Brooklyn’s favorite son local bike rack designer, David Byrne, will be coming to Brooklyn early this summer for what promises to be a truly spectacular (in every sense of the word) collaborative work called “Contemporary Color.” BAM and Barclays Center will be co-presenting this work, which was inspired by the “high school phenomenon of color guard, known as ‘the sport of the arts.'”
According to a press release from BAM, this extraordinary performance event will feature “Ten 20-40 person color guard teams from the US and Canada [who] will perform at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center and Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, alongside an extraordinary array of musical talent performing live. Contemporary Color is the artistic culmination of Byrne’s interest in color guard as a piece of Americana and a competitive art form.”
Byrne has reached out to fellow musicians like Nico Muhly, Dev Hynes, St. Vincent, Nelly Furtado, Kelis, tUnE-yArDs, and How to Dress Well, all of whom will join Byrnes in collaborating with a different teenage color guard team and performing together. Byrnes said he was inspired after watching a DVD of a color guard championship, remebering, “I was stunned at what I was seeing, and being a musician I naturally wondered to myself: what if these performances had really great live music? Wouldn’t that lift it to another level?”
This piece also marks the first collaboration between similar-in-location-yet-vastly-different-in-vibes venues BAM and Barclays Center, but one can easily see that this could be the beginning of a real partnership, which will hopefully continue to involve collaborations of this level. Because this? This sounds amazing.
The Brooklyn performance dates are June 27 &28, and the piece will take place at the Barclays Center.
Tickets (which start at just $25) went on sale for Friends of BAM January 21, and will be available to the general public on the 28th.
Visit bam.org for more info.
Follow Kristin Iversen on twitter @kmiversen
“…one can easily see that this could be the beginning of a real partnership”
Maybe. But please remember that this show–coming in the later part of the third year of the Barclays Center’s operation–is the *first* example of the BAM-Barclays collaboration that was hyped in 2011 as “three or four shows a year.”