New York City is in a liminal state: partially vaccinated
while still in the grip of
COVID-19; beckoning cautiously masked people outside
with the blossoming spring; and reopening indoor performance venues at last,
but with caveats that color every show with reminders of the continuing
pandemic.
اضافة اعلان
This moment of in-betweenness is like “that scene in the
movie when the prisoner wakes up, and the jail door has swung open and no one’s
around,” polymathic artist Laurie Anderson said Friday during “Party in the
Bardo,” her collaboration with jazz luminary Jason Moran at the Park Avenue
Armory. “So … what’s happening next? Can I just go?”
There’s another fitting metaphor, the one that gives
Anderson and Moran’s project its title: the bardo, the Tibetan Buddhist
transition between death and rebirth that has been described as a 49-day
process during which energy prepares to take on a new life. It’s a long-held
preoccupation of Anderson’s, the theme of her poetic 2015 film, “Heart of a
Dog,” and the namesake of a late-night radio show she hosted last year as part
of a Wesleyan University residency — also called “Party in the Bardo,” whose
guests included Moran.
“Party in the Bardo” — the version at the Armory, presented
to an audience of a little more than 100 in its 55,000-square-foot drill hall —
is, like many projects by both Anderson and Moran, difficult to label. It would
be too limiting to call it a performance or an elegy. Or an installation,
though it included one in the form of “Lou Reed: Drones,” a sound-bathlike work
assembled from Reed’s guitars by his former technician Stewart Hurwood.
More than anything, “Party in the Bardo” is a vibe — an
hour-long immersion into an environment that is both intensely visual, with
continuous tai chi by Ren GuangYi and Haobo Zhao, and a large mirror ball
kinetically reflecting lights on every surface of the drill hall; and
chaotically musical, with Anderson, Moran and a small group of fellow artists
in a series of structured, often simultaneous improvisations layered atop
“Drones.” Those of us in the audience were given cardboard mats, to feel it all
through the floor if we wanted. I spent a good 20 minutes lying in Savasana,
vibing.
Spread throughout the space, the players — Louie Belogenis
and Stan Harrison on saxophone, Susie Ibarra on percussion and Vernon Reid on
guitar, in addition to Moran on piano and Anderson on violin and vocals — were
not unlike the ethereal, chattering personalities in the colloquy-as-novel
“Lincoln in the Bardo,” by George Saunders. There were distinct notes, distinct
voices, but they were only fleeting, coming and going as quickly as the lights
on the floor.
The clearest sounds came in moments of transition: at the
start, Anderson bowing the lowest string of her violin while Moran rumbled the
piano’s deepest registers as if building a foundation; and at a later ebb, when
the drones were pierced by painfully human wails coming from the saxophones at
opposite ends of the room.
Two readers, Afrika Davis and Lucille Vasquez, spoke text I
couldn’t make out until I realized, near the end, that it was a list of the
pandemic’s victims. How many, of the nearly 33,000 in
New York City alone,
could have been named in an hour? To do them justice would require mourning on
a mass scale — bigger than Friday’s artistic expression of grief for a
privileged few.
With the worldwide death toll continuing to inch higher by
the day, it will take time to truly process the tragedies of the past year. It
will take time, too, for live performances to resume comfortably. During the
curtain call at the Armory, the artists bowed with their arms out but their
hands at a safe distance — a reminder that we may have spent an hour partying
in the bardo, but we are still very much in it.
Read more trending
.jpg)
.jpg)
