The PA system launched a song by Azealia Banks, and the dancers Roderick George and Josh Johnson exploded William Forsythe’s Pas de deux cent douze (212 pas de deux, get it?). Inside and outside merged, the architecture dissolved, the audience regrouped, dancers flowed out onto the open plaza, and one piece bled into another.
Daylight encroached, and the idlers sitting on the benches outside found they were being scooted in various directions. Nobody declined.Īfter 20 minutes, the singer/dancers slithered toward the room’s plywood perimeter and, as they pushed, the wall disassembled into units that slid and turned. A couple of performers politely approached the non-participants and wordlessly offered each of us an embrace. It was like stumbling into a beach party where you’re not sure you belong but where everyone is very nice. Eventually, I realized that only a handful of audience members were standing around among a troupe that moved sinuously around the room or sat, singing in a circle. I sensed something moving near my face and as my eyes adjusted I began to make out a dancer writhing in slow motion, his arms stirring the air around me. A hand touched my elbow and led me into the center of the room. Unaccompanied voices fluttered in the total darkness, quietly singing, trilling, and laying down a percussive beat of crunches and clicks. Mastering my claustrophobia, I stepped into the blacked-out, superheated interior, where an installation by Tino Sehgal was underway. Sweaty people were resting on the high-backed upholstered benches that line the building’s exterior.
The shed dragon spring phoenix rise windows#
There, the architect Kunlé Adeyemi, who once designed a solar-powered floating school for his flood-prone native Nigeria, has erected a temporary pavilion with no windows and movable walls. I stopped by on an eerily warm afternoon, when the glass towers along Tenth Avenue focused the heat and glare and noise onto the plaza at West 31st Street like a noxious ray gun. And so he produced the artistic equivalent of a variety pack, in which you never quite know what you’re going to get.
“I didn’t want to open up New York’s first major new arts center in decades and have people say What is that?” artistic director Alex Poots told me. To give a little body to these lofty abstractions, A Prelude to the Shed is running until May 13 in a temporary, um, shed across from the construction site.
The shed dragon spring phoenix rise free#
It’s not just a rental hall but an engine for the creation of new work, with free events, an open-call talent search, and a cache of $5 tickets for each of the paid shows. (Naturally, Quincy Jones is involved.) Chen Shi-Zheng, who directed The Peony Pavilion at Lincoln Center, is putting together Dragon Spring Phoenix Rise, a spectacular dance-heavy retelling of “a Chinese myth about a sect in Queens that holds the power to extend human life.” (Who knew there were Chinese myths about Queens?) The Shed has declared itself a home for artists in all forms, popular and avant-garde, legendary and obscure, intimate and immense. Steve McQueen, the director and producer of 12 Years a Slave, came up with the idea of a multi-concert saga of African-American music, starting with its origins in slavery. The first major commissions are in place, and the menu reads like a list of buzzwords (“immersive,” “multimedia,” “site-specific”), elaborate concepts, and a credit roll of prestigious names. A year before its opening, the Shed, the bubble-wrapped, steel-ribbed arts complex nearing completion at Hudson Yards, remains fuzzed in mystery.
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