Last week, I attended several events as part of the 4th edition of Perfoma: the biennial exhibition of "visual art performance." As oxymoronic as that sounds, there was something strangely compelling about hearing legitimately good music put into the service of some truly strange happenings.
On Friday night, I saw Will Cotton's Cockaigne in the ballroom of the Prince George Hotel: an old SRO on East 28th Street. Amidst a sea of cotton candy, cupcakes and champagne, there was a short ballet by John Zorn, and a four-minute burlesque for two violins written by Caleb. If the idea was specatacle, the creators succeeded.
On Saturday afternoon, I went to a lecture at the Performa Hub by Eve Essex and David Guskin that explored alternate forms of notation in Robert Ashley's music. The first half of the lecutre was a bit scattered and overly-academic, with Essex awkwardly trying to explain Ashley's pictographic scores. Far more engaging was the second half, where we all performed Ashley's "She Was a Visitor" from That Morning Thing, where a single reader repeats the phrase over and over while five group leaders picked out a particular phoneme – "eee"; "ahhhh" ; "vvvv" – holding it for the length of a single breath. Props to our leader, Charlotte, who made it easy to follow.
By far the most incredible – and incredulous – event of this year's Performa was Ragnar Kjartansson's "Bliss," performed at the Abrons ArtCenter on the Lower East Side. The performance consisted of a live performance of a two-minute excerpt from the final aria from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, where the count gets down on one knee and asks his wife for forgiveness.
The incredible part was that the performers repeated the aria in a "live loop" for twelve hours. By the time I arrived, shortly before 11p.m., they had been at it for nearly 11 hours. The orchestra players (including members of ACME, NOW, and ICE, among others) all had wine glasses and half-eaten fried chicken parts next to their music stands. The singers' eyes were all at half-mast, though their voices were somehwow still supple. (No doubt it helped that Kjartansson cut the aria off right before the final crescendo.) The conductor, David Thor Jonsson, had become completely unhinged: his bowtie undone, gesticulating wildly with the baton upside down in his left hand. And yet, despite all this chaos, there was something euphoric about it all, as if Mozart's music had somehow sustained them through this unprecedented marathon.
When the performance finally ended, shortly before midnight, the audience erupted into applause, joining the cast onstage for a party with free-flowing champagne. And, whether it was part of Kjartansson's point or not, I still can't get that aria out of my head. More pics here and here.