breakup with longtime partner Matthew Barney. And now the Iceland- and Brooklyn-based artist has inaugurated her latest elaborate production, Björk’s Cornucopia, at the Shed’s McCourt concert venue, where the dazzling show, based primarily on her 2017 concept album about love and nature, Utopia, continues through June 1. Cornucopia begins with several a cappella songs performed by Iceland’s Hamrahlíð Choir in front of the stage, including Björk’s “Sonnets/Unrealities XI” and “Cosmogony,” the boys wearing dark slacks and white shirts buttoned to the top, the girls in traditional folk outfits; at one point the members of the choir — which Björk belonged to when she was a teenager and is still led by the same conductor, founder Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir — darted up and down the aisles of the raised rows of seating.
Björk dazzles in ethereal multimedia production at the McCourt (photo by Santiago Felipe)
It’s then Björk’s turn, and she takes the multilevel stage in a nautilus-like costume designed by Olivier Rousteing of Balmain and Iris Van Herpen, with a headdress by co-creative director and frequent collaborator James Merry that covers much of her eyes. She emerges from behind a curtain of hanging ropes where Tobias Gremmler’s giant color-drenched videos of animated flora and cosmic fireworks (and an avatar of Björk) are projected; the video also appears on a large rear screen. Chiara Stephenson’s set features a pod that looks like an alien-head silo and a platform that extends four rows into the center of the audience. The music is played by Icelandic flute septet Viibra, dressed like fairies, along with harpist Katie Buckley, percussionist Manu Delago, and Bergur Þórisson on electronics; the complex lighting design is by Bruno Poet, with choreography by Margrét Bjarnadóttir. All the elements, under the direction of Argentine film director Lucretia Martel (The Headless Woman, Zama), come together to form a celestial wonderland where Björk’s ethereal music, less dance-oriented than on previous tours, transports the audience on an otherworldly adventure.
Nature comes to the forefront in Björk’s Cornucopia (photo by Santiago Felipe)
Björk performs twelve of Utopia’s fourteen tracks, including “The Gate,” “Arisen My Senses,” “Claimstaker,” and “Blissing Me” (joined by experimental musician serpentwithfeet), as well as such older songs as “Show Me Forgiveness” and “Mouth’s Cradle” from Medúlla, “Hidden Place” and “Pagan Poetry” from Vespertine, and “Venus as a Boy” from Debut, each with its own unique sonic and visual flourishes. Delago swishes upside-down bamboo-like bowls in a tank of water. A metal ring drops from the ceiling, surrounding Björk as four members of Viibra play flutes embedded in the circle. Björk sings from inside the closed pod. There are different ways to experience the show; if your seats are near the front, it feels more intimate, especially with Björk singing such lyrics as “Just that kiss / Was all there is / Every cell in my body / Lined up for you / Legs a little open / Once again / Awaken my senses / Head topless / Arisen my senses” and “Utopia / It’s not elsewhere / It’s here” in close proximity. But from farther back, the epic scope of the videos and staging combine for a bolder, more immersive effect.
Björk is joined by Icelandic flute septet Viibra for Cornucopia (photo by Santiago Felipe)
Prior to the encores, a recording of sixteen-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg is projected, the schoolgirl explaining that “we are about to sacrifice our civilization for the opportunity of a very small number of people to continue making unimaginable amounts of money. The biosphere is being sacrificed so that rich people in countries like mine can live in luxury. . . . We cannot solve a crisis without treating it as a crisis . . . And if the solutions within this system are so impossible to find, then maybe we should change the system itself.” It’s a powerful statement that Björk follows with “Future Forever,” in which she opines (in a lush new costume), “Imagine a future and be in it / Feel this incredible nurture, soak it in / Your past is on a loop, turn it off / See this possible future and be in it.” It’s hard not to get on board with that direct yet hopeful sentiment.
New York City has seen a dramatic rise in the closing of long-beloved institutions in the twenty-first century as gentrification and rent hikes soar. When filmmaker Kurt Vincent heard rumors that the Chinatown Fair arcade game haven was on the way out, he brought his camera to the Mott St. spot to document what it meant to him and the community that has been built around it since it opened back in 1944. “After all these years, the path to the arcade was ingrained, even in dreams,” he narrates at the beginning of The Lost Arcade, describing a dream he had. “As I stood in front of the doors, I could smell the arcade. The smell was a primordial memory hidden deep in my mind, somewhere beyond time and space, and somehow, in my dream, I connected with this distant and abstract memory.” Director-producer-editor Vincent and producer-writer Irene Chin, who previously collaborated on the experimental short The Bachelorette Party, have created a love letter to Chinatown Fair, affectionately known as CF, which has seen its ups and downs over the years, including a boom during the golden age of arcades in the 1980s and a problematic drop in the 2000s as kids stayed home to play video games on their computers and televisions. Vincent speaks with Anthony Cali Jr., who practically grew up in CF; former CF employees Henry Cen, Norman Burgess, Derek Rudder, and Akuma Hokura and their boss, Sam Palmer, who bought the place after visualizing it in a dream; and Lonnie Sobel, who attempted to resurrect it after its initial closure.
