Tag Archives: wade thompson drill hall

JANET CARDIFF AND GEORGE BURES MILLER: THE MURDER OF CROWS

“The Murder of Crows” is an intriguing, involving immersive experience at the Park Ave. Armory (photo by James Ewing/Park Avenue Armory)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through September 9, $12 (open Labor Day Monday)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.cardiffmiller.com

“Close your eyes and try to sleep,” Canadian-born sound artist Janet Cardiff repeatedly sings in a lullaby that is part of “The Murder of Crows,” a beautifully immersive installation continuing at the Park Ave. Armory through September 9. “Dreams will come / And when they’re done / It won’t be long / Until the dawn,” she adds. Closing one’s eyes and waiting for the coming of the proverbial dawn is the best way to experience “The Murder of Crows,” which was originally commissioned for the 2008 Biennale of Sydney. A collaboration between Cardiff — whose wonderful installation “The Forty Part Motet” can be seen at P.S. 1 in Queens through September 4 — and her husband, George Bures Miller, the thirty-minute “sound play” features ninety-eight speakers, fifty-five chairs, twenty-one amplifiers, and a gramophone horn on a lone desk. It was inspired by Goya’s late-eighteenth-century print “The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters,” number forty-three of eighty works that make up “Los Caprichos,” a series that was critical of Spanish society. In the print, Goya buries his head in his arms on a table, surrounded by bats and owls, as if his nightmares are coming to life. In “The Murder of Crows” — the title refers to the collective noun used for a group of crows, intelligent, opportunistic birds that do so many things together, including mourning — Cardiff recounts several disturbing dreams, speaking through the gramophone horn, with sound effects, a traditional Tibetan prayer chant, and orchestral compositions arranged by Tilman Ritter and performed by Deutsches Film Orchester Babelsberg emanating from the speakers, which reside on chairs, hang at different heights from the ceiling, and are set on stands surrounding the chairs. “The Murder of Crows” touches on such issues as racism, globalization, war, and loss in evocative narrative fragments, including a surprising dose of unexpected humor, that create visual landscapes despite being a sound-based project. Visitors can enter the expansive Wade Thompson Drill Hall at any time during the piece and stay as long as they’d like, letting the dreamlike sounds wash over them as they remain in their seats or wander around the speakers, each one emitting something different. “The Murder of Crows” is yet another fascinating production at the armory, which has quickly become one of New York City’s most exciting venues for inventive, often cutting-edge art, dance, film, and music programming.

SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS AT THE PARK AVENUE ARMORY

RITE OF SPRING kicks off Shen Wei triptych at the Park Avenue Armory (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
November 29 – December 4, $35, 7:30
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
www.shenweidancearts.org

Since its founding ten years ago, Shen Wei Dance Arts has been touring around the world, in traditional venues as well as unique indoor and outdoor locations. Based in New York City, SWDA has performed at the Joyce and the Lincoln Center Festival while also staging site-specific pieces for Judson Memorial Church, the Guggenheim Rotunda, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Engelhard Court, and, last fall, a two-day marathon of Re-(Part III) in Duffy Square, Grand Central Terminal, several parks, outside the New York Public Library, at Columbia, and in the 42nd St. subway station. This week they return to the Park Avenue Armory, where in 2009 artistic director Shen Wei created Behind Resonance, an exciting, involving work set in and around Ernesto Neto’s massive “Anthropodino” sculptural installation. As part of its tenth anniversary celebration, SWDA will perform 2003’s Rite of Spring (with music by Igor Stravinsky), 2000’s Folding (set to music by John Tavener along with Tibetan Buddhist chants), and the new site-specific multimedia commission Undivided Divided (scored by Sō Percussion), created specifically for the armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall. All choreography is by Shen Wei and lighting by Jennifer Tipton, with ten lead dancers (Cecily Campbell, Sarah Lisette Chiesa, Evan Copeland, Andrew Cowan, James Healey, Kate Jewett, Cynthia Koppe, Sara Procopio, Joan Wadopian, and Brandon Whited) and nearly two dozen additional dancers (including Shen Wei). Shen Wei favors slow, precise movement and elegant nudity, resulting in intoxicating works that lure you in with their sheer beauty. She Wei’s performances are the first of a triple play of dance at the Park Avenue Armory, followed December 14-22 by STREB’s Kiss the Air and concluding December 29-31 with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s grand finale, a series of site-specific Events that will mark the last performances ever by the noted company.

FOLDING brings origami to life in elegant dance (photo by Stephanie Berger)

Update: As he did with Behind Resonance two years ago, New York City-based dancer-choreographer Shen Wei again turns the Park Avenue Armory’s massive Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an intimate gathering that celebrates his unique movement language, presenting two repertory works and a new site-specific piece as part of Shen Wei Dance Arts’ tenth anniversary. The evening begins with a restaging of 2003’s Rite of Spring, set to Fazil Say’s version of Stravinsky’s 1913 ballet, in which as many as sixteen dancers make their way in and around a crooked chalked grid, running to the edges, moving in formation, pausing for long moments of inactivity, and rolling on the floor, their black and gray costumes streaked with white. That is followed by 2000’s Folding, in which the dancers first appear in long red skirts and odd head extensions (evoking Robert Wilson and Matthew Barney), gliding slowly across a white reflective surface, soon evolving into duets with the performers in black, their powdered bodies folding into each other, leading to a finale that recalls, of all things, Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

