BAM 2006 Next Wave Festival presents the New York premiere of Still Life with Commentator: An Oratorio
Critically acclaimed composer/pianist Vijay Iyer, internationally renowned theater director Ibrahim Quraishi, and prolific poet/writer/hip-hop artist Mike Ladd join forces to comment on America’s media obsession
BAM 2006 Next Wave Festival is sponsored by Altria Group, Inc.
Still Life with Commentator: An Oratorio
Composed by Vijay Iyer
Libretto by Michael C. Ladd
Directed by Ibrahim Quraishi
Set Design by Robert Pyzocha
Video Design by Prashant Bhargava
Lighting Design by Stephen Arnold
BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton Street)
Dec 6–9 at 7:30pm
Dec 10 at 3pm
Tickets: $20, 35, 45
BAMdialogue with Vijay Iyer, Michael C. Ladd, and Ibrahim Quraishi
Dec 7, post-show (free for same-day ticketholders)
Brooklyn, NY/October 23, 2006—BAM 2006 Next Wave Festival presents Still Life with Commentator, a cross-media oratorio featuring an electro-acoustic score by pianist/composer Vijay Iyer, a libretto by poet/writer Michael C. Ladd, and a theatrical environment by conceptual artist/theater director Ibrahim Quraishi. An evening of propulsive music, spoken texts, digital interactivity, and movement performed by an eight-member ensemble of musicians and actors—including award-winning experimental vocalist Pamela Z—Still Life with Commentator is a darkly lyrical and sometimes comic portrayal of our media-filtered encounters with war and atrocity.
Five performances of Still Life with Commentator: An Oratorio will take place in the BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton St.), on Dec 6–9 at 7:30pm and Dec. 10 at 3pm. Tickets—priced at $20, 35, 45—can be purchased by calling BAM Ticket Services or online at
www.BAM.org.
About the work
As in the classical oratorio, in which a familiar religious narrative becomes the substance of an episodic musical work, Still Life with Commentator is suffused with the weight of a new kind of religion—namely, our addiction to the opiate of personal testimony: live newscasts, blogs, reality TV. Still Life addresses our participatory role as spectators with a perpetual hunger for the unspeakable and the tragic, and our continual passivity in the face of televised authority. Ladd’s poems decode and condense our post-9/11 culture of surveillance and spin, forming an ironic counterpoint with Iyer’s elegiac, cycling rhythms. With songs such as “Jon Stewart on Crossfire” and “Blog Mom’s Anthem” performed against Quraishi’s stark tableaus and a video backdrop of effected television clips and images created by Prashant Bhargava, the result is a living portrait of our televised moment.
Ladd and Iyer received critical acclaim for the work In What Language? A Song Cycle of Lives in Transit, a live multimedia project that premiered in 2003 at the Asia Society and was released as an album in 2004. The Boston Globe called the work “a triumph of a genre that doesn’t yet exist” and “a model of what makes good art connect: It is aggressively ambitious yet unfailingly accessible and deeply empathetic.” Rolling Stone said of the disc “A song cycle of powerful narrative invention and ravishing trance-jazz, In What Language? is about nothing less than the death of trust…It is also an eloquent tribute to the stubborn, regenerative powers of the human spirit.” The album version of Still Life with Commentator will be released this winter on Savoy Records.
About the artists
The Village Voice calls Vijay Iyer “the most commanding pianist and composer to emerge in recent years.” Iyer has released nine highly acclaimed albums, most recently Reimagining (2005) with his quartet and Raw Materials (2006) in duo with Rudresh Mahanthappa, both on Savoy Jazz. His numerous honors include the CalArts Alpert Award in the Arts and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. The Downbeat International Critics Poll named him #1 Rising Star Artist and Composer of 2006. He tours around the world with his various ensembles, and has collaborated with artists such as Steve Coleman, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Amiri Baraka, Butch Morris, dead prez, Ethel, and DJ Spooky. His writings have been published in Music Perception, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Current Musicology, and Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies.
www.vijay-iyer.com.
Boston-born Michael C. Ladd is a poet, writer, and MC. His writings have been published in the literary magazines Long Shot Review and Bostonia, in the book Swing Low: Black Men Writing, and in the anthologies Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Café, Bum Rush the Page, and Pour La Victoire, among others. Referred to as “one of hip-hop’s most restless minds” by The New Yorker, his widely praised albums include Easy Listening 4 Armageddon (1997), Welcome to the Afterfuture (2000), The Infesticons: Gun Hill Road (2000), Father Divine (2005), and Negrophilia (2005). As a Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Civic Dialogue at Harvard University, Ladd produced and directed Blood Black and Blue, a documentary/performance about African American police officers. He resides in Paris.
Ibrahim Quraishi is a conceptual artist, writer, choreographer, and co-founder and artistic director of Compagnie Faim de Siècle, a multi-cultural, multimedia performance company. Born in Pakistan, Quraishi has collaborated with artists from all over the world to showcase his unique interpretation of the socio-economic, artistic, and cultural fabrics of individual communities. He has presented his cross-media multimedia installation performances in Munich, Paris, New York, Sarajevo, Tel Aviv, Kyoto, New Delhi, and Tokyo. Quraishi has won a number of prestigious awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Grant (2005), a Rockefeller Fellowship (2000 & 2004), the Islamic World Arts Initiative (2004), and an Arts International grant for 2001 and 2003. Quraishi just completed his one-year artist residency in Vienna’s prestigious Schauspielhaus, where he created a controversial interpretation of W.A. Mozart’s “The Abduction of the Seraglio” under the title “Saray//Mozart alla turca” celebrating Mozart’s 250th anniversary for the International Mozartjahr 2006 Festival in Vienna. The Performing Arts Journal says of Quraishi, “no other influential theatre director besides Wilson…has created a style that is sustained across continents in the work of younger artists.”
Linear Mode
