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Tickets at BAM Harvey Theater
Still Life With Commentator Discount Tickets
About Still Life With Commentator on Broadway
Story for Still Life With Commentator
COMPOSED BY VIJAY IYER, LIBRETTO BY MICHAEL LADD, DIRECTED BY IBRAHIM QURAISHI.
A bass groove, deep and reassuring, lures us in like a subterranean heartbeat, only to be buried under a sublime, electro-acoustic fog of sounds competing for our attention—it's the perfect opening for Still Life with Commentator, a timely show about the disorienting effects of wartime media. The composer is the brilliant pianist-improviser Vijay Iyer, recently named Down Beat "Rising Star Jazz Artist" and "Composer of the Year." Together with post-hip-hop poet Mike Ladd ("one of contemporary hip hops greatest innovators," The Village Voice) and conceptual artist Ibrahim Quraishi, the trio delivers a trenchant and darkly comic down-tempo distillation of our romance with the digital world.
Introspective and articulate, Still Life builds upon Iyer and Ladd's "In What Language?" ("simply a masterpiece," Signal to Noise; 2004 Album of the Year, Jazzwise), fortifying it with live actors, video, and music in a way that seduces us from every sensory angle—just like the media-saturated world it seeks to elucidate. Here, the objects of our sustenance come as much from a virtual landscape as they do from a physical one: Jon Stewart is an action figure with posable limbs. Animated cable news graphics are souped-up thrill rides. And televised atrocity, pixilated and bloodless, competes with sitcoms for prime-time ratings. More of a bittersweet contemplation than a one-sided critique, Still Life takes the chatter of the information age and translates it into art—if only to propose its redemptive possibilities.
Note: This performance contains nudity. APX. RUNNING TIME: 70MIN, NO INTERMISSION
A bass groove, deep and reassuring, lures us in like a subterranean heartbeat, only to be buried under a sublime, electro-acoustic fog of sounds competing for our attention—it's the perfect opening for Still Life with Commentator, a timely show about the disorienting effects of wartime media. The composer is the brilliant pianist-improviser Vijay Iyer, recently named Down Beat "Rising Star Jazz Artist" and "Composer of the Year." Together with post-hip-hop poet Mike Ladd ("one of contemporary hip hops greatest innovators," The Village Voice) and conceptual artist Ibrahim Quraishi, the trio delivers a trenchant and darkly comic down-tempo distillation of our romance with the digital world.
Introspective and articulate, Still Life builds upon Iyer and Ladd's "In What Language?" ("simply a masterpiece," Signal to Noise; 2004 Album of the Year, Jazzwise), fortifying it with live actors, video, and music in a way that seduces us from every sensory angle—just like the media-saturated world it seeks to elucidate. Here, the objects of our sustenance come as much from a virtual landscape as they do from a physical one: Jon Stewart is an action figure with posable limbs. Animated cable news graphics are souped-up thrill rides. And televised atrocity, pixilated and bloodless, competes with sitcoms for prime-time ratings. More of a bittersweet contemplation than a one-sided critique, Still Life takes the chatter of the information age and translates it into art—if only to propose its redemptive possibilities.
Note: This performance contains nudity. APX. RUNNING TIME: 70MIN, NO INTERMISSION