Who: Tyshawn Sorey, Peter Sellars, Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, Julie Mehretu, Kim Kashkashian, Sarah Rothenberg, Steven Schick, Davóne Tines, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street
What: Monochromatic Light (Afterlife)
Where: Park Ave. Armory, Wade Thompson Drill Hall, 643 Park Ave. at Sixty-Seventh St.
When: September 27 – October 8, $40-$95
Why: During the pandemic lockdown, the Rothko Chapel in Houston celebrated its fiftieth anniversary with a livestreamed meditation and discussion from the ecumenical space in May 2021. “The Rothko Chapel is oriented towards the sacred, and yet it imposes no traditional environment. It offers a place where a common orientation could be found – an orientation towards God, named or unnamed, an orientation towards the highest aspirations of Man and the most intimate calls of the conscience,” said Dominique de Menil, who commissioned the chapel with her husband, John, in 1964. Rothko had previously written to his benefactors, “The magnitude, on every level of experience and meaning, of the task in which you have involved me, exceeds all of my preconceptions. And it is teaching me to extend myself beyond what I thought was possible for me.”

Continuing the golden celebration, Newark-born American composer Tyshawn Sorey will be presenting a new multidisciplinary piece, Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), at the Park Avenue Armory September 27 through October 8. The work is inspired by the Rothko Chapel and Morton Feldman’s 1971 masterpiece, “Rothko Chapel,” created for the opening dedication. Sorey’s score for percussion, viola, celesta, piano, bass-baritone, and choir premiered at the chapel in February and has now been reimagined for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, featuring new and existing immersive art by Ethiopian-born painter Julie Mehretu, choreography by Brooklyn-born Flex dance pioneer Reggie (Regg Roc) Gray, and direction by Pittsburgh-born theater legend Peter Sellars. Mehretu and Gray were both involved in Carrie Mae Weems’s “The Shape of Things: Land of Broken Dreams” at the armory last December, multi-instrumentalist Sorey performed with pianist and composer Conrad Tao in the armory’s Veterans Room in May 2016, and Sellars staged St. Matthew Passion in the Drill Hall in October 2014 and collaborated with Gray on FLEXN and FLEXN Evolution at the armory in 2015 and 2017, respectively. The music will be performed by Kim Kashkashian on viola, Sarah Rothenberg on piano and celesta, and Steven Schick on percussion, with vocalist Davóne Tines and the Choir of Trinity Wall Street.

Art, music, and dance come together in Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)

“When asked to write this piece, I made the conscious decision to not compose a single note of music until I experienced the visual and spiritual transformation of [Rothko’s fourteen] paintings for myself inside the Chapel, where I’ve spent several hours during different times of each day I went,” Sorey said in a statement. “This piece reflects these experiences as well as the influence of both Rothko’s artistic output and that of Morton Feldman, one of my biggest musical inspirations. As with all my works, my hope for this composition is for audiences to have an active, dynamic experience with it, not simply just to listen, which the nontraditional space of the armory’s Drill Hall helps to realize.”

Sellars added, “Tyshawn Sorey has created a spare, intimate, enveloping world of sound calling forth the piercing memories, unfinished and unburied histories, yearning, and resolve that live inside every step forward and each moment of stillness; Julie Mehretu’s paintings frame, focus, color, and intensify a thirst for justice and spiritual renewal that moves across layers of generations and geographies; Regg Roc Gray and the courageous movers of FLEXN wear the grief, the loss, the endurance, the grace, and the unbroken life-force itself in every bone and sinew as they break, glide, pause, and get low. It is a privilege for me to enter and share the charged, contemplative, cleansing space opened, activated, and sustained by these artists. For these evenings, the Park Avenue Armory will become a communal site of remembrance and deep introspection.”

On September 29 at 6:00 ($15), Sorey, Mehretu, Gray, Tines, and Sellars will come together for a preshow panel discussion about Monochromatic Light (Afterlife), which was originally co-commissioned by Park Avenue Armory, DaCamera, and Rothko Chapel. In the above promotional video of the four creators at the armory, Sellars, explaining how the work is really a ceremony, a way for people to gather peacefully, says, “For me, one of the deepest things about this not being a show is I also think that we’re at a period in history where we don’t need more shows.” Sorey adds, “Yeah, there’s not a show at all.”

Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) offers a multimedia meditation at armory (photo by Stephanie Berger Photography / Park Avenue Armory)

Update: At the end of the performance, I approached Sellars to tell him how moved I was by the stunning show. His eyes tearing up, he gave me a warm embrace and said, “We’re all so moved. It really was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

I had never met Sellars before and he didn’t know who I was, but Monochromatic Light (Afterlife) provides that kind of atmosphere, bringing everyone together across ninety minutes of art, music, and dance.

The piece is presented in the round, with violist Kim Kashkashian, pianist Sarah Rothenberg, percussionist Steven Schick, and composer-conductor Sorey in the center, surrounded on all sides by the audience. Eight abstract works by Mehretu circle the space, hanging above a platform on which eight dancers are positioned, each in front of one painting. The Choir of Trinity Wall Street is seated in a back row; vocalist Tines walks throughout the space, entering through the audience and later slowly moving across the platform.

Banks Artiste, Deidra “Dayntee” Braz, Rafael “Droid” Burgos, Quamaine “Virtuoso” Daniels, Calvin “Cal” Hunt, Infinite “Ivvy” Johnson, Derick “Spectacular Slicc” Murreld, and Jeremy “Opt” Perez, most of whom are veterans of FLEXN and/or the D.R.E.A.M. Ring, perform unique dances in front of their assigned painting, their Black and brown bodies, particularly their arms and legs, interacting with the swirls and shapes of Mehretu’s canvases, which have such titles as torch, sphinx, about the space of half an hour, and A Mercy (four of which were created for this collaboration). James F. Ingalls’s superb lighting creates shadows of all sizes as well as haunting silhouettes when the dancers roll under the paintings and dance on the other side; shifts in the color of the lights, from blue, red, and pink to green, yellow, and white, breathe life into the paintings as their palettes change.

The music is slow and deliberate, at times almost too much so, but it is also meditative and, perhaps surprisingly, comforting, as it harkens to memory and grieving in addition to healing and rebirth . Tines mostly sings guttural sounds, but he repeats occasional words, such as “Sometime I feel” and “Child,” evoking the Negro spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” The dramatic sound design is by Marc Urselli.

For ninety minutes, there is always something going on, something to be seen or heard, wrapping the audience, including the creators, in a warm and loving embrace.