UNDIVIDED DIVIDED is sure to get the audience’s undivided attention (photo by Stephanie Berger)

After a thirty-minute intermission in which the audience must leave the drill hall, everyone returns for the grand finale, the specially commissioned Undivided Divided, a whirlwind tour-de-force featuring thirty topless male and female dancers situated throughout the space, rolling around in paint on a long canvas, throwing themselves against the walls of a plexiglass box, climbing atop and inside a set of plastic cubes, performing intimate duets confined to a small rectangular area, amid other unique and unusual set-ups enhanced by visual projections on the floor. The audience can remain in their seats but are encouraged to remove their shoes and walk up and down pathways that allow them to come face-to-face with the dancers as they writhe about, some making eye contact, others lost in fantasy, like living sculptures in a museum. Undivided Divided is an exhilarating experience, seemingly for the dancers as much as for the crowd, an exuberant display of physicality that goes beyond mere sexuality and voyeurism, offering an energizing and thrillingly different relationship between audience and performer.

RYOJI IKEDA: THE TRANSFINITE

Ryoji Ikeda’s “test pattern (enhanced version)” invites viewers into a dazzling display of light and sound (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Ave. Armory
643 Park Ave. between 66th & 67th Sts.
Through June 11, $12 (children ten and under free)
212-933-5812
www.armoryonpark.org
twi-ny slideshow

Japanese multimedia artist Ryoji Ikeda has created quite an audiovisual rave at the Park Ave. Armory, and no E is necessary to feel it pulsate through your mind and body. Ikeda’s three-part installation, “the transfinite,” combines the beautiful with the sublime, filling the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall with a dazzling sound and light display built around experimental digital music and mathematically based projections. “For this project, the invisible multi-substance of data is the subject of my compositions,” he explains in his artist statement. “Ikeda is drawn to that which is at the edge of comprehensibility and human perception, and he distills it into an experience we can viscerally and physically connect to,” adds artistic director Kristy Edmunds. The first section of “the transfinite” is “test pattern [enhanced version]” (2011), a fifty-four-foot-high wall and fifty-four-foot-long floor on which computer graphics are projected, a thirty-minute series of black, white, and gray lines, boxes, and blips, synchronized to a digital score and stroboscopic effects. You can sit or stand on the floor (shoes off) as the lights are projected onto you as well, immersing everyone in the dizzying, hypnotic surroundings. The closer you get to the screen — we recommend getting right up against it both forward and backward, staring straight up — the more physical it all feels, and snippets of color, especially down the dividing line between the two sides of the projection, become visible. Sit back down and close your eyes for yet another type of thrilling experience, as shadows flit across your brain. On the other side of the screen, “data.tron” (2007-11) consists of mathematical equations, Matrix-like progressions, datatronics, and other digital imagery synched to the same musical composition in a fabulous fury of technological wizardry. Stand in front of it and the numbers are projected onto your body, fusing human and computer. The third part of the installation, “data.scan [1×9 linear version]” (2009-11), features nine monitor boxes, arranged in a vertical line, that depict various digital patterns, some that match up with “data.tron” and others that resemble 1980s video games and Terminator-like visuals. An engaging, involving symphony of sound and vision, “the transfinite” is best seen if you give yourself over to it, allowing it to merge with your soul.

YOSHITOMO NARA + YNG: OPEN STUDIO

Friday is last chance to see Yoshitomo Nara’s work-in-progress in the Park Ave. Armory (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Park Avenue Armory
643 Park Ave. at 67th St.
Through Friday, August 27, free, 4:00 – 7:00
www.armoryonpark.org
www.asiasociety.org
“Home” slideshow

In preparation for “Nobody’s Fool,” his major exhibition opening at the Asia Society on September 9, Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara and his design team, YNG, are constructing a special installation this week in the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall in the Park Ave. Armory. When it’s finished, “Home,” a one-story living environment, will be transferred a few blocks uptown; in the meantime, visitors are invited to get a free sneak peek at the work-in-progress every afternoon from 4:00 to 7:00 through this Friday. The fifty-one-year-old Tokyo-based Neo Pop artist is most well known for his paintings, sculptures, and drawings of wide-eyed childlike characters who are not quite as cute as they first appear, evil and danger lying not too far below the surface. Nara’s punk-rock influences are evident at the armory, where a glassed-in room holds dozens of his drawings, many of which include musical elements, from a young girl playing air guitar to a Ramones postcard. Meanwhile, music blasts as workers continue building “Home” right out in the open. Don’t look too hard for Nara himself; the shy artist has done a good job of avoiding being in the spotlight so far this week. In order to enter the hall, visitors must wear closed-toe shoes, shoulders must be covered, and yellow hard hats will be given out. Be sure to pick up a card that offers two-for-one admission to the upcoming show; in addition, Nara and curator Miwako Tezuka will be at the Asia Society on Friday night for a Q&A and discussion following a screening of Koji Sakabe’s 2007 documentary, TRAVELING WITH YOSHITOMO NARA. Tickets are also now available for such related events as an artist talk with Nara and Hideki Toyoshima on September 10, a live performance by Shonen Knife on September 25, and a screening of Lewis Rapkin’s documentary about the contemporary Japanese indie music scene, LIVE FROM TOKYO, on October 29.