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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
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