Premiere New York Premiere
Production Language Japanese;English;Italian
Country of Origin United States
Description There's a saying that history is the story told by the winners. Of course, when history explodes daily on high-definition flat screens, winning seems to take second place to telling. Welcome to the world of Still Life with Commentator, the new multimedia oratorio from composer Vijay Iyer—hailed as "one of today's most important pianists" by The New Yorker—and poet and hip-hop iconoclast Michael Ladd (Negrophilia, Welcome to the Afterfuture). With director Ibrahim Quraishi and an eight-member electro-acoustic ensemble featuring experimental vocalist Pamela Z, the pair turn their attention—and ours—to the symbiotic relationship between both sides of the camera covering the atrocity of war.
Animated by Ladd's rapid-fire libretto and set to Iyer's raw beats and downtempo rhythms, Still Life with Commentator fuses dramatic narrative, poetic lyric, and musical performance exploring our mediated relationship to violence in a series of lyrical, darkly comic narratives punctuated by live video. As battles rage half a world away, on the home front a new kind of refugee emerges—the infogee—horrified by atrocity, and yet hungry for spectacle, forever lost in incessant web surfing, blogging, and speculating. It's a scene in which we see ourselves, as if reflected on a television screen, and we can never quite change the channel. Artistically daring and morally courageous, Still Life with Commentator asks, are you watching yet?
Identifier 2006f.00851
